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Calvin’s Company of Pastors: An interivew with Scott Manetsch

Many things come to mind when you think of John Calvin. Is pastoral care among them?  To bring that contribution closer to the top of our first thoughts, let me introduce you to Scott Manetsch’s fine new book, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536-1609 (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology). Dr. Manetsch is Professor of Cpastoarl care 2hurch History and the History of Christian Thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He also happens to be one of my top favorite and influential professors in seminary. He is the perfect scholar to tackle this subject, a man of impeccable theological insight joined with a  pastor’s heart. I heartily commend this book to our Credo readers.

What drew you to this topic and what kind of work was involved in researching it?

More than a dozen years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer reading through the published sermons of Theodore Beza (1519-1605), and I was impressed by the many pastoral themes and concerns that appeared in them.  It occurred to me that this “pastoral” side of Theodore Beza was entirely missing from the scholarly literature, and deserved further study.  In the years that followed, my family and I spent four summers in Geneva, where I had an opportunity to explore the entirety of Beza’s literary corpus.  At the same time, these summers allowed me to work extensively in the city archive, reading church documents related to religious life and pastoral practice in sixteenth-century Geneva.  What had begun as a monograph on Theodore Beza’s pastoral theology quickly mushroomed into a book on the pastoral company of 135 ministers who served the Genevan church between 1536 and 1609. As it turned out, most of the original research for my book was drawn from the minutes of Geneva’s Consistory, a disciplinary body created by Calvin that met every Thursday, beginning in 1542.  City scribes were hired to produce detailed, hand-written minutes of each Consistory session.  Most of my research time in Geneva was spent reading hundreds and hundreds of pages of these almost-illegible minutes preserved in Geneva’s city archive.

What was Geneva’s Company of Pastors and how did it change the shape of Christian pastoral ministry?

The Company of Pastors was a church institution founded by John Calvin and his pastoral colleagues in the mid-1540s.  Its membership consisted of all of the ministers who served churches in the city-republic of Geneva, including Calvin and the other ministers who served the three large parishes within the city walls (St. Pierre, St. Gervais, the Madeleine) and the pastors who served around a dozen smaller rural parishes in the surrounding countryside.  In addition, several professors from the Genevan Academy were members of the Company of Pastors.

The Company met every Friday morning to address concerns of the church both locally and internationally.  In terms of local concerns, the Company examined students for ministry, filled local ministerial posts (with the approval of the city magistrates), addressed theological disputes within the city or Company, and negotiated religious policy with Geneva’s city council.  Owing to Calvin’s theological stature, the Company of Pastors also soon gained an international role, providing support and theological advice for reformed churches and pastors in other parts of Europe.  It was pretty common for foreign churches to ask the Company to send them promising ministerial candidates from the Academy.  Moreover, as historian Robert Kingdon has shown, the Company of Pastors also recruited, trained, and secretly deployed more than 100 pastors into France between 1555 and 1562. Thus, the Company of Pastors played an important role in shaping the institutional form and theological content of pastoral ministry in Geneva.

It seems one of Calvin’s pastoral concerns was cultivating a spirit of ‘collegiality’ among the clergy.  Why was this important to Calvin?  

This was one of the biggest surprises that came from my research:  the degree to which Calvin not only championed, but institutionalized a form of church government that promoted pastoral equality and collegiality.  The caricature of John Calvin as the “dictator of Geneva” deserves to be put to rest once and for all. I think Calvin cultivated this spirit of collegiality for at least three reasons.

First, Calvin (and Beza as well) had a deep aversion to forms of church government that were hierarchical and autocratic.  They believed that Scripture taught that, though pastors’ roles might vary from parish to parish, the pastoral office was a single office, and all pastors were equally servants of Christ and ministers of the Word of God. Second, Calvin recognized the need for ministers to be accountable to one another to preserve the health of the church.  Hence, Calvin created the weekly Congregation (patterned after Zurich’s Prophetzei) where the city’s pastors met to study Scripture together and evaluate one another’s exposition of biblical texts.  So too, four times a year in the Quarterly Censure, Geneva’s ministers met behind closed doors to air their differences, to address colleagues suspected of immorality or teaching wrong doctrine, and to promote mutual trust and common vision. Third, and this is related to the second point, Calvin valued collegiality among pastors because he recognized the dangers of individual interpretations of Scripture.  Right doctrine depended on a community of pastors studying Scripture together.  In a letter to a colleague in Bern in 1549, Calvin defended the work of the Congregation as “not only useful but necessary” for the health of the church.  Calvin further stated that “The fewer discussions of doctrine we have together, the greater the danger of pernicious opinions… for solitude leads to great abuse.”

