What is Pastoral Leadership?

Okay, you can still chime in on that last one if you want (in fact, Trembling just added something while I was posting this), but here's a new topic dedicated to Tuna, who is taking a class on leadership next week. I just did a paper on pastoral leadership and in my research came across some very polemical outbursts against contemporary pastoral leadership trends. I, of course, liked these very much.

Here's some stuff from Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon's Resident Aliens and Andrew Purves' Reconstructing Pastoral Theology.

The problem is compounded because our church lives in a buyer’s market. The customer is king. . . . Pastors with half a notion of the gospel who get caught up in this web of buying and selling in a self-fulfillment economy one day wake up and hate themselves for it. We will lose some of our (potentially) best pastors to an early grave of cynicism and self-hate. What a pastor needs is a means of keeping at it, a perspective that enables the pastor to understand his or her ministry as nothing less than participation in the story of God. . . .

Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people’s self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself? (Hauerwas and Willimon)

We live in the time of the entepreneurial pastor who understands ministry according to business practices that are focused on marketing and selling a product. . . . [Isn’t it a sort of] ministerial programmatic triumphalism, in which God’s salvation and blessing are tied to a special kind of pastoral competence and seeming contextual and contemporary relevance? . . .

Shepherding has been developed as an imitative rather than as a participatory approach to ministry. . . . The effect is to cast the pastor back upon his or her own resources.... [leading to Jesus’] replacement by an ethical Christ-principle separated from him. . . . Of course, a pastor must develop interpersonal skills and understand emotions, human development, and the complexities of human relationships and family systems. But none of these supplies the ground, the basic content, that gives pastoral work its specific identity as Christian. (Purves)

What do you think?

How Christian is Evangelicalism?

I remember as a kid growing up I sometimes marvelled at how lucky I was to be born into the very denomination that was right. I mean, everyone in church believed what they were saying, and so it isn't a big leap in logic for me to then assume everyone else was wrong. How lucky I was to be right!

I have since come to realize that people all over the world in all sorts of denominations and streams of Christianity have probably grown up thinking the same thing. And recently I've begun to wonder, not about my denomination so much as my tradition as a whole:

How Christian is Evangelisalism anyway? Consider the following:

-We tend to reject or ignore church tradition between the Apostles and Martin Luther. This sounds like Mormonism which says that the period between Peter and Joseph Smith was the dark ages of depravity and silence from God.

-We have turned the church into a corporation complete with a mission and value statements meant to accomplish that mission, which for all its biblical language, is basically to grow the corporation in numbers, the meeting of felt needs, and impressiveness. This sounds like consumerism and customer service; Westjet and Walmart (except you always get friendlier greeters when you pay them)

-Our spiritual gifts classes are all about being who God made you to be. Serving the church becomes the means to the end of self-fulfillment instead of the other way around. Sounds a lot like Oprah.

-Conversion is all about an individual praying a certain prayer, giving assent to a certain doctrine, which can only be revealed to us. Sounds like gnostic secret knowledge and enlightenment.

-Thus preaching becomes motivational speaking and worship motivational singing. Sounds like Tony Robbins and (insert favourite music here).

-The sacraments of baptism and communion are about us and our obedience to God, our proclamation of faith, our rememberence and recommitment. Where is God? Does Christ need to be in the room?

-The Bible is the authority. But whose Bible? Whose interpretation? For us this basically means each of us are the authority, and we choose whose commentary to use and go from there. Hence we have guys like George Barna telling us that the church is anywhere one person is following Christ the way they want to. This is evangelicalism taken to its logical conclusion.

-Western evangelicals are among the wealthiest and most consumptive societies in the world and many of us are just going with the flow in that regard. Sounds disturbingly like Isaiah 58.

-The Reformers did not intend to split with Catholicism, but it was inevitable, and necessary. Now evangelicalism has even split with the Reformed church. How far can this go? What is Christian about all of this?

At some point we have to ask: How Christian is Evangelicalism?