Tending Not To Tend

It is true that I am searching for a perfect version of Christianity; I can admit that. On the one hand I realize the futility, even the danger, of pursuing such a course, while on the other, I see it as a holy duty, the fulfillment of a promise I once made. The existing models don't work, not because they fail to get results but because they are results oriented.

The most popular model of church is one in which a pastor, usually trained and ordained, shepherds his/her congregation by preaching to them in a one-sided dialogue for anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour. The pastor may not interact with a particular member of the congregation at another time or any other way over the course of several months until the obligatory harvest picnic. In churches where the congregation is unusually large, the contact with the pastor may only be possible via a video screen. This can hardly be viewed as effective shepherding.

In business, supervisors are usually limited in the amount of people they can effectively manage; anymore than seven and the supervisor risks allowing an employee to slip through the cracks, missing vital performance indicators. If this is the case in business, where cost is the ultimate determiner of practice, how can churches, where the quality of discipleship should be paramount, allow pastors to oversee huge congregations?

Sermonizing has become the modus operendi for most shepherds and because of the impersonal nature of the act, pastors are forced to provide practical steps for implementation at the end of each sermon otherwise the congregation has no idea what to do with what's been said. But it is not that the word, which does not return void, is effective, it is the fact that there is no one of mature status to guide that Christian on how to apply it in their particular situation. Instead of living one-on-one with the person, getting to know their particular needs and struggles and mentoring them in the way they should go, a general word is pronounced from the pulpit and people take from it what they think they need or want to listen to with little or no accountability.

Sermons become instructional guides to living--following these steps to fix your marriage, forgive your neighbor and manage your money. Instead of building people who see the world through Christ's perspective and who are therefore better able to make the choices that genuinely glorify God, pastors create two categories, the obedient and the disobedient, neither of which have any correlation to a life committed to Christ.

This approach is all wrong. Stewardship is preached as a substitute to pursuing Christ. It amounts to instructing a thief on how to spend his ill-gotten gains for the furtherance of the kingdom. Because they only have a few minutes to speak into peoples' lives, pastors feel they can only address the symptoms and not the disease or they simply diagnosis it as sin, like the common cold, a give people a laundry list of ways to prevent it.

Jesus took only twelve disciples and walked with them, ate with them, lived with them closely for three years. He loved them, guided them and at times rebuked them so that when He left they would be able to faithfully carrying on his work. True shepherds know their sheep and are willing to lay down their lives for them, not in principle but in the genuine knowledge of those look to them for direction.