If that is your response to anyone claiming to be a church doctor, you are not alone. However, a closer look at what it means to be a "doctor" in the church might set your mind at ease—a bit. To be a "doctor" is to be a teacher. We have long since lost the association between doctor and doctrine. In that sense, then, I seek to teach in the church and to the church as needed.
My aim is to provide the best teaching for those seeking to make sense of living Jesus's way in the midst of institutional church life. Most of the ministers I know serve older, more established churches in which the minister is required by the nature of the job to be a champion of the institution. However, because of the deeper calling God has made on the live of those who pastor, ministers often feel the distance between what the institution has become vs. what they read of the church of God's dream in Scripture.
Ministers, elders, and other church leaders really do live between these two worlds. Sometimes we can go weeks having only given attention to institutional maintenance. When this happens, it is easy to become dried up, empty, resentful, and lonely. I have come to accept some of this as the way God shapes leaders. Those dry spells lay a foundation for those times when we do experience God in dramatic ways.
So as your church doctor, if you will, I will seek to do no harm to the patient but I will seek a level of honesty necessary if the church in North America can find healing and new capacity for rapidly changing territory of our mission.
So I hope you will follow this blog and comment from time to time.
2 comments:
I do not believe you are being presumptuous to call yourself a "church Dr.". Do I think you will be our "Saviour"? No--already got one. Do I think you will solve every problem we have --not in a million years.However, I do think it is time that someone addressed the issue that the church in America has some serious problems.
(Some said, "at least we are so fractured we can't split"--sad, but maybe true)
I am more than happy to have you undertake that mission. The word "missional" sounds like we are going to shoot ICBMs at each other --so how about "Getting back to what we are supposed to do." (Small joke)
James the lesser,
Thanks for your support, I think.
I don't think the solving of our problems is even the goal. Each day will have enough trouble of its own, as our Master said. Some of our problems are merely distractions.
My hope is that I can participate in the task of disentangling the church from its culture enough that we can really see how compromised we have become.
So, no savior complexes here! Just a deep desire to be about the Mission of God.
Stan
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