Side-stepping the Law of Hire
I try to find my answer to these troubling queries in a glance down the centuries. There are the barefoot Black Friars of Dominic and the Gray Friars of Francis of Assisi (him who took poverty for his bride) in the thirteenth century. They gloried in mean clothes, mean shelter, mean food, as they ministered out of their own poverty to the poor, the overlooked, the no-accounts (in cities, then, because the troop of comfortable parsons were fattening in the popular country districts).
There are the visionaries and enthusiasts: John Bunyan in the seventeenth century; John and Charles Wesley in the eighteenth. In the very face of the plentiful, complacent clergy, they fought the wolf as if they had been apostles living in the first century.
There is Jean Frederick Oberlin, in the early part of the nineteenth century, who protested, “I do not wish to labor in some comfortable pastoral charge where I can be at ease. I want a work to do which no one else wishes to do, and which will not be done unless I do it.”
Oberlin had just won his degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Strasburg, at a time when Strasburg was a city of France. His “call” to pastoral duty came all of a sudden with the wind of a February evening rushing in at the door as a stranger stepped into the bare room. Struck with the poverty of the place, Pastor Stuber introduced himself. Beard’s translation from the French presents us with the picture:
“I have learned about you, Herr Oberlin. Your name has been mentioned to me as one who does not follow the beaten paths of ministerial candidates. You have studied surgery and medicine. You have a knowledge of botany and herbs. Is this not so?”
“In my leisure hours I have paid some attention to botany, to blood-letting, and the experiences of the anatomical room,” replied Oberlin.
“Will you be kind enough to explain to me what this little pan means that I see here by your lamp?” asked Stuber.
A deep blush ran over Oberlin’s face. “Pardon the cooking, Herr Pastor. I take my dinner with my parents, and I bring away some bread which my mother gives me. At eight o’clock I put this little pan over my lamp, place my bread in it, with a little water and salt. Then I go on with my studies.”
“You are my man!” exclaimed Stuber, rising from his chair. “You live on the diet of Lacedæmon. Yes, you are my man. I see you do not understand me; but I have got my man, and I shall not let you go. I want you for the pastorship of Waldbach in the Ban-de-la-Roche. There a hundred poor and wretched families in want of the bread of life; four or five hundred to shepherd and to save, poor, wretched, friendless.”