The Last Long Pastorate, by F. Dean Lueking & Ministry Loves Company, by John Galloway Jr.
Pastors need to reflect on their lives--on what they do, why they do it, and how such doing shapes a way of life. F. Dean Lueking and John Galloway Jr. both write out of the experience of a lifetime of ministry.
Lueking offers the story of a ministry--from ordination to retirement--within a single congregation: Grace Lutheran Church in the Chicago suburb of River Forest, where he served for 44 years, 35 as senior pastor. I was struck by the way his call to ministry was mediated by a thick, cohesive Lutheran culture that provided a seamless, tutored movement from home, to sanctuary, to college, to seminary, to graduate school, to congregation. In a day when the church's capacity to call forth a new generation of pastoral leaders is very much in question, one cannot but be impressed by this account.
Perhaps the greatest strength of Lueking's narrative is that it speaks, explicitly and implicitly, of the long, slow process of becoming a pastor. Ordination authorizes what it takes a lifetime to internalize. In one place he describes the central practice of achieving pastoral identity (which is finally a gift) as embracing the dailiness of congregational life: "Everydayishness was not boredom or hand-over-hand sameness; it was the receiving of the overwhelming goodness of people and their love as a sustenance for my daily work." It is the dailiness of ministry that provides the context for constancy--an exemplification of what Nietzsche termed a "long obedience in the same direction."
