I just returned from a denominational conference and was shocked by the “us” verses “them” conversation representing the clergy verses the laity. As though “we” clergy (or whatever we are) have an experience of God that we need to lead the people we serve with to experience…. that “we” know better than “they” do.
The Christ-communities we are called to serve, each have an unique spirit, that we (as individuals and as participants in the historical community of religious professionals) have shaped. The idea of “scraping it all” is not only offensive to any given congregation but may well demonstrate a failure to love and service on the part of the spiritual leaders. If one of the core practices of spiritual/missional leadership is to listen and seek to understand one’s cultural context, certainly something similar may be true in a local congregation. Change will happen but change is a foolish goal, when change is a given.
It is arguably less important to understand THE church than it is to know and understand YOUR/OUR church.
Most Christ-communities are being/doing the best that they know to be/do. A pastoral goal is not transform (as if you can know what transformation God ultimately wants) their being/doing but to be fully present with, so loving and so serving that the construction of God-view of world happens. This is not an action item to be “five-year-planned-out,” rather, this is a life lived-with. And the community will inevitably shape the pastor as much (if not more) than the pastor will ever shape the community.
Certainly in most of our current Western Ecclesiological structures, the local church has been around longer than her pastor, and will be around long after her pastor has gone on to greener pastures, given that – a pastor who thinks they should or can bring radical change to a given community is often more self-serving than Kingdom minded.
Maybe when pastors imagine themselves as more than participants within the life of a community an unhealthy separation begins to develop.
Even much of our talk of servant leadership is more of a passive aggressive way for clergy to manipulate their communities’ to get “them” to do what the pastor wants “them” to do.
Our system may be flawed. From what I am discovering the kind of service Christ seems to invite of spiritual leadership/pastors to embody within the life of a local Christ-community is self emptying… and maybe not something that many of us really want. It is quite demanding… it invites suffering, is holistically costly, and may even feel more like failure than success.
Peace, dwight
