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 Knee-Driven MinistryStepping off the trend-mill is an important step of faith.
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I entered pastoral ministry in a time of great transition for the institutional church (the early 60s). In the eyes of many, the church had reached a low. "Relevance" was the buzz word, and the church, as well as preachers in general, were said to be irrelevant, perhaps obsolete. As a result, a heavy percentage of my seminary classmates were headed for missions, parachurch works, the chaplaincy, and a new discipline called counseling. Only a few of us really believed there could be a future in the pastorate. My recollections are probably faulty, but as a new pastor, it seemed that every week someone from some new organization blew into town with a new program to sell me. The opening pitch rarely varied: the church was dying, pastors were desperate, and here is a program (anointed by God) to save it all. Somewhere in the country (usually California) was a church that had adapted the program and was now growing by the "thousands" (count 'em). I always found myself feeling guilty and a bit faithless as I would counter: "But that's in California" or "he's a different kind of leader" or "you don't know our people (or me)." If it wasn't an organizational representative, it was one of my own people who had just returned from some church or conference saying, "You won't believe what God is doing there" or "You've got to attend their … " or "You've got to start this … " I always tried to be nice in response, to show genuine interest and excitement, but sometimes it was difficult. Over the span of my pastoral years, I have seen a lot of trends, emphases, and calls to reengineer the church: church renewal, body life, personal evangelism, the charismatic gifts, Sunday school conventions, the Jesus movement, contemporary music (drums in the sanctuary?), church growth, the overhead projector and the "pastor-teacher," spiritual gift inventories, the pro-life movement, discipleship, concerts of prayer, cell groups, home-schooling, drama/dance, high liturgy, and country and western worship. Some of them have flared for a moment and then gone; others have taken a solid position in our perspectives of ministry. But each, when it appeared, was just the latest in a series of solutions for the church's ills. When I began public ministry, the slogan was "release the laity"; today it's "be seeker-sensitive." Back then we wanted to recover the "great hymnody of the church"; today we seem to make them up as we go along. Yesterday we talked about changing the world; today it seems as if we'd just like to change ourselves. As they say about the weather, if you don't like what's here now, wait 15 minutes. As a much younger man, I found myself bewildered as I listened to all the claims. Thus, it was an important moment for me when I turned one day to an older, wiser man and said, "I find my head spinning trying to determine which of these approaches to lock on to. How do I choose? I can't do them all." |             | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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