The pastorate is dead. Not that I am particularly happy about this, but it seems true nonetheless. Currently there are over one-half million paid clergy in the United States, most of whom do not realize that their profession has become obsolete and irrelevant. Some welcome this change, some fight against it, but most will deny its reality. Like self-absorbed adolescents, we have propped up the dead corpse of spiritual leadership in order to practice a "Weekend a Bernies" approach to ministry. While such an approach seems full of life and vitality, in reality the death has already occurred and it is only a matter of time before the charade can no longer be held.
At one point in this nations history, pastors were men of stature and learning. This followed a centuries long tradition going back to the Early Church period. Their sermons held the attention of the town, salvation and moral reform was consistently preached, and human life was interpreted and corrected by God's Word (a). It was the universally-held responsibility of these men to educate the children of the community. While the Christian homeschooling movement has many admirable qualities, they are flawed in their estimation of the history of schooling, which they maintain happened in the home. While this is true to some degree, to a greater degree it was the responsibility of the church--and most particularly the clergy--to oversee the education of the children. Pastors held a voice in the community, were recognized as an authority, and their opinions were held in the greatest regard (and generally unquestioned). The pastor's assumed dual duty was (1) the transformation of the individual human soul and the (2) regulation of human society according to the moral norms of Scripture. The pastorate, as historically conceived, is dead.
Pastors themselves are not fully to blame for this situation. We are, after all, products of our environment and the forces of culture are larger than any one individual or groups of individuals. No, the wrongdoing of pastors is not in causing the demise of the pastorate, but rather in aiding it. Pastor's have ceased being authoritative spiritual prophets & priests to a dying culture and have assumed the position of managers of small enterprises (i.e. "churches"). Churches have ceased to be those radically called-out by God in a given location and have become buildings occasionally filled with activity. We have become irrelevant and detached from our culture, both in the ghetto of fundamentalism and the ivory-tower of liberalism. Or, conversely, we have become all too relevant and accommodating to culture by trying to 'entertain' crowds into the kingdom of God. As such, we have given up the mantle of prophetic & priestly duty for the hat of the court jester. Our vocation is no longer the proclamation of truth but rather the peddling of 'experience'. We encourage people on their own "spiritual journeys", but refrain from informing them that the pathway to God is narrow. We rejoice with 'seekers' who find peace in a homily about God's love, but withdraw from our duty to inform them of their sin which separates them from this love. We stimulate our people into talking about what a Bible passage means "to them", without ever discussing what that passage meant to the God who wrote it. We perceive that rigorous exposition of the Bible limits the expansive congregational growth we seek, so we abandon depth for superficiality. We insist that solid theological grounding is unnecessary for our people, because we secretly view it as unnecessary for ourselves. 'Pastors exhibit less interest in proclaiming truth and therefore we have less seriousness, less depth, and less capacity to speak the life-giving Word of God to our own generation' (b).
Today, pastors prop themselves up in their pulpits every week. Some entertain. Others lecture on some liberal cultural issue for 10 minutes. Still others rant for 50 minutes regarding some fundamentalist cultural issue. They believe with either raised activities or raised voices they can bring the dead corpse back to life. In the end, we are the last to know that we are dead.
May God raise up in the tribe of pastors a faithful generation of men who will fulfill their prophetic and priestly task. I'm afraid our current tribesmen are more in need of burial than medical attention.
(a) David F. Wells, No Place For Truth; Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology
(b) ibid., p 12. (Eerdmans, 1993), 34.
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