Well into two decades of Pastoral ministry, I have seen significant changes in how the church has functioned. I entered ministry just before the onset of the internet and many years before social media became our main source of information. The modern church movement has had an enormous effect on church leadership roles. Not the least of which has been the movement towards strategy and taking advantage of best business practices in the church. This is not a criticism nor should be taken as an outright rejection of these practices. Although the tendency can be to lean more heavily on key performance indicators and other measurable success components that may or may not reflect a God given goal for the church. Combine this with the necessary requirements of the western church leaders to give larger amounts of time to fiduciary tasks placed squarely on their shoulders such as legal, HR, facility and safety issues you can see how this could dominate their time especially in the larger churches.
Pastors and lay leaders can begin to evaluate everything in the church from only one perspective. While these changes have been borne out of good motives, we can readily admit that depending on how much you rely on such thinking there may be a corresponding loss of the type of biblical leadership that is distinctly required for overseeing God’s church.
A missionary friend serving in Southeast Asia told me he is glad that where he serves that his church planters do not have reliable access to the internet. He lamented that a constant diet of western church thinking may serve to build an unhealthy expectation in the minds of his Pastors and the people they serve. I admit that with so much information and expertise readily available at my fingertips, for which I am thankful, I have lost some of my dependence on the practice of prayer and thoughtful discussion
with other Christ devoted leaders as we seek God. We can easily seek to benchmark our church leadership decisions against the “more successful” larger church without engaging in the process of benchmarking against scripture. How much I determine to seek God for direction must be measured against how much I seek the church growth guru, movement or latest mega church model.
I don’t want to cast aside strategy, collaboration and planning or neglect our fiduciary responsibilities but to rather evaluate our leadership in the church based upon the expectations God has placed upon the Pastor and Elder?
For various reasons many churches are increasingly moving away from biblical terminology (elders, overseers, deacons, presbyters, pastors, bishops) and using generic categories such as leaders, directors or even managers. Sometimes as we attempt to define our language, we can slowly end up with our language defining us. Instead of striving to live out the function of the biblical offices, we may have adopted expectations into these offices that God may have never intended. Some years ago, I was listening to a powerful talk by Andy Stanley on leadership. I always appreciate his teaching but, on this occasion, he stated that the church needs to do away with the term shepherd and adopt a CEO model. He suggested that the word shepherd is insufficient in describing the modern church leader. He stated, “That word needs to go away. Jesus talked about shepherds because there was one over there in a pasture he could point to.” At first, I related to this in a very pragmatic way but realized that there is a big difference between a manager and the calling of shepherd. Jesus came to earth at the perfect time in history ordained by His Father and used His context to beautifully illustrate all the complex facets of a relationship with our creator and He with us.
In Acts chapter 20 Paul told the Ephesian elders, “Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.” Overseers were given this position by the Holy Spirit and commissioned to give careful attention to the flock, protecting them from the wolves and those teaching false doctrine. In 1 Timothy 5 the leadership of elders was to include the special responsibility of teaching. The Ephesian church that Timothy was to oversee were made of small house churches where I am sure an elder was assigned to shepherd that group. An elder had direct contact with people and their influence was over the handling of the word and protection in respect to sound doctrine that was being threatened by false teachers. Peter speaks to elders as a fellow-elder and charges them to shepherd the flock and be examples to them and to exercise oversight willingly and eagerly. I suggest that leadership does not need be redefined but shepherding needs to be rediscovered in our churches. An elder is a pastor, a shepherd, an overseer, a teacher as well as a leader, and in many ways the unifying concept underlying the biblical material is that of guardian. Our job, as elders, is to protect the church from harm – from danger, division, drift, and ultimately its enemy the devil. This is a sobering task that begins in the heart and mind of the overseer themselves. I cannot guard your heart if I am not guarding mine. Engage God with the type of intentionality that reflects a desperate dependence on an unchanging source of truth and light.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. Proverbs 3:5-6
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