Jeremy L. Berg

Tim Morey pulled these excerpts from a Dallas Willard interview at Out Of Ur.  I, too, have been listening to a series of lectures by Dallas myself this past week.  He’s been an enormous influence in my life and a magnificent gift to the 21st century church.

As a 30-year old visionary leader who often lacks adequate grace and patience with the church-as-usual, older, wiser Christian leaders like Dallas Willard and Eugene Peterson inspire me to be a gentler prophetic voice among my generation.  Gentle in a Gandalf sort of way — grace with gravity, and a holy discontent.

Here’s Willard’s gentle jab to church leaders:

Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings.

But I do grieve for the people within the church who are suffering—especially the pastors and their families. They are suffering because much of North America and Europe has bought into a version of Christianity that does not include life in the kingdom of God as a disciple of Jesus Christ. They are trying to work a system that doesn’t work. Without transformation within the church, pastors are the ones who get beat up. That is why there is a constant flood of them out of the pastorate. But they are not the only ones. New people are entering the church, but a lot are also leaving. Disappointed Christians fill the landscape because we’ve not taken discipleship seriously.

[Pastors need to] change their definition of success. They need to have a vision of success rooted in spiritual terms, determined by the vitality of a pastor’s own spiritual life and his capacity to pass that on to others.  When pastors don’t have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success—models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture. They begin to think their job is managing a set of ministry activities and success is about getting more people to engage those activities. Pastors, and those they lead, need to be set free from that belief.

Read full interview here.