3 Reasons You Should (not) Be a Social Worker

On loving the demon-possessed

The pastor is not a social worker.

It’s dangerous to begin with a negative because it can be difficult to prove. But we live in an age where no one knows what it means to be a pastor.¹ And some have turned the vocation of the pastor into the role of a social worker, so it’s important to state the negative.

Liberal protestants are particularly guilty of this. I’ve watched at least some of them in my own context be quick to write an op-ed protesting the overturning of Roe, but I’ve never heard them invite children to come to Jesus. They’ll support the Center for Worker’s Justice, but all of it is the work of social transformation by social means. It’s “progress,” one step at a time. I get the sneaking feeling that most of them have no idea what to do with the injustices of the past. That’s the problem with progress—there’s no hope for past evil to be rectified regardless of what we might achieve moving forward. Reparations can’t raise the dead.

Those who have ministered in my tradition will think I’m saying something so obvious, what’s the point in saying it? It’s so obvious to them that—in my opinion—it’s a problem. Pentecostalism (as the saying goes) has been known to err on the side of being so other-worldly minded that it’s no this-worldly good. Whatever social work we might do is usually a bait-and-switch evangelistic technique. We’ll snake you through an emporium of free food, but we won’t let you leave until there's an altar call. There’s no aspergillum, but we’ll use whatever manipulation necessary to get you to say the sinner’s prayer. Free groceries are really about free salvation.

But the reason I state the negative with which I began is because it gets at an aspect of my pastoral vocation that I struggle to otherwise talk about. I’m not a social worker, but have I done an incredible amount of social work over the last seven years. I’ve confronted landlords and debt collectors, accompanied people to medical appointments, attended immigration appointments near and far, and written letters begging the clemency of the Iowa court system.

So how does a pastor do social work without becoming a social worker? There’s a lot to say on that front, but I want to highlight one particular feature that I think is indispensable: eschatology.

By eschatology, I mean the studying and knowledge and proclamation of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Matthew 25 is famous for the eschatological parable of the sheep and the goats. The goats are judged—like the Rich Man—for ignoring the Lazaruses at the gates. The sheep, on the other hand, are lauded for caring for the poor, the sick, the naked, the prisoner. Jesus says that they cared for him by caring for the destitute. The sheep claim they had no idea that it was unto him the whole time.

What strikes me about this passage is that the story lets the cat out of the bag. The end of the story is already revealed. While we may feel an invitation to anticipate the experience of the sheep, we will never be those sheep. This end times parable tells us ahead of time that to serve the destitute is to serve Jesus, so we can’t be and won’t be surprised like they are in the story. The parable gives us end times goggles through which we can see an eschatologically-augmented reality (please forgive the manner of speech). Every interaction with our neighbor is charged with ultimate and final meaning. We can see our neighbor and our God simultaneously without one erasing the other.

The Eschaton—the Final Day—will conclusively reconcile the double love command. To love God and to love neighbor are ultimately the same endeavor. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead has revealed this, for he is our God and our neighbor because he is God and man. So in him, we love God and our neighbor. It is, after all, a single command, even though it is double.

It is not sufficient to hold this reality as an intellectual datum. We’ve gotta preach it. We need to make the connection from the pulpit for people between feeding people the Lord’s Supper and feeding them some soup from the kitchen. We need to connect baptism, which makes us one with Christ, with cleaning and caring for the human body. Christ’s living body was anointed with that alabaster jar, and his dead body was carefully cleaned and embalmed. We can let down our hair, and do this again and again.

Of course, there’s always the risk that we can make the mistakes of protestant liberals or pentecostals as I described them above. But the only way to pastor—the only way to love God and love our neighbor—is to constantly live in that risk.

Finally, there are those who are demon-possessed. That is, those who don’t want to be identified with Christ no matter how destitute they may be. That reality complicates, but does not nullify Matthew 25. It just means that we need to serve Christ even in those who are demon possessed. We might need to serve the poor thief. Or the sick drug dealer and addict. Or the naked womanizer. Or the prisoner who is a child molester.

Does that make you uncomfortable?

It does me.

Maybe the great eschatological unveiling that will surprise us is when Jesus says we washed his feet when we washed Judas’s.

<Comments are welcome>

1. Andrew Root’s The Pastor in a Secular Age has a helpful discussion of this in his first chapter.