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The article below was written from a denominational church
perspective and therefore contains a few statements that do not
apply to many independent and non-denominational churches. For
example, references to educational requirements for the Clergy,
denominational authorities and specific Clergy practices and terms
such as the "serving the sacraments", etc, … may not apply to
independent and non-denominational, non-Protestant churches. In
addition, many churches may not use the specific expressions
“Clergy”, “laity” or “parishioners”, but clearly they have a two
tier structure. Nonetheless, the article below is very clearly the
overall mindset of the Institutionalized church, whether
denominational or non-denominational. It describe perfectly the
problem with most every Christian church today, Catholic, Orthodox,
Protestant, and non-denominational.
Thankfully, we
have put into practice the manner in which the early Christian
church operated and have completely abandoned the destructive
Clergy-laity system described in this article.
There is much
truth in the article but it is not for the faint in heart.
The
clergy is a highly overrated institution. Indeed, reports on the
value and necessity of clergy have been greatly exaggerated. Many
Christians assume, for example, that the most important thing in
choosing a church is its minister, that a church cannot function
effectively without a priest or pastor, that the first thing one
must do in starting a church is to hire a minister to lead it, that
Sunday morning should be judged by its sermon, and that the
preeminent way to serve God is to go to seminary to be trained for
Christian service.
But
could it be that, on the contrary, clergy are neither necessary nor,
in the long run, good for church? Is it possible that one of the
best things that could happen to the church today is for all clergy
to resign their posts and take jobs in the world? Might it be that
church without clergy could be the best kind of church?
Certainly, for many we may as well ask whether we should shoot
ourselves in the head. But upon closer inspection this perspective
is not as lunatic as it first seems. The fact is, although our
clergy-system is one of the dominant features of the church today,
it has almost nothing to do with the New Testament, is fundamentally
counter-productive, and is an inherent obstruction to healthy,
biblical church life.
PLEASE
NOTICE, FIRST of all, that when we talk about clergy we are most
definitely not talking about the actual people who are clergy. The
specific men and women who are priests, ministers, and pastors are,
on the whole, wonderful people. They love God, want to serve God,
and want to serve the people of God. They typically are sincere,
compassionate, intelligent, self-giving, and long-suffering. Let it
be clear, then, that the problem with clergy is not the people who
are clergy but the profession that those people are a part of.
Furthermore, let it be clear that, despite serious problems of their
profession, clergy do actually accomplish much good in the church.
It's not that clergy don't help people significantly. They most
certainly do-which is one reason why they are such a dominant
feature of church life. But the good the people of the clergy are
able to accomplish is despite their profession rather than because
of it.
Without
a doubt, the clergy is a profession and members of the clergy are
professionals. Just as lawyers protect and interpret the law and
doctors protect and administrate medicine, clergy protect,
interpret, and administrate the truth of God. This profession, like
any profession, dictates standards of conduct for how its members
should dress, speak, and act, both on-duty and off-duty. And, like
other professions, it dictates standards of education, preparation,
admittance to the profession, procedures for job searches and
applications, and retirement. Clearly, Catholic priests and
Protestant ministers alike are expected-by their parishioners,
friends, hierarchies, denominational authorities, and themselves-to
have a distinct kind of training, be certain kinds of people, and
perform certain kinds of duties.
Traditionally, the profession has demanded that clergy be male and,
in some denominations, preferably married and, if so, happily
married. The profession demands that its members possess a seminary
degree and official ordination. The profession (unrealistically)
requires that clergy be extraordinarily gifted: natural leaders,
skilled orators, capable administrators, compassionate counselors,
wise decision-makers, dispassionate conflict-resolvers, and astute
theologians. Naturally, professional standards insist that clergy be
morally upright and exemplary in every way. And, as an outward sign,
clergy must dress respectably and speak with authority and
conviction.
Clergy
function essentially as professional church managers. Clergy are
responsible for preparing teachings, homilies, and sermons, visiting
the sick, conducting funerals and marriages, properly administering
the sacraments, overseeing church social events, Sunday School, and
catechism programs, preparing engaged couples for marriage,
counseling those with problems, preparing denominational reports,
attending denominational meetings, managing missionary and
evangelistic programs, assembling and overseeing staff (such as
assistant ministers, youth group leaders, administrative staffs, and
evangelism teams), organizing fund-raising drives, attending to
community relations, facilities use, and building maintenance,
encouraging, disciplining, and edifying parishioners, and
establishing the vision and direction of the church.
There
exists, then, a definite set of tasks which everyone (even the
non-Christian) knows is the rightful duty of a member of the clergy.
Everyone knows it because it is an institutionalized profession,
created and maintained by denominations, hierarchies, theological
seminaries, the laity, and, finally, the clergy themselves.
THE
FIRST PROBLEM with the clergy is that God doesn't intend such a
profession to exist. There is simply and unequivocally no biblical
mandate or justification for the profession of clergy as we know it.
