"The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God."

So says Eugene Peterson as quoted by Michael Spencer from Peterson's book, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity.  This perspective is important not just for pastors, but also for Christians who are serious about what their relationship to their church and the Lord should look like. I have heard people who come to our church of around 200-250 people say, "I love the preaching, teaching, worship, fellowship, and sense of spirituality and focus on Christ that you have here. My children made friends and we love their Sunday School teacher. We have made friends and have never been in such a warm, loving spiritual environment where the Bible is taught and people take their relationship with God seriously. We just don't know if we can be in a church this small. We are used to really large churches with a lot more options and activities." Seriously. I have heard people, who see themselves as mature Christians say this very thing. There are times when it can be legitimate (if it involves an issue with a child or a special needs situation), but often it belies a desire for entertainment and trendiness over a desire for spiritual growth. Years ago, I once heard someone say, after they had left a smaller church for a large mega church, that they were so happy that they could now just show up at church and not have to do anything. Everything was already done for them and they could just sit back and receive! They had been Christians for years, and this was their perspective! They judge by the outside appearance and, as pastors, many of us seem to encourage this and try and build upon it to attract people like this for reasons unknown to me, unless it is for their money and to "grow our church." It is very disheartening. So, with that as a background, perhaps that is part of the reason why Peterson picks up on this crisis in pastoral leadership. His words were very convicting for me as well:

American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.

A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted…. It is bitterly disappointing to enter a room full of people whom you have every reason to expect share the quest and commitments of pastoral work and find within ten minutes that they most definitely do not. They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status. Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills.

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns–how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists.

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.

From the introduction of Working the Angles written by Eugene Peterson.

The last paragraph of the quote was the take home for me. What do you think?

Comments

[Micah Fries]

Wow. I don't really know what else to say. I read your title and the first bit of your post and I was already to jump on and share my lengthy opinion about why this article was on the money. Now, instead, I just want to go and pray.

That one hurts a bit.

[Les Puryear]

Oh my. That is so good.

Les

[Paul]

I agree with Micah. Ouch!

[the Milkman]

Prophetic and convicting. In light of this, what shall we do? This "virus" has inoculated most everyone in ministry.

[cb scott]

Well said. I agree with Les and Micah even fi Les won't invite me to speak at his ole conference.

cb

[J. R. Miller]

Coming from the man who promotes his commentary as a "Bible"... this is good news. I hope that in his new effort to refocus on God, he will rethink his own role in creating a consumer religion with his consumer "bible"