Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson
DA Carson
Crossway, Wheaton,
2008, 160pp.
Available from Moore Books
02 9577 9966
info@moorebooks.com.au
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Here’s an admission: I have always avoided reading Christian biographies. For most of my life, the thought has filled me with dread. I can’t quite explain why—I’m a big reader in general—but something inside me insists I won’t enjoy them. Perhaps it’s because when I was young, the popular biographies at youth group were all so extreme: Through the Gates of Splendour; Forgive Me, Natasha; The Hiding Place; God’s Smuggler; The Cross and the Switchblade; and so on. They all seemed to be accounts of extraordinary Christian people in violent, extreme situations. Torture, imprisonment and death were standard features. These books and others like them have brought inspiration to legions of Christian readers, but they never appealed to me. Yet, despite my general avoidance of the genre, I was drawn to Don Carson’s latest book—a little gem called Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson.
Tom Carson grew up speaking English in the Canadian province of Ontario. He was converted as a teenager in the 1920s, and during his time at seminary in the early 1930s, he began to gravitate towards ministry among French Canadians. In time, this would lead to pastoring both English and French-speaking congregations in Quebec, and eventually doing ministry among predominantly French-speaking people—ministry that continued until the late 1980s. Don Carson, the author/editor of these memoirs, recognizes that few readers will know the religious situation of mid-20th-century Quebec, and so provides helpful background information. It certainly came as news to me that, at the time, by some measures, “Quebec was the most Roman Catholic ‘nation’ in the world” (p. 11), that it remained largely untouched by the reforms of Vatican II (p. 20), and that “Between 1950 and 1952, Baptist ministers spent a total of eight years in jail for preaching the gospel” (p. 11). This enormously difficult spiritual landscape was the setting for Tom Carson’s pastoral ministry, and these were to prove crucial decades for the progress of the gospel in Quebec.
As the title says, this book is Tom’s memoirs. Memoirs are essentially a person’s private journals, letters and papers—normally selected by an author/editor and smoothed out with comments and historical explanations to organize them into a coherent story. It’s not the sort of autobiography where a person has sat down to write his own life story. Instead, you read what was originally written as ongoing private reflections during the person’s life, bringing you right into the heart of their experiences and reactions as events happened. It’s the difference, if you like, between the young sportsman’s autobiography (which is always premature and often terrible) and his tour diary (which is often clunky, enlightening and funny). Memoirs are ‘real’ and immediate, frequently written initially for the person’s own reflection rather than for publication. So we gain not just an overall sense of Tom’s life and work, but his own as-it-happened thoughts about his ministry, his reflections on his wife’s declining health, his fears for his children, the content of his prayers, his moments of self-doubt or hopefulness, and so on.
Don Carson is, of course, Tom’s son, and this closeness of author to subject produces both the book’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. Carson can fill in gaps and offer explanations and perspectives that no outside writer could. But at times I felt that he was unnecessarily protective of Tom, sometimes following Tom’s journal entries with editorial sections in defence of his father—particularly at those points where Tom was finding the going hardest and when his journal entries were at their most raw. Rather than trust the reader to understand that the journal entries were coloured by Tom’s mood and circumstances, Carson seems to feel the need to take issue with his father, to dispute his negative self-assessments and to defend him against his own remarks. It becomes a little intrusive, but perhaps this lack of detachment is forgivable as Carson himself is, after all, a character in the story.
I daresay it reveals something about my personality that where Tortured for Christ failed to gain a reading, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor succeeded. In many ways, Tom was just an ordinary pastor, which is why it was so inspiring to discover his profound humility and see his dogged perseverance in the face of lean times, exasperating denominational officials, his wife’s dementia and his seasons of self-doubt. The heart-stopping biographies of spiritual giants undergoing severe testing have their place, but who can relate to them? How can I sympathize with them? Where is the opportunity to draw encouragement from their struggles with the very weaknesses I see in myself? Tom Carson was, perhaps, not widely influential or exceptionally gifted, but this book is worth reading precisely because, for all Tom’s ordinariness, it contains the memoirs of an exemplary pastor.
