The Secret Sauce of Pastoral Ministry

Moving from the HOW to the WHAT

One of the many reasons why pastors find themselves worn out, exhausted, and disconnected is because ministry is no longer about WHAT we do but instead HOW we do it. In this post, I will explore my experience working as a Protestant Chaplain in a Catholic Hospital, examine the sacramental nature of Catholic pastoral ministry, differentiate between the elemental and performative aspects of pastoral ministry, and investigate the cause of pastoral burnout to suggest that WHAT pastors do in ministry is more important than the HOW they (we) do it.

A Protestant Chaplain in Catholic Hospital

One of my favorite memories from working as a hospital chaplain during Covid (8/21-8/22) was ministering to a large Catholic family, a member of whom had come to the hospital emergently.¹ As a Protestant Chaplain working in a Catholic hospital, there was only so much I could do by way of pastoral care for Catholic patients who were often interested in receiving the Sacrament of the Sick and other measures of pastoral care from Priests. My role, in these instances, was to call a Priest, either from the patient’s parish, or the Parish nearby, to come minister to the patient.

As it was for my clergypersons during Covid, the Priests in the hospital’s parish were overworked exhausted. Worse, we (the chaplain staff) called often and therefore they could be a bit prickly with us chaplains. One weekend evening I was on-call at the hospital when this large Catholic family came in. The spouse of the patient asked for a priest, so I immediately went to work calling the local Parish. Soon enough, a Priest came out to the hospital. I met him near the waiting room, and the family celebrated his arrival upon seeing him.

But just before he turned his attention to the family, he motioned to me and said he needed to speak to me. I came over and he began talking about how busy things were at the Parish. I knew I was about to receive and earful (which is similar to what some of my colleagues had also experienced).² Yet, just as the Priest was about to lay into me, the spouse of the patient came over and thanked the Priest up and down for coming out, celebrating his responsiveness, and lauding me for being so helpful. I took a big sigh of relief and walked away for a moment to check in with the hospital staff.

Catholic Secret Sauce

The next week during group time with the fellow hospital chaplains, I gave our Catholic chaplain some friendly ribbing about the encounter, joking that if “only these priest can give out the ‘secret sauce,’ they need not be so grumpy when they themselves get called at inconvenient times to give out such ‘sauce.’” This Catholic chaplain, a wonderful and mature woman and especially grounded in her Catholic faith, took it all in good fun and we shared in laugh together.

Yet, despite my silliness about the “secret sauce” of the Catholic Priests, in truth there were times where I envied those same Priests and their “secret sauce.” For, the essence of their pastoral care was not in HOW they provided care, but in WHAT they provided—the “secret sauce” if you will. Meaning, if a family or patient was in crisis, the Priest could come in, provide the sacrament, and both the Priest and the patient/family could know that they had been given what they needed.³

Ministry as an Introvert

For me, as an introvert, I wished my role was that clearcut. For instance, I often joked that I took full advantage of the “white male privilege” I had in patients or families assuming I was a doctor or trusting my role as a clergyperson, because as an introvert, walking into a stranger’s room and striking up conversation is the absolute last thing introverts want to do! My role, as a Protestant chaplain, was much more focused on the HOW aspects of pastoral care rather than the WHAT. Meaning, how I talked with the patient or family, how I engaged them in their grief or crisis, how I sought the right moment to offer prayer or scripture reading etc., etc., etc. For a Catholic Priest, their pastoral care offerings were much more simple—they were providing the WHAT, the “secret sauce” if you will.

In his book, The Pastor in a Secular Age, Andrew Root talks about the WHAT/HOW dichotomy, suggesting that pre-Reformation, clergy were much more interested (and laypeople also) in WHAT the pastor provided (the sacraments). Increasingly ever since, pastoral ministry (at least on the Protestant side) has been focused on HOW pastors minister. Root says it this way, “in the shadow of the radicalizing of the how over the what, it becomes nearly impossible for a Protestant pastor to disconnect herself completely from the what…” most pastors discover “that no matter how hard they try to deconstruct the what, it is inextricably laced within their vocation.”⁴

Why the pastoral malaise

This angst or inbetween or disconnectedness Root is alluding to is what I was alluding to earlier in my envy of the simplicity of the Catholic priest’s “secret sauce.” I wanted my pastoral care to be less about HOW I did it and more about WHAT I was doing—connecting people to God. But, as Root says, “the pastor can’t assume that he job is to enact the Mass”⁵ (the WHAT). A pastor’s job, at least in this secular context Root writes all about, is to make their pastoral ministry interesting, relevant, and engaging. Being a pastor is more about a performance than content.

Its no wonder so many pastors wrestle with feeling of malaise or dis-ease says Root. For, pastors have either got to rid themselves of the notion that the WHAT they do has spiritual significance (communion, baptist, preaching, etc.,) or live with the internal conflict that our modern secular society says there is no actual significance in these things themselves⁶—the only significance is in how they are performed. For example, I was listening recently to an episode of the Emerged Podcast, and a guest spoke about how with the right aesthetics and elements, communion “came alive” to the recipients. This is a conclusion incompatible with Catholic teaching (elements are the body and blood) and only thinkable in our current secular society.

What to do

The only solutions, at least as I see it are to quit pastoral ministry and leave the church, “re-enchant” one’s understanding of faith,⁷ or water down Christianity and pastoral ministry to the point that a pastor is the equivalent of a life coach.⁸ Obviously, we’ve seen many pastors walk away from the church and from the faith, seeing no other logical option for themselves. Its also clear that some pastors have chosen to simplify Christianity to the point that it becomes life coaching. My choice—and I frankly pray this is your as well if you’re wrestling with this “malaise,” is to choose the path less-traveled and open yourself to the idea that God is active, alive, and at work in and through our world and in what we do.

1. I’m being purposefully opaque with details due to HIPPPA protocols.

2. Again, I look back with no animosity. This was very difficult context in which to minister, and I can only imagine how hard it was being on-call so often, especially considering how taxing my once-a-month weekends were.

3. This is not to say in my experience Priests never did any more than that. I remember an especially tragic scenario where the Priest ministered alongside of me, caring for a family in trauma.

4. Root, The Pastor in a Secular Age, 82.

5. Root, The Pastor in a Secular Age, 82.

6. The understanding of these as Sacrament becomes especially significant here and it tracks why so many Christian denominations formed post-Reformation have resisted Sacramental understandings of these practices.

7. It should be quite obvious to my readers that this is the path I have chosen—meaning believing for instance in the importance of the what vs. the how; essentially when I receive communion, I’m of the opinion that I am receiving God’s grace.

8. Root doesn’t offer this option, at least explicitly, though its basically what he’s arguing against.