CL: You talk a lot about the importance of “place” and ministry context in pastoring. How would you encourage young pastors to better embrace their ministry locale as a part of their formation as a pastor?
EP: Well, this is where most of the satisfaction comes in being a pastor, in being local and being personal. The vocation of the pastor is one of the best in which you can learn to find out ways to be intimate with people and to understand the actual location where you live. This Earth is glorious, and we’re not disembodied—we don’t levitate. We’re people with our feet on the ground, and who else gets to do this in quite the way a pastor can do? You know, a doctor deals with bodies who are disembodied from place and relationships, and the businessman is dealing with commercial transactions that have nothing to do with relationships as far as he’s concerned. But a pastor gets to do it all; the whole thing comes together, and the pastor knows whole entire families and neighborhoods and gets to see the whole thing: the good, the bad, the indifferent, the sick, the healthy. I think it’s a glorious vocation to get called into, and it saddens me when pastors eliminate so much of it just by ignoring the actual circumstances in which they live and try to plant something that’s disincarnate and using programs instead of relationships in order to cultivate the Christian life.
CL: You’ve written over thirty books, many of them on spiritual formation. In your opinion, does church size matter when it comes to spiritual formation? Are megachurches healthy places to grow?
EP: It’s very difficult to develop maturity in a place where the size is so huge. I’m thinking particularly about pastors. How can you preach to people you don’t know? The sermons become, and the church is run, primarily through programs, which are inherently depersonalizing. And so you’re choosing a way to have church which makes it very difficult to be at church. Of course, there are many good things that happen. You can have mission projects and world influence in what’s going on, and you can certainly say what needs to be said. You know, our primary theological tenant is the Trinity. God is personal, and He’s interpersonal. There is nothing God does that doesn’t come from a Trinitarian sort of an operation, and when we start to develop strategies that bypass the personal, the local, then it seems to me we’re just hamstringing ourselves.
CL: What are the major things you would encourage young leaders and pastors to be involved in on a daily and weekly basis in their ministries?
EP: I think one of things I think I’d like to convey is that there are twenty hundred different ways of being a pastor, and there’s probably no vocation in which you’re able to be yourself, with your whole self as a pastor. And I think it’s important for each of us to say, “What’s gone into the making of me as a pastor?” and use the strengths that I’ve been given, the experiences I’ve been given to be a faithful servant of Jesus Christ. But I think local and personal is very important. There are a lot of different ways to preach a sermon or teach a class or visit somebody in the hospital, but if we try to take somebody else’s mantle and put on us, it’s like Saul’s armor. It just doesn’t work. It might look really good, but we can’t move in it. It keeps us from being ourselves. So I think that’s what I’d say. Pastors I’ve known and who have been important to me have kind of done it out of their own skin, have tried to be modeled by somebody else.
