It is 1999, and I am squatting down in a garden plot unlike any I have previously visited. The air is hot and dry. As I look down at the vegetables, near the edges of the plot I hear voices speak in a language strange and wonderful. I arrived in this tropical savanna by air from Lokichogio, a city in northwest Kenya overrun with non-governmental organizations and military groups sending food aid and supplies into southern Sudan. Five of us, including the pilot, flew due north in a six-passenger aircraft to touch down on the airstrip in Pochalla, a town in South Sudan near the Ethiopian border. 

In this farm plot, a Kenyan agriculturalist describes the first crop of eggplant he transplanted and grew within the famine-stricken fields of Pochalla. These fields are framed by displaced people who, unbeknownst to them, are little more than halfway through a twenty-two-year conflict. Under the leafy stems, he grasps and holds for my attention the rich, purple eggplant, turning to me with a wide smile. I invite you to consider with me this image as a framing metaphor for the pastor as gardener, particularly in terms of the work in relation to the environment of ministry. Within the difficult environment in which his work took place, this Kenyan agriculturalist provides glimpses of God and his Kingdom with a rich, vividly purple eggplant, which serves as a parallel to pastoral work.

Paul Sowing Seed in the Environment of Athens
On his second missionary journey, the apostle Paul visits Athens after facing intense persecution, becoming “greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols” (Acts 17:16). Alongside his typical approach of teaching in synagogues, Paul also debates in the Athenian marketplace. Paul’s disputes caught the attention of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, who claimed he was either a silly babbler purveying soundbites of philosophical knowledge or a dangerous teacher of foreign deities. Either way, they invite him to a meeting of the Areopagus, a council gathered to make decisions and maintain order over the city’s political and religious life. In that conversation, Paul references the eye-catching inscription “to an unknown god” on one particular altar. Seizing upon this, Paul draws upon the philosophy and poetry to connect their cultural longing for an unknown divine being with the God revealed in Jesus the Messiah.

Because of the uniqueness of this exchange, many scholars identify Acts 17 as a window into Paul’s missionary methods: immersing himself in the culture, observing potential connection points between the culture and the gospel, and utilizing those connection points for meaningful ministry. This episode shows us one way in which Paul “planted the seed” (1 Cor. 3:6) of the gospel of Jesus Christ in a philosophical and religious environment of other, even unknown or unnamed, gods.

The Pastor-Gardener Sowing Seed in the Environment of a Secular Age
But what happens when the cultural environment moves from an awareness of God to being utterly closed off from the transcendent? What happens when the concept of the divine is seemingly squeezed out of the environment, but still haunts us? In the modern classic A Secular Age, Charles Taylor explores these very questions, tracing the historical journey that has led us into what he describes as “a secular age,” the environment in which we live and function as pastors and ministers. Admittedly, Taylor’s view of our current time is very complicated to summarize in a brief space. However, much like the Kenyan agriculturalist in Pochalla, without understanding the environment of our ministry, our efforts as pastors will likely not only be frustrating but also fruitless.

Fundamental to Taylor’s entire argument is the idea that our current environment of secularity is unique from earlier periods. “In those [earlier] societies, you couldn’t engage in any kind of public activity without ‘encountering God.’…But the situation is totally different today.” This is true not only in the sense of visible public spaces or personal belief but also in the sense of an entire environment or context, the very backdrop of individual and communal existence. Taylor continues: “It is this shift in background…that I am calling the coming of a secular age…In which, moreover, unbelief has become for many the major default option.”

Taylor explores three senses of what “secular” means in his work. 

1. The first sense of the secular, or Secular 1, relates to the absence of God or lack of reference to the divine in public spaces, the “economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational” domains. 
2. Secular 2 “consists in the falling off of religious belief and practice, in people turning away from god, and no longer going to Church.” 
3. Secular 3 consists “of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” 

Pluralism rises and belief in God or the transcendent becomes one more choice in a plethora of options. Taylor’s central thesis is that we now exist, at least in the contemporary West, within a secular age, not only in the first and second senses, but in the third sense as well. 

Taylor’s description of the historical and contemporary environment is incredibly valuable in considering the environment in which ministry takes place. Whether they want to or not, Christians living and ministering in the secular age operate within the modern, largely secular social imaginary, a way of seeing and living in the world that is disenchanted. Even if we believe in God, we, too, now doubt the possibility of the transcendent and see our religious actions through the modern social imaginary with all its component aspects. It is the proverbial water in which we swim or, to lean into our agrarian metaphor, the environment in which we garden.

