Galli, Bolsinger and Now Michael Mercer

Galli’s defense of the “chaplain” model of the pastor drew Tod Bolsinger to say “but not today” because “missional” is the new category, and that got Michael Mercer onto the platform with some serious pushback:

Yes. Churches need to be more missional. Yes. Pastors need to provide a degree of leadership to help their congregations burst the Christian bubble and get meaningfully involved in their world. However, what I can’t accept in Tod Bolsinger’s argument is that somehow, the meansby which we (pastors, in particular) most effectively provide the care and spiritual formation that will enable missional living has changed.

In my own work as a chaplain, I have come to appreciate more than ever before the power of personal, face-to-face ministry and the effects of that, which seem to multiply exponentially when we simply engage in humble, “chaplain-like” service to our neighbors.

Bolsinger seems to suggest that simple servants can’t cut it today because the world has changed. But I have to say it again: WHO is our model for ministry? If it’s Jesus, then I see a Gospel servant who changed the world by working personally, humbly, and in relative obscurity in a world long before anything like Christendom ever existed. And if it’s the apostles, then they did the same. They were “missional,” of course, going to the ends of the earth, but everywhere they went their work was simple, house to house and face to face, and energized by a servant approach and willingness to suffer. The Cross was their paradigm, plain and simple (see 1Cor 2:1-5).

I don’t care if we live in the first century, the tenth, or the twenty-first, the job of a “pastor” (shepherd) will always be to take care of sheep by feeding them, protecting them, nurturing them, tending them when they are sick and injured, and leading them on paths that they sometimes don’t want to take. It is intensely personal, hard, dirty, often repugnant work….

This is not the place to get into all of that; I simply want to make one comment in response to Tod Bolsinger’s post. What I fear about all this talk regarding “Missional” Christianity and “new paradigms” to meet “post-Christendom” realities, is that we are simply replacing one set of corporate principles with another.

Older, 20th century “corporate” paradigms adopted by the church were established when large post-WWII corporations dominated the landscape and their suit-wearing executives still walked the earth. You know the model. It’s the one all the dying people I visit as a hospice chaplain used to work for back in the day. Back when it was cars that rusted in the “Rust Belt,” not the factories that made them.

In today’s outsourced, globalized internet age, “new paradigms” have emerged. In recent years our corporate “hero” has been the young entrepreneur with “vision” who seeks to“empower” vast numbers of people by “equipping” them through personal computers, tech devices, and continual and better access to information and data. These visionaries have a dream for building “community” through social media. They have a social conscience, valuecreativity, participatory processes, diversity, and they tend to foster de-centralized organizational structures. They are striving to “transform” the world.

Hey, guess what? Sounds like the “missional” church program we’re now being sold! The spiritual glaze can’t hide the corporate model beneath….

In other words, it won’t be Mayberry. It won’t be General Motors. It will be Apple. It will be Facebook. It will be Twitter.

Meanwhile, my neighbor still lies bleeding by the side of the road.