April 2007 Archives
Sally Morgenthaler writes "about our cultural shift away from an autocratic CEO model of leadership toward a more reflexive and cooperative model, and why many churches have failed to get the memo":
Large-church leaders have been trained in the modern, command-and-control paradigm for thirty years. Here, organizations aren’t seen so much as gatherings of people with a common purpose but as machines. There is no irony here. Machine parts don’t have minds or muscles to flex. They don’t contribute to a process or innovate improvements. Machine parts simply do their job, which is, of course, to keep the machine functioning.
The mechanical paradigm of organization largely explains why modern church leaders are trained as CEOs, not shepherds.
LT at The Heresy reacts to The People Formerly Known as the Congregation meme:
The time has come to move beyond blaming "the church" or "the pastors" for our problems. It is easy to rail against a faceless intangible segment of the church. If we actually start identifying the concrete problems in our sphere of influence then we'd be responsible to act on those problems.
Judges is a book about the Canaanization of Israel. Instead of living distinctly as people under God's rule, Israel lived by the values of its neighbors.
In Judges 17, someone hires a Levite as his own personal priest, and the priest does it for the money - at least until he gets a better offer. In Judges 18, a whole tribe offers a better job for this priest. "Isn’t it better that you serve a tribe and clan in Israel as priest rather than just one man’s household?” they ask. "The priest was very pleased. He took the ephod, the household gods and the idol and went along with the people."
Daniel Block comments on this incident for pastors today:
The cult is syncretistic, the priesthood is mercenary, and the devotees are evil. Instead of calling people to repentance the professional and spiritual leaders capitalize on the degeneracy of the times. Similarly, the "spiritual service" of many current pastors is motivated not by the call of God but by the opportunities for personal gain. The question the Danites posed to him is asked every day by pastoral search committees: "Which is better, to be the pastor of a small family or to be the pastor of a megachurch?" The contemporary problem of ambition and opportunism in the ministry has at least a three-thousand-year history.
Steve Cornell suggests that "the recent trend to pursue new ways to do church" may be "an indicator of a deep identity crisis in many churches and leaders":
Though it is not always the case, often the leaders who attend these conferences do not have confidence in ministry because they lack a solid scriptural understanding of the church. A superficial ecclesiology makes leadership susceptible faulty understandings of ministry success. Leaders need to develop and teach a biblical theology of church. People can be more easily moved to change methods if they are secure in their understanding of what scripture teaches about the church. Revisit important NT texts like Acts 20; Ephesians 4:11-16 and I Peter 5:1-4. If you do an investigative study of these passages, you can save the money spent on a trip to the mega-Church.
Dan MacDonald writes to the People Formerly Known as the Congregation:
And so I raise a glass, as a Person Still Willing To Call Myself a Pastor, to You, the People About to Be Known Again As The Congregation. I know church isn't what it should be. That's my fault- and yours. I stamped it with my pathologies, and so did you. Don't try to bail on your responsibility just because I got paid to do this full time. Guess who paid me? This sucker is OURS, first to last. It's wounded, and weak, and corrupted, and full of hypocrisy- I agree.
But the funny thing is... it IS the body of Christ. A messed up, messy, ego-saturated, hypocritical institution on earth. With idiots like you and me running it, what did you expect? Oh yeah, and one more thing - it is also His Bride. The glorious, triumphant, sinful yet forgiven, cleansed, spotless Bride against whom the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.
If you turn your back on His Bride, you turn your back on Him. And since you are His, you won't do that. You will come back and help make the Bride beautiful again. Because you care. There is enough piss and vinegar and sadness and passion and real, Spirit-groaning hope in these blog threads to start a new Reformation. It's high time we started. Who's got the nails for the Door? I'll bring the hammer.
And drink a glass to you all. Welcome back.
(comments are closed - join the conversation at Bill's blog)
Dan Edelen follows up on a previous post and compares Externally-Motivated (EM) Christianity with Internally-Motivated Christianity.
David Fitch on why smaller more organic missional community leadership is more difficult than megachurch CEO leadership:
It is more difficult to take 10 people and grow a living organic body of Christ to 150 than it is to transplant 200 or 300 people (or I have heard even 600-800) and then grow that congregation to 5,000. Because a crowd draws a crowd. And if you have all the bells and whistles, 5 pastors and a youth program, all from day one, and a charismatic speaker with spiked hair (no shot intended at anyone in particular) and you don't mind putting the smaller less flashy community churches out of business, it will be harder to stop attracting a big crowd from all the people who want Christianity to be more fun and mesmerizing...
Dan Edelen with an important post on the difference between Externally Motivated Christians (EM) and Internally Motivated Christians (IM):
IM Christians…
…have humbly died to the externalities.
…don’t concentrate on defending external systems and institutions prone to decay.
…concentrate on the real mission of evangelism and disciple-making.
… comprehend that they are expendable for the Lord because their lives are hidden in Christ.
…work best under persecution.
…have nothing to fear because what they have cannot be taken away from them.
…are truly free.
When we examine the state of the Church in 2007, we find that EM Christianity predominates in the American Church, while IM Christianity marks most regions of the world undergoing revival...
Two Christianities: Externally-Motivated and Internally-Motivated.
Lord Jesus, make us Internally-Motivated Christians.
An Easter sermon:
Or as one of my favorite writers, Robert Capon says, “Jesus solves the world’s problems by dying." And unless we are willing to see our own death as the one thing necessary for our salvation, we will never be able to enjoy the resurrection, even though Jesus hands it to us on a silver platter. If we refuse to die, we will cut ourselves off from ever knowing the joy of his grace in us...
James Forbes, former pastor of Riverside Church in NYC, once spent three days at a conference trying to hammer this point home: The church can’t rise because it refuses to drop dead. The fact that it’s dying, he said, is of no use to it whatsoever: dying is simply the world’s most uncomfortable way of remaining alive. If you are to be raised from the dead, the only thing that can make you a candidate is to go all the way into death. Death, not life, is God’s recipe for fixing up the world. And we, as individuals and as church can choose to die, because we believe that Jesus specializes in bringing the dead to life again.
Will was kind enough to link back here. Lots of good stuff in this sermon.
Emerging Grace has a great post on some of the underlying issues of church as usual. It's a follow up to Bill Kinnon's post The People Formerly Known as the Congregation.
Passivity
We are convinced that a church system which allows believers to fulfill their weekly spiritual obligation by listening to a sermon creates a consumerist audience who have not been encouraged to step into the responsibility of being a disciple and discipling others.Clergy/Laity
We have seen that the false distinction between clergy and laity has led to a professionalization of ministry which contributes to the passivity of congregants.
