On pastors embarrassed to say the great word “God”

Inside the immanent frame, there is a sneaky temptation for the pastor. She is often tempted, and somehow invisibly formed, to take God less seriously than her people do. The pastor can feel embarrassed to say the great word “God” or to even see the word “God” as a great word. Inside the invisible immanent frame, the word “God” feels meaningless, even immature. The pastor feels the temptation to run the congregation as a small business, even a little self-conscious of all the enchantment and dogma. But her people, who more directly bear the contradictions of modernity, and at times spit out the dry sawdust of the immanent frame, yearn to know that God has a purpose for their lives. They yearn to know that God can still speak. Secretly, and maybe with a little shame, the pastor finds herself doubting this, wanting at least one foot to rest squarely inside modernity, fearing she’ll be overtaken by superstition. The moral vision of immanence becomes more tempting for her than for her people.

—Andrew Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age (2022), 31. Preach, brother.