Score one for the Methodists
Posted in Church by RB on October 2nd, 2007 Back in my Baptist days I never understood the Methodists. I knew (or at least thought) that their ministers wore robes. I knew that they had strange people like Bishops. I knew that the denomination had a lot of control over everything. And, oddly enough to me, I knew that they regularly rotated pastors.
This last one seemed so strange to me. Everything I knew pointed to the pastor as being the most important part of the church. How could the church survive regularly changing its figurehead? And how could the congregation be sure its next preacher would be as good as the last. After all, isn’t preaching what church is all about? These questions continued to cause me to wonder about our UMC brethren even when I became a Presbyterian.
I started seeing the value of the Methodist system a few years ago when I came to grips with the fact that the pastor has no business being the figurehead of the church. We should have no figurehead other than Jesus, and regularly rotating pastors helps enforce that fact.
Our church had to come to grips with this fact about 10 months ago when our founding pastor announced his future resignation. He felt that it was time to return to being a missionary, so he decided to step down. It’s been a good thing for our church overall. We’ve come to realize that the church is about its members and their relationship with Jesus, and that the pastor is just there to facilitate that. It’s also been an interesting time for me. Despite my better intentions, I was elected to the pulpit committee.
We’re now 9 months into a process that at many churches takes 18. On the one hand it’s been an amazing journey. On the other hand, I’m wondering about the futility of it. My conservative estimate is that we’ve now spent about half a man-year in meetings alone. That doesn’t include the time spent reading resumes, listening to sermons, talking to references, interviewing, and, of course, praying. And the burden is becoming more intense. If things don’t go well, if we don’t pick the “right guy”, if there’s a bad match, then we’ll be at this again in a year. If things go well, then we can probably hope to put this process off for about 7 or so years. I can see why it makes sense to have a bunch of professional Christians coordinate the rotating of pastors every 4-8 years; it just speeds up the inevitable.
