Six years ago, in the midst of COVID-19, I realized I needed a mentor. As the world around me was alternately shutting down and catching fire, I needed someone who could speak wisely into my life and pastoral ministry.
I reached out to someone I had a hunch could help me. I didn’t reach out to someone across town, and I didn’t reach out over the phone to someone across the country. I reached out across the centuries to a local church pastor ministering in Roman Africa in his own troubled times.
In Augustine of Hippo, I found the mentor I was looking for.
Since those dark days of COVID-19, I’ve been an apprentice to Augustine: reading his works, studying his biographies, understanding his thought and his times.
Yes, there are dangers to having a long-dead mentor who can’t speak personally to your heart or directly to your current situation. But there are also real benefits in looking to the past for wisdom on faithful ministry today.
Wisdom That Transcends the Moment
Each year, I read newly published books with great benefit—books about important cultural trends and new directions in biblical studies. I’m grateful for these books, but I have little expectation they’ll still be read a century from now. Most will come and go, useful for a season before drifting into obscurity.
There are real benefits in looking to the past for wisdom on faithful ministry today.
But some books last. They’re read generation after generation, age after age. Why? Because they possess a timelessness along with the timeliness that occasioned their composition. There’s a wisdom within their pages that transcends their moment.
No one can read Augustine’s reflections in Confessions and deny there’s a profundity and a familiarity with the ways of the human heart that speaks to every reader. We can say the same about Calvin’s Institutes, Owen’s The Mortification of Sin, Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and many others. We return to these books because we suspect we’ll gain from them what centuries of readers have gained: timeless wisdom for whatever our situation may be.
Weightiness That Withstands Cultural Pressures
When we’re formed solely by contemporary voices, we can become reactive. We’re “tossed to and fro” (Eph. 4:14) by whatever cultural winds are blowing at the moment or whatever trending topics are buzzing. But when we look to the past for guidance, we drop an anchor down through the centuries to find purchase on enduring truth.
Alan Jacobs, in his exhortation to read old books, calls this acquiring “personal density.” A mentor from the past can help us obtain the kind of interior solidity that allows us to cope with the dizzying, disorienting array of challenges we face today.
Amid the tumult of the last few years, I read Augustine’s City of God. I encountered a pastor who wasn’t reactively racing around putting out congregational fires but rather was irenically shepherding his people through calamity. As I apprenticed myself to his pastoral posture, I found firmer footing for myself and thus for my people.
Strangeness That Fosters Humility
L. P. Hartley once said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” When we listen to voices outside our own times, we’ll often be surprised at what they say. Things taken for granted at one point in history may seem strange to us today. But the converse is also true. Many things we assume today would be seen as bizarre by generations past.
Received correctly, this reality cultivates humility in us. When we see how confidently the great minds and souls of the past believed things strange to us today, we should be more humble about our convictions and aware of the blind spots of our age. As C. S. Lewis wrote in a famous essay on the necessity of old books, mentors from the past “will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.”
I chuckled in disbelief when I read, in City of God, Augustine marveling at how certain people can make various incredible noises with their body parts. But I also read soberly Augustine’s meditations on suffering as he pastored women and men who had experienced the Sack of Rome in AD 410. And I was astonished to discover how much Augustine reflected on angels—a theological topic that in our own times rarely reserves serious dogmatic attention.
What seems odd from the past should remind us that future generations will also see many of our present preoccupations as strange. Every age has blind spots that only future generations will see. Remembering this can keep us humble.
Every Pastor Needs a Mentor
Augustine has proved a reliable mentor in my life and work as a pastor. Don’t hear me suggesting a living mentor isn’t also vital for pastoral ministry. I’d encourage every pastor to find an older brother or father in the faith who can mentor him face-to-face, in real time. But I’d encourage every pastor to also find mentors from Christian history, as I did with Augustine.
Every age has blind spots that only future generations will see. Remembering this can keep us humble.
Too much is at stake in pastoral ministry to try to go it alone. When we preach, teach, counsel, and shepherd the flocks entrusted to us, we need more than our own resources, our own exegesis of Scripture, our own wisdom, our own pastoral instincts. We need mentors who will challenge us, who will help us see our own limitations, and who will give us what we can’t of ourselves give to our people.
I found such a mentor in Augustine of Hippo. He’s been a voice of wisdom who, conveniently, is only as far away as my bookshelf, passing on to me the time-tested wisdom of ages past.
