You Do Not Have A Pastor

She worked out that she did not have one by trying to think of a name to write in a box.

It was a form. Something entirely administrative, a course she was going on, and there was a line on it that said: who provides pastoral oversight for you? And she sat with a pen in her hand for a surprisingly long time.

Then she put the name of a man she has met four times.

He would be extremely kind about it if he knew. He is a good man and he would take the call. He does not know her, and he has never asked her one question about herself, and she has never told him a single true thing, and she wrote his name in the box because there was a box.

That was two years ago and she has thought about it since.

She has tried twice. She wants that on the record because it matters to how this lands: she is not a person who has failed to look.

The first time was a woman she admired, four years ago, whom she asked to meet twice a year, and it happened once and was warm and useful and then the second one was moved three times and never happened and neither of them mentioned it again.

The second time was worse. It was a man in her own network, and it went well for about eight months, and then he was appointed to something that made him, in a structural sense, someone who reports on her, and neither of them said anything but both of them knew, and the conversations went from real to careful in about one meeting.

So there is nobody. Not because she is proud, and not because she has not tried, and not because there are no good people. Because everybody in the world is either somebody she pastors, or somebody who might one day be assessing her, or somebody three hundred miles away with their own building, and the intersection of the people who are none of those and who also know her is empty.

She is not lonely in the ordinary sense. She has a good marriage and real friends. There is simply one specific chair in a person's life, and hers has been empty for eleven years, and she has stopped expecting it to be filled.

Who watches the ones who watch

Let me tell you at the top what this is and I will keep to it all the way down.

Nothing is going to be asked of you here. There is no suggestion coming, no arrangement to make, no name for you to think of, no course of action at all. If a single line of this turns into a task then it has failed and you should disregard it. You are being given something and nothing is being asked back.

Now. There is a chapter at the end of Hebrews that people quote in pieces and almost never read as one movement.

Partway through it, the writer tells the readers about the people who lead them: obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves, for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account.

They watch for your souls. That is your job description and it is exact, and it is a heavy sentence, and if you stopped there you would have a chapter that describes exactly the situation you are in: a watcher who is watched by nobody.

But the chapter does not stop there. It goes on, and at the end of it there is this.

Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will.Hebrews 13:20-21

That great shepherd of the sheep.

Read who that phrase makes room for. Not the shepherds and the sheep, as two categories, with the leaders somewhere in the middle looking after their own. One great Shepherd, and then the sheep, and the sheep is everybody, and the woman who watches for a hundred and forty souls is standing inside that word with everybody else.

So hear this, holding a form with the wrong name written on it: you are inside the flock and you never left it. That is not my comfort; it is what His word does with the category at the end of that chapter, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a benediction and puts it over the head of somebody who normally pronounces them.

And notice something else about how that chapter ends, because it is worth having.

The writer, who has spent the whole letter teaching and correcting, finishes by praying a blessing over the readers. He does not tell them to go and find somebody to bless them. He does it himself, at the end, in writing, from a distance, and it reaches them.

Which means a covering does not require a chair in a room. It can arrive in a letter from somebody who is not there.

You have been covered for eleven years in ways that have not looked like the thing you were watching for. Scripture ends a whole letter by doing exactly that at a distance, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying blessing to you through people who never once knew that was what was happening.

Now let me say one plain thing about the empty chair, because I am not going to pretend it away.

It is a real gap. The situation you described is accurate and it is not paranoia and it is not a failure of effort. The structural bind is exactly as you set it out: pastored, assessing, or distant, and no fourth category. A great many people in your position are in it and almost none of them say so.

You are allowed to call that a loss. Nothing in Scripture requires anybody to be content with an empty chair, and the Holy Spirit is not the one asking you to be philosophical about eleven years.

Both of those are true tonight. The chair is empty, and you are inside the flock of the great Shepherd, and neither of those facts is being used to cancel the other.