After reading our recent
post on “The Role of a Senior Pastor”, David B. asks a perfectly legitimate question:
“From the ‘brethren assemblies’ perspective, what is your opinion on the ‘full time worker’?”
From any perspective, denominational or
otherwise, there’s a point well worth considering here, and that is that “a
rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Things are what they are at their core, not merely what you label
them. A garbage dump smells like a garbage dump even if you call it a Post-Consumer Product Management Initiative.
Sometimes your nose tells you what your
eyes may not.
The Full Time Workers of Yesteryear
I replied to David as follows:
“Very briefly, it seems to me it depends on what the ‘work’ is understood to entail. It’s one thing for a local church to ‘commend’ a brother ‘to the grace of God’ (Acts 14:26) and send him off to do a work to which you and he believe he has been called (Acts 13:2). It’s quite another to install him as a ‘stealth pastor’ exclusive to your own group with a near-monopoly on the platform of a single congregation.
It seems to me the ‘full time workers’ of yesteryear were of the first sort. Today, maybe not quite so much.”
And, yes, it also seems to me that comment could
use a little further explanation.
Life on the Road
You see, you can’t sell the idea of a
full-time, paid “pastor” to Christians who are firmly committed to a
non-denominational, priesthood-of-all-believers way of meeting. Not by that
name at least.
But if you are bound and determined to
bring in a paid hireling to do the bulk of your preaching, teaching and political
maneuvering, you might just be able to do it under the rubric of “full time
worker”, a designation such Christians rightly associate with hard-working
individuals from the last century who dedicated themselves to planting new
churches and encouraging believers in established gatherings, usually by
driving or flying tens of thousands of miles annually to bring solid Bible
teaching to smaller congregations that lacked it,
by doing weeks of camp work in the summer while others were vacationing, and by
spending any time they were not on the road doing things like marking Emmaus courses, visiting hospitals, counseling
troubled believers and bringing the gospel to needy people in jails and on reserves.
In 1970, a “full time worker” in the “brethren
assemblies” David refers to might spend three to four weeks of the month
on the road preaching and teaching, living by faith on whatever gifts from God’s
people might show up in the mail. There was no salary, no set portfolio of
responsibilities, and certainly no appointment to a local position. Men who
were referred to as full time workers lived on a fraction of what the average
working Christian in their own local churches took home from employment, though
many of them worked much harder than I have ever done. Some are still doing so today.
The View Up Close
I know. I had a full-time worker in my own
family, and I’ve seen it up close. The commending local church that released my
dad to follow the path on which he believed the Lord was leading him never
sought to manage him or tell him what to do. Equally, they were never able to
provide a living wage for him, and he did not expect it from them. He was, like
the apostle Paul, freed up with the encouragement of his fellow believers to do
the work to which God had called him, and he did so for over sixty years.
You may like this idea or not. There are
arguments to be made that establishing a “circuit” on which traveling Bible teachers
frequently occupy the pulpits where local believers should be cutting their
teeth and learning how to use their own gifts keeps those young believers from
growing and developing as the Head of the Church would have intended just as
effectively as if the preaching and teaching schedule of their home church were
given over entirely to a single man. And if that’s your concern, fair enough. You
can certainly make the case that a preaching schedule carved in stone four
years in advance and largely filled with visiting speakers may cramp and impede
the development of local gift. That’s definitely a danger.
On the other hand, there are many small,
rural churches made up largely of women and men who, for one reason or another,
are unable to profitably preach and teach. These benefit immensely from visiting
speakers, since the notion of driving 30 minutes to an hour down the road
to fellowship with Christians in a larger community makes little sense to
anyone, as you cannot very easily bring others along with you. It is most
practical to go to church as close as possible to where you do your witnessing
and where you live your life.
Under the Guard
But whatever you may choose to call such an
individual, they are following a biblical pattern established in the book of
Acts. When they run out of money, they drive a taxi or find a way to make a few
bucks on the side in order to keep doing what they love.
On the other hand, the sort of “full time
worker” who spends three to four weeks of every month teaching and
preaching in a single, larger gathering while being conditioned to rely on a
regular paycheque (whether formally acknowledged or otherwise) is in a little
different category. He is functioning as a denominational “pastor”, whether he
chooses to acknowledge it or not.
You can call such a man a “full time worker”
if you wish, but he is nothing more than a stealth pastor. He is a convenient way
of sneaking past the guard of a minority of well-intentioned believers who
would prefer to see things done biblically.
It is not surprising that many of the men
now doing this for a living are young seminary grads with little commitment to
New Testament church principles. After all, there is a career to be had and
probably student loans to pay back.
But is that really where you want to get
your Bible teaching?
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