The bishop who never wanted the job
Augustine ordained by popular demand
Augustine is thirty-six years old, has been baptized for five years, has buried his mother, returned to North Africa, and established a small monastic community at Thagaste. He is writing theology, living quietly, and under no circumstances does he want to be a bishop.
He knows what happens to gifted men in that role. He has watched Ambrose. He has watched his own gifts get him pressed into service repeatedly. He makes a point of avoiding cities that have vacant sees, because the practice of the time is for congregations to simply grab suitable candidates physically and present them to the bishop for ordination.
He visits Hippo to see a friend. He attends church. The bishop Valerius preaches a sermon lamenting the lack of suitable priests. The congregation turns and sees Augustine. The grabbing begins.
He weeps. The congregation interprets his tears as humility. They are partly that. They are also genuine grief at the life he is losing.
He is ordained. He becomes Valerius's assistant and eventually his successor. He will be bishop of Hippo for the next thirty-five years, until his death in 430 AD.
In those thirty-five years he will write the Confessions, the City of God, the treatises on grace and free will, the anti-Donatist and anti-Pelagian works, and hundreds of letters and sermons. He will be the most productive and most influential theologian in the history of the Western church.
He never stopped grieving the quiet life he lost.
“Our heart is restless until it rests in you — and I had not thought the rest would come in a bishop's chair.”
— Augustine, paraphrase, c. 391 AD
“Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I don't know how to speak; for I am a child. But the LORD said to me, Don't say, I am a child; for to whoever I shall send you, you shall go, and whatever I shall command you, you shall speak.”
Augustine wept when he was ordained because he understood what was being asked of him — not the honor of the office but the cost of it. The life of scholarship and contemplation he had built would be subordinated to the endless demands of a North African diocese.
He was right about the cost. He paid it. And the work he did from inside that costly role produced the theology that shaped the Western church for a thousand years.
The life we are given is often not the life we planned. The work that matters most sometimes comes through the door we were trying to avoid.
What has been asked of you that you are still grieving rather than accepting? What might be possible on the other side of the acceptance?