I confess that I belong to a partisan movement within Church History.
I’ve shared this on the forum. I promote the shepherd image of church leadership, and the relative independence of lay people. The flock is the whole point. What I shared in that post on the forum is some of the history of this movement. I’ve added a few words in brackets here:
At the end of WW2, our nation’s leaders had an industrial policy. The process of organizing and mobilizing for war had very good effects on the economy and our living standards in general. At least some of those leaders felt it was a good idea to take advantage of that bureaucracy to encourage veterans returning from war to go to college. It was a massive project that exploded the population involved in academics in the US. The colleges and universities could not keep up with the demand for seats in classes.
While it’s well established that our nation’s elite were hoping to turn the population into very productive drones who were motivated by their own rising standard of living, [most of] the colleges up that point were still rather honestly academic, and all these working class guys suddenly got exposed to serious intellectual pursuits. The result was an explosion in creativity that was not constrained by the elites. It took them another generation to get it all back under control. We can trace the dumbing-down of college education starting in the 1960s. The [hijacked] civil rights movement was partly a cover for that “correction”. The natural rise in yearning among minorities who were getting real educations was seized by the communists as a way to force changes in our society and government.
Meanwhile, that sudden rise in people getting real educations opened doors among the American evangelical clergy. A part of this was the rise of lay ministries [not just filling staff positions]. There was a strong move in some circles to actually cultivate such a thing. This movement viewed clergy primarily as equippers, not simply leaders. A host of strong educational books were published to put some measure of theological and biblical expertise in the hands of the lay public. The idea was to engage the lay members in ways that got more of them involved in sharing their faith without the silly old door-to-door canvasing operations. Thinkers were looking for ways to broaden the concept of outreach so that any individual member could discover their unique faith and mission calling, and have support to practice it.
If you never heard about this move, which came out most strongly in the late 1960s-1980s, I’m not surprised. I was there, and I felt like it was being squelched from all directions. I ran across it quite by accident, and discovered a huge number of churches trying to get this thing going, and nary a peep was heard from church staff [i.e., denominational] news sources. The established elite were against it from the start.
Thus, the movement represented by the book The Purpose Driven Life was actually meant to stop the earlier lay ministry movement. The same with “Seeker Sensitive” and some other trendy terms that burst on the scene in the 1990s. All of it was a mask covering a behind-the-scenes movement among leaders to learn how to assert a more centralized control over church operations that turned the membership into passive idiots who waited for the leaders to decide everything. In small newsletters and exposés you could read the horror stories of how the leadership training that came with those “Forty Days of Purpose” programs specifically called for kicking out lay leaders and destroying anything they had built.
Notice that I start the story with WW2, but it’s actually much older; it goes all the way back to Old Testament times. A critical element in the Pharisaical agenda in the Jewish nation that developed before Jesus was born was the rabbinical contempt for the common folks. The peasants were kept out of Talmudic discussions. They were to be taxed and milked, but were unfit to so much as make suggestions. The Pharisees strove to inject this into churches as part of their Judaizing efforts.
Once the church leaders accepted this notion, it has never stopped. The people must be oppressed and kept in their place. I’ve always been against that, and in retrospect, I now know this was the main reason I was marginalized among my fellow preachers. I often espoused the idea of training and motivating laymen to develop their own outreach ideas in the church. It never got anywhere.
At any rate, the backlash against this movement is currently what we see in church politics across the whole range of evangelical organizations.
