5/7/14. DECLERGIFYING THE CHURCH … OR ELSE RECONCEIVING ‘CLERGY’
The report came from Pope Francis’ time in Brazil last year, that in a meeting with clergy there he told them: “that we need shepherds who participate in the life of the people and ‘who smell like sheep.’ ” I like that. Such a statement really rings my bell. For one thing, there is no such category as ‘clergy’ in the New Testament, certainly no sacralized class of persons set apart from the rest of the community. There are certainly those who emerge from within the community who are gifted in teaching and equipping God’s people (laity) in the Word of Christ, and bringing them to maturity in their New Creation lives, … but their identity is with, and out of, the people of God first and foremost. They “smell like sheep.”
I think it was Jacques Ellul who raised to our consciousness, that the whole concept of clergy is one of the subversions of Christianity. Maybe I’ve lived too close to divinity schools and theological seminaries in my lifetime, so that my ‘yellow lights’ go on when I hear ‘clergy talk,’ and hear budding young divinity students talk of developing: “the clergy mystique” and not getting too chummy with their lay members. What this deliberately, or inadvertently, produces is what I call: The clergy-seminary subculture. People go into such careers for all kinds of (often questionable) personal needs and reasons, but when they choose to hangout, and feel comfortable, primarily with other clergy, and to attend clergy conferences, and to remain somewhat aloof from the sheep—then something is badly amiss.
Ellul remarks: “When we are told that the church has ministers, and its life is organized around them, well and good. But at once we have to remember that these ministries are a gift of the Holy Spirit and not a permanent or organized thing. This leads us to invert the biblical movement. We set up pastoral positions or benefices with rectors and bishops, etc. We then fill these posts with people we think are suitable. But this is the opposite of the movement presented in the Epistles, in which the Holy Spirit gives to the church people who have the gifts of love or the word or teaching, and the church has t find a place for them even if it had not anticipated doing so. If, after a while, the Holy Spirit does not give someone who has the spirit of prophecy but someone who has the gift of miracles, then the church must change its form an habits” (The Subversion of Christianity, 1986. Wm. B. Eerdmans. p. 157).
Does that sound strange? If so, maybe you have not read your New Testament carefully. If I read such a seminal text as Ephesians 4 correctly, the pastor-teacher’s goal in the community would be to work himself/herself out of a job, since he/she would have been mentoring others into maturity so that the Word of Christ dwelt richly in, and so formed, the community of God’s people. A clergy-dependent church has a basic pathology in that it never comes to maturity. True gifts emerge from within the community, and are proven there.
Which means that we need either to de-clergify the church, or totally reconceive what it is we’re talking about. Eugene Peterson translates the introduction to John’s gospel with his unforgettable comment that “the Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” Jesus identified with the neighborhood to which he was sent, and so was able to communicate with them on their terms—he was incarnate, he “smelled like sheep.”
This means that there are at least two very basic requirements of those who are leaders of the Christian community: 1) that they be profoundly formed by scripture and effective in communicating that knowledge to others, and 2) that they be profoundly familiar with the existential realities of the people among whom they are living. To have community leaders who only have a theological degree, but are questionable in both of those two requirements raises all kinds of questions (and need to be questioned). Theological training schools take note …