One of your main concerns is to challenge the notion that Calvin and his successors represented a white-tower approach to theology and pastoral ministry.  What kind of evidence have you found to correct this assumption?

Having grown up in the reformed tradition, I was sometimes exposed to a portrait of Calvin that focused on his theological genius at the expense of his pastoral concerns and commitments.  In this caricature, Calvin was little more than a reformed “brain on a stick.”  When one studies the documents of the Genevan church, it becomes clear that this depiction misses the mark.  I’m reminded of Calvin’s statement:  “the office of a true and faithful minister is not only to teach the people in public, which he is appointed to do as pastor, but also, as much as he is able, to admonish, exhort, warn, and console each person individually.”

The Ecclesiastical Ordinances (1541), written largely by Calvin, laid out a plan for ministry that involved intensive pastoral care of God’s people through the Word.  And this plan was enacted in practice during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  All of Geneva’s ministers preached multiple times each week.  They were expected to visit sick people at bedside.  Along with the city’s lay elders, they conducted pastoral visitations of all the households in their parish each year before Easter.  Ministers also preached catechetical sermons to children every Sunday at noon to teach them the basics of the Christian faith. Furthermore, every Thursday the pastors and elders met in Consistory to interview, reprove, and offer spiritual advice to men and women guilty of a whole variety of sins, from adultery to drunkenness to spousal abuse.  Although these consistorial interviews could be confrontational and were always intrusive, they constituted a form of spiritual counsel and pastoral care as the pastors and elders engaged people at their point of greatest brokenness and need, seeking to guide them to repentance and spiritual healing.  On many occasions, the Consistory also intervened on behalf of the neglected and abused, seeking to protect the weak and poor as well as mediate conflicts between spouses and within households.  I came away from my study of Geneva’s consistorial minutes with a deep sense of admiration for the amount of time and effort that Geneva’s pastors and elders devoted to this painful, yet important, aspect of spiritual care.

What did a typical week look like for a minister in Geneva circa 1590?  

That depends on whether the minister worked in one of the three city parishes, or whether he served one of the dozen small rural parishes in the surrounding countryside.  Countryside pastors usually preached 2-3 times per week, held weekly catechism classes, and visited members of their congregation who were sick or suspected of moral failure.  Baptisms, weddings, and (quarterly) celebrations of the Lord’s Supper were performed during the regularly scheduled worship services. Many of the countryside pastors were responsible for two different congregations within their single parish, requiring them to travel on foot 3-4 miles several times each week to perform their pastoral duties.  When possible, rural pastors were also expected to come to the city to attend meetings of the Consistory (on Thursdays) as well as the weekly meetings of the Congregation and the Company of Pastors (on Fridays).  Because their salaries were usually inadequate to pay bills, at least some of the countryside pastors supplemented their incomes by raising cattle, farming a garden, or tending a vineyard. City pastors usually preached more frequently than countryside ministers.

Prominent ministers such as Calvin, Beza, and Simon Goulart usually preached twice on Sundays and every weekday morning, every other week. (That adds up to around 18-20 sermons per month!)  In addition, city ministers instructed children in the catechism at noon on Sundays, performed baptisms, the Lord’s Supper, and weddings (in conjunction with regular worship services), and attended the meetings of the Consistory, Congregation, and Company of Pastors.  Most city ministers had special assignments as an additional part of their vocations:  some like Calvin or Beza taught at the Genevan Academy; others were part-time chaplains in the hospital or army; still others visited prisoners in the city prison, or were assigned to the plague hospital.  Moreover, I discovered that nearly one-in-six of the ministers wrote books, whether theological tomes, works of poetry, historical books, or exegetical works.

