Kierkegaard writes scores of paragraphs critical of pastors under whose watch the church itself is disintegrating. He points out the following problems:

• Pastors’ lives do not reflect their sermons.
• Pastors do not really mean what they preach, so that preaching “jams the lock on imitation” (FSE 261).
• Pastors preach watered-down drivel, and thus they are dishonest about the gospel—its claims and its demands on human life.
• The pastorate is a professional job no different from any other in law, business, medicine and so on. The implications are that some are drawn to the “trade” for secular reasons and thus some pastors have gotten themselves in the wrong business.
• In their sermons pastors promote the view that doctrine matters more than the imitation of Christ; faith is intellectualized.
• Pastors do not understand the world in which they live (i.e., non-Christian forms of existence), nor do they care to, and thus their message is largely irrelevant.
• Pastors offend, but for the wrong sorts of reasons.

Tietjen, Mark A.. Kierkegaard: A Christian Missionary to Christians

The one thing I would add is that “pastors preach for their own benefit.”

Faith is precisely this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal and is justified over against the latter not as subordinate but superior to it, yet in such a way, mind you, that it is the single individual who, after having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now through the universal becomes the single individual who as the particular is superior to it; [faith is this paradox] that the single individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.

Fear and Trembling .

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. There are perhaps many in every generation who do not even come to it, but nobody goes further.

Kierkegaard

Humanity has lost meaning because the accepted criterion of reality and truth is ambiguous and subjective thought—that which cannot be proven with logic, historical research, or scientific analysis. Humans cannot think out choices in life, we must live them; and even those choices that we often think about become different once life itself enters into the picture. For Kierkegaard, the type of objectivity that a scientist or historian might use misses the point—humans are not motivated and do not find meaning in life through pure objectivity. Instead, they find it through passion, desire, and moral and religious commitment. These phenomena are not objectively provable—nor do they come about through any form of analysis of the external world; they come about through a direct relationship between one and the external world. Here Kierkegaard’s emphasis is on relationship rather than analysis. This relationship is a way of looking at one’s life that evades objective scrutiny.

Philosophy of SK