Thursday, March 29, 2007
Let's Staff Up!
- Because it doesn’t make sense to build a church around a personality.
- Because there are no supermen(women). No one pastor has all the gifts.
- Because isolated pastors can become blinded to their own lacks and get tunnel vision and become egomanical.
- Because pastors cannot lead alone.
- Because pastors benefit from being bi-vocational.
- Because it models the diversity and interrelatedness of the Body.
- Because it keeps pastors from becoming fake images which inevitably leads to moral failure and/or disappointment.
- Because it is hard for pastors to foster servanthood when they are put on a pedestal separated from the people.
- In summary, because the senior pastor position is an impossible position to live up to.
I canot help but reflect on the fact that all of those are based on a gross misunderstanding of the office of pastor, the organization of the church, and leadership.
We are talking pastor here, not guru. It is as simple as that. No one ever intended the pastor to be all that these points seem to insist he/she should be - which brings me to my second point - the organization of the church.
This sort of vision for what a pastor should be comes out of the assumption that the church is a service provider to the congregation, that somehow the church and the congregation are separate entities, and yet that is not the biblical model for the church. Scripturally, the church IS the congregation.
I think that part of the reason this service provider model has developed is because it has been increasingly difficult for pastors to get laymen to take the kinds of leadership roles so clearly intended for them. What that tells me is that pastors don't understand leadership very well, they can't do it and they can't train others to do it.
Providing a service in the form of some program, curriculum, or some such is a mechanical activity. Secure materials, location, promote, teach, NEXT! Leadership is a very different thing - it is far more than simply turning the wheels of activity. Leadership envisions, it motivates, it inspires, and it transforms.
Managing things is very different from leading. These points put the pastor in the role of manager, not leader. It's about mechanics, not transformation.
How much time do you think Jesus spent teaching the Apostles organizational skills?
Related Tags: leadership, pastors, management, model, the church
