“When you become a pastor, you shouldn’t feel guilty because you spent the entire day reading The Grapes of Wrath.”
As a first-year seminary student, these words from my preaching professor caused me to chuckle. Correction, they caused me to scoff.
He’s obviously never served at an Asian immigrant church. Does he know how busy we are?
Now, more than thirteen years since that first semester preaching class, I’m finally realizing the value of his advice. It took three churches, a cross country move, two trans-Pacific moves, and a heart attack for me to get the message. I was overworked.
More than being overworked, however, my theological imagination was undernourished and depleted. Sure, I was keeping up with my reading and staying sharp exegetically. But like a bird feeding her new hatchlings, I was only chewing enough to regurgitate and spit it back into the open mouths of my congregation.
At my current church, transitioning from a solo English Ministry pastor to an associate pastor within a team of staff has meant more than just a lighter workload. It’s been a revelation.
Composting to Feed the Imagination of the Theologian
My wife loves to garden. It’s a hobby she honed during our time serving at a church in Hawaii. When we first moved into our home in Northern California, we rented a modest house with a small patch of dirt. She was determined to continue gardening, but she knew the dry Cupertino dirt presented more of a challenge than the lush volcanic soil of East Honolulu.
So one of her first tasks was to start a compost pile in the corner of our yard. She asked me to throw our food scraps into the pile to sit in the dirt. I didn’t know much about gardening, but it was a fun way to discard our orange peels and onion skins. So over the course of the last year, that’s what I did. Every day, I added scraps to the pile―everything from vegetable discards to coffee grinds to eggshells.
It was fascinating to witness the slow but inevitable change—rotting food, mixed with gray dirt, somehow turning into a dark and rich soil. But it didn’t happen overnight. The process required moisture, heat, worms, and most of all, time. Composting takes time. It cannot be rushed. It’s been well over a year and only now is our compost pile really beginning to yield results.
Pastors, similarly, need time to become theologians. It takes time to think deeply about the world in intersection with deep thoughts about the Word. To become a good theologian, pastors need a compost pile for their imagination. A consistent fertilization of thoughts and ideas is how dirt becomes soil.
Along with conventional sources—commentaries, Christian literature, theological journals, and good conversations—developing theologians also need onions skins from The Grapes of Wrath, orange peels from Bruno Mars songs, coffee grinds from leisure, and dare I say, even some broken eggshells from social media feeds. Composting, feeding the imagination of the theologian, requires one to be a consumer of content, any and all, the more the merrier. Consume, both broadly and deeply.
Above all, the budding theologian needs time. A true theological compost pile takes the aggregate whole of trash and scraps thrown onto the ground of our minds, and as it’s allowed to ruminate, it does its work over the course of months and years, not days and weeks. Dirt to soil.
Creating Good Soil
Theological composting will not only benefit pastors, but congregations as well. One of the more common complaints from congregation members is that their pastor’s sermons are boring…the same ol’ same ol’. If you’re unhappy with your pastor’s sermons, if you aren’t “getting fed” (and assuming there isn’t a major crisis or long-term hidden ordeal your pastor is dealing with), then my inclination is to believe that your pastor is too busy.
Pastors are often too busy going to meetings, overscheduled with appointments, and bogged down by the nitty-gritties of ministry. Don’t get me wrong. These things are necessary, vital even. But when your pastor couples these imagination-stalling tasks with their own demands for a social life and family, there just aren’t enough hours in the week for dirt to become soil. Congratulations, you may have a great pastor, a gifted administrator, and a truly competent leader, but there’s a good chance you also have an undernourished theologian. Your pastor isn’t afforded the time necessary for scraps to ruminate and for the alchemy of the soil to produce a healthy and imaginative theology. The result is often disengaged sermons, uninspired analogies, and predictable applications.
Especially in Asian American churches, changing the acceptable standards of how pastors spend their time is an uphill battle, and for solo pastors of smaller churches, a near impossibility. But even small changes can create a better composting environment.
Recognizing that productivity is often taken as a measure of spirituality, here are a few questions we can ask ourselves to gauge our church culture’s potential compost environment.
- What degree of scorn would your pastor face for spending the better part of a day reading Harry Potter?
- Would you complain if you ran into your pastor at the movie theater on a Thursday afternoon?
- How pronounced is your pastor’s need to “check-in” and “show face” at every single church function?
These simple questions can spark some hard conversations. But one last question needs answering for real change to take place.
Do you see yourself as a theologian?
Planting Your Own Garden
Faith seeking understanding, a phrase coined by Anselm, is a call for all believers to take seriously the mandate to be theologians. Our faith begs to be understood, and we must give ourselves to a lifetime’s pursuit of supplying ample fertilizer to our own spiritual gardens. The call to be a disciple of Christ comes with an intrinsic obligation to be ongoing consumers of content.
To be sure, I’m not advocating for doom-scrolling or neglecting basic responsibilities to binge-watch an entire series. Rather, I’m advocating for the wholehearted belief that thinking deeply about God includes thinking deeply about the entire world which we inhabit. I’m advocating for the belief that common grace allows us to see inspired revelations in the short stories of Ernest Hemingway, or in One Piece, as much as in Barth’s Church Dogmatics.
In other words, being an imaginative theologian is not just the work of the clergy. The moment we say anything about God and faith, we are doing the work of a theologian. Therefore, may we be spiritually engaged consumers of media and culture, courageous enough to give ourselves to the time-consuming work of the compost pile. If it causes us to miss a minor deadline or a couple of meetings (that could have been emails anyways), then may we truly engage, and in doing so, believe that God is processing the monochromatic dirt of our own souls into good and fertile soil.
Photo Credit: Gabi Miranda