About Field Work
As an ‘unconventional’ pastor (actually conventional if Jesus is the convention, not culture), my work is done ‘in the field’. Jesus moved the center of faith and life from the temple to the table. I seek to learn from the outsider, the stranger, who shows up as a mysterious divine presence, and then reframe pastoral work along this path. I suppose Wendell Berry says it best in my view.
“I kept on as janitor of the church, which is scheduled work. I still walk up on Fridays to clean, as I have always done, and on Sunday mornings I go up to ring the bell and sit through the service. I don’t attend altogether for religious reasons. I feel more religious, in fact, here beside this corrupt and holy stream.
I am not sectarian or evangelical. I don’t want to argue with anybody about religion. I wouldn’t want to argue about it even if I thought it was arguable, or even if I could win. I’m a literal reader of the Scriptures, and so I see the difficulties. And yet every Sunday morning I walk up there, over a cobble of quibbles.
I am, I suppose, a difficult man. I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”
