Forever Pastoral

It’s not about me, so I tend to avoid divulging much.

Still, there comes those moments when it’s hard to do much unless you explain the human context. After all, I teach that the whole point of everything is people, on one level. Knowledge and reason mean nothing if they don’t serve human interest. Oddly, human interest itself is not a real human interest except as the side-effect of pursuing truth. Truth is the single greatest human interest.

And regular readers know that I define truth as the Person of God. More specifically, truth for us is whatever we can know about God. Apparently He decided that His moral justice is the core of what we can and should know of Him. Everything came across as covenant laws, but actually it was all about the covenant.

Under the covenant in His Son, the people who strive to follow Him will take on a certain organizing principle that keeps people focused on truth — focused on God. My single greatest dispute with Western Christian churches and organizations is the intellectual approach underlying how we understand that organizing principle. A genuine church will have two roughly equal fundamental offices: pastor and elder. Those are the words we use in English to translate what would, at a much higher level, be priest and king. These are the Two Divine Witnesses mentioned in John’s Apocalypse, the religious and social leadership that God sanctioned from the very beginning. Sometimes it’s pulled together in one person, rather like it was with Moses, but it remains two distinct kinds of ministry.

Both are spiritual in nature, but with a different focus of application. Sometime around age 9 (48 years ago) I knew I was called by God, but due to the confusion of those spiritual offices in my religious context, I was sure it could only be a calling to preach and pastor. For years I pursued that all the way through high school and college. I strove to gain entrance into the full time Christian ministry that way. I was ordained fairly early in the game, around 1983, and volunteered to serve while I struggled to meet my financial family commitments, hoping some day someone would recognize my divine calling and hire me for the professional ministry.

It never happened. I was paid as “lesser” church staff a few times (youth, music, etc.), but never seriously considered as pastor more than a couple of times.

Meanwhile, my understanding of the context shifted, then shifted some more and a few years ago I realized Western Christianity was horribly twisted and perverted out of shape. It is so primarily because it is Western. That is not an insignificant criticism. Organized Western Christianity belongs to the wrong civilization altogether. I assert Christ pointedly avoided participating in Western Civilization, but did so by what He said was the minimum requirement to walk in the truth of His Father. There are many historical reasons why and how Christians forgot that message, but they did forget. So I decided to belong to the civilization of Christ.

Thus, I am a “pastor” in the sense that I serve as shepherd. While I can comfortably perform ritual functions, I’m not really part of the priesthood. I’m part of the government side of the twin witness of God’s revelation. So the proper term is “elder” — that’s my true vocation. In the apostolic ministry in the New Testament, pastors were appointed but elders arose naturally from the social structure. Some felt called and some just got dragged into it, but it was organic to the human principle of coming together in the Spirit and needing a human focal point for decision.

Because of the prevailing civilization, I can’t say whether I will ever see actual meat-space service in that office. I’d love to, but from where I sit today I don’t see it happening. On purely practical grounds, I realize it would first require some sponsorship of sorts. Someone has to want this thing bad enough, to embrace what I teach as somehow reflecting truth for them, that they will invest resources I don’t have in making it happen. There has to be a real human community, a nearness of time and space.

Right now, all I have is the virtual office here. And I’m not hindered from caring and extending an eldership in the odd moments when someone opens the door in meat space. It does happen from time to time. I certainly don’t do it for the money; you can’t buy what I offer. The whole point in sponsorship is having a real human need that requires freeing up time and resources so that full time availability happens. I’m not begging you folks for that; I’m seeking God for a vision to give substance to things my mind can’t comprehend. What can I do with this that I’m not already doing? I don’t know right now, but I sure do have a fire burning too hot and bright to keep things as they are.

Nobody has to tell me that God is often disappointed in how we respond to Him, so I should hardly be insulted if no one buys into what I’m doing.