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Tag: pastors

  • Choosing Pastors and Church Continuity

    Choosing Pastors and Church Continuity

    churchandpeopleLast week I encounter two posts that got me wanting to say something about the same topic: pastoral leadership and church mission and continuity. The first was The United Methodist Church Should Give Up Its Game of Musical Chairs, and the second was not obviously related, 5 Reasons Why the Sunday Sermon Is Boring (both HT Dave Black Online). I do tend to see them as related, and I’ll explain why.

    The United Methodist Church has an approach to assigning pastors. We call it itinerancy, because it grew out of the system of circuit riders, but we Methodists should admit that it bears very little resemblance either in theory or in application to circuit riding. And yes, it has its problems, sometimes serious ones. Bigger churches get preference. Places that are well established and have good income are more likely to get experienced and effective pastors. Places where the ground to be ploughed is hard often get pastors who are tired or inexperienced.

    I would also say that quite frequently churches get what they deserve under this system. If a congregation is lively and active and wants to impact its community for good and for God, then it will often get a similarly lively pastor. I once heard a United Methodist district superintendent say she wasn’t going to waste a good pastor on a church that wasn’t going anywhere.

    But the system has the bottom line problem of all systems: People. One can write a similar list of problems for almost any system. A call system often results in similar disparities, this time because the same pastors the bishop would have assigned to more active or larger churches are chosen by such churches, while the smaller or less active churches are left to choose between the remnants. On the other hand, pretty much all systems have at least one plus: People touched by God’s grace.

    We often believe we can rewrite the rules for church polity and thus solve the church’s problems. But our rules do not solve problems. Our rules provide a framework for us to live in community. Yes, they can encourage or discourage various kinds of behavior, but they will not make a successful church. For the church to be successful, we need to proclaim the gospel and act on it in our community. That will require discernment and listening to the Holy Spirit. There are independent congregations that find their way and there are churches with a pastor assigned by a bishop that do so. There are house churches that proclaim the gospel. There are also house churches that go nowhere. The building, furniture, and human rules won’t make it all work.

    So what about those boring sermons. How does that relate?

    I’m glad you asked! The sermon is another point at which we hope certain rules or procedures will solve the problem and make the sermon “work.” But like a pastoral call, we get stuck with what happens. If the called or appointed pastor is a good preacher, we’ll get a good sermon. I know there are classes on homiletics and good books on sermon preparation and presentation. I even publish one. But some people simply aren’t preachers. I know more than one person who was a deep thinker, perhaps an excellent discussion leader, certainly someone who did her or his homework, yet the sermon was just not the right medium for the person.

    But the pastor has to present a sermon!

    And there is our problem with both elements. We have churches that are pastor centered. Why is it that a church cannot function with a change of pastor? Why is it that a church cannot function in the absence of a pastor? Why is it that a change of pastor will bring active ministries crashing down?

    In all cases, I would say, the ministries are too pastor-centered. We are the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27). Paul doesn’t tell us that the pastor is the body of Christ and we are the pastor’s minions. Rather, we are the body of Christ and “pastor” is a gifting and calling exercised within that body. A pastor won’t necessarily be a good preacher. And despite those who advocate pastor-teachers (and there are many of those), I believe that the two exist separately as well as together, though the work overlaps. Both pastors and teachers (in one person or not) equip the saints (Ephesians 4:12) for the work of ministry. The means may be different, but the goal is the same: To produce disciples who go forth and minister.

    Now teaching and preaching are not necessarily the same, either. One friend of mine told me that the sermon was more a form of art than of teaching. It carried the worship service forward in an artistic way. I don’t really object to this except to say that if this is worship in the form of an art, it shouldn’t be an individually-centered thing, but rather something in which the whole congregation participates.

    I would suggest that the needed response to the problems addressed in both these articles is to make our churches less pastor-centered. We need to spread out both the work and the leadership. If a church needs to call a new pastor, they should have continuing, active ministries waiting for the new pastor’s added touch, not for him to revive before moving forward.

