Ruling and Teaching

http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2010/10108.htm

I don't always find myself agreeing with Joe Small--nor do I know why i should!--but in this press release I find his thoughts right on the mark.

For context, a lot of my reading in the past couple of months has waded through materials on leadership and its challenges in the 21st century. One of the things that has impressed me along the way is the extent to which effective leadership is so often undermined by over-reaching. Knowing the limits of your role, and how to use especially the edges of authority in order to move people into truly creative change, is I think one of the most important facets of trying to lead just about anything these days, from a community organization to a church and beyond.

What Joe suggests is that Pastors have been encouraged, and allowed themselves to be increasingly defined in ways that would look an awful lot like the Executive Director of a modest Nonprofit organization. Guilty as charged. Knowing where all the lightbulbs are, what line of the budget accounts for the paper supplies, and where to order chalk might not be the best use of a seminary education. It can keep things moving with some efficiency, but is it faithful?

He then harkens back to language that slipped away from Presbyterians through merged mergers: "teaching elders" and "ruling elders" with I think a really nice highlight: "ruling as in measuring". "Ruling elders measure the congregation’s “fidelity to the gospel” and the “spiritual health of the congregation.” Well put!

Of course, if you take Calvin as your model, that teaching role can be quite forceful. There's a reason he got run out of Geneva the first time round! Calvin used pulpit and lectern to create a new and radically different image of what a church could do and be, and we're still living into all the implications of that on the Reformed side of the Christian house. Teaching is decidedly not telling people what they want to hear when they want to hear it, but in this unique Presbyterian way Joe Small set my mind to pondering, it is always set alongside the "rule" of those ruling elders.

I suspect the impact would be great if we, as a church, sought to live back into the roles that tradition carved out for us, while pushing them into the future instead of trying to make the present fit old paradigms like a size 10 foot in a size 8 shoe. It's that balance I want to hold in my mind for just a bit: finding the new possibilities in old language and categories without letting that old language bring with it all the baggage of the old world that birthed it.