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

Truly blurring the line between sacred and profane, and therefore keeping enchantment down, would necessitate a liberation of the people. They would need to be freed from seeing themselves as just links in a chain of being. They would need to see themselves as priests.

The pastor is not the one who saves people from any or all of the impingements. Rather, the pastor is the one who reminds the community that though God seems absent, nevertheless the God who is a minister arrives right here in the middle of such events of impingement, when things seem so hard.

Preaching has had to turn to self-help and humor (turns initiated by Henry Ward Beecher in the nineteenth century, as we’ll see) because the self is buffered and disengaged. Humor, particularly, becomes a direct switch that can flip people from being disengaged to engaged—laughter is a sure sign that people are with you

The world was assumed to be part of an intricate cosmos, a system of natural and supernatural forces and beings that interacted and affected one another. Meaning was everywhere because the natural world was the staging area of cosmic action.

Young pastors, particularly, hate when people assume that they don’t drink, swear, or watch HBO (one of the reasons hotel restaurants are filled with cigar smoking and Scotch drinking at pastors’ conferences). Now in a secular age, with its attention to authenticity, this leftover conception of politeness and manners seems restricting at best and a

The Reformation asserts that what matters is not what you do but how you do it.

We can seek for new enchantments, but those of the past are past. It is no wonder the pastor feels caught in a malaise of meaning. The pastor is left to wonder what the liturgy and sacraments are good for.

time wasn’t frozen in a linear progression as we now assume. Certain moments cast meaning over all of ordinary life by shifting time. The people to whom Augustine, Becket, and Edwards ministered had a shared imagination (a “social imaginary” as Taylor calls it)6 that led them to assume that Good Friday in the year 435, 1138, or 1752 was closer to t

divine action becomes obscured in a disenchanted world.