By many accounts North American Protestant pastors are in crisis. Some would suggest that this crisis is due to the increasing hardships brought about by the end of Christendom in the West. However, placing pastors in a narrative of mounting marginalization and victimization does not explain the vibrant and dynamic nature of pastoral ministry in other times and in other global contexts that are less than optimal. Instead, this project argues that pastoral identity suffers, at the hands of modern metaphors for ministry, because those metaphors fail to cultivate the pastor's ability to behold Beauty. To say this is to make the bold claim that the crisis facing pastoral identity is at its heart a crisis of aesthetics; buy which h I mean, the ability of pastors to apprehend, thorough the senses, the beauty of God and God's world revealed supremely in the person and work of Jesus Christ This project is organized in three parts: Beauty, Gift, and Metaphor. The first section traces the loss of Beauty in the world and in the parish. It explores what difference this has made to pastoral ministry as it relates to the pursuit of the two other transcendentals, Truth and Goodness. Second, with the lost ability to behold the Beauty of the Lord comes an anemic understanding of pastoral ministry as charism or Gift. The result is a loss of joy (Nehemiah 8:10). Lastly, the third section argues that recovery of a vigorous pastoral identity and ministry requires (1) an honest evaluation of the modern metaphors exerting influence on clergy, (2) a grounding back in the ancient biblical and extra-biblical metaphors that have sustained pastors, and (3) the exploration of new metaphors for ministry that can aid the renewal of the pastor's ability to behold the beauty of the Lord.