There are those who tend to see attendance at church services as the best litmus test of people’s love for and commitment to God.

For them, any fall off in church attendance is an indication that people are becoming ungodly or permissive. But one ought not to conflate church attendance with people’s general belief in God. In other words, people do not love God any less because they do not attend church, neither are they atheists because they do not believe in organised religion. This truth is something that is very hard for the devout Christian — the one most likely to attend church — to swallow.

As a minister with almost 50 years of service in the Church, I have never bought into the notion that the more people you see in church the greater is the quality of their love for God and their fellow men; the more seized they are to do the mission of Christ in bringing his gospel to others; or the more they understand their mission to a hurting world. If this were the case, then we should be seeing a greater transformation of society for good. But are we seeing this?

I believe that even the most ardent churchgoer is aching for something more than that which they are being offered by their respective churches or denominations. I ended the first part of this two-part article by urging that what people seem to be searching for is a church unusual instead of a church as usual. This is more than a catchy phrase. It speaks to what I believe to be a rediscovery of the true identity of the Church as an organic and dynamic community living out the implications of the salvific love of Christ in the world.

People are searching for an organic fellowship in which they can freely express themselves without being judged or condemned; for an organisation without prohibitive rules and regulations which often ignore the mediation of God’s grace when people err. It is not that they do not see the need for structure and order, but what many instinctively reject is the top-heavy power structure in which leadership often tends towards excommunication of the errant one rather than restoration.

The Church unusual is the Church, or fellowship of Christian believers, that fundamentally returns to the concept of its early beginnings in the New Testament. There we see a truly organic Church, defined only by the love of people for the Christ they served. It was a Church overflowing with generosity to those who were in need. It was defined by the enthusiasm of the faithful, born out of a desire to take the good news of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ to the world.

This enthusiasm was as admirable as their boldness in declaring this new reality into which they believed the world had entered in Jesus Christ.

The work of the Church, in taking care of the social needs of widows and orphans and the most vulnerable in the society, was a stark contrast to the often horrible and brutish life under which the poor and rejected lived in Roman society. It was not long before the Church saw the need to create the diaconal ministry to take care of these emerging social needs. Thus, the appointment of the seven deacons in Acts 6, the most prominent among the first set being Stephen, who was stoned for his boldness in declaring the good news, was a move in the right direction.

What the early Church insisted on is that there should be no confusion between the administration of the Church and the pastoral, missional work of those who are called to proclaim the good news. The appointment of the deacons was to ensure that the apostles, the called and sent ones, were freed from this responsibility to do what they were called to do — proclaim the word of God.

The early Church had order and discipline, but its leadership was not seized with the need to exercise power over those in their charge. They were not burdened by the minutiae of church administration, which today means presiding over a budget and ensuring the “plant” is well run. By a random survey of clergy from mainline churches, I can safely say that 60 per cent of the work that is done by clergy/pastors is administrative. This means, more than anything else, presiding over a budget, often from fund-raising projects, and being involved in endless meetings that often bear no good, lasting results. As one senior clergy told me, “Raulston, you have to watch the money, ” as if to suggest that this is the sine qua non of clerical survival.

Even a cursory look at the charge that is given to ordinands to the sacred ministry in the Anglican Church, which I can speak of more authoritatively — but is likely to be the case with other churches — reveal that there is no insistence on the administrative functions of the clergy. Starting from the consecration of a bishop to the ordination of a priest and deacon, the charge is heavily weighted on the pastoral function of the person so charged. They are to work with the people of God in proclaiming Christ’s death and resurrection and watch over and pray for all those committed to their care, helping them to interpret the gospel of Christ.

The bishop is specially charged to govern the church after the example of the apostles and to know his/her people. The bishop has a special responsibility as a shepherd to the shepherds that are set over the flock. This is just a summary of the pastoral functions. Church administration is implied but never categorically stated as one to be valued over the primary calling to be a shepherd to the flock.

Yet it is the administrative functions that seem to override the pastoral. One great signal of this can be seen in the annual church synod where the greater part of the agenda is preoccupied with reports, resolutions, and other administrative matters without much space left for discussing the spiritual mission of the church and the lives of those who execute the ministry of the church. Again, this is not just the bane of the Anglican Church, but a matter which one can be sure persists in other denominations.

The constitutions and canons of the Church seem to have overridden the pastoral functions which are primary to one’s call to servanthood. There seems to be a conflict between the ordination vows of the clergy and the administrative burdens that are imposed on them. This is why, perhaps tongue in cheek, I urged that there needs to be a re-examination of these constitutions which would remove the clergy from the centre of administrative functions and free him/her up to really fulfil the call to ministry. No clergyperson will ever admit that they are called to administer a bureaucratic church organisation. They will tell you they are called to preach the gospel, tend to hurting souls, and bring the love of God expressed in Jesus Christ to them.

But with the often burdensome administrative functions to which they have to attend, they have no time for this. Thus, many a pastor suffer burnout or, as one person described it, become “pooped pastors”. If they are willing to admit it, many will tell you they find no joy in what they are doing. This joy is often communicated to the faithful in the pews, some of who vote with their feet. So if it is a matter that there is a decline in church attendance because people are fed up with church as usual, doing things the same way, year in and year out, then this may not be a bad thing.

Leadership must sit down and re-examine how they are doing the Lord’s work and determine whether they are living out the true implications of their ordination vows. They must determine whether the time has not come to divorce administrative functions from the pastoral and farm these out to the vast talents for administration that are in the Church, as the early apostles did. Then they will really do the work God called them to do, which is to go out into the pasture and feed God’s flock. Many are hungry and thirsty and crying out to be fed.

Dr Raulston Nembhard is a priest, social commentator, and author of the books
Finding Peace in the Midst of Life’s Storms; The Self-esteem Guide to a Better Life; and Beyond Petulance: Republican Politics and the Future of America. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or
stead6655@aol.com.