Pastoral ministry…is counter-cultural and prophetic in its insistence that people encounter the Word of God. As people are “rooted and built up” in Christ and “strengthened in the faith” (Col. 2:7), pastoral ministry unleashes an equipped body of believers to be salt and light and carry a biblical worldview out into the world to make more of a difference than any “bully pulpit” could ever hope to achieve.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…a time to keep silence, and a time to speak. (Ecclesiastes 3:1,7)

A pastoral colleague recently bemoaned, “It feels like I get hammered if I do, and hammered if I don’t.”  He was referring to the constant pull of our culture these days to “make a statement” about the current “hot topic” trending on the 24-hour news cycle or on social media.  The pull to “use your platform” from the pulpit to the blogosphere is an interesting dance for the contemporary pastor because there exists some inherent tensions in pastoral ministry in shepherding the flock, teaching the gospel of grace and truth, and modeling winsome cultural engagement in an increasingly fragmented world.

On the Value of Statements 

I was initially ordained in a mainline church which, for several decades, felt comfortable occupying space near the center of American culture.[1]  For most of my lifetime, the chaplain of the U.S. Senate has been a Presbyterian (from 1969 to 2003).  The ethos of Presbyterian cultural engagement for several decades seemed to carry an attitude best portrayed by the famous TV commercials in the 1970s and 1980s with the line:  “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.”  In the commercials, the entire room would stop—in silence—and lean in closely to hear whatever E.F. Hutton had to say.  The luxury of Christian cultural engagement 40-50 years ago was that people listened to the church.

That time has passed.  Case in point:

• Only a few years ago, my former denomination, the PC(USA), spent time and energy outlining a peace resolution for Israel—Palestine.  Oh the hubris of it all!  Was the world (or even the Middle East) really listening and paying attention to a bunch of (predominately white) American Presbyterians thousands of miles away?  What was the value of all that time and energy spent on statements about Israel-Palestine by a bunch of American Presbyterians?

• A short time ago, a prominent blogger was calling for Christians to “walk out of their churches” en masse if the priest or pastor didn’t speak out against the separation of children from their families at the US-Mexico border.  I personally wonder whether such vitriol reflects an ache and a longing to restore the primacy of Christendom’s authority.  Surely the culture is listening to the church…right? 

Yet, as the church has been pushed from the center to the periphery of American culture, its cultural engagement radically (and necessarily) changes in tenor and tone.  Recognizing the massive shift from a Christendom mentality to a post-Christian era mindset is indispensable for guiding pastoral discernment for wading into cultural engagement in the contemporary world.

Ever since Theodore Roosevelt coined the term, US Presidents have been known to use their “bully pulpit” to trump up favorable public opinion for high-profile initiatives.  A hot-button topic will arise in the country, and the president will inevitably begin communicating far-and-wide about the issue in hopes of swaying public opinion.

Yet George C. Edwards III, the presidential historian at Texas A & M, after conducting a massive study on the “bully pulpit” over the last six decades of American history suggests that the steady stream of statements from US Presidents have almost always failed to move the needle of public opinion or translate into significant legislative victories for presidential policies in Congress.

“It is true for all presidents. They virtually never move public opinion in their direction,” Edwards tells National Journal. “It happened for Ronald Reagan. It happened for FDR. It happens all the time. You should anticipate failure if you’re trying to change people’s minds. The data is overwhelming.”[2]

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