Urban Reformation

A couple of years ago John Piper came out with this book Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry . This is a collection of 30 articles that Piper had written to church leaders. He talks of insulated & Isolated American Christianity. He speaks of American’s waking from the dream world that being a Christian is normal and safe. Piper sees that the professionalizing of the ministry has done it great harm and often killed or maimed many a congregation. He calls pastors to abandon their worldly views of seeing their pastoral ministry as a professional vocation and to reclaim the view of God’s call as a prophet.

My thought this morning from reading Jim Spencer’s Post called ‘ Every Believer Called & Equipped ‘ circles around the fact that we seemingly still have a popish mentality, as we believe because we have pastors and deacon’s or elders often without thinking about it in any purposeful way, we make them out to be our spiritual hands in all aspects of spiritual life.  They do bible study for us, they read for us, they pray for us, they fast for us, they reach out to the lost for us and yes we have they that do missions for us.

We must cast down the notion that we are not responsible for these things ourselves, that we have no part in discipleship or spiritual disciplines because we have those who are trained in the church to do these things in our place.  Much like in Catholicism, the priest becomes our mediator or the virgin Mary our intercessor before God, as if God is somehow just outside our grasp, but at the fingertips of those who are trained or have other some other merit.  Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and man, but this hasn’t changed out mentality of wanting not to have a relationship ourselves with God but someone to do it for us.  Democracy and professionalism have the congregations of America looking to the leaders of the church as they grow in spiritual maturity, as an excuse for the believer not to grow our own spiritual maturity.

I don’t think these things are carried out in any specific or purposed way, only that we fill our lives up with so many other things to, as my last post talked about, the neglect of those things that are spiritual and eternal.  Someone said to me one time the only kind of “Drift” that there is to drift “Away.”

Once the leadership reads the books about not being professionals but prophets, we the congregations of America, need to take heed of the notion about putting the leadership’s spiritual maturity & spiritual disciplines on a pedestal, as justification to be a slacker in the things of God ourselves.

This is a grave injustice done by we who sit in the pews to the exclusion of all else.

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