Who Is It All About?

Over the last few weeks I have had a growing sense of the shallowness of the evangelical sub-culture within Christianity. There is report after report of pastors who are plagiarizing, buying their way onto bestseller lists, spending exhorbitant amounts of money to build mansions, and even the manipulation of baptisms. It's vapid.

I keep asking the Lord, "Why?"  Why are these things happening? How do good men get to the place where they are so hungry for power and fame that they must do these kinds of things. Why? Where are the people around them calling them to account and challenging them before they get to this point?

So much of this comes from a broken view of the Church. Many churches, big and small, are "personality cults". That is, the leader is dynamic or has a compelling vision.  As a result, people follow the aura of the person, more than the Word itself.  Or, and this is worse, the leader practices spiritual abuse as an authority figure speaking for God.

This past weekend I was able to be a part of the installations of two pastors. One of the texts that was expounded on was from Acts 20, Paul's interaction with the Ephesian elders at Miletus. What is becoming more and more striking to me about that moment in history is that Paul is speaking to a group of elders as though they were like pastors.

Do not miss this: There was not a "pastor", but a gathering of Ephesian elders. We extrapolate the principles of the passage to the pastor, but the context of Paul's comments was to a community of elders.

I think that we too often overlook the flat leadership of the church that is, at the least, described, if not, prescribed in the Scriptures. What would happen if our communities became more centrally focused on the development of groups of elders (in my tradition this is called a Session) and less focused on the centrality of a "pastor"?

I often think that the Church would be better off if we could authentically move in the direction of a plurality of leadership as opposed to "the man of God preaching to the people of God" kind of model that is so present in the Church today.  Jesus, in fact, modeled plurality of leadership when he bestowed the eldership of the church to His disciples.