This last Sunday at the 6- Jay (the man!) spoke on church leadership and the assumptions we have that aren’t necessarily biblical. Jay spent the first half of his message laying the historical foundation for how both the Catholic and Protestant churches came to be organised around either a priest or pastor. As he went through a survey of 500 000 pastors he pointed out the enormous and unrealistic pressure that we put upon them. I very much agree with this, and myself have fallen victim to expecting too much out of church leaders in the past.
The only time the word pastor is used in the NT is in Ephesians 4:11 where the context is plural. Jay described how the first churches were led by teams of elders rather than a ‘hired gun’. Edge Kingsland follows this model. I still feel that we can easily put pressure on the main guy at the front to bring whatever we might need.
The history of God’s people is that of the people nominating a mediator, someone to “do the work”, whereas as Christians we each have been selected by the Father through Christ to be his sons and daughters. The priesthood is now for all believers.
Jay emphasized leadership, and leadership for all to do our own work of deciding to pursue Christ and his anointing and to not be lazy and defer to a preacher or pastor the hard work of following Jesus. Maybe in our culture where we have specialized every difficult and arduous task to professionals, we have done the same in our spirituality. We are told in Scripture to delight ourselves in the Lord- why should we let someone else have our fun. Lets pursue Jesus today (and be like Jay) haha.
James K.