Good work: learning about ministry from Wendell Berry

Christian Century, March 8, 2005 by Kyle Childress

Years ago Berry wrote, "During the last 17 years ... I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though still visible, and this year it has provided abundant pasture, more than in any year since we have owned it. But to make it as good as it is now has taken 17 years. If I had been a millionaire or if my family had been starving, it would still have taken 17 years. It can be better than it is now, but that will take longer. For it to live fully in its own responsibility, as it did before bad use ran it down, may take hundreds of years."

We all have church members whose lives are deeply scarred by bitterness, anger, hurt, abuse, disease and death. Add to that the deep scarring caused by war, consumer capitalism, nationalism and racism. In short, scarred by sin. For the gospel of Jesus Christ to grow and heal such worn-out, eroded lives takes patient, long-suffering, detailed work. It takes time to cultivate the habits of peacemaking, forgiveness, reconciliation and love where previously violence, mistrust and fear were the norms. It takes time to grow Christians.

And we need more. We also need "correct discipline" along with "enough time" to properly farm and to properly pastor. "Propriety" is an important word to Berry. "Its value is in its reference to the fact that we are not alone. The idea of propriety makes an issue of the fittingness of our conduct to our place or circumstances, even to our hopes.... We are being measured, in other words, by a standard that we did not make and cannot destroy" (Life is a Miracle). Proper work is the practice of submitting our lives to this call and to these people in this place. It includes the pastoral practices of preaching and teaching and leading the liturgy, but also the detailed, painstaking, mundane care of nurturing the people and paying attention to God working in them. Proper work is work that fits with the purpose of God in this particular place.

EVERY PASTOR-TO-BE should ponder this passage, in which Berry describes a farmer who is considering the purchase of a piece of land (he sounds like a pastor looking over a new church assignment or call):

      When one buys the farm and moves there to live,
   something different begins. Thoughts begin to be
   translated into acts.... It invariably turns out, I think,
   that one's first vision of one's place was to some extent
   an imposition on it. But if one's sight is clear and one
   stays on and works well, one's love gradually responds
   to the place as it really is, and one's visions gradually
   image possibilities that are really in it.... Two human
   possibilities of the highest order thus come within
   reach: what one wants can become the same as what
   one has, and one's knowledge can cause respect for
   what one knows.

      ... The good worker will not suppose that good work
   can be made properly answerable to haste, urgency, or
   even emergency.... Seen in this way, questions about
   farming become inseparable from questions about propriety
   of scale. A farm can be too big for a farmer to husband
   properly or pay proper attention to. Distraction is
   inimical to correct discipline, and enough time is beyond
   reach of anyone who has too much to do. But we
   must go farther and see that propriety of scale is invariably
   associated with propriety of another kind: an understanding
   and acceptance of the human place in the
   order of Creation--a proper humility.... It is the properly
   humbled mind in its proper place that sees truly,
   because--to give only one reason--it sees details.
   (Standing by Words)