Last night, I met with a group of twenty adults from Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, the congregation I serve as pastor. We were discussing some of the common reasons people give for not associating with a local church. One of these objections was, “I once had a bad experience with a pastor (or a congregation).” I asked the class members to tell me how they might respond if a friend said this to them.

Several answered and the gist of their responses was simple: “I don’t attend Sunday worship and I’m not involved with my church because of the pastor. I’m here because this is my Christian family. This is the fellowship in which I worship God, hear God’s Word, and receive the Sacraments.”

They admitted that if a pastor is a poor preacher or an indifferent visitor of the sick or unchurched or one prone to stubbornness, it can be tough to keep coming to worship week after week or to be involved in the church’s ministries. But each person who spoke said that Jesus Christ is the reason they’re involved with the Church, not the pastor.

To a pastor who cares about Christ and the Church, their sentiments were wonderful to hear. It means that even when I mess up, I’m working with a congregation that has a strong commitment to Christ and to the mission Christ gives to Christians. I’ve always subscribed to the notion that the best churches compensate for the weaknesses of their pastors and use the spiritual gifts of their members to pursue their ministries, often in spite of their pastors. As a pastor conscious of my own deficiencies, this is a huge comfort.

I bring all of this up because this afternoon, after returning from a lectionary study in Chillicothe, Ohio and spending time with the family of a wonderful member of Saint Matthew who passed away this afternoon, I came home for a late lunch during which I flipped on CNN and saw Senator Barack Obama’s press conference regarding the most recent public statements of Jeremiah Wright. Wright was, of course, Obama’s pastor for twenty years. Many of Wright’s public pronouncements have been at variance with what Obama has been talking about during his run for the presidency. Senators Clinton and McCain have both attempted to make political hay of the fact that Obama remained a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and that in his speech in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, Obama refused to completely disassociate himself from Wright.

Today, Obama made a point with which the folks in last night’s class at Saint Matthew would totally agree:

…Now, to some degree, you know — I know that one thing that he [Wright] said was true, was that he wasn’t — you know, he was never my, quote-unquote, “spiritual adviser.”

He was never my “spiritual mentor.” He was — he was my pastor. And so to some extent, how, you know, the — the press characterized in the past that relationship, I think, wasn’t accurate.

But he was somebody who was my pastor, and married Michelle and I, and baptized my children, and prayed with us at — when we announced this race. And so, you know — so I’m disappointed…

For some, it may seem that Obama is trying to put too fine a point on things. But, in fact, my experience as both a pastor for the past twenty-four years and as an active adult layperson for some eight years before that buttresses the senator’s point. A pastor can be a spiritual mentor, particularly for those who seek out the pastor’s counsel. But a pastor isn’t a spiritual mentor to every member of her or his parish.

There are several reasons for this. The most important is that the larger a congregation becomes, the more difficult it is for a pastor to have a mentor/mentee relationship with a parishioner. Pastors and members may have one-on-one contacts at various juncture in a pastor’s ministry. Such contacts are likely to take place during hospital, nursing home, or home visits, on the occasion of Baptisms and funerals, while both are involved in committees or task forces of the congregation, and so forth. But even then, a pastor is seldom going to be seen as a primary spiritual mentor. A pastor’s sermons and classes may set the tone or context for much of the vision, mission, ministry, and life of a congregation and that’s as it should be because a pastor is above all, a leader. But whenever I ask people to identify primary spiritual influences in their lives, it generally takes a long time, some time after folks mention parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, Sunday School teachers, and friends, before people say, “Pastor So and So.” Spiritual mentors are usually more up-close-and-personal than most pastors will ever be with their parishioners, especially in a congregation as large as Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has become. To me, there’s validity to Obama’s distinction between spiritual mentors and pastors.

One other thing: Obama also disagreed with Jeremiah Wright’s assertion that disagreements with Wright reflected an attack on the black church in the United States. Said Obama:

I did not view the initial round of soundbites, that triggered this controversy, as an attack on the black church. I viewed it as a simplification of who he was, a caricature of who he was and, you know, more than anything, something that piqued a lot of political interest.

I didn’t see it as an attack on the black church. I mean, probably the only — the only aspect of it that probably had to do with specifically the black church is the fact that some people were surprised when he was shouting. I mean, that is just a black church tradition.

During my ministry in Cincinnati, after the riots of 2001, I joined with other concerned black and white pastors in making a deliberate effort to be part of bridging the divide between the races both within and outside the church. I played a small role and was no leader in that effort, but a willing, if sporadic, participant. I joined with black and white clergy to pray for our communities, for justice, and for racial reconciliation at quarterly ecumenical gatherings. I became part of the group of seventy Cincinnati-area citizens who invited Billy Graham to conduct a mission in the city in 2002, a major component of which was an effort toward bringing blacks and whites together. I also came to know, among others, the Rev. Ralph Godfrey, Sr., the founding pastor of New Life Temple Church in Madisonville. Pastor Godfrey was an extraordinary man, a spiritual entrepreneur whose initial ministry of providing baked good and wholesome activities for black teens turned into a great church that ministers to the spiritual, physical, social, and financial needs of the black community.

What I learned of the African-American Church during my seventeen years in metropolitan Cincinnati underscores what Senator Obama said today. Black preachers, to be sure, are inclined to yell when white preachers are not. But some of the ideas pushed by Jeremiah Wright as orthodoxies of the African-American Church–ideas that Obama himself catalogued, when he referenced Wright’s beliefs that “the U.S. government [is] somehow involved in AIDS, …suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century,…equates the United States wartime efforts with terrorism”–have nothing to do with the African-American Church I have experienced. They are Jeremiah Wright’s ideas, not the ideas of the whole African-American Church.

The danger in all of this is that folks from either the conventional or new medias may begin to comb through the public pronouncements of every candidate’s pastor as a means of tripping candidates up. This would be terribly unfair because in healthy churches, the ministries of pastors may be appreciated even if parishioners don’t agree with everything their pastors say. As someone has said, if two people agree on everything, at least one of them is irrelevant.

Christians gather not to worship their pastors. (Thank God for that!) They gather to worship their God, serve in God’s name, and they pray that, most of the time, their pastors speak both faithfully and accurately about the God they believe is revealed on the pages of the Bible.

In that sense, Obama’s statements today reflect classic Christian understandings of pastors, the ministry, and the Church.

[This is being cross-posted at my personal blog.]