EngineeredTheology

For a while now I have contemplated the role of a pastor (and implicitly church organisation as a whole). I use the word pastor knowing that technically the word pastor has a very defined meaning. I use it the local form to mean “the guy running the church”. Most pastors I have come in contact with feel, and represent themselves, as the shepherds of the people in their congregation. What the lingo boils down to is a conglomeration of many roles. They are the chief visionary, expositor of God, primary counsellor, and director of finances. Basically, they are the head in chief of everything. Most pastors do this not in any megalomaniac sense (but some do), but they feel it is their responsibility and what it means to be a “pastor”.

For a while I have reacted negatively against this role. There is no one person is capable of fulfilling all these roles, and those who try find themselves burnt out after a very short period of time. I came to wonder if the true role of a pastor is not specifically the leader, but just another (equal) role needed in a healthy church. Much as teachers are needed, they are not pastors. Nor are theologians, counsellors, prophets, etc. A pastor may have a gift in one of these areas, but can often cause harm when those roles are not left to others in the congregation who have those specific gifts. A pastor would be one who brings these different entities into one cohesive unit. He is no more in charge than any one else who chooses to help lead, but is responsible to helping all these people come to some forms of agreement. In short, they are the chief administrator, nothing else.

While we are not just called to repeat history, I began to think about the role of the pastor in the early church. There is no doubt that in the Pauline epistles and in early Christian writings the pastor did lead the church in a more directive way than I laid out above. This leadership was not the CEO type leadership that many assume it to be, but a father/child relationship with the congregation (Gal 4:18, Eph 6:1, 2 Cor 12:14, etc). This view of that role tends to split the difference between the two roles. I am everything to my children. I provide for all their needs, their primary counsellor and teacher, expositor of God, and also their disciplinarian. What many pastors have forgotten is that children need to grow up. If I am still performing all of these tasks in the same way for my children in 20 years I will have failed as a parent. There must be a point in time when a parent moves from being the chief of their children, to not just an equal, but to hope that their children become wiser and more capable than the parent. Failure to realise this has left churches in their current state – an overworked pastor performing duties he should no longer be doing and a congregation full of overgrown children.