ken wilson online

Evangelical, what’s in a name?  It’s funny how you get these names.  I don’t recall signing up to be an evangelical.  It just happened.  Well, not quite.  I was a Jesus freak.  But  you can’t escape history, especially not with a religion whose founder was God coming into history and wearing it like a tool apron.  Who would want to take off what he put on? So you find yourself or that community of people that you’re part of, I don’t know, slowing down just long enough to let history catch up with you.
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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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