Dr. Thomas Blackaby has an essay up at SermonCentral.com entitled, "Pastors: Be Shepherds, Not Sheep."  In it, he takes pastors to task:

Instead of leading their people to find the heart and mind of God for their own congregations, some pastors seek to copy other “more successful” congregations that have blown past the norm, set new standards, and developed innovative approaches for reaching their communities. These churches have successfully marketed their strategies, and multiple thousands of other churches around the world have bought into their techniques and methodologies. We love to buy other people’s techniques because it means we don’t actually have to come up with our own. We don’t have to do the hard work of going before the Lord on bended knee or going without to fast and pray to seek the heart and mind of our Master. We can open a book or watch a DVD and, poof! There it is already prepared for us!

I've been trying to have this conversation with our church 'leadership' for over a year.  Let's just say that hasn't gone so well for me.  I'm still grieving. But this essay can't be so easily dismissed. This isn't some ticked-off anonymous cook at a homeless shelter who just doesn't get it. This is a serious piece of work from a serious writer who is part of a well known and influential ministry. The irony of it being posted on Sermon Central was, well - I started laughing as I was reading it. As I reflect on it, though, it just seems perfect - where else are you going to reach those pastors who are downloading their sermon each week? What Sermon Central's corporate masters think of it, though, one can only guess.

Dr. Blackaby's contention is that pastors have gone from being shepherds to being sheep - that is, they are following other churches, other pastors, other 'models' of church instead of doing the hard work of prayer and fasting to seek and find the will and presence and power of God. Mr. Blackaby goes on to say that there are four reasons why pastors have become sheep instead of shepherds:

1-) Many pastors have not seen a model of a God-seeking pastor in their formative years.

2-) Some pastors see their ministry as a job that they get paid for, rather than a calling from Christ.  

3-) Some pastors have succumbed to the pressures of their congregation to look like all the other churches.

4-) Pastors simply do not have the time, nor do they particularly want to pay the price personally to seek the Lord.

There's a lot I could say about any one of these points but I doubt I could say it as well as Dr. Blackaby does. But did you get that first one? I mean - really - did you get that? I got my ears boxed for saying exactly what he did and it's just this: It's been so long since we've seen a real man of God that most of us don't know what it looks like anymore. I say most of us because those men are out there. There are those men out there pastoring churches, putting their hearts on the line week after week for their congregations, honestly trying to do the right thing. Yet they get so caught up in the politics and the power plays and the bullshit and the mundane insanity of running the business end of a church that God gets what's left over and that's the way it is, boys and girls. And I want to take Mr. Blackaby to task for not saying that we - those nameless, faceless 'sheep' - bear some responsibility for this sad state of affairs. But you sit in church on Sunday morning, and realize that it bears no relevance to your life on Monday morning, and what on earth are you going to do? How are you going to go against the power structures that are already in place? Do you really want to go down that road? Do you really want to fight a battle for control - the very thing that breaks your heart in the first place? Or would you rather just quietly leave and, if you do, what's the alternative? What is life like after church, besides a great, big, frightening unknown? I want to challenge Mr. Blackaby to address all of this but, as I think about what he's said, realize that he can't. No-one can walk that road for us. In the end, you live and work with what you have, and compromise what you know in your heart is the very heart of God, or you leave. No, the next church down the road isn't any better, but there's always a another way. The hard way. The narrow way.

But then, what do I know? After all, the problem is me.