Individual Entry: What is a Pastor?
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October 22, 2008

Faith : What is a Pastor?

I was involved in a discussion about church leadership in another blog, and there was a point I wanted to expand on here.

In most of the (protestant) churches I have been a part of over the years, the person in charge of the church was referred to as the “pastor”. In the larger churches, there main leader was known as the “Senior Pastor” and there were one or more “Associate Pastors”. Sometimes the additional “Pastors” were assigned very specific areas of responsibility, so you’d have the “Youth Pastor” and the “Men’s Pastor” and so on. Sometimes the Senior Pastor didn’t have complete control – there was a committee of laymen who had oversight over at least the finances and who had the ability to hire and fire pastors. The committee was known by names like “Board of Deacons” and the like.

All of this fairly transparently mimicked the corporate world. Pastors today are primarily managers, or better yet Presidents and Vice Presidents of the local church. So you have the President (Senior Pastor) and various Associate Vice Presidents (Associate Pastors) and the Vice President of the Youth Department (Youth Pastor). Then in some churches they all were held accountable to the Board of Directors (Board of Deacons). How corporate can you get?

Now I’m going to set aside the whole Board of Deacons question for now (that’s yet another post someday), and simply ask – is this corporate model of Pastor as Manager/President a Biblical one? The short answer is that while Pastors are mentioned a number of times in the Bible, I see nothing to indicate that their job was to manage or direct the people in the church. There isn’t even evidence of people being appointed as pastors. There are three titles used for people being appointed in the Bible: elder, overseer, and sent-one (apostle). Some have argued that “overseer” is the same office as “pastor” yet Paul uses both words in his writings and consistently uses them in very different ways.

So if the Pastor was not the appointed manager of the church, what is he? Unfortunately the Bible provides few clues. The first clue is the name itself – the word is actually a synonym for Shepherd. So whatever Pastors were meant to do, the role of a shepherd was intended to be an inspiration for it. What did Shepherds do? They ensured that the sheep were safe, well fed, healthy, and that they did not wander off (which would likely result in their being neither safe nor well fed and eventually unhealthy). The other clue is Ephesians 4:11 which couples Pastor together with Teacher in a way that indicates that the roles are related.

On that foundation, I will add my own personal observations.

There have been a few occasions in my walk with The Lord when I have been a part of a group of Christians that did not have structure imposed on it from outside; but rather was allowed to create its own structure organically, naturally. When this was allowed to happen I have noticed that there were always a few individuals in the group who were very focused on how everyone else was doing. If someone didn’t show up for a few weeks, they would be the first ones to become concerned, and would likely be the people to start phoning and making sure the missing people were OK. Those same people tended to be the ones to invest a lot of time with new people, nurturing them, answering their questions, making sure they were comfortable within the group. Those same people would also be among the first to come to someone’s defense when there was a problem and would be the first to speak up when “troublemakers” would disrupt the meetings. Their focus was on the well-being of all of the individual members of the group, and their energies were directed toward keeping people included, safe, and growing in their faith.

I claim those people were the shepherds, the pastors of those groups. They did not manage people. They did not lead. In fact I would go so far as to say the people who I have thought of as being “pastors” were poor candidates to be leaders. Their energies were focused on the (spiritual) health and wellbeing of the individuals in the group – making sure they were in condition to contribute to the group and that they did not get lost or stray away. But as a result, they were focused on trees and not the forest. They tended to lack a sense of the “big picture” of where the group was moving as a whole and so would fail to lead it anywhere.

In military language, they were the medics – keeping the troops healthy and ready to fight while someone else decided where to go and who to fight. I can’t think of an equivalent role in the corporate world (perhaps Humans Resources, although few corporate Humans Resources departments really invest much more that lip service in those kinds of activities). And therein lay the problem – by modeling the pastoral role on the corporate manager as opposed to the Biblical model of shepherd, we have effectively eliminated from the church people who do what pastors are supposed to be doing. The “pastors” are too busy managing the church, and too often there is no one actually guarding, nourishing, and encouraging individual people in the community. No wonder so many people leave!

Posted by Steven at October 22, 2008 05:00 AM

Comments

Posted by: janbergs at October 22, 2008 09:54 AM

Posted by: Steven at October 22, 2008 03:08 PM

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