    Am I against pastors? No! Am I against professional pastors? In some cases. I see a problem when churches that are small spend too much money on having a professional pastor. There is a place for a lay-led congregation or a pastor who is bi-vocational. But whether the pastor is a full-time worker who is paid, or a lay person volunteering part-time, the church shouldn’t center on that one person. Pastoring or teaching should equip others and help them find their place of service in the church and in the community. Further, churches need to recognize this as work. When the pastor sits down in his office with someone for an hour or so, that’s not wasting time. That’s equipping. When the pastor teaches people how to visit and encourage others, that’s not trying to get out of work, she’s doing her job.

    I’d further suggest that we, as a church, should not reserve ordination or commissioning for pastors. We should discover the gifts God has given to each member and commission them for that service in the body. Do you have gifts of administration? Let’s pray over you and lay hands on you commissioning you to administer the church office. Do you have the gift of encouragement? Let’s pray over you and lay hands on you, commissioning you to go out and encourage, recognized by and supported by your church.

    Recognizing, equipping, sending! Sounds like fun! And we might even find that we had fewer discouraged pastors if we did it.

     

  • Unconscious Traditions Fight Change

    I’ve said quite a few times that I think that the job description we have for a pastor in most churches is ungodly. It’s also inhuman. The pastor can’t do all of that, so many times they fail. Those who succeed do so through extraordinary talents, gifts, and dependence on the grace of God. But it’s very difficult to change.

    That’s because we have a traditional set of responsibilities for a pastor, and usually an additional set for a particular parish or congregation based on the things previous pastors, fondly remembered in their absence, are said to have done. A pastor who fails to accomplish all of these things will likely be accused of not doing his or her job. Many of these traditions are not conscious ones. People simply assume that this is done. Let me give some examples.

    A pastor I invited to speak at a conference had to back out. The reason? He had an out of town wedding he had not expected, and he had made a covenant with his church to be in the pulpit 50 out of the 52 weeks of the year. I do not, of course, want to suggest that the pastor should violate his covenant, but I have to ask why a pastor needs to be the one to preach that often. Of course, it is traditional that we hear only the pastor, or one of the ordained members of the pastoral staff, but why is this?

    On the other hand, recently I have visited the United Church of Christ congregation (a new church plant of theirs) here in Pensacola three times. I have yet to hear the pastor preach. It’s not that he was missing. He was on the front row. But he hears other members of the congregation. I like that. I do hope to hear him preach some day, but he doesn’t feel bound by the tradition that the only time someone else can preach is when the pastor is absent, rarely, of course, and with good excuse!

    Another Methodist church I know of had more than 30 lay speakers, many of them certified lay speakers. You would hear one or two of them preach in a year. If you had lay speakers speak too often, people would think the pastor was lazy. In lay speaker training I was told to expect to speak only rarely, which made me wonder why there was a certification program if the certified speakers were not to speak. I was told this prepared one for more involvement in church leadership. What leadership, nobody said.

    Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14, describes a church gathering. Here everyone comes with something, many of them wanting to speak. The problem is not getting activity, but rather controlling an excess of activity. I think that we fail in following 1 Corinthians 12-14 because we don’t have the same problems as the Corinthian church, but we think we do. We should be so blessed as to have the problems of the church in Corinth. Certainly one needs to solve those problems, but they’re easier to solve than apathy and inaction. Our tradition, the unconscious one, puts a big divide between the pew and the platform/pulpit and puts the activity “up” and inactivity” down. We expect information to flow from the pulpit/platform and are silly enough to think it will be absorbed by those in the pews.

    What would happen if we spread things around? What if we heard from one another during the gathering of the saints on Sunday morning? I’d miss being able to hear my pastor on Sunday. I’m blessed to be in a church with multiple services with good speakers all around. Nonetheless, I don’t think they should be the only ones who speak when the saints gather. They need to equip the saints, all the saints, to study, think, and share.

