You call him, “Pastor”, but do you know what it means? In our urbanized modern world, the knot between pastors in churches and their rustic origins has been cut. Today many people are asking, “Where does our food come from?” Christians ought to ask, “Where does our pastor come from?” You likely know his birthplace, but you might not know where his job came from. Without knowing that, both pastors and people will have a tendency to distort what a pastor does and what he is for.
Just as many people are looking to rediscover where their food comes from, it’s also helpful for pastors and their churches to take an agrarian turn. Does food come from the grocery store? Do pastors come from the seminary? For some people, the one question is as elusive as the other.
Pre-Processed Pastors
Is it too cynical to characterize some pastoral careers today as the equivalent of processed food? Many pastors are the product of a systematically funnelled career path which introduces them from youth ministry, through seminary, onto senior leadership, and then a repeating tenure of stops in an ascending scale of congregations. Those careers look like they were made in a factory.
Inside the church, the processed programs which pastors can bring may be useful for producing results, but they get stale quickly. Then new processes are needed. More efficient programs need to be discovered and implemented as a new way to do church. Like pre-processed food, those store-bought programs only require you to add water and stir.
Agrarian Losers and Gainers
An agrarian turn in pastoral ministry would aim to reconnect to the Scriptures’ own priorities set in agricultural and biblical soil.
The trouble with using a term like ‘agrarian’ today is that it already conjures up images of middle-class westerners with good jobs to support their farmers market dreams.
When it comes to farming it has always meant losing. Losing sweat, crops, herds, flocks, not to mention years. In that losing, the gains can only come from the heavens. Rain and favourable providences of God provide the only hope for the farmer.
The agrarian pastor is a loser too. Paul could describe himself this way saying, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Phil 3:8). Most pastors don’t know how much they must lose, but Jesus is worth it all.
The pastor has to live on hope. As Paul put it, “the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing in the crop” (1 Cor 9:10). A pastor hopes in God because whether he sows or irrigates or threshes, it is God who gives the growth (1 Cor 3:7). Only Jesus, the chief Shepherd can claim to have lost none of the sheep (John 6:39, 17:12, 18:8).
Prone to Quit and Hope
I’ve seen how a brief hailstorm could devastate fields and families. One moment, showers of rain fell on ripening heads of grain and a few moments later the crop was flatter than a tabletop. Hope and despair passed within minutes. No wonder so many farmers quit.
Pastors are prone to quit too. But like the hardworking farmer, he will have the first share in the crop (2 Tim 2:6), and his hope renews constantly, not from his own skill, but from the prospect of the next season and what God might provide. Pastors have setbacks. Churches blow up. Members leave. The baptized get excommunicated. Satan roars. In all of these the pastor still has hope, like a crazy farmer. For pastors, like farmers, can keep on pastoring their churches and say with Paul, “that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles.” (Rom 1:13).
To hope in the face of regular perplexity is the way that pastors imitate farmers. But the pastor, as a Christian believer is “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (2 Cor 4:10).
Where to Find A Pastor
The idea of an agrarian pastor stands out in comparison to many of the pastoral models promoted today. The metaphor is quite different than the pastor as comedian, talk-show host, marketer, or CEO. Instead of those outstanding celebrities, the agrarian pastor is like the simple farmer. He may never be outstanding but will be literally out standing in his field. That’s where you need to go to discover where the idea of a pastor comes from. The agrarian pastor hopes in the Lord puts his hand to the plough and doesn’t turn back (Luk 9:62).
