10,000 MEN

Have you heard the nursery rhyme “The Grand Old Duke of York”? It goes like this.

The grand old Duke of York, he had 10,000 men
He marched them to the top of the hill and he marched them down again.
And when they were up they were up and when they were down they were down
And when they were only half way up they were neither up nor down.

What you might call an exercise in futility.

Have you heard about the churches 10,000 men and exercise in futility? Apparently there are 10,000 ‘pastors’ in Australia who are no longer serving in the church. It seems that they couldn’t cope with the pressures of the job.

Can I suggest why they couldn’t cope with the pressures of the job? I believe there are two main reasons.

One, the job of being paid to pastor a church does not exist in the New Testament Church. New Testament leadership was by a plurality of Elders, all of whom were unpaid. They were recognised as Elders because they grew up in the congregation where they served and had proved themselves to be men of integrity and service.

Taking on a role of a ‘paid pastor’ and being imported from outside the congregation is a recipe for disaster because it is contrary to the word of God. One cannot expect God to bless what he has not commissioned. I have debated this issue with people and they have come up with one or two verses to support their tradition and ignored about 20 others that say the opposite.

I would like to suggest that there are probably another 10,000 pastors who have not left the ministry but are struggling to fulfil the demands of the job.

Secondly, the one man paid pastor is contrary to scripture from the aspect that Jesus gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers to prepare God’s people for works of service so that they may be built up to become mature and attain to the whole measure of Christ. It’s all there in Ephesians 4:11-13. Service in the Greek means attendance as a servant, not in charge of as a paid pastor.

Have you noticed how immature some Christians are?

How on earth any church expects one man to do the work of five is beyond me. No wonder they are burning out. How arrogant of us to believe that we can ignore the truth and insist on tradition over the word of God. Most churches using the one man model are in ’maintenance mode’ and are not growing.

How stupid of us to believe that we know better than the God of the word. While we persist we are going to deny Jesus the opportunity to build a spirit filled living organism. All we have produced is dead organisation that has a form of religion but denies the power of it. After all, when you ignore his teaching, what do you expect?