ken wilson online

We’re taking our time plodding through set theory–bounded sets, centered sets, etc.  Why? Why bother?  What does any of this have to do with faithfulness to Jesus?  Thanks for asking. Set theory is a way of understanding underlying cultural assumptions that affect the way we understand categories.  Still pretty esoteric sounding?  Except that categories are important in the Bible and in life.  Who is a Christian for example, is a category question.  Who is a member of the body of Christ? is a category question.
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Sola Scriptura is the rallying cry of the Protestant Reformation, but it never rang true for me.  I was never a Lutheran or a Presbyterian.  Forgive me, but I was raised Episcopalian–that middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism–and then went Ayn Randian for a while, then back to Jesus through the Jesus movement, shaped mainly by a Jewish believer who didn’t have a dog in the Catholic-Protestant fight, which was a Gentile brawl.
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Good pastors are about empowering people to do the Jesus stuff.  So there is a great need for pastors who can learn to trust others to do things better than themselves.  Clericalism, the view that pastors are the Christian professionals who can do Christianity better than anyone else is boo-honkey.

But it’s my belief that many pastors have been too passive in their leadership.  We’ve allowed ourselves to be cow-towed by other voices within the wider Christian community.  We let them take the lead because they have the biggest media megaphones, or the biggest mailing lists or they have somehow gained the ear of many people.  Which is fine.  It’s good to have a mix of voices in any movement.  But we’ve given too much of our pastoral leadership task away to some voices.
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I wonder if we’ve had the emphasis on the wrong syllable on the pressing issue of authority.  Speaking big picture, long time frame here.  The church at it’s inception had one creed: Jesus is Lord.  Simple.  All authority in heaven and on earth given to him, Jesus. What rolls off our tongue like a tired chorus, was, on their lips, incendiary. Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not, and Apollos is not and Astarte is not and the moon and the sun and the stars are not….and the powers and principalities that hold sway in this world are not.  Every knee shall bow before the One not the many, not the several, not the few.
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Young pastor, prepare thyself for the not-so-local church. You grew up, perhaps, in a local church, or you were drawn to pastoral ministry through your experience in a local church (if not, get thee to one pronto, unless you plan to give away what you haven’t experienced). You may have been to seminary and taken classes on leadership in the local church–teaching, managing budgets, working with boards, and all that. These leadership classed may have been based on the assumption that the local church is led by local leaders. But the local church has changed, and it has changed rapidly and dramatically. It’s not so local anymore. And that means that you, pastor, aspiring or actual, are not in the same position of leadership that pastors once were. You will find within the local church, the powerful influence of leaders you don’t know and will never meet, some of whom you admire at a distance, others who make your skin crawl, and here’s the kicker, most of whom work at cross purposes with each other.
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