Friday, November 19, 2010

The church does not need leaders from all walks of life

The church does not need leaders from all walks of life. It needs leaders IN all walks of life. We need christian economists, plumbers,mums, artists,politicians, hippies, farmers, philosophers and unemployed. They need to be gutsy, thelogically informed, Jesus loving,bible saturated, humble servants who lead those who follow them.
One way to achieve this would be to pull all the good leaders out of these contexts, and make them clergy. I guess the hope would be that each plumber will be able to speak to plumbers, economist to economists, hippies to hippies. But despite the desires of those who love the homogeneous unit principle, our churches simply aren't like this, they include a whole range of ages, ethnicity and walks of life.
Church leaders need a certain amount of imagination to equip people to be Christians in their different lives. The least imaginative option would be to say 'well you should become a church leader like me'. Not that there is anything wrong with full time gospel ministry. Only when it becomes a pyramid scheme. Then it stops doing the very thing it is meant to do, equip the saints for THEIR ministry. It becomes the absolute opposite of a belief that people are equal but different.
Of course, not everyone can be a clergyman, so the second least imaginative option would be to say,
'you can do clergy like things' even if you cant do it full time. So, on top of your job as a plumber, you can run a bible study. In fact, if it is a bible study on how to run bible studies, even better!
Again, don't hear me saying that running a bible study is a bad thing. But if we take no interest in how to be a christian plumber. In what it might mean to lead the plumbing industry into more godliness. In how the structures of a plumbing business might best give glory to God and serve the gospel and serve the world, we have failed as leaders of the church.

Which is partly why people in our churches give lukewarm responses to our calls for evangelism and action.
Our dreams are far too small.
We dream for the church, instead of dreaming for the world.
We dream for our local church to run smoothly, to evangelise, be taught and give money.
Maybe we dream for so much money to be given that we could employ someone else to do some teaching that might cajole us into doing some evangelism.
But God's dream is for the world. The world that all of us live in. God's dream is for peace and justice for our world. Not by abandoning the gospel. Not by turning into a government agency. But by living out the gospel in everything.
Our people live in a crying world that thirsts for love, and we want people to keep our system functioning.
Our people live in a desert of meaning, and we tell them their lives are pointless except for that hour of walk-up.
Our people are weighed down with guilt, because they are complicit in an abusive, destructive, shallow society, and we tell them that as long as that society keeps paying us to preach forgiveness everything is ok.

Well, everything is not ok.
Jesus is Lord of the entire earth, but while our churches are focussed on themselves, no-one will know. While our churches swallow up all possible leaders as clergy or pseudo-clergy, no one will know. While our churches ignore real evil in our society (and so ourselves), no one will know.

1 comment:

byron smith said...

Maybe we dream for so much money to be given that we could employ someone else to do some teaching that might cajole us into doing some evangelism.
This line made me laugh. Maintain the rage (of joy), my friend.