Multiple Intelligences

The pastoral imagination requires multiple kinds of intelligence. Pastors must also allow these intelligences to be trained and formed within a lifelong process of learning. Both substantive knowledge—some of it fairly abstract—and practical know-how will be required, and because ministry takes place amid the changing circumstances of life, intelligent adaptation and renewed learning will often be necessary as well. Extensive reading and serious observation, along with a great deal of accumulated personal experience, is essential to the emergence of a mature pastoral imagination.

Indispensable to good ministry is a deep, sustained, and thoroughgoing engagement with the scriptures and with a sound theological tradition that brings the word of God into an ongoing history of endlessly contemporary thought and practice. Every good minister also has to have a reliable understanding of what makes human beings tick, of who people are and how they operate. This has to be learned from lots of firsthand experience with all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, as well as from novels and poetry, history and psychology, and again, of course, the Bible and theology.

Above all, learning humanity requires a disciplined spiritual life through which one enters into the deeper levels of one's own self, encounters one's own deepest hopes and fears, and, placing them in God's hands through sacrifice and prayer, learns to trust the spiritual terra firma that enables one to live a faithful and generous life.

To do pastoral work well, a person needs to have a truthful and nuanced understanding of how congregations and other institutions actually work, both on a day-to-day basis and at the strategic level where long-term patterns are identified, shaped, and reformed. Pastoral leaders need to know how to keep the life of a community alive and how to keep it effectively engaged in a way of abundant life, both for the sake of the specific company of people who make up that congregation and for the sake of the larger world. All this requires a fairly profound understanding of organizations, and particularly of congregations.

Pastors must have a broad awareness and understanding of the world that the church exists to serve, both in its scope and contemporary need and in relationship to the specific environment in which a pastor and a congregation operate. All of this requires continuing study and reflection, but also experienced, practical know-how that has been tested and developed through broad experience, struggle and sustained engagement.

Finally, and above all, pastors must have clarity of mind and spirit about what it means to worship God in spirit and in truth.