By Claudio Oliver, RdC Leader, Brazil

As originally posted the blog: http://naruacomdeus.blogspot.com/2010/03/for-portuguese-speakers-vou-fazer.html. This is a transcript from a lecture Claudio shared at Surrender 10, in Australia. The full content of the speech can be watched clicking here.

Who Needs A Pastor?

To address this point I’ll try to make a twofold approach.

On the one hand, I would like to try to describe what, in my humble opinion, has been a general movement the church has taken since the late 50’s, but mostly in the 60’s and 70’s until today, and how that is at the origin of some struggles we have to address in our time.

On the other hand, I will at least try - if space and time permit - to question some of the assumptions that have led, even unconsciously, to the kind of answers we have proposed to the world.

A church going astray

After the end of the World War II, a phenomenon, surely pre-existent, started to become perceptible in the church, and eventually dominated the actions and deeds of mercy and justice that the church has been called to carry out. Far from [the church] being a victim of what I’m starting to describe here, all of this has come about because of an attitude that was proposed and taken up inside of its own walls. That attitude can be defined by the word “delegation.”

Mostly after World War II, acts and deeds of justice were performed as tools to address common assumed needs to be satisfied and strategically managed. What’s more, they were undertaken as a global task and an obligation, instead of being done as local attitude and a natural flow of love, contingent and out of a forgiven heart. Having taken on such a big task as a “call”, the church perceived, and at the end established, that the task was too big for a local congregation to deal with and–in greater and growing proportion after the late 50’s–that the task had to be delegated to agencies, para-ecclesiastical organizations, boards, committees and programs specialized to address those assumed needs. Alongside those inventions, church planting and missions were also delegated to similar structures, separated from local congregations. The local community of faith did not own the missional and mercy activities anymore, which became the job of separate agents, financed and supplied by the church, in order to have the work done.

Now, milked as a cow and free from the concerns with the world immediately around it, what was left inside of the church? Self-sufficiency and maintenance. As a world in itself, the church became concerned more and more with non-tangible issues, hyper-spirituality, how to teach people to escape to heaven, or how to wait for Jesus at a secure station.

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by Karen Parchman

North American Network Conf. Call 5/14/10 from Leah Hood on Vimeo.

Thank you to all who participated in May’s North American Network Conference Call last week!  I found the conversation stimulating and enlightening.

Several comments from our partners in Latin America stood out to me, particularly as Claudio asked us to re-imagine and re-member how to be “the church as a localized people in the diaspora.”  Carlos wisely reminded us that the work of the church isn’t “our” work or “their” work: the North and South must work together.  Robert asked us to wonder with him about the structures of power that impact relationships.  It reminded me that we should be talking about a theology of power that might give us wisdom for how to move forward together.

Please feel free to pass along the link to the audio recording above. There are many church practitioners struggling with some of the same questions that Carlos, Robert and Claudio addressed that could benefit from the conversation.

Again, thanks for your participation.  We look forward to hearing from you!

Shalom,
Karen, Bruce, and Leah