From Relevant Dude to Spiritual Father

Baby Boomers wanted pastors who were "with it," competent, efficient. A new generation is looking for something very different.

By Kevin A. Miller

Josh, a twenty-something guy in my church, invited me to play basketball at Triangle Park. "A lot of guys from church will be there," he said. Without much thought, I said yes.

When I showed up in my JCPenney sneakers, I looked around the asphalt court and realized the last time I played 5-on-5, full court, was longer ago than these guys have been alive.

The game started, and I ran the court, filling the lane like my freshman coach had taught back when Dr. J was playing in the ABA. It felt good to go up for a rebound. I've still got it, I thought. Then I threw up an air ball. The next time I got the ball, it was quickly swiped away. In theological terms, my game bore the marks of the Fall.

After my team lost, new teams were formed (the main goal being to divide up the guys from Indiana, where they start dribbling a basketball in preschool), and my team was designated "skins." I'm so white and skinny, I look like the Pillsbury Doughboy after he married Jenny Craig. When I peeled off my t-shirt, some of the young guys hooted.

As I drove my minivan home that night, I thought, I embarrassed myself. I showed how painfully old and uncool I am. Plus, this wasn't doing anything in the way of ministry.

The next week, Josh asked, "You coming out to Triangle?"

"I, uh, no, I'm kind of busy," I said.

"Well, okay, but we'd love to have you."

Well, yeah, I thought. It's nice to have someone to score against. But then Nate stopped me at church and said, "It was great having you play this week. Hope you come again." Scott, one of the Indiana guys, said the same. So did another guy. I got more positive comments from that lame basketball performance than from most sermons I preach.

That led to other discoveries about ministry among twenty-somethings. There are some clear differences between the generation that beat me at basketball and my own.

Baby Boomers tend to ask me about results: "How many showed up last night?" Millennials ask about relationship: "Next Tuesday, can you hang out?"

When we bring loving pastoral discipline to a Baby Boomer, he will often try to squirm out of it; when we do the same with a Millennial, he's likely to stay and end up closer to the pastors and the church.

Baby Boomers show up for classes and programs; Millennials show up for mentoring. Both show up for retreats.

While Boomers want their church leaders relevant, competent, and efficient, a new generation is looking for a different kind of minister. At my church, 80 percent of adults are under 40, and they seem to want me firm, mature, and relationally present (even if I'm uncool). In short, they want me to be a spiritual father. For some, I'm the Christian dad they never had. For others, I'm the father figure who's here now.

This is causing me to rethink the way I do ministry. It has driven me back to the Scriptures. For this is far more than mere generational preference. What's at stake is our very identity as pastors. It's how we as pastors answer the question: Who am I, and what am I supposed to be doing?

Pastoral Identity Crisis

In the 1970s, when Boomers began to graduate from seminary, pastors began shifting their role from shepherd to leader. Now, of course, the leader-CEO model is rejected by many. But what will take its place? Pastors seem lost, with little guidance on the core question: What's my role?

I keep coming back to an ancient answer—one that never seemed so fresh. It's what the third-century Christians called a spiritual father, an "abba" (or spiritual mother, "amma"). When young believers zealously pursued lives of prayer, they knew that amid their fierce temptations, they needed sage counsel. They went to their spiritual father.

To me, our way forward as pastors today involves becoming a spiritual father (or mother). It's an answer that fits Scripture, Christian tradition, and the longings of our time.

The role depends on (1) spiritual maturity, born of prayer and experience; (2) an intimate knowledge of another person's life and spiritual condition; and (3) an ability to speak the truth in love in a personal way: "Warn those who are lazy. Encourage those who are timid. Take tender care of those who are weak" (1 Thess. 5:14-15).

This is the primary way faith is passed on. Older teach younger (Prov. 3:1-2); fathers have sons (2 Tim. 2:1-2; Titus 1:4); older women train younger women (Titus 2:4-5). And spiritual parenting transcends the current debate over whether pastors should be shepherds, leaders, agents of cultural transformation, or something else. As a spiritual father or mother, you break free from fads; you don't invest years of ministry in a model soon outdated. Indeed, your ministry can become more powerful, not less, with age.

Whatever your ministry, consider what it means to be a spiritual father or mother. Here are three shifts I'm trying to make, and what I'm learning as I do.

