AND - Some Initial Observations, part 2

The next nugget from AND comes from pages 184-185 as the authors understand that the average church has one person (i.e., the pastor) doing 90% of the activities in any given Sunday because the whole meeting is centered on him and the message.  They make a case that this makes for an unbalanced meeting.

The church service with a sermon has and always will be necessary and helpful, but if used as the main way of making missional disciples, it falls far short.

Ephesians 4:11-13 gives us freedom in this regard when it suggests that "prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers have been given to equip the body to do the work."  I'm not sure how we took this to mean that God gives us preachers to keep us happy and fed as followers. These gifts…are given to help train church members do the actual work of evangelism, pastoring, and teaching.  Imagine what would happen if the average pastor/teacher who gives 25 to 30 hours a week to preparing a sermon actually gave 25 to 30 hours a week to teaching people how to teach other people the Scriptures?  It would so outpace the amount of biblical discipleship and scriptural knowledge in our people that we'd never go back to the old model!

I am not in total agreement with the authors' theology of church governance as a whole, but this effort to challenge the status quo of the modern pastorate has merit.