I’m really grateful to have your perspective as a Salvation Army member. There was somone here recently from a Mennonite tradition, and those are certainly less common perspectives that make this discussion healthier. I love what you wrote here:

“people who want to be passive are attracted to congregations where someone is paid to do things for them.”

I think that’s an excellent point, and I would agree that dynamic occurs. I don’t mean to represent passivity as a simple effect caused caused by paid clergy. Rather, I’m driving at the idea that our client/patron tendencies are a symptom of being birthed in a thoroughly market-based society. I’m hoping to suggest an alternative way of seeing clergy that allows for remuneration while removing them from the paradigm of the market as sheer producers of consumable goods.

I’m a new reader. JR Rozko’s been “sharing” these posts in Google Reader and they caught my attention, so I thought I’d come over and check them out for myself. I like the discussion so far.

I’m an engineer by trade, a pastor’s kid, and a member of The Salvation Army. My comments are not coming from the position of someone in a Missional community (although I do have some exposure) or from a full-time traditional pastor (although a handful of relatives and many of my best friends are).

As to your first point, my experience hasn’t been that the act of paying a full time pastor contributes much to the church having a more passive attitude. I’ve found that,in the churches I’ve been a part of, the same people that expect to receive will expect it just as much from an unpaid active member of the congregation (like, for example, me or my wife) as from a paid staff person.

I think cause and effect may be backwards here. Rather than “paid pastorate creates passive member of the congregation”, the real answer might be that “people who want to be passive are attracted to congregations where someone is paid to do things for them”.

Just a thought.

Thanks for hosting this discussion!

Jason, I appreciate the way you have set up the tension. Seminary education often takes people out of their home congregation apprentice contexts and leaves graduates with debt and a professional mentality and gears them for placement (read: “parachuting”) in a new church and denominational structure. How strange to be hired by a church where the pastor has no shared history or experience with the congregation!

One comment about professionalism. I think I agree that leading from a place of title, position, or as the expert can lead to a passive community. However, I think the church needs people who have expert knowledge. They are important to the health of a community. Isn’t this leading from gifting? I wonder if our anti-professional tendency can swing us toward discounting people’s gifting for the sake of making sure everyone is on level ground.

I’m not arguing for the way things are in Evangelical churches but I wonder if our reaction might make us unbalanced in the other direction?

But to the point, I generally agree with everything you said, except I don’t believe the church scattered is immeasurably more important the church scattered. If you have some really watered-down, typically evangelical, individualist, consumer version of church “gathered” then sure that is bad. but come on, we can and should do better than that. The church gathered is where Christ promises to meet us in word and sacrament to make us into his people SO THAT we can discern Him in the world while scattered.

The problem is most just gather once a week which historically is not what had been practiced. in fact, we should always in various ways be moving from scattered to gathered and back and back again.

Lastly, what is the church scattered anyway? a bible study, soup kitchen, private prayers but using the same prayers as the entire community, visiting the sick, ministering to the lost. could most of those be called the church gathered b/c none of those things should be done alone anyway?

I will argue that the church scattered is immeasurably more important than the church gathered. If so, then it should cause us to re-evaluate other major assumptions. One of those, for example, is discipleship. If our central dynamic is outward-focused, then discipleship focuses (rightly) on the path we prepare for those on the way to Jesus. Our contemporary perspective is completely inward at those already safe inside the four walls.

If the Church is, by nature, centrifugal rather than centripetal, then mentors successfully living in a relational interface between Jesus and the unsaved become primary players. Full-time vocational clergy simply cannot do this.

Maybe one way to shake us from our pastor-centric view of ministry is to re-examine how the New Testament uses the word “church.” When Paul addresses “the church in Rome,” or anywhere else, he is speaking of all followers of Jesus in the geographical region regardless of their local house gathering affinity. When he speaks to the believers in Ephesus, therefore, about leaders God has given to the church, he is speaking of regional leadership.

Let’s define our terms and identify our assumptions. It might render certain professional categories a little less biblically legitimate than we currently think.

And speaking of naivete, as an earlier post mentioned, thinking that the pastor’s attitude toward his role and function is the key to missional success is simply not true. Winston Churchill once said, “We form our buildings, and then they form us.” The cultural baggage of evangelical church membership is so heavy, as soon as we enter the trappings of “normal” church life we invite all the expectations that nearly three centuries of American religion have to offer. This includes the assumptions of attractional, building-based ministry as both biblical and culturally effective; professional performance with the sermon as the central point of the Christian week; and passive observation in a weekly gathering as the average church member’s responsibility.

This is the real elephant in the room. Once we start naming these things, the issue of pastoral compensation pales in comparison. Several earlier posts speak freely about what post-christian or postmodern people look for, but most of what I read offer answers from the modern worldview. If this truly is a changing of epochs in church history, then let’s struggle with what the new expression might look like instead of trying to squeeze another couple of miles out of the old vehicle.

Thanks for sharing!