Back the other week, I was talking to some Evangelical Anglicans about the state of the CofE. I explained to them the problem. With their “stay in” strategy that it leads to people thinking they have to stay when their evangelical vicar is inevitably replaced with a liberal.
One response was to the effect that a sound vicar will train up the congregation. They will all become sound and so have nothing to worry about.
Well, they themselves quickly highlighted the flaws in their argument when they told me why they could not possibly leave with their church. Apparently, congregants, even Evangelicals, remain tied to their buildings and graveyards with ancestral tombs. Now I suspect they are overstating the case because sadly people will quickly leave once they fall out over the hymn choices of flower arrangements. However I would have expected them to have greater confidence in the ability of a sound vicar to train such sentimental attachments out of the flock.
In any case, this mechanical view of pastoral ministry where the teaching pastor downloads Biblical knowledge to the congregation before moving on falls a long way short of Scripture but sadly seems to feed off of a deficient culture within conservative Evangelicalism. It’s the same culture that creates university churches that think they have three years to download a syllabus into students instead of clicking that they are playing their small part in a lifetime
Of course pastors exist to equip the church for service but when you look at the New Testament, especially Paul’s instructions to the Ephesian elders, you don’t see a data download culture. Instead there is an ongoing, living, lifetime relationship between elders and flock, the elders are meant to keep watch, to provide and protect.
It’s not download and move on.
Faithroots 