Part Four (conclusion) of a series on pastoral ministry, featuring a classic Michael Spencer post.

I’ve Got A Question

Are pastors called to be church growth “entrepreneurs?” The contemporary pastorate seems to be all about church growth, not Christian growth. Evangelism has even been eclipsed by church growth. Worship is now about church growth. The majority of “purpose ” churches are dominated by the agenda of growing larger. Given that church growth is an effect, not a cause, in the New Testament, what is the eventual result of retooling the pastorate to be completely about church growth? Won’t the church be tempted to find a justification for embracing anything that will bring about growth? Are the skills of the entrepreneur really the tools of the pastor?

Are large churches or many churches the New Testament model? In the recent past, it was considered healthy for a large church to start many mission congregations. I served a First Baptist Church that had at least ten “daughter” churches in the community. This was not unusual in Southern Baptist life before the “seeker” church became the model, (with Saddleback Valley as an exception.) But today, churches see no reasonable limits to their size, and believe that a mega-church can evangelize the community better than many smaller churches. (The error of this assumption will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that large churches do some things well, and other things poorly or not at all.) Evidence seems to indicate that the growth of mega-churches comes at the expense of smaller churches and their ability to permeate an area with congregationalized Christians.

A large church that I think highly of recently went to two separate facilities, but both will have the same preaching by way of a video link. The eventual implications of this are disturbing, as whole denominations can form without pastoral leaders in the congregation preaching to the congregation at all. This is a solid church, but it is showing the evidences of the seeker approach to pastoral ministry.

Continue reading “iMonk Classic: Those Magnificent Young Men in Their Pastoring Machines (4)”

Part Three of a series on pastoral ministry, featuring a classic Michael Spencer post.

What’s Not to Like?

As I have met and listened to these young pastors, I have been occaisonally impressed, but mostly distressed. With the surprisingly wide reach of some Internet Monk articles, I am sure that some young pastors believe I have nothing but criticism for them and what they are doing in ministry. Nothing could be further from the truth. I recognize the love for God and the passion for reaching people that lies at the heart of so much that is done in the seeker sensitive movement. I am frequently challenged deeply by the commitment these men have to the mission of the church in the world. Their critiques of the church are frequently prophetic and often painfully true. I recognize a real spiritual quality of love for people and a concern for the church in these “seeker-sensitive” pastors.

But I must voice some serious concerns about the young pastors that I have met in the last decade. If the seeker-sensitive movement is right, then they are heroes. But if the seeker-sensitive movement is wrong, they are perpetuating, preaching and practicing painful errors that will become part of the legacy of Christianity. They are diluting the church with the worst tendencies of the culture. Many of the problems with the seeker movement are problems with its conception of the work of the pastor. By embracing the seeker movement enthusiastically and uncritically, many young pastors have devoted the authority of their position and their preaching to defending error and weakness in the church. This is serious business.

I will not surprise my regular readers when I say the root of this error comes from the seeker-sensitive movement’s attitude toward the Bible. At this point, it is helpful to note two things. One, many members of the seeker-sensitive movement have realized that there is a problem in the relationship of the Bible and their version of pragmatism, and they are seeking to correct that problem. This is no small thing, and I want those who may strongly disagree with me to remember this. I have heard specific and sincere acknowledgements that the Bible must have a larger place in the seeker sensitive movement, and I believe there will be fruit from that resolve.

Secondly, the problem grows out of the relationship of the seeker sensitive movement’s relationship to youth ministry as it has been practiced in America in the post-war era. As far as I know, no one has related the seeker movement to the youth ministry efforts that preceded it, but the connection is important and undeniable.

Youth ministry, in general, was the American church’s great experiment with pragmatism. If it worked- i.e. got the kids interested and kept them in church- it was alright. Any honest youth minister would tell you that he or she could get away with all kinds of things that would never be done by anyone else in the church, because the church wants young people in the house. The idea of “if it works, then God will use it,” was grown from youth ministry into everything that is evangelical seeker-sensitive ministry today. Most seeker churches- like Willow Creek- are grown-up youth groups. (I know, because some of them are MY youth groups.) They are doing what we taught them was OK in youth ministry, and now they are redecorating the church to suit themselves. And they are good at it.

It was not philosophical pragmatism that came into the church through youth ministry, it was evangelistic and methodological pragmatism. It was an assumption that we should do everything for the purpose of making young people comfortable. Make it all “cool.” Make it personal, exciting, emotional and non-traditional. The question that wasn’t adequately asked in youth ministry, or in the seeker movement, was what does the authority of the Bible mean in the life and mission of the church? Does the Bible have a method for youth ministry? Youth ministry was never seriously subjected to Biblical critiques of how it went about its business. Youth ministers- like me- weren’t held accountable to Biblical standards except in the most severe of cases, and many of us resented ever being told we were going too far. It was always fun to be the outraged youth minister in a church run by Pharisees saying “no” to throwing pies in the sanctuary.

Contemporary youth ministry operated on the notion that the Bible provided the message, but pragmatism provided the methods. This is what has taken root in the seeker movement, and it is what has shaped the ministry style of contemporary seeker pastors.

Nothing characterizes modern pastors more than devotion to this idea that the Bible is a message from God, but not a method from God. When it comes to methodology, we are to use the best of contemporary wisdom and secular methods to reach the “target audience.” No one would deny that there is a general sense in which God’s wisdom is revealed in human ingenuity or that this may be useful. But no one who reads the New Testament could come away with the idea that we are to turn to the culture for our methods of doing church and evangelizing. The seeker movement, however, is entranced with the wisdom of the culture. Especially the wisdom that comes from marketing, management, business, public relations and psychology. The  warning sirens of scripture about this kind of wisdom have gone unheeded among the seeker pastors.

