Before I had even set foot at seminary, Richard Lischer’s Open Secrets transformed my faith and call to pastoral ministry.

For a break from online summer Greek in 2021, I accepted a pulpit supply invitation from a local pastor of two rural Lutheran parishes not too far from where I grew up. The Gospel reading was the Beheading of John the Baptist; I prepared a sermon about how faith calls us to defy despots.

Milling around before and after each service, I got to know a few of the parishioners. From one, I learned the story of a property dispute with a farm whose land bordered the church. From the first church’s pianist, I learned the lineage of several pastors who had come and gone from the parish – and the families who had come and left with them. To neither person did I pay much attention. I felt both insecure about my youthful inexperience in leading worship and self-important as an incoming student at Princeton Seminary, invited to preach to people I had already written off as backwards and ignorant of what real Christian faith was about.

I expected to encounter small, dying congregations of conservative churchgoers whom I could surely transform into progressive disciples of a radical Jesus with just one topical sermon.  I didn’t expect to encounter people who knew Jesus far better than I did. 

I stumbled my way through each service. I announced the wrong hymns, forgot to recess at the sending hymn, and sped through the prayers. The lectors were my lifelines. But when I swallowed my nerves and looked up from the pulpit, I saw Christ’s body in a way I had never seen before. In the handfuls of people gathered for worship I recognized communities gathered by God’s grace. Nothing else could have preserved them through decades of living together – through baptisms and funerals, marriages and divorces, dreams and disappointments. 

No denomination would consider either congregation “vibrant ministries.” Neither congregation would be found at the forefront of societal change. And yet they were communities of people who had been nourished by the Word and the Sacraments, who recognized God’s activity in their lives, and who craved the good news of the Gospel as much as anyone else. 

Being raised in a larger church and having been formed in progressive Lutheran youth and young adult ministries, I couldn’t believe God would choose these two small parishes to show me Christ’s Body anew. When I shared my bewilderment with these parishes’ pastor, he recommended I turn to Lischer’s Open Secrets. 

In Open Secrets, Lischer writes of his first call in southern Illinois. Fresh off his PhD in theology, Lischer resists his assignment to Cana Lutheran Church in hopes of serving a “significant ministry,” one that “has to be right for me” and which can “have an impact on real people’s lives.” (1) In New Cana, Lischer finds anything but the significant ministry of his dreams. He finds himself tasked with pastoring a small, rural community of farmers whom he cannot help but look down upon. Over the course of the book, he recounts vignettes from his ministry: a eucharistic visit for which he forgets the host, a shotgun wedding for a young couple expecting a child, and attempts at pastoral care for families encountering abuse, alcoholism, and other crises for which Lischer admits he was insufficiently trained. 

Lischer does not shy away from his mistakes. He describes the “homiletical gridlock” which emerged between himself and his congregation, sharing that his “audience paid a heavy price for the gospel…All I asked of them was that they pretend to be me.” (2) In another episode, he banishes a parishioner from the Eucharist for her participation in marital infidelity. At home, he’s not much better: his self-importance drives him apart from his wife and children, who suffer beneath the weight of Lischer’s dreams for his ministry.

Lischer’s commentary extends beyond New Cana. His reflections challenge what he considers the “therapeutic model of ministry,” in which pastors are trained to offer care akin to clinicians apart from the resources of scripture, prayer, or spiritual direction. (3) Against this model, he points to community and its forms of discourse – especially gossip – as ripe for redemption and, under the right circumstances, a healthier approach to pastoral care. When redeemed, Lischer argues that gossip helps a community air their grievances, forgive and care for one another, and reinforce a sense of one belonging to and with others.

Of course, I knew gossip could corrode the bonds of community. Before reading Open Secrets, though, I hadn’t considered how gossip could help to construct community. I presumed that gossip, especially in small country churches, would undermine ministry and challenge pastoral authority. Surely, the best way for pastors and parishioners to communicate would be within sanitized, clinical dialogue undertaken to preserve privacy and uphold proper boundaries. But in New Cana, Lischer found this impossible. He realizes that he can’t “carry on a decent ministry” without gossip: the “decentered speech that belongs to the entire community” and reflects a community’s tradition of care.” (4) Sometimes what ministers and pastoral care experts dismiss as gossip is nothing more than a community’s stories about itself and its members. Those stories may be harmful or helpful, but they cannot be ignored. 

No pastor can avoid gossip. Lischer argues that instead of trying to overcome it, pastors can embrace and redeem gossip. Pastors redeem gossip by listening to it in search of the questions, histories, and values which a community’s gossip communicates. Gossip is a way in which communities tell pastors who they are. As words to which God’s Word responds, gossip can serve one’s ministry and sustain a communal tradition of care beyond the ministry of any sole pastoral caregiver. 

Open Secrets offers no romantic image of community or of pastoral ministry. Lischer’s parishioners are flawed, broken, and in need of forgiveness. Still, his stories uncover an odd beauty in pastoral ministry. Amid conflicts, tragedies, and comedies, Lischer notices God already active in the lives of their parishioners and their contexts. God’s faithfulness extends through and beyond what Lischer could imagine for himself, for his ministry, and for the people of New Cana.

I devoured Open Secrets in a day. I could see parts of myself in Lischer’s experiences. I saw my self-importance and insecurities in his. Lischer’s reflections on preaching cut through any idea I had that I would – or even could – bring God to my parishioners. 

Open Secrets offered something more than this, though. Lischer had revealed to me a glimpse of what he describes as “the church as God sees it, not as a series of individual quirks and opinions, but as a single heart of love and sorrow… [made unique by] the mysterious presence of Jesus in the community. We were his Body, which is not a metaphor.” (5) I had seen a glimpse of this, but I knew not what to make of it. With Open Secrets, though, I could better encounter and appreciate community as where Jesus mysteriously dwells. Of course, I knew Jesus’ promise that where two or three are gathered, there He is also. (6) But among those whom I had written off? Those with whom I would surely disagree on matters of politics, theology, and the shape of discipleship? Those who would surely contribute next to nothing in the construction of God’s coming kingdom? I wasn’t so sure, until I heard the different voice of Open Secrets. Lischer helped me witness how Jesus’ presence in community will never be restricted by human disagreements, shortcomings, and sins. These are precisely the reasons why Jesus comes to us in community to do what we cannot: to forgive us, reconcile us with God and another, and free us to love each other without condition. 

Open Secrets offers a beautiful portrait of God’s faithfulness to God’s church, and with it, Lischer proclaims an ecclesiological theology of the cross apt for our current moment in American “mainline” Christianity. Congregations like Lischer’s are dying across America today, and those that remain alive are all-too-frequently viewed as either undesirable pastoral calls, or places where parishioners need to be changed before “real” discipleship can take place. Some motivations for these views are better than others, but what they overlook is a lesson I missed when preparing to pulpit supply, and which Lischer learned in New Cana: God is already present among those whom we might rather not serve. God has a unique way of showing up where we least expect or want with the promise that amid suffering, struggle, and death, there God is for us in Jesus Christ. It took Open Secrets to promise me this and to shape my faith.

1.  Richard Lischer, Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 45-46.

2. Lischer, Open Secrets, 74.

3. Lischer, Open Secrets, 101-2, 117.

4. Lischer, Open Secrets, 100-1.

5. Lischer, Open Secrets, 232.

6. Matthew 18:20 (NRSV).