The Biblical role of a Pastor.

[GraceAmbassador]

Brethren: Our friend Charles, (W.B.) sent me a number of articles to read and I was very impressed, I am still reading, but I want to make this first one public here and hopefully we may have a bit of conversation about it. I love the way this man expresses himself and I have used his analogy before and LOVE IT. Well, let him speak for himself:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/55216082/F...al-Arminianism

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Freed From the Shopkeeper's Prison
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Rev. H. R. CurtisTrinity Lutheran Church – Worden, ILZion Lutheran Church – Carpenter, ILPresented General Pastors' Conference of the North Region of the IN District, LCMS, May 9, 2011.I. Introduction
American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are notleaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on thechurch stationery and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their
calling.
They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoralministry hasn't the remotest connection with what the church's pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted. Most of my colleagueswho defined ministry for me, examined, ordained, and then installed me as a pastor in a congregation, a shortwhile later walked off and left me, having, they said, more urgent things to do. The people I thought I would be working with disappeared whne the work started. Being a pastor is difficult work; we want thecompanionship and counsel of allies. It is bitterly disappointing to enter a room full of people whom you haveevery reason to expect share the quest and commitments of pastoral work and find within ten minutes that theymost definitely do not. They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status.Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills.The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops theykeep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper's concerns – how to keep the customers happy, howto lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers willlay out more money.Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping: religious shopkeeping, to be sure, butshopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepeneurs; while asleep they dream of he kind of success that will get the attention of journalists. . .The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners,gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. . . . The pastors' responsibilityis to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.
- Eugene Peterson,
Working the Angles,
pp. 1-2.

[GraceAmbassador]

This Lutheran sounds like a hyper Calvinist and I love him more as I read him more! here is something amazing. Now, a bit of background: He believes that the Church, the ministers, should not strive to seek after pagans to be converted. That's debatable because we don't know whom the Elect are, but, he has a point! Evangelicalism has led ministers to do stuff, to change the core of the Gospel to make it palatable to those whom God did not even care to elect! So, I love this part here, and again, it is almost as if he is reading my heart at least in few portions: (Please, all us us no-conformists must read this article). Here is what I like: (All EMPHASIS are mine).

"C. So what about All Things to All Men that I Might Save Some?
I hope by now we can see some more context to this often quoted, but misunderstood passage from Paul. Just as Romans 10 (how will they hear) is often misunderstood by stopping the quotation too soon (they have heard!), so also here depends on which sylLAble you put the emPHAsis. That I might save some.

Parallel with 2 Tim 2:10:my ministry is for the sake of the elect.
With all those uses of the verb save in the Scriptures – here, and I was saved by your prayers, and even Baptism now saves you – the verb is used in an instrumental sense. Christ saves us. That’s the absolute. Baptism only saves by connecting to Christ. Prayers saves because of Him who hears (and remember: he hears and knows what you need even before you ask). Baptism is the means by which Christ comes – and Paul is the means by which the means by which Christ comes comes. So read that again. He’s not saying that by his efforts at least a few folks will be saved. He’s saying that at least I might be the one to bring these gifts to some. This passage is specifically about the Gentile believer, Jewish believer divide. As we've just seen, Paul never sought out opportunities to seek pagans. He did not start coffee bars, or tabernae as the Romans called them, to draw in the pagans so that they might hear a message tailored to pagan ears. This is not what he meant by becoming all things to all men. He just meant that he lived according to Jewish cultural law among Jews and according to Greek cultural norms among Greeks. In other words: If you live in NE, prepare to root for the Huskers."

My feelings exactly! I highly recommend read his entire article. Not seeking agreement, but some clarification as to one more reason as to why churchianity has departed from Biblical Gospel preaching into a "find a customer" stance.

[rlhuckle]

I have a copy of the Peterson book (Working the Angles). It was given to me by my brother-in-law (at the time in training to be a pastor for a Free Methodist Church). I remember reading the Introduction (which you quote above) and chuckling as I had just left his church's services. The church had invited a guest musician to play that Sunday and the "artist" had set up tables in the vestibule so she could sell t-shirts, tapes and cds and stuff. I felt like turning over the tables--but I didn't.

I recall saying to myself that words are easy, but truth takes a miracle. I'll have to re-read the book.