Of all the ERC eNews videos, I'm, by far, most impressed with the 8/17/17 edition featuring Dave Williams.
The video provides an intellectual foundation to justify a changing of ERC ways.
Dave explains, clearly and simply, that leadership by pastors functioning in the role of parish priests is no longer respected in our culture.
Then, bafflingly, he gives a preview of the new New Strategic Plan, explaining that it centers on the leadership that healthy pastors provide to healthy churches.
I've received some feedback on the sort of Safe Space group Dave has in mind from someone who is aware of how these groups will work. And, the person writing to me gives a mostly positive assessment and, certainly, favors these safe space pastors' groups.
However, a compelling truth of the decline of the ERC is that the plans, dreams and schemes of its leaders have, since I entered the Conference 42 years ago, ALWAYS failed.
Two truths about where we are in 2017:
1. Pastoral leadership is not biblical.
Jesus trained the twelve apostles, not the twelve pastors.
Jesus taught rather extensively about people having the gift of prophecy and how to tell true prophets from false prophets. Clearly, Jesus did that with the understanding that He would always been empowering prophets and that the devil would always be creating counterfeits.
The Book of Acts highlights the ministry of apostles and prophets. There's not a pastor/parish priest to be found anywhere in the whole book.
Paul actually says that it is Jesus who gave APESTS and that He will continue to do so "until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God..."
Yet, nowhere is the a hint of leadership by pastors functioning in the role of the parish priest.
Parish priest leadership, the core of the new New Strategic Plan, is not in the Bible.
2. While there was a time when the culture accepted parish priest leadership, Dave makes a clear and convincing case, that, in the culture today, the pastor/parish priest is no longer respected.
And, certainly, the millennials whom we've lost and hope to win back, do not groove on parish priest led ministry.
Truly, some of them love Jesus. But, a pastor led ministry? No.
The millennials with whom I'm in conversation want to bypass the middle man.
Peter says that all disciples are a royal priesthood. That is what millennials want.
The very idea of the clergy/laity separation of the priestly class from the rest of Body makes the millennials I know want to hurl.
And, they will never, EVER accept it!
It repulses them more than anything else about the traditional, organized, institutional church.
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What the new New ERC Strategic Plan wants to do just, very simply, can not work among people in their 20s and 30s. It certainly can't work among their children as they mature.
ERC hierarchs are attempting to produce the perfect buggy whip, the ideal boom box.
Their plan will, no doubt, do nice things for people older than Dave and Kevin and Chuck...
...but for millennials and the people who will come after them, it can't work.
The people who have written the plan are people who have thrived in ministry among Boomers and Builders...
...they are also the people have lost us the Xers and their kids and grandkids.
There's a way in which what the hierarchs have come up with could have worked. But, that day has passed and it is gone for good.
We must begin again to walk in the power of the Spirit.
We must repent and turn from our failed ways that the Lord of all authority and power and grace and mercy and blessing is not blessing.
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