Wednesday, February 22, 2012

THE QUESTION NO ONE WANTS TO ASK

For the last 10 years, I have been studying church history. Apart from my study of the New Testament, I must have read at least 60 books on the subject. My latest journey is the 8 volume “History of the Christian Church” by Philip Schaff.

I am rather pleased with this purchase as it normally sells for $200 and I paid $50. A big thanks to the Christian book trade in the USA.

One of my purchases was tapes called “Pastors in Crisis” which talks about all the sorts of problems that pastors in the USA experience. There were cases cited of pastors who gave up because of the success syndrome. They were employed to get results and when they didn’t they were sacked or resigned.

This does not surprise me as I went though a website that advertised Christian jobs. There were 263 adverts for pastors. Apart from three, the qualifications required were experience, a degree and the ability to make things happen. Only three mentioned they wanted someone who had a serious prayer life.

In one book, I read that on average, 1,600 USA pastors resign or are sacked each month. In my country there are over 10,000 ex pastors who gave up because of burnout or unrealistic expectations.

One other thing the tapes mentioned was the fact that these situations were sad because these men were called by God to do a special ministry.

I am not convinced however as I cannot see God approving of something contrary to his word. My own feeling is and it has been confirmed by other writers that probably at least 50% of the pastors out there should never be in ministry.

The reason they are is that they are fuelled by rejection so they need to be needed which means their so called “calling” is nothing more than to cover up a dysfunction without having to face it.

If you are in ministry because of rejection, everything is filtered through it so you are unable to see reality. A protective mechanism builds a wall to stop you being hurt so you cannot see the wood for the trees as they say.

Apart from the forgoing, I cannot find anywhere in the New Testament church where they hired a pastor from outside the church to run it. Leadership in the NTC was firstly apostles and prophets and later resident Elders who were chosen from within the fellowship. Not once does it say a pastor is in charge.

What this tells me is that when you ignore the obvious and impose a man made system on a spiritually devised and God given structure, you are asking for trouble because you are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

I believe the reasons I have stated are the reasons why the current church leadership model is a killing ground for professional pastors. It doesn’t work because it was never intended to.

The question no one wants to ask is “why do we so blindly follow man’s design and ignore the scripture and what God intended for leadership of the church.”

There can only be one answer to this and that is that man has too much invested in their way of doing things and to do otherwise would mean a loss of authority, power and prestige because doing it God’s way would mean that he gets all the glory, not man.

Man’s sinful nature does not want that to happen.

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