From Relevance to Depth

In Christianity Today Brett McCracken writes, "In order to remain relevant in this new landscape, many evangelical pastors and church leaders are following the lead of the hipster trendsetters, making sure their churches can check off all the important items on the hipster checklist." Including:

"Show clips from R-rated Coen Brothers films (No Country for Old Men, Fargo) during services.

"Sponsor church outings to microbreweries.

"Put a worship pastor onstage decked in clothes from American Apparel.

"Be okay with cussing."

I'm not against cultural awareness and engagement. For most people today, pop culture is their culture, so it can be an act of love to learn it. But to be a spiritual father means you are definitely not Wholly Relevant. Dads are, by definition, older and not hip. This one hurts. I spent much of my forties not wanting to accept my age, not wanting to lose my place among the popular and the trendsetting.

However, to pursue relevance is to lose your spiritual power. When all you read, watch, and listen to is what everyone else is reading, watching, and listening to, you have nothing to say.

Chris, a young guy in my church who moved to Manhattan for grad school, explained to me: "The highly relevant pastor is bro'. There's certainly a place for pastors to be in tune with culture and to be relatable. But where do I find a man of God who will nurture my spiritual life? That's what's I need. Relevance is easy to find. But when I stumble in that same old sin that I keep slipping in, I need someone with wisdom and maturity to go to. It's fine if that person also happens to know about some great new indie bands, but in those moments, I need something else. I need depth."

Since it's always been true that "You reproduce what you are," why would we care more about reproducing relevance than reproducing depth? Why trade the timeless for the trendy? Is it because we don't want to pay the slow and taxing price to actually become someone of spiritual depth?

Martin Luther once said that what forges a minister is prayer, meditation, and temptation. Let's not diminish the role of that third ingredient. It's in temptation that we grow deeper by choosing the way of the cross. It's here, when we fail, that we learn brokenness. Richard Rohr calls this "the authority of those who have suffered."

Here we come to know God's power (2 Cor. 12:9). What people most need in their pastor is someone who's suffered and come through it better, with faith and hope and love intact. That's what a spiritual father or mother can offer.

I, for one, cannot offer this without a life of prayer. Our church asks each senior pastoral staff member to spend one day in prayer each month. (Over the course of a year, that yields 12 days, or two full weeks, in prayer.) That prayer day is paid. Even so, under the tyranny of the urgent, it's tempting to skip this month's prayer day to catch up on email. So we have to ask each other: "Have you taken your prayer day?"

Out of the depth of prayer, meditation, and temptation, I may or may not be able to offer intimate knowledge of contemporary culture. But I can offer genuine interest in each person and his or her culture. I may not have seen the latest movie, but if not, it's fine to say, "No, I haven't seen it. Tell me what you liked about it." And even more than talk about a movie, people want to tell me about their lives, to have me listen and care that "My mom's coming out to visit next week" or "My nephew's still in ICU."

The power to listen with compassion comes not from relevance but from depth.

From Efficiency to Intimacy

The church-growth movement of the 1970s and 1980s taught pastors that instead of shepherding, a slow and outmoded way of caring for animals, we had to learn the efficiency of ranching. Picture driving your pickup past vast herds.

But if any churchgoer ever wanted to be "ranched," today's twenty-somethings definitely do not.

 

Sociologist Christian Smith and other researchers tell us that today's young adults walk a long, uneven road to maturity. "There is a new and important stage in life in American culture," he writes in Books & Culture, "what scholars call 'emerging adulthood,' the time of life between ages 18 and 30." Not surprisingly, since they don't feel they've reached full maturity, the "emerging adults" in my church hunger for spiritual fathers and mothers to help them get there. And parenting is not a large-group experience; few families have more than eight children.

So I've been experimenting at church with "Transformation Conversations," extended times of listening to another man and then helping him form a spiritual-growth plan for the coming year. (Mature women are beginning to do the same with younger women.) It generally takes two 90-minute conversations before I feel I know the shape of someone's soul well enough to offer a few "pastoral invitations."

In one recent Transformation Conversation, we talked honestly about this young man's vocation, money, relationships, marriage.

We finished, and he said, "Since my wife and I attend worship regularly, serve, and give, it would be easy to conclude we're doing fine. But I need shepherding, too. And I don't think I felt fully shepherded until right now."

At times I look at how much time these conversations take, and I think, This is painfully slow and inefficient. The raw truth is that spiritual fathering is something you can't accelerate, microwave, chart, whiteboard, measure, or scale.

