Of Churches and Pastors

The Jeremiah Wright episode has raised another issue which the media miss. Just why DO people join churches and stay with them? Why do people leave churches? How much should the pastor influence a church member’s devotion to the body as a whole?

When Jesus refers to the church in Matthew 16:18, he uses the Greek word “ecclesia.” “Ecclesia” is a compound word, combining the prefix “ek” which means “out” and a form of the base verb “kaleo” which means “I call.” In other words, the “church” is literally the “out-called” or the “called out people.” A church is a collection of people who’ve heard the call of God in Christ and have come out of one way of living and entered into another way of living. Any church is made up of people who have joined together to live out a different set of priorities and objectives than folks who are following a lead other than Jesus.

According to New Testament principles, one joins a body of believers in order to better live out one’s vocation as defined by Christ. Most bodies of believers I know of outlive individual pastorates, so which comes first, the body or the pastor? Even in the case where the church has been founded by the pastor who preaches every Sunday, if the church goes out of existence when the pastor retires or otherwise leaves, then you didn’t have a body of Christ followers: you had a personality cult.

I don’t think our media understand this. As a matter of fact, I don’t think that the majority of church-goers today understand this. The church is not primarily a place where people go to listen to well crafted religious oratory for roughly an hour a week. A church is a group of people practicing certain principles 24/7 who regularly gather together to encourage and empower each other to continue in that quest and celebrate the successes of that quest and to comfort each other through the failures. Nowhere in the New Testament is a pastor central to the work of the called-out people. A pastor has an important roll to play, but that roll is always supportive.

Read Ephesians 4:11-13. In part it says that Christ made some to be pastors and teachers – and here are the operative words – “in order to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ. . .” Nowhere in scripture does it suggest that a person should leave a body of Christ-followers because of an occasional opinion uttered by a pastoral person regarding a secular political state. According to the New Testament, the criteria for leaving a church centers on whether or not that group of Christ followers makes Christ real in the community in which it lives and whether or not the individual followers are being equipped to carry it out.