Church land 2

Maybe an explanation is needed for my previous post.I tend to rant a bit about subjects that are important to me.

The reasons for being passionate about "lay leaders"are not just because I have been one for nearly 20 years but because I believe the ordained leadership system we have now can be an obstacle in church life,not church growth but church life.

Church leaders are in a class of there own in the churchland world.They are the elite the upper class they hold the power .This is not to say that all church leaders want or desire this status although clearly a minority do.In order to be part of this elite it means having been educated to degree level in most cases which will be above that of the average church member especially in inner city areas.It also means taking spiritual responsibility for the church members ,again this is not always what is desired but it is nearly always the outcome.It means attending leadership gathering of which there are many ,these are almost always exclusively for leaders.It also means the delivering of the preach/sermon on a Sunday a time when the whole church will listen to one person give there interpretation of Jesus and scripture.None of the above activities are negative in themselves but together they lead to leaders being seen as elite.

When all of this is put together it can only result in one thing.Leaders are in a different class to the rest of us.

Now there are some advantages to having full time leaders and they include having someone available to do pastoral duties having time to spend with God being able to put 100% into new projects.But even these can end up with some negative results.

Church leadership is a very difficult job and I do not wish to criticise them as people but I do wish to challenge the system that makes the job so difficult.

I believe that there is a need for some people to be in full time positions within the church.But I think there work should be the work of church planting and encouraging new local leaders for those church's.This I believe is the NT model shown to us in the life of Paul and the some of the other apostles.The church in the west has stopped growing because it has largely been unable to see past its own door step and has adopted local church models instead of city or state models.Sectarianism has played a large part in this because it divides the church everywhere and what we have ended up with is a lot of small expressions of the body which want to look after there own needs.The church in general has lost the idea of mission to its own city or community and largely thinks of mission as a foreign affair.We have ended up being self serving and the best answer to that is to have a full time leader who can look after "our needs".

The biblical model is one of "the church" giving support to mission that leads to the planting of churches which leads to the raising up of new leaders a growth cycle that is natural and not programmed.If those in full time leadership were free to give there time and energy to this we might have a much healthier church where lay leaders did not have to leave a church to start there own.