But there is no substitute for being known by another. This is parenting, meaningful spiritual intimacy. People say these conversations are changing them, but even if they weren't, I know they are changing me: as I listen deeply to someone, I care more deeply for him, and I can't help but pray for him.

Does this "inefficient" approach to ministry mean you limit the growth of your church? That depends. The answer to more sheep is more shepherds—what the Bible calls "elders" or "undershepherds" (1 Peter 5), "fathers" (1 John 2), or "older women" (Titus 2).

So your growth is limited by the number of shepherds (whether lay or ordained) who can do this kind of work. I look for the people who are spiritually mature—usually in the second half of life, though not always—good listeners, confidential, loving, and able to restore someone gently (Gal. 6:1).

From Being Liked to Respected

I know I'm unlike anyone else who's gone into ministry, but I like to be liked. Too bad that what church "kids" sometimes need is discipline, a process that generally means I'll be disliked (at least, for a time).

What helps me is to realize that though people resent church discipline and push back against it, usually deep down they know they need it. And even if they don't like it (or me), to be a spiritual father means I must take the risk and plunge into bringing guidance and loving discipline to my spiritual children.

I've had to ask someone to step down from a ministry he enjoyed; he looked like he'd been kicked. In one case I had to ask someone to refrain from receiving Communion for a season, and that was painful for him and for me. But usually, the discipline is not so formal and public. Instead, it's a corrective word when he's begun to veer but not yet left the roadway.

Over lunch a young man said, "I feel anxious a lot."

"What do you do to help with the anxiety?" I asked.

"I have a couple of drinks."

I could tell he was becoming emotionally dependent on the alcohol, and I knew I needed to address that. But I ducked it, chiding myself for my cowardice.

Thankfully, a few weeks later, we met again, and this time, he brought it up. I lovingly challenged him with my concern. And that conversation became a turning point for him.

When people sense that your correction comes because you know them and you love them, the majority of people accept discipline and grow through it.

Sometimes I shake my head and wonder, Why do they stay? My theory: They've never known a world without internet porn and access to strong, compulsive powers. Deep down, they are saying, "Protect me from the forces in my life that are raging out of control and threaten to consume me." Discipline, caringly administered, makes them feel loved and secure.

As Robert Frost put it in Our Heavenly Father: "Our basic need from our fathers is one of affectionate authority."

Becoming a Spiritual Dad (or Mom)

Lest I offer only a paradigm and not the practical steps to enter it, here are three I've found helpful:

1. Count the cost. As a spiritual father, there is much I can lose: relevance, efficiency, and being liked (at least, at the moment of bringing correction or discipline). I may lose the cachet of my church growing rapidly. And being a father ties me down: Kids need fathers who stay, so I can't just take my talents to South Beach. Let us count that cost.

But in being a spiritual father or mother, there is much to gain. You gain depth, intimacy, and being respected. What a joy it is to have a spiritual son or daughter call, stop by, or send a Facebook message, just to let you know how things are going, to share a worry or something to celebrate. It's the spiritual equivalent of a child bringing home a picture from school for you to proudly display on the fridge.

2. Be fathered (or mothered) yourself. When I was in elementary school, my dad's commute was two hours each way. In those formative years, every Monday through Friday, I never ate a meal with my dad. That left a gaping hole in my soul, and I sometimes wondered, How can I be a father to others when I hardly know what it means to be fathered myself?

My answer was born out of crisis. As I neared age 40, I struggled with a loss of meaning. That was humbling: I'd always told myself that because of my faith in Christ, I would never experience a midlife crisis. My wife finally said, "I can't help you. Why don't you go see Doug?" 

That began an 11-year journey in which Doug and I have met almost every month. Doug listens, ask questions, cares, prays. Twice in those 11 years he has firmly warned against a decision I was about to make. But mostly, he has just shown up, and somewhat silently and mysteriously, his steady, caring presence in my life strengthens me to father others.

3. Rethink your calendar. You probably already have a few people in whom you feel a spiritual interest, and you sense that if you parent them, they will be able to parent others (2 Tim. 2:2). Then make time to get to know them, to show up, to be a steady presence.

Appointment by appointment, you slowly enter the joy Spurgeon once expressed: "What position is nobler than that of a spiritual father who claims no authority and yet is universally esteemed, whose word is given only as tender advice, but is allowed to operate with the force of law? … Lovingly firm and graciously gentle, he is the chief of all because he is the servant of all."

Kevin A. Miller is associate rector of Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, Illinois.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today International/Leadership Journal.
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