I've been reading Eugene Peterson's book Working the Angles (which is a must read for anyone in ministry), and came across this passage on Sabbath. I wanted to quote it for a couple of reasons, not least of which because of the hilarious comment about Augustine and his mother: 

"We are, most of us, Augustinians in our pulpits. We preach the sovereignty of our Lord, the primacy of grace, the glory of God...But the minute we leave our pulpits we are Pelagians. In our committee meetings and our planning sessions, in our obsessive attempts to meet the expectations of people, in our anxiety to please, in our hurry to cover all the bases, we practice a theology that puts our good will at the foundation of life and urges moral effort as the primary element in pleasing God...Pelagius was an unlikely heretic; Augustine an unlikely saint. By all accounts Pelagius was urbane, courteous, convincing. Everyone seems to have liked him immensely. Augustine squandered away his youth in immorality, had some kind of Freudian thing with his mother [!], and made a lot of enemies. But all our theological and pastoral masters agree that Augustine started from God's grace and therefore had it right, and Pelagius started from human effort and therefore got it wrong. If we were as Augustinian out of the pulpit as we are in it, we would have no difficulty keeping sabbath. How did it happen that Pelagius became our master?"

It is an interesting point. Theology has been abstrated from life, and doctrine becomes something we merely check off of a list. For Peterson, that shows itself most obviously in Sabbath, or, more appropriately, it shows itself in the neglect of Sabbath among pastors. Virtuous piety, for many in ministry, is workaholism - not hard work, but obsession to self-fulfill and accomplish kingdom tasks through sheer fortitude.This goes back to my last post highlighting Jamin'sblog post on ministry as secular. It is troubling, is it not, that a pastor could say that he could train an atheist to do what he does on a week-in and week-out level?