Was Jesus just a dumb hick?

The answer, of course, is no, but one might be excused for coming to that conclusion after reading Andy Stanley’s assault on pastoral ministry in this lauded interview from 2007.

Stanley the Younger is a lead-by-example advocate of CEO pastoring and wants to run through the Bible with a large bottle of whiteout to get rid of the tricky bits that describe Christ-modeled pastoral ministry. Since Downing linked to this article last week, I haven’t been able to get this section out of my head:

Should we stop talking about pastors as “shepherds”?
Absolutely. That word needs to go away. Jesus talked about shepherds because there was one over there in a pasture he could point to. But to bring in that imagery today and say, “Pastor, you’re the shepherd of the flock,” no. I’ve never seen a flock. I’ve never spent five minutes with a shepherd. It was culturally relevant in the time of Jesus, but it’s not culturally relevant any more.

Absolutely. That word needs to go away. Think about that and how confidently it appears to have been uttered. This site has chronicled recent appalling disrespect shown to God’s Word by Furtick and his staff, and this Stanley quote shook me with the realization of just how riddled the Turnstile Church is with a low opinion of God’s written revelation.

Some related thoughts on Stanley and the horde of leaders who imbibe his wisdom:

• They worship culture more than the creator of culture. Who created the sheep? Who taught man to care for those sheep? Perhaps there was a shepherd standing nearby when Jesus spoke, but that’s only because before the foundation of the world God had ordained his profession and his activities that day. The illustration was the product of a Creator, not of a culture.
• They consider themselves equal to Christ. When Jesus said “Follow me,” Stanley apparently thought he was talking about Stanley, as in, “Follow Stanley.”
  

  “Follow me.” Follow we never works. Ever. It’s “follow me.”

  Stanley refuses to follow Jesus’ on shepherding, yet appropriates Jesus’ words to clear the deck for himself and bludgeon his followers into submission.

• They blaspheme the Word. Jesus is the Word, yet Stanley thinks the best he could do was search for an about-to-expire metaphor because it happened to be close at hand. Jesus was so inept with his references to shepherding that Stanley claims they were irrelevant as soon as Acts. “By the time of the Book of Acts, the shepherd model is gone,” he said. In other words, Jesus’ own words were stale by the time the New Testament was written. If we can dismiss Jesus so easily, why pay any attention to anything the other old, dead guys wrote?
• They strip the Word of inconvenient truths. The obligations of a shepherd don’t feel like they fit our more advanced times, so we shouldn’t even try to deal with them. Stanley cites Bill Hybels as inspiration for dismissing the Bible as too anachronistic.
  

  It’s going to be the best corporate institution it can possibly be, and we’re not going to try to merge first century –

  The church wasn’t an organization in the first century.

  Not an organization? Don’t tell Paul or any of the supervising apostles in Jerusalem. How shortsighted was Jesus not to anticipate that the church would grow so much it would one day turn into an organization? You can’t expect too much business foresight from a young rural carpenter, though, so we’ll give him a break. He founded a pretty useful brand name, so we’ll keep him around.

• They misunderstand the role of the pastor. Stanley allows that we can still see glimpses of shepherding.
  

  Nothing works in our culture with that model except this sense of the gentle, pastoral care.

  Yes, the shepherd could be gentle, but he was responsible for the life of his sheep. He fed the sheep, disciplined the sheep, and even sacrificed his life for them. Does David strike you as a gentle-all-the-time kind of character? Me neither.

• They abandon the saints to the wolves. This was yet another important function of the shepherd, and how our aforementioned hero developed the skills that let him fell a giant. If the shepherd was a disposable metaphor, how do the references to heretics as wolves make sense? Note Jesus’ warning in Matthew 7:15:
  

  Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.

  Note Paul’s last words to the church leaders on Ephesus in Acts 20:28-30:

  Take heed unto yourselves, and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit hath made you bishops, to feed the church of the Lord which he purchased with his own blood.

  I know that after my departing grievous wolves shall enter in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them.

  So much for being irrelevant by Acts. Most on point is Jesus’ reference in John 10 to leaders who abandoned their roles as shepherds.

