The Pastor in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #2): Ministry to People Who No Longer Need a God

When these reforms took, all practices of magic were pushed to the margins, making superstitions in toto out of bounds.

Making everything sacred by breaking the rigid chain of being eventually allowed us to imagine the public space free of any divine reflection or even responsibility.

This change is to divide the natural world from “divine purpose and action.”

The fundamentalists underestimated what an exciting freedom the secular age was; our ordinary lives were now assumed to be completely our own.

Taylor says it like this: “The buffered self is essentially the self which is aware of the possibility of disengagement. And disengagement is frequently carried out in relation to one’s whole surroundings, natural and social.”

If Edwards was pushing his people up the hill of holiness, making priests of them all, Beecher layman-ized the priesthood, making the pastor just like one of the people.

While our secular age seems to stymie pastors, surgeons like Kalanithi are awakening to the pastoral task as central and transformational. The invitation to share in the depth of human experience, to enter into the reality of death, seems to bring an overwhelming sense of transcendence within the most immanent of occupations.

And if the pastor can’t do this, completely shaking off the what in favor of the how, then she is always under the threat of being perceived, ironically, as a blockage to people’s genuine (authentic) spiritual journey (more on this below).

this drive into pastoral personality is connected with the conception that nature is impersonal, as we saw above, divine action becomes much fuzzier and faith more fragile for the pastor and her people alike.