The pastor-gardener must take account of this complicated environment in which the work of ministry takes place. The Kenyan agriculturalist near Pochalla implemented transformative agrarian development within a complicated context. A long-standing civil war, the resulting displaced people and their traumas, as well as drought-like conditions were but a few of the most readily perceptible factors in that agricultural environment. Failure to attend to these readily perceptible factors, let alone the less-perceptible factors, would have led to utterly fruitless agricultural efforts. Yet there I stood in a well-cultivated field amid an environment of famine and civil strife, holding in my hand one of the most vividly purple eggplants I have ever beheld.

Like this Kenyan agriculturalist and all good farmers, the pastor-gardener who seeks deep understanding of the environment of ministry must cultivate attention to the readily perceptible and less-readily perceptible factors within that environment. Such work is not peripheral to ministry but essential, particularly in this current age with rapidly changing approaches to religion in North America. While books and models of ministry proliferate, the pastor-gardener seeks a deeper understanding that reaches beneath shallow assessments or ready-made solutions to attend to the environment of ministry.

The pastor-gardener who seeks deep understanding of the environment of ministry must cultivate attention to the readily perceptible and less-readily perceptible factors within that environment. Share on X

The Pastor-Gardener in a Secular Age
One of the most helpful interpreters of Charles Taylor for pastoral ministry is Andrew Root, particularly in The Pastor in a Secular Age. Root explores what he calls “the pastoral malaise”—the sense in the secular age that God is unnecessary and, therefore, so is the pastor. Tracing historical developments in pastoral ministry that have led to this malaise, Root then proposes a potential way forward grounded in the idea that God is a minister. Those in ministry echo and respond to the ministry work of God “through hearing, speaking, inviting, and participating” in encounters that others have with God.

In a secular age, pastors witness to transcendence as they watch, wait, and listen for it, bearing witness that God is there in the events of life. “So the pastor’s job is not to conjure up the presence of God…The pastor’s job is to bear the darkness, to join the pull of the event horizon of nothingness. And in this pull she prepares—with practices and prayers—for the arriving of a speaking God.” Root reminds us here that pastors cannot exist separate from their environment but also that pastors have the opportunity to live into that environment in a focused, meaningful way.

Like the Kenyan agriculturalist understanding the highly stressed environment of South Sudan, the pastor-gardener intentionally steps inside the stresses of our secular age, finding that ministry grows toward fruitfulness within the pressured present. There is no other fruitful way for pastors to minister but by engaging with and living into the real environment in which congregation and people themselves live.

The Pastor-Gardener in a Secular Age: Attentive to God and Environment
Root emphasizes that the most important practice of a pastor trying to live into this new way of ministry in the secular age is prayer. “There seems to be one clear way to avoid observation blindness, a way even to encounter the event of God’s speaking as the direct movement of receiving and giving ministry. This is the way of prayer.” Root invites ministers to form their life around prayer, calling them to become instructors once again in the life of prayer.

Simone Weil helps us understand that prayer is fundamentally a form of attention. She writes, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” The pastor-gardener must know how to live within our disenchanted secular age while also learning attentiveness to the presence of God, the transcendent One who haunts our days, and teaching others to also learn this attentiveness of prayer.

But the pastor-gardener must also cultivate attentiveness to the environment, understanding the cultural setting in which we find ourselves. Given all we have explored in relation to Charles Taylor’s work, we must understand that the case for awareness of our ministry environment is much bigger than Taylor. In one hundred years, the ministry environment will be different from that described by Charles Taylor, even if his work is still relevant in some way. The attentiveness we are focusing on is that cultivated by the pastor-gardener who learns to appropriately contextualize the work of pastoral ministry to the environment in which it takes place.

This leads us back to Acts 17, where the apostle Paul wonderfully displays this dual attention to God and environment. Walking through Athens, Paul attends to the sights, sounds, poetry, history, worship, and confusion of the environment. While Acts 17 does not explicitly mention prayer, it is consistent with other aspects of his life and ministry to suggest Paul walked through the city with prayerful attention to God, which led directly to his ministry contextualization. 

The pastor-gardener lives with this dual attention: attention to the environment of ministry paired with attention to our God who is present and acting within that environment. Kneeling in the field of ministry, the pastor-gardener engages with two open hands—one reaching out to God and the other reaching out to people. The hope is that all might encounter the living God who is just out of sight, yet always present, within the secular age in which we live.