The Problem with The Crowd

In Eugene Peterson’s new book, The Pastor, he tells about his life in a vocation he neither desired nor sought.  But God apparently wanted him to shepherd a flock, and so he did.  Decades before church-planting became all the rage in America, Peterson started a new congregation in Maryland.   He led that church for nearly thirty years.

Somewhere along the way, Peterson began meeting with a group of fellow pastors.  They called themselves “the Company of Pastors.”  I’ve been part of minister’s groups before.  My impression of them was a group of hurried, harrassed men subtly trying to one-up each other:  “How’s it going?  How many are you running these days?  What new programs are you starting?”  Peterson’s group wasn’t like that at all.  These people met regularly simply to talk about what it meant to be a pastor and how to stay true to the calling.

One fellow, who was with them for a few years, decided to leave his church for one three times bigger.  He said he needed a new challenge, an opportunity to use his gifts in a bigger, better way.  This bothered Peterson.  He wrote his friend a letter, a portion of which I reproduce below:

I certainly understand the appeal and feel it myself frequently.  But I am also suspicious of the appeal and believe that gratifying it is destructive both to the gospel and the pastoral vocation.  It is the kind of thing America specialize in, and one of the consequences is that American religion and the pastoral vocation are in a shabby state.

It is also the kind of thing for which we have abundant documentation through twenty centuries now, of debilitating both congregation and pastor.  In general terms it is the devil’s temptation to Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple.  Every time the church’s leaders depersonalize, even a little, the worshipping/loving community, the gospel is weakened.  And size is the great depersonalizer. Kierkegaard’s criticism is still cogent: “the more people, the less truth.

Peterson goes on to say that human being often seek transcendence in three misguided ways:  drugs and alcohol, recreational sex, and the ecstasy of crowds.  Church leaders often warn against the first two, but almost never against the third.

Peterson’s statements hit me like a brick.  For years, I’ve heard pastors talk out of both sides of their mouth on the subject, piously dampening the appeal of the Crowd–”Numbers don’t mean anything in themselves”–only to turn around and say things like, “Those who run numbers down usually aren’t running them up.”   But, until I read Peterson’s book, I’d never seen a minister take a smooth stone, put it in a sling, and send it dead-shot into the face of the giant.  I’d never heard a preacher say, “Not only do we not need a crowd; we shouldn’t have a crowd.”

Instantly, I saw my own tendency to equate the Crowd with success.   With a little more effort, I dug deeper, examining the roots of that tendency–my own desire that my preaching be heard by more people.  I confess to sinful pride.  I own it; it’s mine.

Honestly, though, I’m not just worried about how many come to hear me.  I’m worried about our church itself.  I currently serve a congregation that’s aging, maybe even dying.  We have few young families.  In a town of 25,000 with a church on every corner (some of which are large and offer many programs), with new churches being planted here every other year, our slice of the pie continues to shrink.  Many of our people are sick and infirm.  Almost weekly, it seems, the phone rings with news of a medical crisis, a turn for the worse, a death.   The last couple years we’ve been hit again and again by the four “Ds”:  divorce, disease, discontent, death.  For every new member we take in, we lose two. Each day, I can hear the clock ticking.  It seems to be growing louder.

The temptation to leave for greener pastures is strong.   Another confession:  one thing that keeps me from doing so is my own age.  A man in his mid-fifties doesn’t get on the short list of candidates for younger, growing congregations.  As an unemployed preacher friend of  mine put it, “Churches want a forty-year-old with thirty years of experience.”

So Peterson’s letter, and his book, comes at a critical juncture in my career.  It forces me to ask myself what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.  If the Pastor is a shepherd, then he can’t simply leave his flock, can he?  Not if he cares about the sheep.  Naturally, if it’s mere wooly mammals we’re talking about, then there might be half-dozen legitimate reasons to leave them–a bigger, better opportunity elsewhere, more money, even sheer boredom.  But people aren’t animals to be tolerated; they’re souls to be cared for.

Struck as I was by the force of Peterson’s statements, I can’t find it in my heart to fault large, even mega-churches per se.  I’ve been privileged to know a few men who led large churches.  Maybe they were more evangelists than pastors.   Maybe their churches are a mile wide and an inch deep.  I don’t know.  All I really know is the men themselves, and no godlier have I found.   Even Peterson’s church grew to 500 or so before he retired–what some might call “mini-mega.”  I therefore take his comments in this regard with just a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, I’m not a big church man.  My gifts, conviction, and calling seem to go the other direction.  If only I could be settled about it in my own heart.   I covet your prayers.