Bonhoeffer: Pastors and Authority

I’ve been rereading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. The text has many gems, but the quote below stuck out to me. The passage reminds the pastor that they are always in submission to God’s Word. The pastor is a servant who possesses no authority of his own.

In a world where the desire for power and control presses in on all of us, the pastoral office is no different. Pastors, too, must guard against leading congregations into images of their likeness but give way to Christ Jesus and His Word instead.

I hope this quote is helpful to you. Bonhoeffer writes:

The community of faith does not need brilliant personalities but faithful servants of Jesus and of one another. It does not lack the former, but the latter. The community of faith will place its confidence only in the simple servant of the Word of Jesus, because it knows that it will then be guided not by human wisdom and human conceit, but by the Word of the Good Shepherd. The question of spiritual trust, which is so closely connected with the question of authority, is decided by the faithfulness with which people serve Jesus Christ, never by the extraordinary gifts they possess. Authority in pastoral care can be found only in the servants of Jesus who seek no authority of their own, but who are Christians one to another, obedient to the authority of the Word.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, paragraph 92