Ten years ago, 300 pastors, professors and students met at a conference in Oak Park, Illinois, with the aim of launching a new reformation in church leadership. Like its 16th-century predecessor, this reformation was less about innovation than reclamation of a lost vision: the role of the pastor theologian.
I like to cite as anecdotal evidence a conversation I overheard as I was walking my daughters to school when my family lived in Edinburgh. A couple of American tourists were visiting the Greyfriars Kirk cemetery, and the wife exclaimed in a scandalized voice: “Honey, they’ve buried two people in the same grave!”—because the headstone read, “Here lies a pastor and a theologian.”
The unspoken assumption—that one person can’t be both—presents many seminary students with a false dilemma: the choice of becoming either a church pastor or a theology professor in the academy. Earlier church leaders—bishops like Augustine or reformers like Calvin—would have found such a dichotomy to be unnecessary and unnatural. To quote Tolkien: “Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.” But not quite. There remains a remnant of pastor theologians.
A Division of Labor
Todd Wilson and Gerald Hiestand founded The Center for Pastor Theologians (CPT), the sponsoring organization for the Pastor Theologians Conference in 2006. I met them over lunch a few years later. At the time, Wilson was the senior pastor and Hiestand his associate pastor at Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park. They were looking to partner with theologians, but they wanted to make sure I had the correct ecclesial stuff.
They were right to be concerned. Theologians traditionally earned their doctorates from secular universities that did not view the Bible as God’s Word or see expositing the Bible’s subject matter as theology’s primary task. That was true of my experience as a doctoral student at Cambridge University, where there was no particular expectation that a dissertation in theology would engage with the Bible at all.
What you learn about God in the academy is quite different than what you learn in the church. And when theologians finish their graduate work they often write and teach as they were taught to do in their secular graduate programs, even if they are persons of faith.
It was this tragic division of labor—pastoring in the church and theologizing in the academy—that, more than anything else, led Wilson and Hiestand to protest, and ultimately to recover the all-important missing role of the pastor theologian.
The Identity Crisis
Widespread confusion about what a pastor does, is and is for was another factor that led to the formation of the Center for Pastor Theologians. A pastor is more than a “professional nice guy” or what Stanley Hauerwas memorably describes as “a quivering mass of availability.” There is now a plethora of books and ideas that explore the ins and outs of church leadership, and it’s still tempting to import from outside the church the various metaphors we minister by (e.g., therapist, storyteller, CEO, celebrity).
Eugene Peterson raised the alarm in his book Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness, criticizing in particular the managerial metaphor: “American pastors, without really noticing what was happening, got our vocations redefined in terms of American careerism.”
The church is a holy nation. Its leaders should therefore not strive to be like the leaders of other nations. Our statements of faith are indeed distinct, yet too often our vision statements reflect the social trends of the day. In a digitally driven culture, pastors must be increasingly vigilant lest images of leadership drawn from secular culture worm their way into the ecclesial imagination, and the pulpit.
What’s a head or associate or youth pastor to do? It’s a serious question: What should the pastor’s job description include? Everyone has ideas, many of them helpful, but “theologian” is usually conspicuous by its utter absence. Hiestand and Wilson say, “Today we find ourselves in a context where to be a theologian is, almost by definition, to be a professor in the academy. And to be a pastor is, almost by definition, to be anything but a theologian.”
A Widening Chasm
The segregated locations of pastors and theologians make for a lose-lose prospect, for the academy and church alike. In The Pastor Theologian: Resurrecting an Ancient Vision, Hiestand and Wilson trace the history of the growing chasm between academic theology and church ministry.
The first hint of what would become an ugly ditch appeared with the rise of the medieval university, when theology became a scholastic discipline. The questions students disputed in those classrooms were often far-removed from the life of local congregations.
It was not until the Enlightenment, however, that the division between the church and academy became uncrossable, resulting in the great chasm between what had previously been a unified vocation: pastor and theologian. All the big-name theologians of the 19th and 20th centuries were located in the university. Meanwhile, churches continued to worship, even as they became theology-free zones.
Two vocational roads diverged in a modern world. The body of Christ is now suffering from theological anemia, the result of theologically inclined seminary students opting for the academy rather than the church. Symptoms of such anemia include difficulty concentrating, increased susceptibility to viral memes, moral weakness and tired discipleship.
Solid Food
This past October, CPT returned to Oak Park for a 10th anniversary conference that revisited the essential idea: “Good Shepherds: Pastoral Identity and the Future of the Church.” Pastors are sous-shepherds, commissioned by Jesus to keep his flock and feed his sheep.
Today, under the leadership of its new president, Joel Lawrence, CPT continues to form theological leaders for the church. There are student fellowships in several seminaries, publications (Center for Pastor Theologians Journal and a book series), a website (PastorTheologians.com), and local cohorts across the country. At the heart of the CPT, however, are the eight transdenominational fellowships that follow a six-year formational curriculum and meet annually for mutual encouragement, worship and theological reflection on key issues facing the church.
The CPT is a David facing a cultural Goliath in a struggle to articulate the pastor’s vocation. Shepherding the church has been and always will be theological at root. How could it not be? If pastors exist to form the people of God by the gospel of God to the praise of God, the question is how should shepherds “feed the sheep”?
Pastor theologians don’t have to write academic monographs. They are best seen as generalists who specialize in one thing: helping people understand, grow and live into the saving knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ, into the reality of the new life that is ours in him. Pastors teach doctrine to shape the faith, thinking (including imagination) and practice of God’s people.
In the final analysis, whether to become a pastor rather than a theologian is not an either-or but a both-and choice. Theology matters because, like children, growing disciples need more than milk or junk food. To mature in Christ, believers need the solid food of doctrine (1 Cor. 3:2; Heb. 5:12, 14), teaching that describes what it means to be one holy nation under God. To feed Jesus’ sheep is to nurture people; pastors are public theologians, teaching doctrine to make disciples. What the ascended Christ has joined together—“shepherds and teachers” (Eph. 4:11)—let no church put asunder.