Lauren Winner’s recent book, The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin points out something that shouldn’t surprise us: the Fall has touched everything. She goes on to argue that the damage inflicted by the Fall is felt even in the good practices of the church. One of the chief aims in the book is to encourage Christians ‘to be on the lookout for the ways Christian practices may, and inevitably sometimes will, do the very opposite of what those practices were made, in their goodness, to do.’ When Christian practices tilt towards curvature, they become deformations of their original intention and end up having ‘the propensity for being exploited for the perpetuation of damage rather than received for its redress.’ Winner’s argument contains a real point of incision, suggesting that the practices themselves provoke unique and intrinsic problems connected with the particular practice. Through her work, Winner explores three essential Christian practices: Eucharist, prayer and baptism. She examines how Christian practice, marred by sin, ends up deforming each of them in specific ways. While not dealt with directly by Winner, her insights might be borrowed and applied to the practice of pastoring. The principal good that surrounds the work of the pastor, we might say in very broad terms, is to serve as an under-shepherd to the people of God. One of the characteristic deformations of pastoral practice is the absence of shepherds among God’s people caused by the pursuit of other activities that, while appearing noble and important, inevitably undermine pastoral work. A characteristic good of pastoral practice is very much bound up with presence while its distortion is seen in pastoral absence and neglect.
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