Since Niebuhr’s book, more books have rolled off the presses in response to the crisis. In 1960, James Smart correctly noted that the crisis goes beneath the obvious identity crisis.9 The personal and professional identity crisis is the symptom of a systemic ecclesiastical disease. There is no accepted theology of the ministry in our time. Instead, the practice of ministry has become the theology. The task itself is the model.
Seward Hiltner put it another way. He wrote that pastoral ministry has no unifying theory by which it organizes itself. The ministry is no longer based on a theology. Hiltner’s Preface to Pastoral Theology (1956) was his early attempt to create a new theology of the ministry.