What the role of a pastor is, and isn't

Where are the churches?

Where are the pastors?

I have a feeling this column could cost me some readers. Hope not. I'm persuaded the time has come for a little pushback.

Lately, I've spent a fair amount of time in the car, traveling to St. Louis, Jefferson City and Columbia. Music doesn't keep me alert so talk radio keeps me going on long stretches of highway.

As I listen, I am reminded again that there is no such thing, to my reckoning, as an impartial radio talk show host. Advocacy talk, whether left or right, is in vogue and has been since the 1980s.

Lately, I've been hearing radio bloviators (is that even a word?) ask why Christian pastors don't use their pulpits to inform people about various "abuses" of governmental power. One commentator roared that prayer and Bible reading in schools died in the 1960s because the churches didn't rise up and refuse to accept it.

Another said the Roe v. Wade 1973 Supreme Court decision permitting abortion in certain circumstances is a travesty of pastoral neglect.

Still another suggested churches were falling down on their civic duty by not having voter registration tables in the vestibule.

The churches have gone silent, the radio prophets thunder. The pastors are "hiding behind their Bibles."

The metaphor suggested by that last sentence is interesting. The Isaiahs of talk radio need a little education, I think. A pastor's job is not to stand in the pulpit and tell people how to vote or how to feel about a particular political issue. Churches are not get-out-the-vote vehicles; churches are not outreach tools for the Democratic or Republican parties. When a pastor steps into a pulpit, he or she is not trying to convince men and women in the pew to adopt a certain attitude about a public matter.

The job of the preacher is to take a particular biblical text, study it, pray about it, and bring the theological tools learned in seminary and honed in the work of the parish to do meaningful and helpful reflection. That's a sermon: reflection about a biblical text. If I bring a political viewpoint to the text, the result is prooftexting and I've just abused the written Word.

Faithful pastors, in my experience, use the preaching moment to stay focused on the text and not push anybody's current-day policies.

Faithful pastors allow their hearers to connect their own dots. If that's hiding behind a Bible, then that's what I do.

So, to the radio prophets who charge pastors are guilty of navel-gazing and that churches have gone deathly quiet about social and political issues, I'm tired of you. You have chosen to ignore the works of mercy and justice, great and small, carried about by churches every day. Feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and visiting the sick and homebound are but a few examples of how churches go about the work of Christ.

I'm sorry if it's not enough, but it's not my role to further your agenda. Find your political allies somewhere else.

Leave churches and pastors alone to try to follow the One who associated with priests and prostitutes and with rich and poor alike, being "no respecter of persons." Read the story of Zacchaeus sometime. Jesus allowed him to connect his own dots.