Fairly Good Ministry

The late Charles Schultz, creator of “Peanuts” with its immortal cast of misfit characters, once described cartooning as a “fairly” sort of business. He went on to say that if you were a great writer, you would write novels, essays, short stories; if you were a great artist you’d paint or draw or sculpt; if you were a great comedian you’d do standup or make funny movies. A cartoonist has to be able to do all those things, not spectacularly well but fairly well: write fairly well, draw fairly well, and be fairly funny.

Pastoral ministry as most of us practice it is like that. If you were a brilliant scholar you’d teach in a seminary and write books; if you were a brilliant counselor you’d be in a teaching hospital or private practice; if you were a brilliant speaker you’d be on television. As it is, you need to be a fairly good scholar, a fairly good counselor, and a fairly good speaker, and at the same time be a fairly good teacher, administrator, and visionary. Sometimes we think, as Ernie Campbell once said, that if we could shut ourselves up during the week and spend all our time working on our sermons we could be really brilliant preachers, but it doesn’t work that way. We learn to preach not only by studying and crafting our messages but also by getting to know the people we are preaching to. (You will note that unlike some people I have no qualms about using a preposition to end a sentence with) Tom Long says that the best preaching takes place in small to mid-sized churches and is done by preachers who have lived with the congregation for a fair amount of time. Having been in Presbyteries with large congregations and having been preached to (or at) by preachers who served churches of all different sizes, I have to agree. Generally speaking it was the pastors of the small churches whose sermons were most likely to hit home.

So you’re not Walter Brueggemann or Howard Clinebell or Barbara Brown Taylor. You are who you are, called to do what you are called to do, maybe not brilliant at any one thing but fairly good at many things—and most of the time that’s just what the church needs.