  I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

  He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.

  He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.

  Yet according to Stanley and his brethren, shepherd is out, and hired hand CEO is in.

  Good to know.

• They add their own wisdom to their religion. Although Stanley is all for doing away with shepherding, he insists on adding the CEO as an essential part of church leadership.
  

  I think a big problem in the church has been the dichotomy between spirituality and leadership. One of the criticisms I get is “Your church is so corporate.” I read blogs all the time. Bloggers complain, “The pastor’s like a CEO.” And I say, “OK, you’re right. Now, why is that a bad model?”

  It’s a bad model for the church because it’s not shepherding and it’s not Biblical. It’s an excellent model for Starbucks, though.

• They are building a mass of mindless followers. The followers must be kept quiet and uninformed.
  

  As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information. Congregational rule, when you’re trying to make a complicated decision, works against the principle. So consequently, the guy with the microphone and the clearest message always wins. The most persuasive person in the room is going to win. Whether right or wrong.

  We don’t want good arguments to persuade people, then they might start doubting the leader. Think of all the time Paul wasted arguing his case to the council in Jerusalem (Acts 15) when he could have been about his business of being a model CEO.

• They are building a guild of authoritarian leaders. Has it ever struck you how much time these head pastors (?) spend talking to us and each other about leadership? When was the last time they held a conference to talk about God in the fashion of a Piper? Steven Furtick noted the abundance of leadership talk and resources last week:
  

  This generation has the most access to leadership development in the history of the world. We had better MAXIMIZE it.

  For what? Historically, the combination of a little bit of religion, compliant followers and authoritarian leaders has usually led to bad outcomes.

• They are building a nursery for heretics. At times, we at PP are pressed to declare that folk like Noble and Furtick are burn-them-at-the-stake heretics. When we refuse to do so, we’re usually told to go away because we’re hyperventilating about stuff that doesn’t matter.

  For the last decade or so, astute observers of American evangelicalism have been complaining and warning about the church’s creeping anti-intellectualism. The Turnstile Church is what you get when you mix that anti-intellectualism with cultural flexibility–a church that looks like the culture it’s a product of, but that can’t see what might be problematic with that. Note how criticism is dismissed without ever–ever–engaging ideas or Scripture. If you can’t defend your ideas, if you refuse all challenges, how would you ever know whether the wolves have entered the fold?

We live at a time where massive churches are led by pastors who quote Scripture like it was Shakespeare (a few well-known quotes repeated over and over), distort it, ignore it or reject it. We are not yet at the stage where we have much blatant heresy, but we’re getting there.

What happens to the generation that comes after Stanley and Warren and Noble and Furtick? The generation that has been encouraged to ignore the study of Scripture. The generation that thinks authoritarian leaders are more important than pastors. That knows there’s no value in Leviticus. That thinks Acts talks about pastors on video screens. The generation that thinks most other local churches are either corrupt or inept. That thinks you can talk about God however you want to.

I shudder.

The problem is that by the time we get there, it’s too late. How do you bring CEOs back to the Bible when they don’t know what’s in it and don’t think it should govern them? By then, the game is lost.

So when do you raise the alarm? When do you scream bloody murder?

Now. You do it now.

New Turnstile Church strategy: We avoid God’s Word to keep you from sin

Almost two weeks ago, I asked Perry Noble supporters to give us examples of Noble’s biblical wisdom. I asked someone to describe the emperor’s advertised grand clothes, not seeing any myself, and all of his supporters on this site (and there are many) decided he was best left in his jeans and tee shirt.

Perhaps Noble was a little peeved at being abandoned on these pages, but if you review his tweets from last weekend, it appears that he provided his own response, which was, to paraphrase, It’s best that I don’t preach as well as some others.

How else do you explain this tweet?

The worse thing God could give some of us is more information b/c it would not draw us 2 Him but cause us to run from Him in disobedience!

It must be nice to think you can give advice to God, though perhaps he’s just emulating his pal Steven Furtick, who thinks God spent too much time talking about Moses and wasted all his time on Leviticus. Or Andy Stanley who says we should excise the word shepherd from Jesus’ teaching. As he says, “That word needs to go away.”

