1 Timothy 3:1
The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.
What the church needs more of is not vocational ministers. What it needs is more men aiming their life at eldership. Not that every one of them who aims at it should be granted access to it, but that more men should aim their existence at being qualified in character, competence and chemistry to be the kind of men who could if called upon fill the office.
This would result in more lay leaders. The church needs more men who want to be the kind of men who could be elders without also being the kind of men who pursue this primarily through vocational ministry.
The commonly held prescription is that if you desire to be an elder, you must desire to be a vocational minister. If you want to give your heart, soul, mind and hands to the service of the Lord, it follows that you must give up your day job in order to do so. This is patently false and a major cause of clerical confusion among God's people embracing their post as priests appointed by God in the spheres into which He has placed them.
The false paradigm asserts that those who take the Bible, church, Jesus and spiritual formation seriously ought to be employed in order to pursue those more. But this also assumes that the hoi polloi of Christian fodder are meant to grind and be ground up in order to sustain the ministry of the anointed who make ministry their business. Nothing could be further from the truth. God has called all His children to know Him and make Him known, that His disciples should be disciple makers.
The land will be blessed when the lay of the land again pursue God with all their hearts, all their souls, all their minds, and all their strengths from the comfort of their own homes, in the discomfort of their neighborhoods and the import of their regular, earthy vocations like ditch digging, lawn mowing, teaching, accounting, constructing, cog producing, etc...
No comments:
Post a Comment