Death, Where Is Thy Dignity?
Robbie Low on Pastoral Rigor Mortis
My wife always says that if she were a bishop (she is, I should make clear, the editor of a magazine founded in opposition to such things), her first move would be to spend a week, sitting anonymously, at the back of the chapel of the local crematorium. This, she believes, would, at a stroke, tell her more about her clergy than almost anything else.
There she would learn several things in a very short space of time:
• Has this priest done his homework? Has he spent time with these people so that he has some hope of leading their hearts in worship?
• Does he make any connection with them before, during, or after the service?
• Does he understand how great an opportunity for evangelism his pastoral office is?
• Does he preach the gospel to these people in their hour of need? What does he actually believe?
• Is he using anything that approximates an order of service known to any church in Christendom?
• After half an hour of his ministrations, are these people more or less likely to believe in God or come to church even twice a year?
There are other questions, but these will do to begin with. And they are important because, for most priests, these services will be the only time in their ministry when they have the undivided attention of those who never come to church: the lapsed, the agnostic, the atheist, the worshipers of other faiths, the curious, those who have never heard the gospel, and so on.
Since the Protestant churches of Western Europe permitted and even encouraged the pagan practice of cremation, the priest has had to do this most difficult and rewarding task on alien territory—soulless cemetery “chapels”—on a conveyor belt and against the clock. Nevertheless, his commitment to this task is instructive, and my wife is right, as in so many things, to begin her episcopate in this way.
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more on ministry from the online archives
32.1—January/February 2019
Sex, Women's Ordination & the Rejection of Hierarchy & Equality by James A. Altena
more from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
on Preserving Physical & Spiritual Nourishment by Nathanael Devlin
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
Manly Chastity, Hedonism & the Law of Non-contradiction by Anthony Esolen
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