ken wilson online

Well of course you have.  Then why did you cringe with the title of this post?  Because you probably realize how incredibly daunting the Bible can be–you who wrestle with it week to week to make it sensible to others.  Those others can maintain the comfortable fiction that the Bible is a plain and simple text for plain and simple people, as accessible as Chicken Soup for the Soul or The Purpose Driven Life.
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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 know these guys. They are young pastors. Many of them are young fathers. And they are sons. It’s the latter that most impresses me. A son is not always an easy thing to be. Because the world is hard on fathers. Mine fought in the Big War, was shelled in the heaviest day of shelling in the Big War, survived injury, came home, went to college, went to work. They didn’t have a clue in those days about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Men muddled through. His father was gassed in the previous Big War. As I said, the world is hard on fathers, almost as hard as it is on mothers.
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