Continue reading “iMonk Classic: Those Magnificent Young Men in Their Pastoring Machines (3)”

Part two of a series on pastoral ministry, featuring a classic post by Michael Spencer

Those Who Can’t, Teach

My own seminary training was an example. I came from a church where the pastor was the preacher. His primary task was to pray, prepare and preach. Beyond that, pastoral care of the flock was expected, and he spent a sizable portion of his time in homes and hospitals. In this model, a minister’s worth was really measured in loyalty to his preaching, a reasonable number of baptisms and how many funerals he was asked to do.

I attended Southern Seminary in Louisville in 1979, 82-84. The pastoral track was a completely schizoid and confused experience. The Biblical studies professors urged us to become Bible scholars of the higher critical variety. The theology faculty was throwing us the latest party from Europe. But you couldn’t preach this stuff and the preaching classes never interacted with what we learned in Biblical studies and theology. It avoided it. People who didn’t avoid it produced sermons that were sure to get them fired from any normal Baptist church outside the seminary’s zone of “acclimated” churches.

Meanwhile, the pastoral care classes were giving us the nonsense of secular psychology and nothing from a remotely Christian model. In classes called “Leadership,” we learned systems theory and why we should work with social workers and government agencies. (All that was missing was a trip to Rainbow -PUSH.) Evangelism and Missions were the shabbiest aspects of the curriculum, since they were “conservative” interests in a school that was trying to produce liberal scholars and had accumulated all the resulting contempt for whatever was most simple and obvious in ministry. If you weren’t torn to pieces by this medusa of ministry identities, there was a “supervised experience in ministry” that put you in a weekly group with a “real” pastor to see what the real world was like. Fortunately, my supervisor was a good one (he took us bowling), and it did give me some hope, because they guy never once made any references to his seminary education.

The icing on the cake was what we called the “Exit” class, a ditty that everyone took on their way out the door. This class was intended to teach you how to marry, bury, baptize, serve the Lord’s Supper and be a for-real, actual preacher. (Seminary in a sack.) But the liberal pastor teaching my exit class used every session to talk to us about counseling, stress and good resources for planning the calendar year. We never actually got around to learning how to do any of those things a competent pastor should know. So I graduated seminary not knowing a thing about how to marry, bury, baptize or serve the Lord’s Supper. To learn that, I went back to my pastor at home, who never finished college.

It is safe to say that, at the time I went through seminary, it was a roll of the dice for the average church to get a seminary trained pastor. Who knew if you got Brother Joe or Paul Tillich? I sat under and worked with many of these men. It was not a pretty picture. In my opinion and experience, the ordinary, uneducated, bi-vocational pastor did a much better job than the men “equipped” by seminary. Considering the vast confidence churches put in their denominational schools, this was a travesty and an embarrassment.

Has anything gotten better?

Continue reading “iMonk Classic: Those Magnificent Young Men in Their Pastoring Machines (2)”

Classic iMonk Post
by Michael Spencer
Undated

Note: This week, in an effort to give special focus on pastoral ministry in the local church, we will be running Michael Spencer’s seminal post on the the subject, originally published in the first year of Internet Monk. This is a long article, so we will be spreading it out over several days. Michael’s thoughts on the pastoral ministry still resonate today amidst the confusion that continues to plague the church’s understanding of what being a pastor is all about.

Introduction (from Jan 2009 repost)

Our wayback machine today takes us to the first year of Internet Monk.com, where you’ll find a lengthy essay called “Those Magnificent Young Men and Their Pastoring Machines.” (Excuse the spelling errors. No proofreading in the old days.) It’s my original rant about what was happening to the practice of the pastorate at the time. I could have hardly imagined where we’d be today. (Warning: this was written almost 8 years ago, when I was a self-identified Calvinist in the ranks of the SBC. I am NOT a Calvinist today, but little has changed in my view of what it means to be a pastor.)

I hardly recognize today’s pastors as doing the same job as the typical pastors of my younger days. Of course, expectations were changing at the time, as I could see from what was crossing my desk when I was a pastor and what was happening at the megachurch just up the road.

I have real respect for faithful pastors. I have similar respect for young pastors who are seeking to be shepherds. But I have no respect for those who, under various banners, have turned the church into a business and the calling of a pastor into the work of a CEO and salesman.

There’s a conversation about what it means to be a pastor that isn’t happening in very many places. Instead, the conversation about how to grow a church goes on and on. Contrarians like Eugene Peterson are voices in the wilderness. The field is dominated by those whose churches fulfill the expectations of their entrepreneurial methodology.

I’m sure some will conclude I’m one of those people who have no business talking about this subject because I couldn’t pull off what today’s successful pastors are doing. If you want to conclude that I’m just a whining loser at the game, that’s fine and fair. I don’t want lead a chorus of complaining and badmouthing men who are laboring at one of the most difficult, costly callings in the world.

But as I said, there is a conversation that needs to happen. Confusion is starting to become the norm. Something is being lost in the rush for the next big thing. If that conversation is encouraged here at IM through this essay, then we’ve moved in the right direction.

Continue reading “iMonk Classic: Those Magnificent Young Men In Their Pastoring Machines (1)”