In fact, the New Testament points to a very different way of doing
church and pastoral ministry.
Nevertheless, human societies throughout history have consistently
created spiritual castes of people-shamans, priests, soothsayers,
witch-doctors, wise-men, prophets, gurus-and the Christian church
has been no exception. It didn't take long for the church to
construct, based on a handful of ambiguous scripture verses ("upon
this rock I will build my church," "you shall not muzzle an ox while
it is threshing"), a massive, institutional, hierarchical
superstructure. This, in effect, created a two-class, authoritarian
system within the church in which clergy were considered more
spiritual than laity.
Protestants broke with the Catholic church, of course. But
Protestants are just as "catholic" as Roman Catholics when it comes
to clergy. Though the Bible replaced the Sacraments as the center of
God's revelation for Protestants, the profession they set up to
protect and distribute this revelation is functionally identical to
the Catholic priesthood. As the priest correctly administers the
wafer, the minister correctly interprets the Word of God.
But when
we go back to the Word of God and read it afresh, we see that the
clergy profession is the result of our human culture and history and
not of God's will for the church. It is simply impossible to
construct a defensible biblical justification for the institution of
clergy as we know it.
THE
SECOND PROBLEM with the clergy profession is that it crushes "body
life." We can see in the New Testament that God doesn't intend
church to be a formal association to which a rank-and-file
membership belongs by virtue of paying dues and attending meetings,
an association which is organized, guided, and governed by a
professional leader (and, in larger organizations, by an
administrative bureaucracy). Yet that is exactly what most churches
are.
By
contrast, God intends church to be a community of believers in which
each member contributes their special gift, talent, or ability to
the whole, so that, through the active participation and
contribution of all, the needs of the community are met. In other
words, what we ought to see in our churches is "the ministry of the
people," not "the ministry of the professional." In this way, the
church is to act like a body, with each unique, necessary part
working for the good of the whole body. And, Paul argues clearly
that each member's gift is indispensable, that the body needs each
part to contribute or else it will be lame (1Cor. 12:20-25).
The
problem is that, regardless of what our theologies tell us about the
purpose of clergy, the actual effect of the clergy profession is to
make the body of Christ lame. This happens not because clergy intend
it (they usually intend the opposite) but because the objective
nature of the profession inevitably turns the laity into passive
receivers.
The role
of clergy is essentially the centralization and professionalization
of the gifts of the whole body into one person. In this way, the
clergy represents Christianity's capitulation to modern society's
tendency toward specialization; clergy are spiritual specialists,
church specialists. Everyone else in the church are merely
"ordinary" believers who hold "secular" jobs where they specialize
in "non-spiritual" activities such as plumbing, teaching, or
marketing. So, in effect, what ought to be accomplished in an
ordinary, decentralized, non-professional manner by all church
members together is instead accomplished by a single, full-time
professional-The Pastor.
Since
the pastor is paid to be the specialist in church operations and
management, it is only logical and natural that the laity begin to
assume a passive role in church. Rather than contributing their part
to edify the church, they go to church as passive receivers to be
edified. Rather than actively spending the time and energy to
exercise their gift for the good of the body, they sit back and let
the pastor run the show.
Think
about Sunday morning. Parishioners arrive on schedule, sit quietly
in pews, and watch and listen to the minister who is up-front,
center-stage, whose (usually elevated) presence dominates the
service. They stand, sit, speak, and sing only when they are
directed to by the minister or the program. Yet, in reality, what
happens during these two hours on Sunday morning is only a
micro-cosmic picture of the whole church reality.
If the
people of a congregation began to get a vision that the church is
not a formal association but a community, that gifts are
distributed-apart from ordination-to each person, that everyone must
actively participate and contribute for church to work, that no
one's gift is more important than another's, and that everyone's
participation will ensure a full, healthy church life-in short, a
vision of a biblical view of church life-I suspect many would begin
to ask themselves: "Then what are we paying our minister for?" And,
that would be a reasonable question to ask.
Full-time, professional clergy are only needed when church members
are not doing their part. On the other hand, when each church member
is actively participating and contributing their part for the good
of the body, a professional minister is unnecessary. That is a fact
that is proven every day in tens of thousands of communities and
home churches all around the world.
THE
THIRD PROBLEM with the clergy profession is that it is fundamentally
self-defeating. Its stated purpose is to nurture spiritual maturity
in the church-a valuable goal. In actuality, however, it
accomplishes the opposite by nurturing a permanent dependence of the
laity on the clergy. Clergy become to their congregations like
parents whose children never grow up, like therapists whose clients
never become healed, like teachers whose students never graduate.
The existence of a full-time, professional minister makes it too
easy for church members not to take responsibility for the on-going
life of the church. And why should they? That's the job of the
pastor (so the thinking goes). But the result is that the laity
remain in a state of passive dependence.
