What We Lost When We Lost the Word Pastoral

Yesterday I wrote about church size and the way the apparatus we build to facilitate the gathering tends, over time, to consume the gathering itself. In the course of working through that piece, something else surfaced that I want to spend more time with. It is the word pastoral.

I will admit it plainly: I am not sure I know what the word fully means anymore. I grew up in the church. My father was a pastor. I have spent decades inside churches of various stripes, and as an adult I run a business that services many of them, so I see how they actually function from the inside. And yet when I sit with the word pastoral and try to pull out everything it used to carry, I keep finding that what I have inherited is a thinner, more domesticated version of what the word once meant. I suspect I am not alone in this. I suspect most lay people, and a meaningful number of pastors, have inherited the same thin version and do not know what is missing because they have never seen the older form practiced.

So this is partly a recovery exercise. What did pastoral used to mean, and what is left of it now?

The shepherd metaphor is doing more work than we usually notice. Pastor comes from the Latin for shepherd, and it is not a decorative metaphor. A shepherd in the ancient near east knew each sheep individually. He knew which one tended to wander, which one was sick, which one had just lambed, which one was being bullied by the others. He slept with them. He bled for them. He led them by name. When Jesus picks up the shepherd image in John 10, he is not being poetic. He is invoking a specific kind of labor that his hearers would have recognized as concrete and physically demanding. The shepherd was with the sheep. That presence was the job.

Pastoral care, historically, meant the cure of souls. The medieval term was cura animarum, and it was understood as a craft, something a priest or pastor learned to do over a lifetime. It involved knowing your people. Knowing their families. Knowing their sins and their struggles and their secret griefs. Visiting them in their homes. Sitting with them when they were dying. Catechizing their children. Disciplining them when they strayed. Reconciling them when they quarreled. Hearing their confessions, formal or informal. Richard Baxter, the Puritan, wrote a whole treatise on this in The Reformed Pastor. He visited every family in his parish, by name, on a rotating schedule, and considered this the core work of ministry. Preaching was downstream of it. The sermon could only do its work because the visitation had already done its work first; he preached to people he knew, about realities he had witnessed in their lives.

The pastor was a generalist embedded in a particular place. He married you, baptized your children, buried your parents, prayed at your sickbed, knew your business, and probably knew things about you that nobody else in town knew. The role was deeply local and deeply continuous. You did not have a pastor for one season and a different pastor for the next. You had a pastor, and the relationship was the substance of the work. This is why pastoral letters from previous centuries read so strangely to us today. They assume an intimacy and continuity that the modern American pastor structurally cannot have, because his congregation is too large, too transient, and too professionally mediated.

Visitation was central, not peripheral. Going to people's homes, sitting in their living rooms, eating their food, knowing their kitchens, this was not an optional add-on. It was understood as the means by which the pastor came to actually know the flock. You cannot shepherd what you have never seen up close.

Discipline was part of pastoring. This one is hard for modern ears, but historically the pastor was responsible for telling you when you were sinning, calling you to repentance, and in extreme cases withholding communion. This was not punitive. It was understood as part of the cure of souls, like a physician telling you that you have to stop drinking. The willingness to do this was a marker of seriousness about the work. A pastor who would not name sin was not pastoring; he was performing.

And the pastor was, almost always, one of the most well-read people in town. This is the part of the older form that I think is most under-appreciated and most worth recovering. He read Augustine and Calvin and Luther and Wesley, yes, but he also read widely outside the explicitly Christian canon. Open up Adam Clarke's commentary, written in the early nineteenth century, and you will find references to the Targums, the Talmud, classical Greek and Roman authors, Arabic poetry, the Vedas, the Quran, ethnographic notes from missionaries to India and China, observations about Hindu cosmology. Matthew Henry quotes pagan philosophers. The older Reformed commentators engage Aquinas and the medieval schoolmen who in turn engaged Avicenna and Averroes. There was an assumption that to pastor a flock through the world, you had to actually understand the world, including the parts of it that were not Christian, because your people were going to encounter those parts and you were the one they would come to with their questions.

This was not theological liberalism. Clarke was a Methodist of strong evangelical conviction. Henry was a Puritan. They read widely because they took their faith seriously, not in spite of it. The conviction was that all truth is God's truth, that Christ is Lord over the whole intellectual landscape, and that a pastor who could not engage the wider tradition of human thought could not really shepherd people who lived in that landscape. It was a confident posture. The faith could absorb the engagement because the faith was true.

I want to dwell on this for a moment, because I think the loss here is not merely about reading habits. It is about a theological narrowing that has happened in much of American evangelicalism and that I find myself increasingly unable to swallow. The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof. All of it. The Bhagavad Gita is part of what God has allowed humans to write about the longing for the divine; engaging it does not threaten the gospel, it illumines the world the gospel addresses. The pagan philosophers were wrestling with real questions, and the apostle Paul did not hesitate to quote them on Mars Hill. The notion that there is a distinctly "Christian" intellectual realm sealed off from the rest of human thought, and that the faithful pastor stays inside it, is not Christianity. It is a kind of practical gnosticism, a carving up of creation into sacred and secular zones, and it is a limitation and a rejection of the God who made and sustains the whole of it. When pastors stopped reading widely, the impoverishment was not just intellectual. It was theological. The faith got smaller because the world the faith was allowed to engage got smaller.

