To Know and Be Known

For my own part, a process of cleansing began a little over ten years ago when I ceased being chiefly a rector and became one of a fellowship of pastoral leaders at Church of the Redeemer in Houston, Texas.

In 1965 Betty and I had been married 14 years, and I had been ordained for eight. We had a happy and busy home life filled with parochial tasks that involved both of us and, at times, our four children. My pastoral record as an Episcopalian priest was adequate, not outstanding, though perhaps a cut or two above average because of my earlier experience with psychiatric social services in the fields of family counseling and adolescent behavior therapy. Betty, besides being a godly mother and wife, was a musician and teacher. From a traditional view of pastoral leadership, our gifts combined to make us an ideal cleric-and-wife team.

Then my world began to change. Renewal developments of a communal nature, begun in my Houston parish, forced me out of a middle class, elitist, rather sophisticated intellectual isolation into a thorough-going involvement with the fast-changing and generally depressed American society at my heels.

It had always been dogging me, but rarely had I thought it a concern for pastoral attention, because it was not the society of my own personal or professional world. I was just an ordinary Episcopalian pastor.

I now understand that as an Episcopalian, not only was I ministering directly to only a rarefied segment of American society, but also that, with the obvious exception of certain traumatic moments--death, threatened divorce, and so on--I was scarcely involved in the lives of God’s people at all. My human involvement with those for whom I had pastoral concern was really quite shallow. The words of Jesus about good shepherding in John 10:14 had escaped me.

One of the chief changes in the nature of our ministry resulted from a sudden press upon our lives from desperately needy folk in the surrounding inner city district when the parish became a neighborhood. As a mere expediency toward getting the task done, Betty and I opened home to some single young adults.

We invited them, one man and two women, into our family and into our personal lives because we needed them and because they fit. By “fit” I mean we shared a common vision of pastoral concern, a common faith in God’s desire and power to meet human need, a common fervency and hope in God’s word and prayer, and a common love for each other and our children. They were university graduates--intelligent, stable, and eager young Christians who felt called of the Holy Spirit to give their lives fully in the service of Jesus. They really did fit.

Then the fun began.

There is a world of difference between the sort of casual access a pastor gains into a person’s life because of encounters that happen during moments of pastoral crisis, and the profound access people may have one to another while living under the same roof as a family. Because of diffusion and the disintegration of life in our modern society, even the average nuclear family finds deep interpersonal confrontation an easy thing to avoid: consequently, most of us take the easy way out. But we as a household and an “extended” family were bent upon sharing, not only a common task, but also a common life and a common calling. We were cast into each other’s bosoms willy-nilly.

The extraordinary social behavior which we suddenly found ourselves dealing with among the urban poor and culturally dispossessed during the early sixties is now commonplace in the broader American scene: the use of mind-expanding and hard drugs and increasing self abuse with intoxicants; adolescent coition, popularized prostitution and pornography; unrestrained cohabitation among young singles and the rejection of marriage; divorce, and one-parent families with varieties of illicit serial liaisons; gender identity and confusion and flaunted homosexuality. Such problems and their devastating human effects were at the heart of most of the pastoral situations we faced in family and personal counseling.

Funds were nowhere available for private assistance, and welfare agencies offered little if any help, so we began dealing with the problems on our own. I knew I was unable to face these situations creatively without someone to support and assist me, so my pastoral ministry began taking new shape as it was intentionally shared with other household adults. For me this shared pastoral concern was a whole new experience in ministry, and before long I was incapable of functioning efficiently without it.

But for all of the advantages it offered, this new shape in ministry introduced unexpected and powerful pressures in my personal life. They came from two places, one being my natural family, especially my relationship to Betty.

We had been comfortable with one another and had a good relationship as far as the average Christian marriage goes: common interests, common concerns, common caring, and a happy hearth with healthy children around it. But there were many things between us that were potentially destructive or hurtful and without peace. Of course, we were scarcely ever conscious of them because we had long since discovered their flash points and out of civil kindness had determined to avoid the inflammatory word or circumstance.

But now, in the persons of three healthy and sometimes aggressive young adults, there were forces afoot in the household that Betty and I could hardly comprehend, let alone control: all five adults were dealing openly together with matters relating to others’ family intimacy, sexuality, self-image and self-doubt, as well as with their rage, jealousy, bitterness, and deep personal hurt The flash point of our unresolved marriage conflicts was touched with great enough frequency that Betty and I were forced to deal with them, often without benefit of waiting until nighttime and the privacy of our own room. The fat, so to speak, was in the fire.

Pressure from the other direction was equally troublesome. I had never before dealt at such depth with counseling problems of the sort we were confronting each day; for that matter, none of us had even suspected such human brokenness to be so ubiquitous. In order to relate openly and honestly to the people who sought us out, we faced analysis and re-evaluation of our own reactions to such fearful, threatening things.

Doing that sort of thing alone was no help, so along with private prayer and searching I began sharing my reactions and revealing myself to other household members to a degree that I had never done with anyone else. We were all in the same boat in uncertain waters, and in the face of a common threat, the barriers between us disintegrated. Exposed and often unsure of ourselves, we were soon very vulnerable to one another and bound together by a common frailty hitherto unsuspected. Out of that experience an astonishing growth occurred, and for each of us a rapid maturing both as Christians and as leaders began.

Mine was not the only parish household then engaged in the trauma of pastoral change. There were two others undergoing the same growth pangs. Had we not had one another for support I doubt any of us would have made it safely through those troubled seas. But as it happened, that pastoral milieu was the crucible in which a now-famous parish renewal was refined. Ten years ago at Redeemer Church, Houston, a dynamic of discipling was begun that revolutionized me and my ministry. Thousands of us since then have come to know that good shepherding is not a technique or a method. It is a lifestyle and a gift of Christ to his church.

This is the second of a two-part series on the dynamics of discipling. Last month’s column laid out the impact of Jesus’ model of vulnerability on a seminary graduate’s idea of shepherding. Graham Pulkingham was a leader of the Community of Celebration in Cumbrae, Scotland when this article appeared.