Been thinking a bit about 'Fix You' approaches to Christian ministry. I.e., approaches which see one's primary vocation as righting what is wrong with 'the Church' or Christianity writ large.

This is something that comes from basically all areas, and is in many ways understandable. From a 'progressive' angle, the desire to fix the church's death dealing tendencies. From Anglo-Catholic and other angles, to return the church to its true identity.

And obviously one can combine all these things into one.

The thing that troubles me isn't the idea of taking a critical posture w. regard to the Church/churches, or trying to think about how things can be improved.

It's more the idea that the minister/priest's primary function is to effect this improvement. That *they* truly know both the problem and the solution, and can go into any given community and do what needs to be done to return it to what it should be.

Quite apart from the hubris of this view (a hubris I certainly see in myself), it positions communities primarily as problems to be solved. Or; it positions the nature of one's love for that community as the kind of love that most fundamentally says 'I'll make you better.'

I've heard different iterations of this aspiring pastors for as long as I've been around aspiring pastors. Something like, 'the church is not as it should be, and I don't like it the way it is, but here's what I'm going to do to make it right.'

And 'it's hard to love you because you're not what I think you should be, but I recognize it's my call to make you that way by loving you' is as toxic an approach to ordained ministry as it is to romantic relationships.

Obviously there are complications here: the desire to make one's church a place where one can survive, as well as one's loved ones, carries an ever so slightly different valence to particular kinds of ad fontes movements. And again, its not that there aren't problems.

It's that thinking one's sense of vocation as primarily fixing the Church/churches can distort any number of things which are in play, instrumentalize people, and ground a particular kind of ministerial hubris.

(There's a real question in here as to how one does approach 'reform'; and I think one crucial thing is that effective reform is something that communities do, not something that is done to them—whatever kind of 'leader' visions we have.)

(And how precisely this is brought about in toxic scenarios—here I'm tipping my hand at how much I can think of communities as problems to be solved—is something that requires quite a bit more thought beyond 'leadership.')

(Just in case folks are reading this far down, I *am* thinking on the potentially reactionary character of this line of thought. But I think a critique on this line of thinking from that angle overall qualifies and nuances, rather than undercuts, the basic argument.)