How seriously did Calvin and his successors consider church discipline?  How was it enforced and how did its enforcement change over the years?

Calvin and his colleagues believed that biblical church discipline was essential for the health of a Christian church, comparing it to ligaments holding the body of Christ together.  In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin writes:  “as the saving doctrine of Christ is the soul of the church, so does discipline serve as its sinews, through which the members of the body hold together, each in its own place.”  Thus, “all who desire to remove discipline or to hinder its restoration – whether they do this deliberately or out of ignorance—are surely contributing to the ultimate dissolution of the Church.”  Practically speaking, Calvin and Geneva’s ministers insisted that the local Consistory (consisting of pastors and twelve lay elders) should meet weekly in order to address cases of moral failure and misbelief in their congregation.  The Consistory met every Thursday at noon; its case load often included a dozen or more cases, including cases such as fornication and adultery, superstitious practice, dancing and lewd singing, public drunkenness, fighting and swearing, usury, Catholic behavior, gambling, and begging and idleness.  Many offenders were scolded, counseled, and sent away with warnings.  In more extreme cases, people were suspended from the Lord’s Supper for a few months, until they repented and were reconciled to the church and their neighbors. (Note that the Lord’s Supper was celebrated four times a year in Calvin’s Geneva.)  In the five years following Calvin’s death in 1564, there was a spike in number of annual suspensions with more than 680 people temporarily suspended from the Lord’s Supper in 1568 alone.  Thereafter, the number of annual suspensions declined significantly, reaching levels of 100-150 people per year during the 1590s and early 1600s. It is important to remember that Calvin’s Consistory did not have the power to impose any form of corporal punishment on offenders, i.e. imprisonment, banishment, fines, or capital punishment – that was the prerogative of the civil authorities alone.  The Consistory could only impose spiritual penalties, namely warnings, rebukes, suspension, or, in the worst case, major excommunication (which involved a measure of social ostracism).  With that said, Calvin lived in a city republic where the civil magistrates were willing to stand behind the Consistory, enforcing the church’s suspensions and, sometimes, imposing its own punishments on sinners who refused to repent and be reconciled to the church.

My investigation of church discipline in Geneva indicates a number of changes over the seven decades from 1542-1609.  For one, as mentioned earlier, the number of annual suspensions increased significantly between 1542 and the late 1560s, peaking in 1568 at 681 suspensions, before declining rapidly to levels of between 100-150 suspensions per year.  Second, the kinds of sins for which people were likely to be suspended changed over this period.  Whereas in the early years, the single most common offense leading to suspension from the Lord’s Supper was fornication and adultery, by the latter decades of my study household and family quarrels became the most common reason for suspension.  In addition, “sins” such as ignorance of the gospel and Catholic behavior become less common as the century progressed.  What remains more or less consistent, however, was the sheer number of cases of conflict between spouses and within households in the Consistory’s caseload each year.  Consequently, the ministers and elders regularly devoted a lot of time and energy seeking to reconcile husbands and wives, and pacify households that were torn by violence, mistrust, abuse, and hatred.

Were there any surprising revelations that you came across in your research?

A couple of surprises come to mind.  First, I found it striking the degree to which church discipline served as a form of pastoral care in Geneva during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century.  Second, I did not expect the degree to which Calvin encouraged, and Geneva’s pastors pursued a form of ministry characterized by mutual accountability, encouragement, and collaboration.  Third, I was impressed by the degree to which Calvin’s liturgies (recited in Geneva’s churches several times a week) reinforced and institutionalized his vision of pastoral ministry in the city.  Finally, I was greatly encouraged and blessed by the rich (and largely unexplored) collection of pastoral resources – prayers, sermons, Christian meditations, ethical treatises – produced by Geneva’s pastors during the decades after Calvin’s lifetime.

Matthew Claridge is an editor for Credo Magazine and is Senior Pastor of Mt. Idaho Baptist Church in Grangeville, ID. He has earned degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is married to Cassandra and has two children, Alec and Nora.

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