The Relational Pastor

Pastoral ministry quietly drifts into using people rather than meeting them, and most pastors never notice the shift.

The Instrumental Trap

When a relationship exists to produce an outcome, it is no longer a relationship in any honest sense. It is a transaction wearing the face of friendship.

Root's central claim is that modern pastoral practice has absorbed a habit of deploying relationships strategically, treating human encounter as a means toward attendance, loyalty, or institutional health rather than as something worthwhile in itself.

Why This Matters

A pastor who relates to people in order to influence them is not actually present to those people. The person across the table senses, even if they cannot name it, that they are being managed. Trust erodes quietly.

This is not merely an ethical complaint. It is a theological one. If persons are constituted by genuine encounter, then instrumental relating does not just manipulate people, it denies their personhood entirely.

How the Drift Happens

The drift is rarely deliberate. Institutional pressures, growth metrics, and cultural expectations quietly reshape pastoral imagination until every conversation carries an agenda.

• A pastor visits a family not to be with them but to retain their membership.
• A small group is formed not for mutual belonging but to raise volunteer capacity.
• Pastoral warmth becomes a brand strategy rather than a genuine posture.
• Empathy is deployed as a persuasion technique rather than offered as a gift.

A Concrete Illustration

Consider a pastor who makes hospital visits only to members who are likely to leave. The visit looks identical from the outside. But the person in the bed is a means to an institutional end. The pastor is managing a risk, not sharing a place.

The Single Most Important Application

Show up with no agenda except the person.

The most immediate practice is to enter a pastoral encounter having deliberately set aside what you need from it. No outcome to secure, no decision to prompt. Just presence offered freely.

The Common Mistake

Pastors trained in communication and rapport-building can become highly effective at making people feel met while still relating to them instrumentally. The issue is not competence but orientation.

Deeper Mechanism

The instrumental drift runs deeper than individual habit. It is structurally encouraged by how ministry is evaluated. When a pastor's effectiveness is measured by attendance, giving, or program enrollment, relationships are implicitly framed as inputs to those metrics.

Instrumental relation

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A relation pursued as a means to a goal that lies outside the relation itself.

Personal encounter

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A relation valued for the mutual presence of persons, not for outcomes it produces.

Place-sharing

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Root's term for entering the concrete situation of another person without an agenda to fix or influence.

Root draws a sharp line between an individual and a person. An individual is self-enclosed, defined by autonomous choices. A person is constituted by relationship: there is no settled self apart from genuine encounter with others.

When a church absorbs an individualist anthropology, community becomes a product offered to self-sufficient consumers rather than a shared life that forms persons. The pastor becomes a supplier.

A Contrasting Example

Now picture a pastor who visits the same hospital room without the retention calculation. She is there because she is a neighbor in the deepest sense, someone who has agreed to share the place of others. She may pray or sit in silence. She is not measuring success.

The person in the bed is no longer an institutional unit but a mystery she has been given to encounter.

The outward behavior may be nearly identical. The interior orientation is entirely different, and that difference shapes everything that follows in the relationship.

When the Idea Holds and When It Strains

• The critique holds most clearly in one-on-one pastoral care, where the power differential makes instrumental relating especially corrosive.
• It holds in small-group and community contexts where belonging should be unconditional.
• It strains somewhat in leadership contexts, where a pastor must make decisions affecting many and cannot always be purely present with one person at a time.
• It strains when confused with a ban on all structure: having a pastoral purpose in visiting is not the same as using the person.

Putting It Into Practice

1. 1Audit your agendas: Before a pastoral visit or conversation, name what outcome you are hoping for. Then set it aside consciously.
2. 2Stay longer than necessary: Instrumental visits end when the agenda is served. Presence-oriented visits are not governed by an internal clock tied to a goal.
3. 3Notice the urge to fix: When you feel driven to solve, advise, or move someone toward a decision, pause. Ask whether you are serving the person or managing an outcome.
4. 4Share your own life: Vulnerability is not a technique; it is the currency of genuine encounter. Allowing others to know your struggles dismantles the managed persona.

Deeper Roots and Edge Cases

Root locates this problem inside a broader cultural history. Drawing on Jeremy Rifkin's account of how shifts in energy and communication reshape human self-understanding, he argues that pastors have been gradually recast by cultural pressure into self-help entertainers and institutional managers. Relatability becomes a brand; warmth becomes a delivery mechanism.

The result is a pastoral imagination shaped more by market logic than by Trinitarian theology. In market logic, every relationship carries a return-on-investment question. The pastor who has internalized that logic will instrumentalize relationships even while believing sincerely that they care for their congregation.

Trinitarian Ground

Root's theological counterweight is the communal nature of the Trinity. The three persons of God are not individuals who choose to relate; their relating is constitutive of what they are. Mutual indwelling through love is the very structure of divine life.

Human personhood, created in that image, patterns itself on this: we are not selves who then decide to relate, but selves formed by relation.

This means the pastoral problem is not merely ethical but anthropological. A pastor who deploys relationships as tools is acting against the grain of what persons actually are, regardless of whether the targets of that management notice or object.

Second-Order Implications

• Evangelism reframed: if converting someone is the goal, the pre-conversion relationship is already instrumental. Root argues that evangelism should emerge from genuine shared story, not precede it as a technique.
• Preaching reframed: a sermon aimed at producing a behavioral decision treats listeners as means. A sermon that shares the preacher's own wrestling with the text models encounter.
• Church growth reframed: growth pursued as an institutional metric will reshape pastoral relationships into recruitment tools. Growth that emerges from genuine community is a byproduct, not a target.

Main Objections and Replies

The Exception Worth Naming

There is one edge case Root does not fully resolve: crisis intervention. When someone is in immediate danger, a pastor may rightly override pure presence with urgent direction. The goal in that moment is the person's safety, which is not the same as institutional self-interest.

The instrumental-versus-personal distinction does not map neatly onto every emergency.

The deeper principle holds nonetheless: the test is whether the person is treated as an end or merely as a unit to be managed. Even in crisis, genuine care for the person as a person remains the animating motive.

The urgency of the situation changes the mode of relating, not its fundamental orientation.