What if You Changed Your Church Sign?
Suppose you altered that sign in front of your facility so at the place where is says,
Pastor
(Your Name Here)
it would say,
Missionary
(Your Name Here).
(Missionary is the closest word in fairly normal usage that is equivalent in meaning to apostle.)
Or, where it says,
Pastor
(Your Name Here)
It would say,
Prophet
(Your Name Here)
Or,
Evangelist
(Your Name Here)
How would that change the way you face your daily activities?
How would it change the way your congregation thinks about you and itself?
How would it change the way the community thinks about you and the congregation?
Just what is the biblical rationale for thinking that the leader of a congregation is a pastor?
posted by bill Sloat at 11:42 AM
7 Comments:
In reference to the previous thread, Bill, your beginning and ending points confused me a little. The original post seemed to be saying that titles and terminology are a big deal, and your last comment seemed to be saying that they weren't that big a deal in the early church.
I agree that A) How we think of ourselves in terms of our gifts and calling are tremendously significant, and B) That our churches (and networks/denominations) should be led by teams comprised of an APEST mix.
After all this discussion, I am not convinced that launching an effort to end the widespread use of the term "pastor" will get us very far. For one, I think George is right that all of the APEST giftings can be said to have a responsibility for shepherding the church in some way. And second, most of the people in our churches are not thinking of these terms with the precision we are all discussing them here ("pastor" may as well mean "leader" to most of them).
But I DO agree that we have adopted a "shepherd motif" as the nearly solitary motif for local church leadership, and in so doing churches have lost their edge of faithfulness (which the prophet brings), ceased to have significant pioneering vision or an effective contextualized gospel (which the apostle brings), and ceased to have deep-thinking discipleship (which the teacher brings).
We see this in the abundance of weak and passive local church leaders, and we see it in the denomination when a shepherd is put onto some leadership committee, or into a position of regional leadership, in which they often turn out to be completely ineffective at leading other leaders to greater fruitfulness.
So I'm not sure I care about the church sign... but it's time we start asking where the A's, P's, E's, and T's are.
Fran,
It's interesting to me how powerful it was for me to type the post that launched this thread.
Of course, it's not about dropping the term pastor. It's about being biblical regarding leadership. It's about repenting of the Christendom myth of leadership and rediscovering what Jesus gives the church and what the Spirit empowers.
When I was typing the part about changing the sign so that it says:
Missionary
(Your Name Here)
I was thinking about the fact that the missional crowd here, to use Reggie's language from The Present Future, is working on transforming church members into missionaries and most of our credentialed church leaders would reject the role of missionary for themselves.
How are we going to turn attenders into missionaries when our leaders think of themselves as pastors. When our leaders think of themselves as pastors, it is inevitable that attenders will be enculterated into thinking of themselves as sheep--as consumers of religious products and services.
I've been reading very carefully Hirsch's addendum to The Forgotten Ways and he argues with incredible power that we need to adopt a paradigm of church leadership that is not nurture focused.
The point I was trying to make (and obviously made poorly) is not that we should be changing the lettering on our church signs but that our leaders must be changing the ways they think about themselves and the ways they present themselves to the congregations and communities they serve.
Amen, Bill. That is all.
Friend, this was a powerful paragraph that captures it...
"How are we going to turn attenders into missionaries when our leaders think of themselves as pastors. When our leaders think of themselves as pastors, it is inevitable that attenders will be enculterated into thinking of themselves as sheep--as consumers of religious products and services."
Thank you.
Hi. Just checking things out. LOOOOVE this discussion, in particular. Keep going, please! Fascinating, challenging. You go, pb.
i know that the main point of this post is about how we view our leaders and how what we call them is a reflection of that (more-or-less). this may be a little tangential to that, but here's a question to think about:
why is the "pastor"'s name on the church's sign at all?
Walt,
Good question.
We assume so much from the Christendom myth of the church that needs to be deconstructed. This is one of about a gazillion things.
Good to hear from you.
We need to grab lunch soon.
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