Best of the week entry 2

Comes from Ed Stetzer guest posting for Tim Challies. Ed writes about the danger of pastor adoration with "The problem with pastor as rock star" and I liked it. I liked it a lot. One of the dangers that really got my attention was this:

If the church life revolves around one person’s speaking gift, it is incredible difficult to move to community. A community “won” to a single voice is not won to community, but to spectatorship. Thus, when pastors say, “it’s all about the weekend,” they tend to create an audience rather than a biblically functioning church community. This is still true if your church is an oft-criticized seeker megachurch or a your verse-by-verse preaching point. Either way, if you get thousands sitting in rows but can’t move them to sitting in circles, true community is hard to find.

As a guy who travels around speaking, I understand how quickly it can happen. For the last few weeks, I’ve spoken at a church close to my own house while the pastor is on a short sabbatical. But even in delivering biblical messages, I’m not engaging in biblical community with those people. It takes more than a stage to create a community. The temptation must be fought that a mass of people gathered to hear one person speak is equal to biblical community.

It is amazing that we can read about community, the family of God, fellowship, etc. in the Bible and still assume that a weekly observance of "going to church" to hear one man give a lecture/sermon/message is Biblical community. Meanwhile Christians around us are hurting, struggling with sin, in need financially and we assume the pastor or elders or deacons (somebody else) is taking care of it.

Rock start pastors, as Ed points out, can happen in all sorts of churches of all sizes. Whatever the size of the church it is a danger to the Body because it inhibits actual Christian ministry of the entire Body and substitutes ministry by donation and observation. Good stuff from Ed, who will appear again in a later entry.