That is what pastoral used to carry. The shepherd actually with the sheep. The cure of souls as a craft. The home visit and the deathbed prayer. The willingness to name sin. The breadth of reading that took the lordship of Christ over creation seriously enough to engage it. A particular person, in a particular place, knowing particular people, formed broadly enough to lead them through whatever the world would throw at them.

What does the role mostly look like now?

Running an organization. Managing staff. Attending board meetings. Planning services. Building a brand. Writing a vision statement. Negotiating with the denomination. Approving the annual budget. Handling personnel issues. Preparing the Sunday sermon, often to be preached to people the pastor largely does not know, because the congregation is too large for him to know them and too transient for the relationships to deepen even if he tried. Visitation, where it happens at all, is often delegated to a "care pastor" or a "lay shepherding team" or a deacon rotation, and in many congregations it has simply ceased. Discipling has been outsourced to small group curricula. Discipline has been replaced with affirmation, because discipline costs you members and members are budget. Reading is for sermon prep, and sermon prep is for performance. The cure of souls, as a craft, is not being practiced. It is being administered.

I want to land the critique gently here, because I do not think this is mostly the fault of individual pastors. The structural conditions that made the older pastoring possible have largely disappeared, and the conditions that exist now are actively hostile to it. A pastor in a large American church who tried to read Adam Clarke-style across world religions, visit every home on a rotation, sit at every deathbed, and discipline sin from the pulpit would be unmanageable inside the modern apparatus. He would be fired within a year, not for being unfaithful, but for being incompatible with the institution he was supposedly leading. The apparatus has changed what the role is allowed to be.

This is where the connection back to yesterday's post becomes inescapable. Scale and pastoring are not independent variables. They are coupled. The older form of pastoring required smallness, continuity, and a particular embedded relationship between pastor and people. Scale destroys all three. A pastor with twenty-five families could plausibly know every soul, visit every home, read deeply, and still have time to study. A pastor with two hundred families is already stretched. A pastor with two thousand families is no longer pastoring in any meaningful sense; he is preaching and administering, and the cure of souls has been distributed to staff or simply abandoned. The breadth of reading collapses first, because that is the easiest thing to cut. The visitation collapses next. What remains is the public-facing performance, which is precisely the apparatus the previous post was diagnosing.

So the two arguments feed each other. Scale demands administration. Administration crowds out shepherding. The vacated shepherding function gets renamed and redistributed but never actually replaced, because what was lost was not a function but a relationship. And the pastor, who used to be the most broadly formed person in town, becomes a religious CEO whose competencies are managerial, motivational, and rhetorical, but no longer pastoral in the older and richer sense of the word.

I want to end on a personal note, because it complicates the picture in a way I think is worth holding onto. My father was a pastor for most of his working life, and he carried real elements of the older form in how he did the job. I remember some of the grittier moments. Shoveling snow in a backyard to cover up the blood of a man who had killed himself, so that his wife and children would not have to see it when they came home. Sitting in a living room with a young man who was sexually abusing children, and with his family, and somehow being present to all of them at once because that was what the moment required of a shepherd. These are not stories I tell to admire him. They are griefs he bore, and bore on behalf of others, and they are the kind of work that the older meaning of pastoral actually entailed. The cure of souls is not gentle. It is presence in places almost no one else is willing to go.

What struck me, watching him over the years, is that the pastoral instinct showed up most clearly after he left the pastorate. He went back to school in midlife and became a registered nurse, and the way he engaged his patients, sitting with them, praying with them when they wanted prayer, knowing their stories, being present at hard moments, looked more like the older meaning of pastoral than much of what he had been allowed to do inside an institutional church role in his later years. The shepherd had migrated to a hospital ward, because that was where the structural conditions still permitted the work. The form did not belong to the institution. It belonged to the man.

I do not know exactly what to do with that, except to note it, and to wonder how many people who would once have been pastors are doing the actual work somewhere else, in nursing, in hospice, in teaching, in the unglamorous corners of ordinary friendship. The cure of souls did not disappear when the institution stopped supporting it. It scattered.

I do not want to mistake that scattering for a resolution. It is not. It is what happens when an institution loses its way and chooses scale over effectiveness, performance over presence, brand over shepherding. The work continues because the work is necessary and because God raises up people to do it, but it continues despite the church, not because of it. The pastoral instinct survives in the laity, in the nurses, in the friends sitting at deathbeds, but the formal office that was supposed to carry and transmit and form that instinct has largely vacated the field. The shepherd is still in some pastures. He is no longer in many of the ones with steeples.

That is not a hopeful ending. It is the consequence of a long and largely unexamined drift, and it is the bill coming due for two generations of confusing the size of the apparatus with the health of the church. The work has scattered because the institution made itself uninhabitable for the work. The scattering is the verdict.