Jeremy L. Berg

By Mike Glenn

Over the past few years, my tribe (Southern Baptists) have dealt with the issue of women as pastors. Every year at the annual convention, someone will bring up a motion or resolution to make sure no Southern Baptist church employs a woman as pastor. The dramatic moment of the meeting will be when someone comes to the microphone and accuses a church of having a woman pastor and then points to the church’s website where the crime has been discovered.

Under the “staff” heading on the website, a woman will be listed as a pastor. She might be “pastor to children,” or “pastor to pre-school families”, it doesn’t matter. There it will be, right there before God and everybody, the word “pastor” next to a picture of a female staff member.

The convention will be thrown into an intense debate over the role of women, the autonomy of the local church and then, a series of votes will be held on what to do with that church and its convention membership. Several churches have been voted out of the convention for having women pastors or women as pastors on their staff teams.

First of all, I want to know who has time to scan the websites of Southern Baptist churches – or any other church for that matter – to see what their female staff members are called. With all that is going on in the world, with all of the brokenness in our churches, who gets up in the morning and says, “I have to search these churches’ websites to see if any of them called a woman a pastor?”

Really? Is this a good use of time? Somebody needs to get a life.

For one thing, what a church decides to call its staff is none of my business. If I’m not a member of that congregation, how they address their ministers doesn’t concern me. If you’re not a member of that congregation, it shouldn’t concern you either. If you don’t like how the staff of your church is addressed, find another church. Life is too short to be worried about such things.

But we do worry about such things. I’ve been in meetings where a church personnel committee parsed over the naming of a staff position the way New Testament scholars debate the meanings of Greek verbs. Is it “Executive Pastor” or “Associate Pastor?” Does the youth minister really need to be called “Student Pastor?” Hours will be consumed trying to make sure we find the correct title for each position.

It doesn’t really matter. They’re all wrong and here’s why.

Titles like pastor and minister imply a focus on the congregation. I know what pastor is supposed to mean. I’ve preached a lot of sermons on the roles of the “under shepherd.” I also know what the titles have come to mean. Pastors are executives who are responsible for running the local church. They are responsible for everything from building maintenance to funding and overseeing the budget. They are to manage the programs of the church and make sure these programs are well attended. If the pastor can get in a good word for Jesus on Sunday morning, that’s nice, but the standards of success for a local pastor is one, is the budget being met and two, are the programs of the church well attended.

Few job descriptions for pastors mention evangelism (except in the most superficial way) or discipleship. This would be understandable if we lived in a Christian nation. We don’t. Whether we did is a topic of another day, but right now, we don’t. The numbers speak for themselves. Every major denomination is in decline. Seminary enrollments are down. The vast majority of Americans don’t identify as believers.

What does this mean? Simply this: if we are followers of Christ, we are missionaries. We may be school teachers or mechanics, bankers or computer programmers, but however we “make tents,” we have to understand we have been sent by the Spirit to be missionaries to our communities.

When I was growing up, there were countries in the world that wouldn’t allow Christian missionaries to enter their countries. These countries, however, would let certain “experts” into their countries to help with economic development. We had doctors, agricultural consultants, teachers of English and engineers trained as Christian missionaries and sent into these countries. These missionaries worked their day jobs and looked for opportunities to have gospel conversations and home Bible studies. This method was extremely successful.

The sending of tent making missionaries was such a successful strategy in these international settings a lot of us have begun to think that same strategy may work here in our own communities. Here’s how it would work. First, we’d work at our day jobs – banker, farmer, computer programmer– during the day and then, we’d look for opportunities for gospel conversations and home Bible studies in our own neighborhoods.

For whatever reason, most of our neighbors tell us every Sunday they aren’t coming to church. That means the church must go to them. Relax. We’ve been doing this for a couple of thousand years. It’s called missions and the people who do it are called “missionaries.”

That’s why all of this debate on what we call ministers is such a waste of time. We’re not in a churched world. We live on the mission field. That makes us missionaries.

We’re all missionaries and if we’re not missionaries, I wonder if we’re anything at all.