ken wilson online

If you’re a young pastor in the United States, you’ve grown up with the culture wars.  You may be sick to death of them, but you may also find them hard to shake.  In the middle of the noise, let me offer this counsel: don’t let the loudest voices intimidate you.  Do the work of an evangelist.  Keep your heart open to the heart of God for those who are the outside of faith looking in.  Like Billy Graham, in fact, who in his later years has had some pretty surprising things to say.
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So you’re a young pastor.  Have you noticed that people sin?  Yes, they do bad things.  Some they do to you–complain about you to others for example because they are afraid to speak with you directly.  Oh that’s galling.  So you will be tempted to focus on those sins because they make an impression on you.  But that’s not what the poor sinners need so much.  They need someone to talk to about the struggles in their lives which often involves sins–the sins of others or their own or the communal sins that affect them.  As you are sitting there listening to a poor sinner, you will be tempted to assume the posture of the expert.
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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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