Old Covenant >>> New Covenant (14)

Referencing Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna

Barna, Tyndale House, 2002/8

4

The Pastor: obstacle to every-member functioning (Pagan Christianity, chapter 5 title)

As I have mentioned previously, I did a short stint as a rural Pastor.  It was while I was in that role that everything changed for me.

The area of Queensland I was in was an area of small farms that were established years earlier by German Baptists escaping the persecutions of Europe.  The oldest church in the town I moved to was the Baptist church and I was their fresh, young, enthusiastic (albeit student) Pastor.  There were two congregations separated by about 40 km.

I found the going extremely tough.  I had a wife and a baby; the local Baptist pastor by tradition had a civic responsibility as a community leader.  Then there was the requirement to do religions education in schools in the district, on top of having to attend college in Brisbane over three hours away, staying a few days in the rumpus room of the in-laws house once a month – and on other special occasions as required.

There were two ‘services’ each Sunday in each town, so I had to draw up a roster that put me alternately morning and evening in each town so the congregation got to see me every Sunday, either morning or evening.  Other congregation members did the alternate services; however, at that stage (the early 1980s) and that profoundly conservative region, women were not generally allowed to preach.

The two congregations could scarcely be more different – for a variety of reasons.  And some people rotated their attendance at the two centres to match with where I was.  For some people, I was everything they always wanted in a ‘pastor’; for others, not so much – I tended to be a disappointment to them.

My early christian history was within the Open Brethren assemblies who didn’t have ‘pastors’.  They were used to their meetings being open in terms of not having a standard order of service (although they did usually follow a certain pattern) and in terms of who delivered the teaching/message for the meeting.  The songs sung were selected and announced spontaneously, arising out of the members’ spiritual walk with God during the previous week.  Or at least that was how I understood and interpreted it.

So being on call as a rural Baptist Pastor was a load that ran counter to all that I was familiar with, although I had left the Open Brethren and attended a Baptist Church in the Redlands district some years earlier.

I felt like I was being pulled in six different directions continuously and I became ill.  I was ordered off the set and had to take three months off, during which time I worked with a mentor and opted to consider the terms under which I would return to the church after that time.  My terms and suggestions were unacceptable to the denomination and to the country church and I returned only to pack up our stuff and move back to the Redlands.

But one thing had irrevocably changed: I couldn’t ever be a ‘church pastor’ because I believed (and still do by the way) that the idea is a human creation on multiple layers and, what’s more, what the denomination and the local church saw as a pastor had virtually no cross reference back to the new testament idea of pastors in Paul’s writings.

At the critical breaking point in my role in the rural church, God said to me very clearly, ‘I want you to do what you know.’  That left but one question for me: would the denomination and the congregation allow me to ‘do what I know’?  The answer was a clear no.

I had come to the view that every member of Christ – everyone who is adopted into the Jesus family (this was, after all, the 1970s) – had both the right and the responsibility to be a functioning minister of Christ; and the Body of Christ was a “flat” coalition of brothers.

I saw – as I would discover in Viola and Barna many years later – that the Church Pastor was, with very few exceptions, an obstacle to every-member functioning.  And I made a commitment to myself, my fellowship of friends and to any christian group I might work with that I would not be such an obstacle.  I didn’t appreciate people being such an obstacle to me and I would not do that to others.

And in reading Viola and Barna, I came across the quote they put as an introduction to chapter 5 of Pagan Christianity – a quote from Richard Hanson, a twentieth-century patristic scholar – which, in my view, explains how this has come about:

It is a universal tendency in the Christian religion, as in many other religions, to give a theological interpretation to institutions which have developed gradually through a period of time for the sake of practical usefulness, and then read that interpretation back into the earliest periods and infancy of these institutions, attaching them to an age when in fact nobody imagined that they had such a meaning.

My reading of Hanson’s statement also brings into stark focus another fundamental problem.  I do not believe that what Jesus came to do – least of all what he actually did – was start a new religion, the Christian Religion.  Indeed, I am as enthusiastic about Gregory Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Religion (Zondervan 2009) as I am about Viola and Barna’s Pagan Christianity.

To my mind, if there is an institution, it is not a representation of what Jesus and the first apostles sought to build.  And that, dear reader, is one of the key reasons for this hiatus between a Church Pastor and the pastor as one of the five eldership functions of Paul’s teaching and practice.  So we have amplified reason for not reading institutional ideas back into the infancy of the new covenant people of God.

And – secondly – that is precisely why for me Church Pastor is old covenant and Paul’s idea in Ephesians chapter 4 (ekklesia) is new covenant.

Pagan Christianity makes this point in strong terms:

But here is the profound irony.  There is not a single verse in the entire New Testament that supports the existence of the modern-day pastor!  He simply did not exist in the early church. (p. 106)

Of course there are those who will retort, “So what ... we don’t need a New Testament precedent to do something we choose today based on what we think is of ‘practical usefulness’.”  That’s hubris.  That’s turning our own personal preferences into doctrine.