    Another tradition we have is that trained people think and speak about theology, while everybody else shuts up and listens. This probably feeds into the desire to always have the pastor speak. He’s the one who knows theology, after all. And I believe it’s important for the church to have people who have done serious study of theology and biblical studies to bring information into the discussion. But more importantly, the role of these people should be to guide and train the congregation into how to study and learn more for themselves. We have a hierarchy of knowledge as well as a hierarchy of power.

    And it’s not just (or even mostly) people seeking power in the church that make this happen. It’s not that pastors are power hungry. I know many, many pastors who are not. But when they try to get people to become more involved, those people either don’t want to, or they agree to and then don’t put forth the effort. This is again because our unconscious tradition says that people with theological degrees are the ones who should think and talk about theology. It’s a dangerous tradition, and is one of the reasons so many church members can be swayed so easily on so many subjects.

    I was stopped by a church member in the halls of one church who asked me how it was that people who wrote the notes for study Bibles got their ideas. She explained that she kept looking at the notes, and she figured they must be right, because, after all, those who wrote the notes were experts, but she just couldn’t figure out how. Could I explain? She even had an example ready.

    She showed me her example, and quite bluntly, I thought the note completely emasculated one of the parables of Jesus, making it into a feel-good Twinkie rather than a solid serving of Brussels Sprouts. So I asked her, “Are you sure the note is right?” She was astonished! Now this was an educated, professional woman, but she simply hadn’t considered that she could disagree with the experts. I was able to point out that if she had another study Bible, written from a different perspective, the notes might say something different. Then what would she do?

    I think we need to get rid of these “lessers” and “greaters” in our thinking. This is often referred to as hierarchy, and sometimes if we criticize that, we can be viewed as against order. But the problem isn’t leadership. There are those called to lead, though in Christian communities it should be servant-leadership. But in a “nation of priests” there is some sense in which everyone is called to lead, and everyone is called to follow.

    I’m not talking here about church organizational charts. Some of the best servant-leadership I’ve observed was carried out by a United Methodist bishop. The chart may have said authority, and he was in no way afraid to lead, but his actions put Jesus in charge. I know of independent churches who try to erase the lines of hierarchical authority where nonetheless there is a very clear authority structure. It’s just that nobody admits it. I think that’s a sign of how hard it is for us to take responsibility for our calling and look to Jesus. It’s not so much the formal structure. It’s the attitude of those within.

    It’s these unconscious traditions that need to be brought to light, examined, and discarded if necessary. Tradition can be a good thing. It’s the collection of assumptions about what must happen that gets in the way of doing the right thing.

  • The Role of Pastors

    Dave Black writes about a book on 1 & 2 Timothy and notes that Timothy was not a pastor. Historically, this is quite accurate.

    I find it interesting the things that “church folks” think must be done by a pastor. At one conference where Jody and I were invited to teach, there was a call to come forward for prayer at the last session. All the pastors, i.e. the ordained folk, were invited to come forward and pray with people. We, the unordained, were not. Was it an oversight? I didn’t feel any need to be up there with the pastors, but it is a way of thinking, and I think not a way of thinking that is helpful in building the church. All the gifts need to be used and everyone needs to be involved. Prayer is certainly not limited to ordained clergy.

    I want to quote Bob Cornwall, another one of our Energion authors, who is part of my editing work right now:

    In the course of the journey we will take together, we will consider more fully the nature of God’s church, its calling to be in the world, and the gifts of the Spirit that enable us to fulfill our call to ministry. If the phrase “call to ministry,” seems narrow and limiting, it’s important to note that while some among the people of God have been set aside by ordination for specific forms of ministry that center on leadership and teaching, all Christians have been called to share in the ministry of the Spirit, a ministry that pushes us beyond the walls and into the world, for that is where the Spirit is at work. Indeed, we’ve all been given a “manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7). And when Paul speaks of the common good, it’s likely that his vision is broader than simply the faith community itself.

    Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the stranger who enters our churches could see God’s presence in such tangible ways that their lives would be turned upside down? This can happen when we open the gates of our hearts and let the Spirit begin to move, bringing to us God’s power and gifts so that our lives will be transformed and we can become agents of God’s reconciling love. In the following pages we will see how God can accomplish this through our churches. (From the introduction to Unfettered Spirit, pp. 12-13.)

    I would go even further and question whether ordination is something limited to only one sort of ministry, but that’s for another post.

  • UMC Pastoral Accountability: What About Bishops?

    United Methodist Insight led me to Jeremy Smith’s article, Defeating the Dark Side of Church Metrics. I recommend the second link because of comments. Since one commenter talks about people who oppose accountability but who receive their paycheck from the church, let me note that I am a United Methodist layman, and I do not receive support from the church. I put those little pieces of paper in the offering plate, not vice-versa. (Read the comments to Jeremy’s post if you don’t get this!)

    I have been very interested in this debate because I believe strongly in accountability and at the same time don’t see conference dashboards providing the right sort of accountability. I have encountered United Methodist pastors that I thought shouldn’t be shepherding actual sheep, much less church-member-sheep. There are a few poor excuses for pastors out there. But at the same time there are churches that are more difficult to manage than others. (Out of This World describes one. Full disclosure – my company publishes that book.) There are also large numbers of wonderful pastors, trying to fulfill their call, and being hampered by a dying (perhaps suicidal?) church.

    So the first thing I noticed was that the metrics being used are not properly weighted. My initial impression is that our bishops are numerically challenged. But that’s not really the problem. They have the numbers. What they don’t have is enough context for the numbers. And while one can hope that when the cabinet discusses appointments, such context will be provided by people who are in the field, when one reads a conference dashboard—say North Alabama—one doesn’t have that context. So the public face of the metrics is without adequate context, in my view.

    But I’m just a Methodist layman. Jeremy Smith has looked into this and is suggesting we change the way we do metrics. Much of what he suggests resonates with me. I have to confess that I’m not connectional enough to care whether a particular local church is giving to United Methodist or non-UM projects for the most part. I have a tendency to call myself “a member of a United Methodist congregation” more often than I call myself United Methodist. But in general, he’s talking about the right things, and the charts he uses (see his post for sources) can be helpful in looking at those things.

    But ultimately I don’t think any set of numbers will do the job adequately. Numbers can be helpful, but in the end someone has to take responsibility, prayerfully discern the situation in each ministry situation, and make a call. I’d think the person to take that responsibility in our polity would be a bishop. That’s unfortunate, in a way, as bishops supervise too many churches to really understand all their local church communities, no matter how well one designs and then completes charts and reports. It would be better for such responsibility to fall on someone at the district superintendent level, but I don’t want to beat up on DS’s too much, as I perceive their job to involve taking all the blame, getting none of the credit, and having no actual authority to do anything about it. I exaggerate, but the DS does have to work largely by exhorting pastors below and bishops above.

    Bishops are elected for life, and we should imagine they are elected because their fellow pastors discern in them special gifts and a special call from God. But is there any point at which a person should no longer be called to account? I want to say there is no such point, but in our clumsy Methodist structure, I’m not sure if we’ve given bishops the authority to accomplish what they need to either. I’m no Book of Discipline expert, but I base this on observation.

    I would say the same thing for every level of the church.

    1) Provide responsibility with adequate authority to fulfill it

    2) Place those with the responsibility to hold one accountable in a position to evaluate and act

    3) Hold everyone accountable according to the authority given.

    Incidentally, this leaves us with the power vacuum at the top of the United Methodist Church. There is nobody to hold everyone from bishops to boards and agencies accountable. The members of the church at large should do this, but the authority structure is so bizarre that few Methodists know who is accountable for what. We obviously fear strong executive power, but the advantage to such power would be that the membership could understand that if the agencies don’t do what the general conference votes, there is one person, or one small group, who should be held accountable for failing in their task.

    Or—and it matters little to me, so long as we do one or the other—we could just become congregational and admit we have little control over what’s happening, and that such control as we do have is generally hampering the gospel rather than helping.