When I graduated from seminary 11 years ago, fresh off the presses with a Master’s of Divinity in my pocket and the dream to become a pastor shining brightly in my head, I had expected that the questions I’d been trained to answer would more or less line up with the actual questions I’d be asked in ministry. I’m not talking here about the administrative problems any pastor has to figure out how to solve—how to make sure your church’s insurance is up-to-date, let’s say, or how to file your reports for your denomination. These were context-specific tasks that I knew I’d have to do and I expected to have to figure them out as I went along.
I’m talking about the theological questions that arose in the course of my work shepherding the flock under my care, the spiritual issues and biblical quandaries that the people I pastored were wrestling with. I attended Briercrest Seminary, a very good school that had done some careful thinking about how to equip their grads for “real life ministry,” and I believe that the masters degree I earned there, on the whole, gave me a well-stocked tool box for pastoral work. I even blogged about it early on in my ministry, in a blog post about the Top Ten Classes I’m Glad I Took in Seminary.
That said, I’ve come across all sorts of theological issues in my work as a pastor that I never really saw coming. Few of these were especially deep or troubling, though a small handful were, both deep and troubling. Most were just theological queries that arose in the course of people’s everyday lives, however, and if I were taken aback by them, it was only because it never would have occurred to me to wonder about them myself. Many of them felt somewhat superficial to me at the time, and occasionally it was rather deflating, to want to engage with people over the eschatological significance of Jesus’s counter-intuitive Kingdom of God kerygma (for instance) and to be asked, instead, whether I thought our pets would be with us in heaven.
I would not be communicating well here if I came across as though I looked down in any way on these questions. Yes, it was sometimes deflating, but at the same time, some of the most theologically rich conversations I’ve had in my eleven plus years of ministry emerged out of efforts to tackle these seemingly hum-hum theological questions. Will our pets be with us in heaven? Well: that depends entirely on what you make of the eschatological significance of Jesus counter-intuitive Kingdom of God kerygma.
So I have learned to embrace these kinds of questions—should I get a tattoo, Pastor Dale?—should we pray for Israel, Pastor Dale?—should we put up a Christmas Tree in the sanctuary, Pastor Dale?
In their interesting book How to Think Theologically, Howard Stone and James Duke argue that everyone has an operative theology—even those who aren’t aware of it—even those who out-and-out deny the existence of God. We all have tacit assumptions about who God is and what he’s like, and those assumptions shape our thinking and guide our actions in all kinds of subconscious ways. I tend to agree with them; and I’ve learned that one of the ways to tune in to a person’s “operative theology” is to pay attention to the kinds of questions they’re asking about God, faith, and spirituality.
All this is by way of introduction to a blog series I’m starting here at terra incognita, which I’m calling, “I Thought You’d Never Ask.” It will be an exploration of the “real questions” I’ve been asked over the course of my work as a pastor, the questions my seminar training never primed me to expect. Many of these questions have come to me via email, and so conveniently, I still have a record of the answers I gave at the time. If you happen to have been one of the askers, please rest assured that I will not break any confidences in anything I post; I am more interested in the broad strokes and general themes. But I hope it will be an illuminating exercise, to explore the everyday questions we ask about God, and examine the theological truths that those questions reveal about him, and about ourselves in relation to him.
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