Imagine,
however, a church whose pastor resigned and that could not find a
replacement. Ideally, eventually, the members of that church would
have to get off of their pews, come together, and figure out who
would teach, who would counsel, who would settle disputes, who would
visit the sick, who would lead worship, and so on. With a bit of
insight, they would realize that the Bible calls the body as a whole
to do these things together, prompting each to consider what gift
they have to contribute, what role they could play to build up the
body. And with a bit of courage, that church might actually take the
painful steps in the direction of long-term change. Some might leave
for other churches that have full-time ministers. But those who
remained to participate in the work of building body life would
mature faster and further than they ever would have with a pastor to
do it all for them.
THE
FOURTH PROBLEM with the clergy profession is what it does to the
people in that profession. Being a member of the clergy as we know
it is difficult. Doing it very well is almost impossible. Yet
good-hearted men and women, convinced that they are serving God in
this way, admirably pour their lives into this task. What they
encounter as professional clergy, however, is stress, frustration,
and burn-out.
It's no
wonder, of course, since clergy are trying to do the work of a whole
congregation all by themselves! How can a single person be a natural
leader, a skilled orator, a visionary, a capable administrator, a
compassionate counselor, a wise decision-maker, a dispassionate
conflict-resolver, and an astute theologian all at once? Why do we
make one person be all things to all parishioners?
Being a
minister is, quite simply, unrealistic. It is as unrealistic as a
corporation expecting a single employee to successfully fill or
oversee all of the corporate roles, from mail-boy to secretary to
middle-manager to president, while most of the other employees
arrive at work one day a week to simply watch this super-human
achievement (and sometimes do a chore they are asked by the
super-employee to do). In this way, the clergy profession demands
super-Christian, super-human accomplishment. Christians-with our
realistic understanding of human limitations and weaknesses-should
know better than that. God certainly did, which is why he gave the
task of maintaining and building up the church as the shared
responsibility of all believers, not the centralized, specialized,
professionalized task of one person.
CLERGY
ARE THE keepers-of-the-church; but the church really doesn't need to
be kept in this way because God keeps it and asks all believers to
participate in keeping it. The clergy, as a profession, are assigned
to preserve, protect, and dispense Christian truth, correct
teachings, the Bible, the sacraments, and authority. Yet the
Christian truth does not need a professional class to protect it.
Truth is not that fragile.
Christian truth is not some kind of classified or dangerous material
which only card-carrying experts can handle. Nor is it like riches
which need the protection of safe vaults and armed security guards.
It is the Holy Spirit's and not the hierarchy or the denomination's
job to preserve Christian truth in history; and the Holy Spirit has
seen fit to do so by distributing it to all God's people so they can
share it together.
The
problem with clergy, we've seen, is not the actual people who are of
the clergy-who are typically sincere and committed-but the social
role of the profession to which they belong. Ministers often hope to
re-shape that role in ways that are more realistic and biblical. But
they eventually discover that, for the most part, they can't reshape
the role at will because their congregations and denominations
expect the standard things from them. Of course, that's the nature
of social roles: they shape people more than people shape them.
A
problem even more basic and serious than the clergy role, however,
is that most Christians have completely redefined what a healthy
church looks like in the first place. For most church-goers, a
solid, healthy church is one which is growing numerically, has a
fabulous pastor, and offers many activities and programs. That may
be what a vibrant voluntary association-such as the YMCA-looks like.
But if the Bible is our authority, those factors are irrelevant when
it comes to church.
What's
important in church, according to the Bible, is that each member
actively contributes to the good of the whole body through
responsible participation and the exercise of their gifts. What's
important in church, according to the Bible, is that believers
become strong and mature in their faith through the edification of
one another. A biblical church is a "people's church" with a
decentralized ministry.
Of
course, when we speak of "church without clergy," we do not mean the
elimination of full-time ministers. Indeed, the church needs more
full-time ministers. The relevant question, however, is: what kinds
of ministries ought these full-time people to be doing? According to
the New Testament, full-time ministers ought to be ministering in
and to the world, in such tasks as working with the poor, doing
evangelism, and making peace where there is conflict and violence.
Biblically speaking, it is the world, and not the church, which
needs full-time Christian ministers.
WHAT WE
NEED today is church without clergy. Pastors themselves need to be
liberated from the demand to be ultra-versatile, multi-talented,
super-human performers. And lay people need to be jarred from the
pacifying illusion that it is enough to simply attend church on
Sunday mornings and tithe ten percent of their income.
Church
without clergy is not easy; it demands the full, active
participation of everyone. But the rewards of church without
clergy-the riches of participation, of solidarity, and of
community-make the effort exceedingly worthwhile. And, those who
make that effort will be well on their way to transforming church
from something they simply go to, to something they, together, are. |
