6. The solo pastorate is a young man's game

Presbyterians believe in a highly educated clergy, but not because we believe in higher education; at least, not as an end unto itself. (I personally do, but that’s a subject for another day.) The basic work of a teaching elder is to study, interpret, and teach the Bible, which can be done competently only by one well-trained in the humanities: we believe in a highly educated clergy because we value preaching. Writing a sermon is not unlike writing a term paper: it requires hours of research and preparation before one can begin writing, not to mention the time spent on actual writing. Learning Greek and Hebrew is a necessary prerequisite to preaching; one has to slog through a text’s grammar and vocabulary before one can interpret it.

It’s not the hardest job around, but it is a lot of work: imagine writing two term papers a week. As with any labor, it gets more difficult with age. I have never had much time left over at the end of the week after producing my two sermons, but it became extraordinarily difficult to keep up after I turned 40. I have wondered whether this is my own problem (I have had a series of health problems which caused some cognitive impairment), but I’ve learned it’s fairly common, at least amongst my middle-aged colleagues. 

In fact, frank conversations over the past few years have revealed a dirty little secret: very few  not-so-young-anymore pastors write two sermons a week, at least according to the sermon-writing standards to which I was trained. Instead of translating the sermon text, they will “look at” their Greek or Hebrew Bible. Instead of doing their own study of the text first, they read a few commentaries to learn the basic theme. The morning sermon may reflect the preacher’s best work, but often the evening is more of a make-do “study.” (I’ve come to realize that “study” is a euphemism for “kind of shallow.”) 

(Full disclosure: for the last several years, on the typical Sunday at least one of my sermons has been “recycled” from previous efforts. This allows me to maintain quality and a manageable workload.)

Frankly, it shows. We can all tell when a sermon just skates the surface of a text, and usually it’s because the preacher has failed to truly grasp that text for himself. If you’ve been wondering, go ahead and ask your middle-aged (or older) pastor whether he built that sermon from the ground up all by himself.

That’s not to say that the middle-aged man can’t preach. Far from it: while I think my early work was solid, I am sure my current pulpit ministry is much better. It’s not simply that I’ve learned to use my tools better; with age and time, I’ve also learned how to get myself out of the way so the Spirit can minister. I find the work much more difficult, but the outcome more worth hearing. But does the one good sermon excuse its slipshod companion in the other service?

That choice, if you think about it, is the consequence of an earlier choice to have only one pastor in the congregation. Where there are two or more, the preaching load can be shared and high-quality sermons delivered at both the services on any given Sunday. If Presbyterians value preaching, it’s not enough to make sure the pastor has received a quality education. He has to have the time, and the collegial support, to write a good sermon.

When I look back at the volume of work I produced during my first decade in the pastorate, I am mightily impressed with young me. But I’m not so young anymore, nor are many of the gray-haired pastors who congregations find so reassuring when up in their pulpits. The OPC needs to figure out how to free up her older ministers to produce quality work, or just admit that the solo pastorate is a young man’s game.