The Cult of Pastoral Vulnerability

Another well-known minister has resigned from his pastoral office due to a previously undisclosed inappropriate relationship. The twist in this grimly familiar tale is that he had largely built his ministry around his struggle with homosexual temptation and his advocacy for celibacy. His fall is thus a sad blow not only to him and his congregants, but also to those in the wider church who have championed the same cause.

Much of the subsequent commentary on his fall has focused on whether his theological positions left him vulnerable to such an outcome. But there is a broader question here that all Christians in America need to ask: Is the real problem the cult of vulnerability, which now shapes so much of pastoral ministry?

Philip Rieff observed that the rise of the modern therapeutic society transformed the role of culture and its institutions. In the past, culture pointed people outward and shaped them into members of society. In Aristotle’s Athens, that meant acquiring the virtues needed to belong to the polis. In medieval Europe, it meant being formed by the church calendar and its rituals into faithful members of Christendom. In the nineteenth century, it meant learning the skills and attitudes that made one a productive member of an industrialized society. In the modern therapeutic culture, human happiness, broadly understood as a sense of immediate, psychological well-being, became the imperative—and the direction of culture flipped. Now it pointed not outward but inward, serving the felt needs of the individual.

In such a world, the pressure to rethink all cultural roles, particularly those of a previously prescriptive character, is intense. Teaching is reoriented around the child’s feelings. Physicians become “service providers.” And institutions that demand a sacrifice of the self to a greater good—the nation, the church, the family—become less plausible and must change or fade away. And in ministry, the model of pastor as fellow-struggler, whose spiritual battles need to be performed in public, emerges.  

There are numerous problems with this culture of ministry. The pastor who publicizes his sexual temptations risks attracting predatory congregants or walking into a honey trap. It is true that those ministers who have been public about their vulnerability to homosexuality have helped to set that issue in perspective and removed the notion that it is an unforgivable sin. But that could have been done through careful and thorough catechesis.

The church has historically understood the office as finding its authority in the objective truths of word and sacrament. The Donatist controversy of the early church made this clear: Whether a bishop had apostatized during a period of persecution did not invalidate the sacraments he performed, given that the agent was not him but God himself. In Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, the priest, a pitiful, immoral alcoholic, is still a priest able to carry out his pastoral duties.

Today we live in an oddly neo-Donatist age where there is still a tendency to conceptualize ministry in terms of personal qualities and experiences, although these are now determined by the psychologized values of the therapeutic society rather than responses under persecution. And this neo-Donatism takes various forms: Women need to have pastoral roles because men, lacking the lived experience of womanhood, cannot adequately minister to their needs. Elderly pastors who grew up in a pre-social-media age cannot speak to young people because of the generation gap. And straight pastors who have never experienced homosexual temptation have less authority in counseling those Christians who do. Experience grants authority. 

No, no, no. The minister preaches the word and administers the sacraments. These have an objective validity that does not depend upon the moral or experiential qualities of the man expounding the Bible, sprinkling the water, breaking the bread, and filling the cup. Yes, the minister’s character is important. Paul’s list of qualifications for eldership makes that clear, and when a minister is found to be wanting, he should be removed by due process. But the performance of public vulnerability is not a qualification for ministry. 

Of course, vulnerability can play a helpful role in the church. The couple that has experienced infertility or the death of a child has an informal authority in counseling others facing the same. But those are not struggles that arise from matters of personal morality and responsibility. Rather they are features of life in our fallen world, and expressions of vulnerability in such matters are not problematic. But public performance of vulnerability to sin is not part of the minister’s calling. The congregants, if well-catechized, all know he is a sinner. They need no more information than that. The temptation to say more is a function of our therapeutic society and thus part of the larger cultural problem, not a solution. 

The other week, I overheard a friend commenting that, if she hears another person praising a priest for his vulnerability, she will explode. “I want a priest who has strong convictions and clear theology,” she declared. Amen. It is past time we throw out the vulnerability model of ministry and return to emphasizing the great objective truths of the faith, truths that are true regardless of the “lived experience” of the one declaring them.