A quivering mass of availability

This post is from the defunct blog "Dying Church"

Will Willimon writes in Pastor:

The pastor is [often] reduced to the level of the soother of anxieties brought on by the dilemmas of affluence, rather than the caller of persons to salvation. My colleague Stanley Hauerwas has accused the contemporary pastor of being little more than "a quivering mass of availability." Practicing what I call "promiscuous ministry"- ministry with no internal, critical judgment about what care is worth giving- we become victims of a culture of insatiable need. We live in a capitalist, consumptive culture where there is no purpose to our society other than "meeting our needs." The culture gves us the maximum amount of room and encouragement to "meet our needs" without appearing to pass judgment on which needs are worth meeting... In this vast supermarket of desire, we pastors must do more than simply "meet people's needs." The church is also about giving people the critical means of assesing which needs give our lives meaning, about giving us needs we would not have had if we had not met Jesus.

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