blogspot.

Oh blogspot, you've been so good to me. But alas, I'm moving on. Wordpress is beckoning me. And she has so much to offer. It's not you. It's me. I think I mostly just need a change.

To my few readers, it's time to update your RSS feeds. Here's the new address: matthewgallion.wordpress.com

Hope to see you there.

The Conversationalist

If the pastor’s primary responsibility in a community is to develop an environment in which growth is encouraged, then the identity of the community is not defined solely by the pastor. Instead, the pastor serves as the care-taker for a greenhouse, building structures that help budding growth continue. The pastor does not merely “cast a vision” for a community that can be fulfilled by just anybody. Instead, the pastor must know the congregation. It is true that the pastor serves in a unique leadership position, but that does not mean that the pastor is the only voice that should be heard.

 

For far too long, the pulpit has been the center of God’s activity. In any given community, the primary understanding of God’s will and revelation comes from one person. To honestly maintain such an idea, two things must be admitted: 1) Pastors are generally not over-bearing dictator types forcing orthodoxy down people’s throats in cruel ways. Such an idea is paints an unrealistic distaste for people who genuinely feel called to serve God, and who feel the burden of leading a congregation towards faith. 2) The average person in a congregation is not a brain-washed drone. People often disagree with pastors, and can make their opinions known. What is meant by such a critique of the pulpit is that people in the church have sometimes grown accustomed to looking to the center of a sanctuary for truth, rather than exploring the rhythms of God in their own lives.

 

This can be seen when people choose to live rigidly by the word of the pastor, when the pastor’s word is taken as gospel truth without thought. It can also be seen in the way people hold those in ministry to a higher standard than they hold themselves. When the pastor as a person is cut-off and distinguished too drastically from the life of the community, conversation is lost. The pastor then collapses into a “professional preacher and teacher,” having very little connection to “real life.”

 

Instead, the pastor should be the main facilitator of an on-going conversation. While the pastor serves a unique role in a faith community, it is not a totalitarian role as dictator, but instead the compiler of the many voices crying out in that community. The pastor spends precious moments listening to and collaborating with those voices that need to be heard to further define the ever-changing life of those involved.