Heavy Lies the Stole
Preaching in the Middle of a Crisis
There was a time a few years ago when I tried to be a pastoral YouTube influencer.
Emphasis on the word tried.
Maybe because I’m becoming a crusty old man in my mid-50s, but it didn’t go well. I tried doing videos about the news of the day and relating it to the Christian faith. Some were good, and some were rather cringe.
Why did I do it? I told myself I was doing this for the church where I serve. I told myself that if people saw this, then they would know more about the church and might join.
But if I were honest, I think I did it for me. To build my brand. To show that I was on the right side of the issues of the day.
But is that what the call to be a minister is really all about? Why do so many ministers work at being influencers on social media?
What does it mean to be a minister? And to put a fine point on it, what does it mean to be a minister at this time in history?
Everything in our modern time tells ministers they must say something, anything, to stand up to rising authoritarianism. And so pastors go to social media to speak up and urge others to speak up against things like President Trump’s immigration policy.
But is this the right way to do things as a minister? And are we seeing the role of minister in the right way?
I’ve been thinking about this since I re-listened to an episode of Andy Root’s Ministry in a Secular Age podcast. This episode focused on how to be a pastor during and after Operation Metro Surge, the operation that saw thousands of immigration agents flood Minnesota, especially the Twin Cities. Root’s co-host Derek Tronsgard wonders how one should pastor through all of this. Root shares Tronsgard’s worry about the America we find ourselves in, admitting that we are probably closer to a “Bonhoeffer moment” than he first believed.
So what does a pastor do?
One way is what Root calls “Heroic Individualism.” The emphasis is on people speaking out or standing up. Think all of those Andrew Ross Sorkin stories where you have one character making an important speech that everyone must listen to. This fits our time, Root says, because we place our faith in personality. As Root said in the podcast:
Pastors tend to function more in personality capital than they do in the responsibility of the office. This is why pastors can out each other and be incredibly rude to each other and say things online like, if you don’t preach this, then you’re a terrible person.
In the era of Trump we see pastors making reels and shorts on any issue. Pastors will make posts about their latest protest. It’s all about getting attention, about making sure people know you are speaking out about the injustices of the times. But as Root notes, the focus is on the self. There is something that is also unspoken here. If we expect people to stand up to evil, do you need others? Do you need the church?
Root then says something profound: if what happened in Minnesota during the winter of 2026 was evil, then the lone hero isn’t enough.
“if we really believe this is evil, and I want to say that this is evil, then the individuals in their own kind of a stylized heroism cannot stand up to evil. You cannot, you can only stand up to evil in collectives and communities and in deep traditions that are embedded in a story.”
What Root suggests is that Christians shouldn’t operate within the personality, but within the office of pastor. He shares the following:
And you need to be willing to die for others inside the office. I mean, Bonhoeffer says clearly that as just a single individual, you have every right to flee. You have every right to disappear.
You have every right to preserve your own life. And there will be times to do that. But it’s the office that beckons you out.
It’s the office that calls you to that. So it’s not that no one did anything. The issue really at the core of it is that the institutions failed.
This is why Bonhoeffer wanted to have the church, particularly the confessing church, to hold. The confessing church had to hold. And he thought his most important job was to help the church as a local community stand and him to be pastor to those people.
Not for him to inspire a bunch of individuals to do something heroic, but for people to take responsibility for one another and be neighbors.
What Root is getting at is that the role of pastor isn’t just a job or a step to something bigger. It is an office, an institution. Because of this, there are responsibilities to the office. It’s bigger than you. When a pastor puts on the clergy collar at a protest, it isn’t cosplay. It’s entering into an office and tradition with centuries of history. When other pastors and I wore a clergy stole or collar during the massive protests of Operation Metro Surge, it said not only that the person wearing the stole believed this was wrong, but that the church stands against this.
What does it mean to live into the office of pastor? For that I think you need to look at a specific piece of clergy fashion: the clerical stole.
Maybe it’s because I’m a pastor or because I’m a gay man, but I love me some clergy stoles. They do symbolize the role of being a pastor, but there is something more than just saying “I’m the pastor.” The stole is about office, but it is also about the responsibilities of the job, but also to the church. It’s a symbol also of taking on the yoke of Christ. That means taking on a role of submission, just as Jesus submitted to living as a servant. Submission can also mean being ready to die as Jesus did. It means having obligations to the church, just as Jesus had obligations to live for others and give up his life.
When I think about obligation and living within and dying in the office, I am reminded of the final scene of the 1986 movie The Mission. Jeremy Irons plays Father Gabriel, and he leads a mission to the Guaraní people in modern-day Paraguay. In the climactic scene, Spanish and Portuguese soldiers are taking the mission by force. Father Gabriel is a pacifist and will not take up arms. Another priest and former captain, played by Robert De Niro, breaks his vows in order to take up arms to fight the soldiers. During the ensuing battle, De Niro’s character, Mendoza, is mortally wounded. At the same time, there is Father Gabriel leading a procession in the midst of all the fighting. There is no sound as he keeps marching with the cross and then is cut down by a bullet. In the middle of all of this commotion, when he could have taken up arms, he not only chose not to, but also decided to do something that would get him killed. He lived and died within the office of a pastor.
