Perverted Professional Standards

There’s a burden on my mind about church leadership.

I’ll pick the occasion of Tullian Tchividjian’s professional meltdown for my opinionated screed. The linked story includes more detail than most accounts in the popular media. Let’s pretend it’s accurate, though I am no fan of the site. What matters is not so much this famous pastor’s experience as the entangling mess that made this whole thing worse than it should have been.

First: Don’t confuse pastors with elders, and don’t confuse deacons with elders. In the Bible, there have always been Two Witnesses, the king and the priest. Part of our problem is a horrific confusion over what those words mean, so perhaps it works better if we say sheikh and shaman. That helps you understand that the Bible is an Eastern document that presumes you already grasp that humanity is hard-wired to live in that moral milieu. Studying the Bible means first and foremost that you learn how to think like an Ancient Hebrew and ditch that Western intellectual model.

This link is typical enough of mainstream evangelical thinking about qualifications of a pastor. Right away we see that it confuses elder and pastor. I suppose it would require a genuine revolution with actual bloodshed before we get organized religion to do what’s right so I don’t expect this to change. But a pastor should be the ritual leader, a priestly function that calls to mind the higher meaning behind the symbolism we use in our worship and practice. The elder is the household ruler — the Bible presents the church as a defacto extended family household. The only time you see the two offices merged is when the church body is too small and too new to this whole game-change. Someone who operates in missionary mode approximates what the Apostles did and they were typically both pastor and elder until things got rolling. A deacon is a male or female attendant who helps both pastor and elder get things done, bearing some middling measure of authority.

The pastor is generally a full-timer, set aside for his mission. The elder might be full time as well, if the body can afford it, but he’s often a retired fellow who is already respected enough to rule. Pastors are appointed; elders arise naturally. In Judea, the first churches already had a protocol for selecting who among the various family chiefs would become the senior elder. The working relationship of the pastor and elder varied just as it might for an ancient sheikh and shaman.

But because Western Christianity has been doing it wrong since at least the time of Constantine when he suckered the church into participating in secular politics, we see some serious and painful side-effects. Not least is that a church organized as a Western bureaucracy or corporation will always be the wrong shape and size to meet genuine moral and spiritual needs. It cannot possibly do the work of God, not on purpose. His miracles will happen, but largely in spite of the perverted model.

The next most obvious flaw is the Western Myth of the Great Man. This is wholly absent in biblical thinking. While that linked list of qualifications is a proper quotation, it’s not a proper understanding of most of the Bible passages mean, because they are pulled from the specific context in which they were written. Still, it’s not hard to figure that you don’t want corrupt and violent thugs running the church. Charisma is the last consideration, not the first. Paul fought with that because he had precious little of it and people struggled (especially cultural Gentiles) with responding to him as a man of divine authority. I challenge you to tell me about the pastor of some monster church whose position doesn’t depend on charisma first. Paul would never make in Western Christianity.

On top of this, the profession comes with a false aura of moral superiority. The one bright spot in Tchividjian’s story is that he refuses to run and hide. I’ll let you decide whether that’s because of chutzpah or because he’s honestly trying to do the right thing and buck the broken system. I don’t take issue with his divorce or pursuing a fresh romance; I take issue with the apparent moral standards of his new girlfriend given her choice of costumes. I suppose we should wait and see if she improves on that. Still, his words approach the proper response to this mythology of church leaders as better than the membership. Biblical leadership is a matter of moral character, not performance to some artificial standard that few can sanely match. I can testify that being placed on a pedestal like that is a primary factor in temptation.

Not least is that you will try to hide things that normal people do. This is exacerbated by the perverted view of human sexuality held by most of Western Christianity, a view that arises from heathen mythology, not Scripture.

I’m starting to see glimmers of truth here and there in non-traditional churches, but nowhere near enough. Things are shifting quickly and I cannot guess how far or in what direction it will go, but what we see in the mainstream is ripe for collapse because it can’t keep up with the pace set by God’s wrath. It’s built on the wrong foundation and the flood will come and wash their sand away.