Andy Stanley also says that concealing or dumbing down information is a useful leadership technique:

Here’s an incredibly important principle. You cannot communicate complicated information to large groups of people. As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information.

We talked about church marketing earlier in the week, and here we see how a sales mentality can corrupt faithful preaching. Note two lessons that Tony Morgan says are a characteristic of proper church marketing:

We focus less on what we say and more on how we act.

We reduce the number of competing messages we are trying to communicate.

The spoken word is deprecated and replaced by action, guided by a local pastor who thinks there’s benefit in intentionally hiding the whole counsel of God from his congregation. As Noble reminds us, an emphasis on continual action also suggests that we can stop learning.

Many times with me it isn’t always learning something new…but rather being reminded of what I should already know!

Stay shallow, friends. Stay shallow.

(An alternate interpretation of Noble’s first tweet would be that God only gives new revelation to people who are willing and able to properly respond to it, which often includes Noble himself. Such an interpretation suggests that the Bible is insufficient, and sets up pastors as special receptors of extra-biblical wisdom. It also limits God in whom he’s allowed to speak to.)

Why worship is more important than evangelism

In a recent discussion about what you lose if you try to reproduce church worship online, a commentator posted the following response:

what does it matter? as long as people are being reached for Christ and the doctrine is sound, who cares if online worship replaces physical in-house worship for some? think of it this way, say you live in florida and really like this church in seattle. if you’re able to attend the seattle church online and be ministered to, what’s wrong with the methods used in online worship?

One comment, three questions. Let’s give this a shot.

1. What does it matter? If the primary purpose of our lives is to recruit new converts, it doesn’t matter. If the primary purpose of our lives is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, it really does matter.
2. Who cares? God.
3. What’s wrong? It’s wrong because it inverts the purpose of worship and makes it all about us. Although worship does benefit us, its primary purpose is to benefit (glorify, bring joy to) God. Although he needs nothing from us, he instituted worship as the most appropriate way for us to regularly commune with him. As the Westminster divines discovered,
   

   The acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men.

   God’s Word has so much more to say about how we worship than it does about evangelism. Just because we’re trying to attract the unsaved doesn’t mean that we get to override God’s acceptable methods of worship.

If we are to ignore and abandon proper worship just because people are being reached, why include worship in our services at all? The commentator does acknowledge that doctrine is important, though I don’t know why. If evangelism trumps the worship of God, why should doctrine matter either? Actually, if a church’s doctrine suggests that the worship of God can be jettisoned for evangelism, it’s not sound doctrine in the first place.

Recently, we’ve seen Perry Noble mock parents for being concerned about worship, and this comment is in a similar vein. Why be so uptight about worship when people are going to hell?

Why? Because worship is the whole point. Evangelism is the gateway to worship. When God saves us, he regenerates our heart and makes it capable of performing its most important function of worshipping and glorifying God. Instead, the Turnstile Church treats evangelism as a gateway to evangelism. That will work for a while, but at some point the newly recruited recruiters will ask why is it so important to be saved? If it’s just so that you can be a volunteer to help sign up more volunteers, you’re cheapening the faith by running the church the same way as a multilevel marketing scheme. When the primary value and purpose of a marketing operation is in recruiting rather than in enjoying the product itself, loyalty to the product and process is going to be tenuous and temporary.

God-directed worship gives us an answer to the question of why salvation is so important. God, by his grace, adopts us into his family, making communion with him possible and necessary. God desires our worship, and he wants us to worship in ways that he has directed. It’s appropriate to honor him by paying a great deal of attention to what those directions are.

Although it’s not its purpose, worship can be an evangelistic tool. When the unsaved see how we are able to enjoy God’s presence, a jealousy to be a part of that may suggest that the Holy Spirit is drawing that person to salvation, because we know that our natural condition is to rebel and hide from God. So, rather than considering God-directed worship as an optional extra, we should place it front and center and show the world that it is why and how we rejoice in our salvation.