I’m not saying pastors need to go on suicide missions. What Father Gabriel did was an extreme example, and it was a movie. But it does show us someone who wasn’t seeking attention, but was doing what he was called to do even if it meant giving up his life. He was yoked to the One who gave his own life for the sake of the world.
When we get that stole during ordination, it isn’t just a nice piece of clergy fashion. It’s a sense of who we are, to be like Jesus. Now, that is something everyone is called to do, but for pastors, it’s in the unofficial job description. Jesus preached, taught, and healed. And that is what we are called to do.
But in our modern time, we are taught to believe a good pastor must do something more than preach and teach. In mainline churches, we think we need to be activists or influencers against Christian Nationalism. I’m not saying that one shouldn’t do things like this. Many good pastors are currently standing up to some of the injustices of the Trump Administration. But those activities flow out of the role of being a pastor. They are not the essence of a minister.
The stole is heavy. It is a yoke. It is the yoke of Christ, and Jesus says his yoke is easy, but a yoke is still a yoke.
As I shared recently, a 2025 article from the New York Times caught my attention last summer. It featured a former Lutheran pastor, Jonathan Barker, who was the pastor of Grace Lutheran, a small congregation in Kenosha, WI. This was one of those classic mainline congregations that had over 1,000 members in the 50s and now has 20-30 show up on a Sunday. Pastor Barker believed the way to revive the church was through politics:
Pastor Barker, 41, said he had tried to rejuvenate the church by focusing on liberal causes. He wrote a book about climate policy, and brought then-candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr. to the church for a listening session in 2020 after Kenosha police shot a Black man, Jacob Blake.
Outside church, Pastor Barker was more aggressive. He had tried to disrupt two Trump rallies and a Republican primary debate by super-gluing his feet to the floors of the venues and a parking lot outside.
He then tried to endorse New York representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez for President. Even though the Internal Revenue Service’s Johnson Amendment is no longer enforced, Barker’s denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, wasn’t interested in tempting fate:
Rev. Barker did not warn the denomination’s leaders of his plan to endorse Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. But he sent out a news release to reporters.
“I said, ‘Jon, we just agreed as a group that this is not a good idea,’” said Bishop Paul D. Erickson, who oversees churches in southeast Wisconsin. He was recounting a conversation with Pastor Barker, urging him to reconsider, and warning that he could jeopardize the tax exemption for most of the denomination’s other churches.
“You are putting them at risk without their knowledge or consent,” he recalled saying.
That is because most Evangelical Lutheran Churches share the same tax exemption, dealing with the I.R.S. as a single entity rather than church by church.
Barker’s response was to resign from Grace Lutheran and also leave the ministry.
All of this so he could give an endorsement to someone who had not even indicated they were going to run in the next presidential election.
This left the small congregation hanging, wondering about their future:
Their questions were not about politics. Who had keys to the front door? Who knew the Facebook password? Would the diaper bank be discontinued? Was the church going to survive?
Bishop Erickson said they would figure the answers out together.
“Pray for us!” one of the congregants said.
I did some checking to find out what happened to Grace Lutheran. Its Facebook page said there was a service of Holy Closure in May 2026. Its diaper ministry and food pantry had closed beforehand.
Did Pastor Barker cause Grace to close?
I think it’s hard to say yea or nay. The congregation was already struggling. But his decision didn’t help. I’ve been in ministry long enough to know that pastors make a big impact on their congregations, and when a pastor abruptly resigns, that can be a tipping point. What I do wonder is this: was he living into the office of Pastor, or was he trying to get attention as a liberal activist? I’m going to say at least in that instance, he wasn’t living into the office. He didn’t take the stole around his neck seriously. In the photo for the Times, he is still wearing a pastoral stole even though he wasn’t a pastor anymore. Over time, that stole became less of an obligation and more of a prop.
What this comes down to is believing that the things pastors do, like preaching and teaching, aren’t enough in this day and time. The fear is that being a “normie pastor” is tantamount to not caring about what’s happening outside the walls of the church.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Preaching is always about proclamation, and it should be about preaching God’s justice to the gathered community. We teach people to be people who learn to care for another and those outside the church, just like the early church did as told in the first few chapters of Acts. We teach people to reach out to people different from us just as God taught Peter in Acts 10.
Does that mean we don’t protest if needed? No. But our calling is to make disciples, to make followers of Jesus who will do what he did, to preach the good news, to heal and drive out demons. These aren’t antithetical to the cause of justice; they are the basis of justice.
When I was ordained in 2002, I got a homemade stole made by Joan. It wasn’t the spiffiest stole, but it was lovingly made by her. She had suffered the loss of her husband Clark, a year before. In a few years, she would go to live with her daughter in Alabama because of her health. I cherish that stole. I cherished it because it was made by Joan and because it meant I entered into a role, an obligation. I might not be a Catholic priest, but I still made vows. I am obligated by my role to preach Christ and him crucified. I am obligated to care for the community I am called to minister to. I’m not called to influence, but called to make disciples and baptize people in the name of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.