But, far worse, it totally negates the original reason Jesus and the apostles had no Pastor or Senior Pastor or CEO: read Matthew 23.  Furthermore, Viola and Barna got it spot on with the heading for this chapter: no-one should be in such a “position” that he/she is an obstacle to every-member ministry.  Ekklesia is a flat, single-level organism, not an hierarchical organisation/institution.  The position or role of Church Pastor flies in the face of Jesus’ and Paul’s specific instructions.

So where did our popular notion of Church Pastor come from?

In large part, it is a blend of three things: the ‘fallen’ nature of unredeemed humanity; the substance of the Mosaic covenant with Israel; and what was ‘lying around’ at the time when we faced critical questions of humanity.  There are some moments in Israel’s history recorded in the old testament that are illustrative of the precise issue that drives this human quest.

As Viola and Barna rightly point out, “With the fall came the implicit desire in people to have a physical leader to bring them to God.  For this reason, human societies throughout history have consistently created a special caste of revered religious leaders.” (p.108)

And with that comes the special training, clothes, language and different way of life.

Exodus 20 records the giving of the ten commandments to Moses.  As that concluded, the record shows “the people perceived the thunder and the lightning flashes and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw that, they trembled and stood at a distance.  Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to God yourself and we will listen, but let not God speak to us, or we will die.”  Despite Moses’ assurances, that’s the way they chose to live – always at arm’s length from God.

The Mosaic covenant itself was built around the notion of a mediator between God and man.  Before kings there were judges; before judges there men like Joshua and Caleb and Samuel.  And going right out to the other end, the new testament tells us that Jesus was God’s way of giving Israel a new mediator – one who would stand forever, never failing and never needing to be replaced: whom many rejected.  As mediator of the new covenant, Jesus was and is the better mediator of a better covenant (referring back to the post on the “better way” of the book of Hebrews).

Later in Israel’s history, during the time of Samuel, the people begged Samuel to ask God (there’s the mediator thing again) to give them a king so they could be like all the other nations around them (there’s the unredeemed heart thing).  This is recorded in 1 Samuel chapter 8.

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah; and they said to him, ‘Behold, you have grown old, and your sons do not walk in your ways.  Now appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations.’  But the thing was displeasing in the sight of Samuel when they said, ‘Give us a king to judge us.’ And Samuel prayed to the LORD.  The LORD said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people in regard to all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me from being king over them.  Like all the deeds which they have done since the day that I brought them up from Egypt even to this day—in that they have forsaken Me and served other gods—so they are doing to you also.  Now then, listen to their voice; however, you shall solemnly warn them and tell them of the procedure of the king who will reign over them.’

This reference also shows up that tendency in unredeemed man to scout around one’s immediate surroundings to find something there that might be of ‘practical usefulness’.  They said they wanted a king to judge them “like all the nations”.

And they got their way, but at a considerable price.  Samuel outlined that cost:

These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.

If you look back over the story later in Exodus where Moses went up the mountain to meet with God (chapter 32), you will find yet another telling moment.

Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make us a god who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’

Have a look at 2 Peter 3:  “In the last days mockers will come with mocking following after their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming?  For since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.’”  It’s like they said, ‘Obviously, we believed in Jesus’ return in vain.  He’s not coming back, so let’s take charge of things and make the best of a bad situation.  We’ve known for centuries how to ‘do church’, so let’s do that – ‘church’ is God’s idea anyway, so He won’t mind.’

Like the Hebrews said concerning Moses: “as for this fellow Moses, we do not know what has become of him”, we are acting as if our thinking goes like this: “as for this fellow Jesus, we don’t know what has become of him.”

“Come, make us a god who will go before us”, they said – and so was created the golden calf, a god made in the image of man or beast.  But they knew that it was written in their ‘bible’ not to do that.  It’s not so different today.  Jesus is away too long, so we cobble together something out of our own imagination and using what resources we have to hand and then we worship it – and insist that all ‘our’ people worship it too, whatever it is.

In this way, we turn God’s idea of five-fold ministry into Church Pastor and Reverend this or that and Father and CEO – and continue on our way as if we have God’s imprimatur and blessing because we can show that it is “successful”.

Pagan Christianity also makes this critically important point (p. 136):

But that is not all.  The modern-day pastoral office has overthrown the main thrust of the letter to the Hebrews – the ending of the old priesthood.  It has made ineffectual the teaching of 1 Corinthians 12-14, that every member has both the right and the privilege to minister in a church meeting.  It has voided the message of 1 Peter 2 that every brother and sister is a functioning priest.

There is even an interesting take on this in the work of American author David C. Korten.  His occupation listed on Wikipedia is Teacher, institutional systems analyst, environmentalist, activist, and author: absolutely brilliant work.  His book The Great Turning: From empire to Earth Community is fundamentally about a version of the shift from old covenant to new covenant I am talking about here.  For Korten, it is a “great turning”, from “Empire” to “Earth community”.  Church as we know it is just another form of empire; what Jesus came to do – and what new testament ekklesia is all about – is a kind of earth community, but led by the Holy Spirit and destined for eternity.

Note to self: Remember William Tyndale, murdered by the church for daring to challenge established church hierarchical protocols with its bishops and priests by his correct translation of key words in the new testament.