Pastors are Too Important

Recently the Bakersfield community has endured the very public moral failings of two of its beloved lead pastors. These public scandals within the local church community got me thinking about the demands we place upon pastors.

Do we really expect these people to be without sin? In terms of daily practice, we clearly do. Pastors can have sin in their past, indeed quite far back in their past, but it better never cross over into the present. They can get away with a few stories from the pulpit about impatience with their kids or frustration in traffic, but if it goes much beyond that, the pastor will be run out on a rail, or will at least feel that he doesn't belong in ministry. We only want to hear about run of the mill everyday softball sins from our pastors. Anything else will disqualify him from ministry and he knows it. But do we really believe that the moral struggles of the people leading local churches only goes as far as marital spats over things like putting the toilet paper on the roll incorrectly?

After hearing these two men make their very public confessions in disgrace, and having either to forfeit their careers or be forced into it, I felt a strange thankfulness for my obscurity and anonymity. But even that got me thinking: Why shouldn't everyone be under this kind of scrutiny in the church? The reason sin so often comes out into the open with pastors is that everyone is watching their every move, all the time. Perhaps we should do the same with everyone else.

Ah, but the Bible says that the teacher will incur a stricter judgment, and perhaps we are to interpret that to mean that we have a right to know about the personal lives of our pastors. But just how much are we entitled to know about our pastors? How much do we need to know? How much do we want them to tell us? Perhaps since they are the models of godliness in the church we should put web cameras in their homes so we can observe every detail. Pastors give up their right to privacy and the deeply personal aspects of Christian growth when they sign a contract to be the public face of the church, correct? Think about it: Would you want to be led by a man that blew up in anger at his children last week? Their Christian journey is now our business! We should not only know about his casual sins, but his past struggles, his family brokenness and all. Why? Because that way we can hold him accountable to the high demands of his office and provide the pressure necessary for him to live representatively. We should know about the times his eyes wander at the gym, the frequency of his sex life, his financial business, his family interactions and the like. Or, more to the point, if he knew we were privy to all of this, then he might be better constrained to live as he ought to live. Yes, his motives might be to please us, but at least the watching world wouldn't see scandal. Perhaps you feel I've stepped over a line here, but I'm hard pressed to see how this is inconsistent with our present treatment of those called to lead us. Should not the pastor himself initiate in all of this? He should feel comfortable granting this kind of access, because, after all, his life is to be above reproach, transparent, vulnerable, opened up to God and man, as an example to the believing community of how we should live.

Surely as it is the majority of pastors instinctively protect themselves and their own personal journeys with Christ. Many of them take up the cross that is theirs alone to bear. And so they suffer in isolation because that is what the system has given to them as a choice; either abandon your profession or carry on struggling with deeply personal sins, perhaps sharing them only with a few trusted friends outside the church. There is no option, clearly, for him to share deep moral struggles with the church and be retained as a pastor. It's a simple either/or choice; vocation with reputation or transparency with no vocation. He cannot have both transparency and his vocation, unless his transparency is over flea bite sins. What other job on the earth is like that? Not even the presidency anymore! And certainly not the kingship of Israel!

How did it come to be the case that an entire believing community would thoroughly, relentlessly examine a single person for ongoing consistency in the Christian life while everyone else is allowed to work out their Christian growth in relative anonymity, free from such intense accountability? Is this a biblical thing?

Pastors have become too important. They are so important that they can't bear up under the pressure, or they do and suffer in silence. We see historically how they came to be so important. I offer a brief sketch of this process here:

1. Clement and Apostolic Succession:

St. Clement appears to be the first person to speak of the notion of apostles passing on their spiritual gifting for leadership to a succeeding bishop. The motivation was pure here. His desire was to ensure, in an age before the wide distribution of apostolic literature, that Christians would be "under" apostolic leadership. The problem of course is that it sets the stage for the bishops to become pre-eminent in the Church.

2. 2nd Century drift away from the notion of "the body:"

Ignatius, the second century church leader and martyr, said plainly, "if one is outside the bishop, he is outside the church." Again the motivation was pure. Ignatius wanted to ensure that Christians were protected from false doctrine and that they were carefully led during a period of great tensions. In the 3rd century, Cyprian of Carthage wrote, "The Church is in the Bishop and the Bishop is in the Church." One can readily see the shift away from the concept of "church" as the people corporately practicing the spiritual gifts for mutual edification to a single individual, in whom all the spiritual gifts reside, offering his singular gifts to the desperate laity, like a hen feeding a gaggle of starving chicks.

3. 2nd Century, The Allegorical Method of Origen:

Origen taught that the common laymen should never see a Bible. Only the spiritually gifted and spiritually clean should handle the word of God. Why? Because only he can be relied upon to find the hidden wisdom of God in its pages. If one were to hand the Bible over, at least for authoritative teaching, to just anyone, the text would be badly misunderstood, to the demise of the whole church.

Now this is starting to sound like an equation: Spiritual gifting for leadership is passed through a proper apostolic process (Apostolic Succession) + Only the bishops in proper succession define the boundaries of the church (Hierarchy of Ignatius and Cyprian) + Only certain men should interpret the Bible (Allegorical Method of Origen) = Pastors are really important! In fact, the pastor is the church.

We are still maintaining the legacy of all this, even in the Protestant church, although you occasionally hear reluctancy among us. We still in practice seem to believe that the spiritual gifts have collapsed into one man, and we go to church to benefit from him. Perhaps it is time to abandon the notion of churches as places of personality and high theater. Perhaps the simple home church of the first century, in which all people practiced their spiritual gifts and in which all were subject to accountability is a better way. There is just something about a crowd of people all lined up looking in the same direction every week expectantly awaiting the brilliance that will flow uni-directionally from the pulpit to the people that elevates a man unnaturally.

Maybe it is high time to meaningfully rethink the centrality of the pastor within the community of God. He is just another of the imperfect people of God practicing his spiritual gifts; he is not the fount of the spiritual gifts exercising them in moral purity.