Pastor is as Pastor does

I have observed a worrying trend in much of the church, which is that pastors are no longer willing or able to live up to their calling as pastors, instead choosing to be 'entrepreneurs' and 'visionaries'. I see the same trend in my own heart too. It is a sickness born of the desire to be significant before being obedient.

Reading from the introduction to 'Working the Angles' by Eugene Peterson;

"The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper's concerns - how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that customers will lay out more money.

"Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same.

"The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades."

'Pastor' is not a job title, nor is it a designation of the level one has reached in the organisation of the church. The Pastor is the one who serves the flock, who even lays down his own life for the flock. The true Pastor is the one who knows what the sheep need and is able to go to God with and for each flock member within his pasture to attain it.

It is not that we don't need teachers, visionaries or entrepreneurs. In fact, we need them all in greater measure. However, these gifts and roles are not, in my humble opinion, what is most important in the life of the church. The most pressing need in the church is for Pastoral care to emerge which will help 'average folks' become the saints that God has ordained them to be. God provides the growth, of course, but we are still told that Paul planted and Apollos watered (see 1 Cor 2). One of the things I most enjoy about the church I work at currently is that there is a sustained emphasis on the need to care for and train people to live out their life in Christ on a day-to-day basis. Even with such an emphasis it is a tough job. Imagine how things go when this emphasis is lacking!

Loving people is not something we do if have the time. It's not an optional extra in the mix of Christian leadership. It is, in fact, the primary requirement. If we can't act pastorally we should wonder what we are doing in the church at all. It is something that all of us are commanded to do by Jesus himself. If we are not doing this we are not Christians, never mind Christian leaders. It really is that simple. Let the visionaries first be pastors. Let the teachers be pastor-teachers and let the church entrepreneurs know that unless they do their work in love it will be as a 'resounding gong and a clanging cymbal' (1 Cor 13).

Yes, let us build the most innovative and exciting church the world has ever known. Let us work as hard as we can in this regard, but let us build it on the foundation of faith, love and care. And let those of us in leadership surrender our agenda for greatness to the greater gospel agenda of love, that we might 'present everyone mature in Christ.' (Col 1.28)