Hauerwas and Willimon write that "The greatest challenge facing the church in any age is the creation of a living, breathing, witnessing colony of truth, and because of this, we must have pastors and leaders with training and gifts to help form a community that can produce a person like Gladys and a people who can hear Gladys speak the truth without hating her for it.

Failing at that, the pastoral ministry is doomed to the petty concerns of helping people feel a bit better rather than inviting them to dramatic conversion. The pastor becomes nothing more than the court chaplain. . . saying nothing more that we do not already know. Or else the pastor feels like a cult prostitute, selling his or her love for the approval of an upwardly mobile, bored middle class [my comment: now a downwardly mobile, frightened middle class], who, more than anything else, wants some relief from . . . anxiety" (p. 123).

Denominational executives and leading laity desire stability, the ability to build growing, increasingly lasting institutions to support persons within the culture over the length of time rather than the church as a pilgrim-people, traveling through this age in preparation for the age that is to come. We do not need God to sustain a congregation; we need more sensitive, caring, affirming, charismatic leaders who can project personal care for every individual that one meets and administrate the congregation to meet the needs of all who need that personal affirmation to which everyone has the right.

We have learned to pastor and be a congregation as practical atheists. "Most of us professing Christians, from the liberals to the fundamentalists, remain practical atheists in most of our lives. This is so because we think the church is sustained by the 'services' it provides or the amount of 'fellowship' and 'good feeling' in the congregation. Of course there is nothing wrong with 'services' and 'good feeling'; what is wrong is that they have become ends in themselves. When that happens the church and the ministry cannot avoid sentimentality, which we believe is the most detrimental corruption of the church today" (p. 120).

As a result, Willimon and Hauerwas describe the resultant pyscho-social temptations and vulnerabilities that pastors can easily fall. "Have you noticed that, when many contemporary pastors speak of themselves as pastors, words like abuse, seduction, and prostitution creep into their vocabulary. . . . Pastors come to despise what they are and to hate the community that made them that way. Because the church is not a place to worship God, but rather a therapeutic center for meeting of one another's unchecked, unexamined needs, the pastor is exhausted. Only a few months into his or her first pastorate, the new pastor realizes that people's needs are virtually limitless, particularly in an affluent society in which there is an every-rising threshold of desire (which we define as 'need')" (pp. 123-24). They go on: "There is . . . no clear sense of purpose other than meeting of people's needs, so there is no possible way for the pastor to limit what people ask of the pastor. Not knowing what they should do, pastors try to do everything and be everything for everybody. The most conscientious among them become exhausted and empty. The laziest of them merely withdraw into disinterested detachment. Not knowing why their pastor is there, the congregation . . . becomes unrealistic critics of the clergy rather than coworkers, fellow truth-tellers. Self-hatred is inevitable in someone who feels abused, prostituted, unfairly criticized. The burden of being a generally good person, open and available to people of unbounded need, is too great for anybody to bear. Self-hate and loneliness result" (p. 124).

What does it look like for a congregation to ask a pastor to make the congregation not feel at home in the culture around them? What does it mean to pastor to call person's to radical conversion, the utter reshaping of one's hearts and lives by the sanctifying work of the Spirit? I think that it is simply to return the pastorate to its true calling: to oversee a congregation to witness together to the coming kingdom in the return of Jesus Christ that we have seen already in Christ's incarnation, life, teachings, death, and resurrection. It is to see the core of the pastorate in the pastor's office to preach the Word and celebrate the Sacraments and to oversee the congregation's involvement in the works of mercy. It is to recognize that "there is no healing, counseling, witnessing, speaking, interpretation, living or dying the clergy can do that is not the responsibility of every other Christian" (p. 113). It is with patience and wisdom, to rebuke and reprove the congregation, to encourage and support the faithful, to witness the glad tidings that the kingdom of God has come in Jesus Christ. It is to initiate the congregation into the faith handed over to the saints across time, to engage in constant catechesis to allow the Spirit to reshape us all, pastor and laity, into the awareness that God calls us into the fullness of care for God's creation only because creation does not have an end in itself, but only in God.

This is the adventure of being a congregation. This is what God really brings forth in our midst, sometimes despite pastors and congregations. God does raise up witnesses. The recent Houston Catholic Worker has an article by Marc Tumeinski. He writes, "The world would have us believe that the most significant events are shaped by the decisions and actions of those with power and money. Christians know a deeper truth: God shapes history. So often, He works His eternity -- and world shaping events -- through the simple faith acts of the poor and lowly; those with little money or worldly power" (Sept.-Oct. 2006). God does not have as much trouble convincing such "lowly" faithful that we are only pilgrims here, resident aliens; htat we are not seeking influence and stability, but seeking the God who is our Creator who has revealed God's own Self in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.