A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original review appears below. Kit Schindell is a psychiatric nurse in Vancouver and an elder at Fairview Church there.
Pastors (Off the Record): Straight Talk About Life in the Ministry, by Stefan Ulstein, InterVarsity Press, 1993.
What a pleasure to be able to review a book by Stefan Ulstein! I have appreciated and enjoyed his movie reviews in Christian Home and School magazine for a long time, and was beginning to miss his writing. Then we received Pastors (Off the Record): Straight Talk About Life in the Ministry. At first I thought that this was a book I should ask a minister to review. But after reading it and thinking about it I realized that it was just as appropriate for a lay person to talk about.
The book is composed entirely of interviews with Christian pastors whom the author does not identify. Most are American. They talk about their lives. Period. That’s the book.
The stories are not necessarily “triumphant” nor are they whining. These interviews simply have the men and women talking about their lives. If ever you’ve wondered, “What does s/he do all day?” here is an answer. This book will also help some people understand why their pastor may be just a little distant, or why he looks exhausted all the time, or why she simply cannot come to one more important meeting this week. I enjoy hearing about and reading about other peoples’ lives, so this was a fascinating look into life behind the collar. All the better that it is written with respect, and the reader has the permission of the pastors for this look into their lives. It comes as no surprise that the leaders turn out to be ordinary people, that the movers and shakers are often plagued with sluggishness, that the spiritual giants often feel more like shrimp. But through it all, there is an earthy faith in the God who called each of these individuals to a special role in his service.
Even though I have read this book twice now, it wasn’t until I was making notes for reviewing it that I realized that the persons are never identified. Ulstein has done such a good job of bringing his interviewees to life that I felt I knew each one of them. You’ll read about the woman who co-pastors with her husband in a small Pacific Northwest logging community recently devastated by massive unemployment; the exhausted pastor who finally has a chance to tell someone about the pain he felt when his wife left him to pursue a lesbian lifestyle; the military chaplain who is sent to home after home to tell the parents their sons had been killed; the senior pastor of a church which had sixty-five members when he arrived some twenty years ago, and now has six thousand, with eighty paid employees; the female prison chaplain who maintains she would not be able to do the job if she were married or a mother; the Korean leader in a small Canadian town; the preacher, teacher and radio personality who had a nervous breakdown and couldn’t enter a church for years, and in fact was never able to return to the ministry.
I am grateful to the author and each of the pastors he interviewed for allowing us into their conversation to hear the stories each has to tell. Ulstein says it is his hope that “the stories of everyday pastors contained in Pastors (Off the Record) will help pastors and their congregations to break through the walls of professional expectation, careerism and petty politics that keep the Church from being all that it can be in Christ.”
It’s good reading for us all.