The guy who taught me Hebrew was a bit of a linguistic philosopher. By now, all these years later, I certainly remember his observations about words and language far more clearly than the Hebrew.
He said, "A word that means everything means nothing."
It seems to me that, in the CGGC especially, the word "pastor" has attained the status of a word that means nothing.
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In our early, Church of God, days, the word was used in a King James Version way, i.e., as a synonym for shepherd.
The biography of John Winebrenner that is most helpful to me is Dr. George Ross' brief 1880 Semi-Centennial Sketch.
After describing Winebrenner as a courageous and radical prophetic figure, a relentless evangelist and a powerful preacher, Ross says, "As a pastor (Winebrenner) had few superiors."
Ross goes on to describe Winebrenner as a man who could, in addition to the activities he was best known for, also provide effective pastoral care, noting that he visited from house to house and prayed with every member of the family.
Interestingly, Ross points out that those visits normally ended with Winebrenner urging the "unconverted" to seek Jesus.
For many years, in the CGGC and everywhere, the word pastor simply referred to someone who acted as a spiritual shepherd and provided pastoral care.
In our movement days, pastor was something a person did, not a title one held.
It was that until no so long ago.
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I've been following the dialog, on the CGGC CONTAGIOUS blog, between Lew Button and Dan Masshardt on Dan's post, "We are Broken in our Focus on Pastors."
In that chat, Lew uses the word to describe the APEST gift of being a shepherd and, to be fair to Lew, the NIV still translates the word, in Ephesians 4:11, as "pastors," though the ESV translates the word, "shepherds."
Lew is not alone. One way the word pastor is frequently used is as that Spiritual Gift and calling.
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Another, very modern, way the word is used very commonly in the CGGC is as a label for people who possess credentials from the denomination. So, to many, if one is licensed or ordained, s/he is "Pastor So and So."
Therefore, to many, I'm still Pastor Bill.
I suspect that most of the CGGC people who use the word that way are ignorant of how extremely recently that use of the word came about.
In fact, when I entered the East Pennsylvania Conference of the Churches of God, people with credentials weren't called pastors. They were called ministers.
Credentialed delegates to East Pennsylvania Conference sessions, for example, weren't called Pastoral Delegates in those days. They were Ministerial Delegates.
People with knowledge of Church of God history know that it was extremely important to John Winebrenner and his colleagues, in our days as a thriving, blessed, movement, that the very few people who were credentialed were known as Elders. It was Elder John Winebrenner, never, ever, Pastor John Winebrenner. Winebrenner wouldn't have known what the title Pastor John means.
To be referred to as an elder was crucial to Winebrenner and our people with credentials in our movement days because, to them, that was the biblical way of speaking and we established churches on the New Testament plan.
When the Church of God rocked in the power of the Spirit, the New Testament, and no human tradition, was our only Authority, Our Only Rule of faith in practice.
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Another use of the word that has become common in the CGGC today and is fuzzily connected to the one previously mentioned.
This use of the word refers to the pastor as the spiritual leader of a local church. This, ultimately, is a way of thinking that has its roots in deeply institutionalized, high church churches in which there is a strong distinction between clergy and laity. The deepest roots of this definition is in the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages.
As the CGGC becomes more and more institutionalized, the understanding is that a pastor is, essentially, a parish priest: a provider of religious products and services to be consumed by a passive laity becomes more and more prominent.
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Still another use of the word in the CGGC these days is the one employed by Brandon Kelly, CGGC Director of Transformational Ministries, in his eNews APEST blogs. Brandon sees the pastor as a local church leader who supervises?, administrates?, manages? the functioning of APEST gifts in the local church.
My guess is that few people in the CGGC other than Brandon believe this. But, I'm not certain.
As far as I know, General Conference staff isn't actually DOING the position of pastor according to this understanding of the word: That is, other than talking, as far as I know, they're not equipping people to be pastors according to this definition.
Like the two previous uses of the word: Pastor as credentialed person and pastor as parish priest, this, pastor as local church APEST manager, is fuzzily connected to the others.
However, none of these fuzzily connected definitions of the word, to my knowledge, have any connection to the New Testament.
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And, this fuzziness is its own problem. It's this fuzziness that makes the word mean so many things that it means nothing. It perfectly enables the dysfunction that feeds our decay and decline.
And, as nearly all of us admit, the CGGC is in the midst of numerical decline and spiritual decay.
Shepherd, or Pastor, dominated church cultures are so focused on tolerance-based relationship that focus on truth, even precision in language, becomes lost because, in the context of tepid, tolerant relationships, no form of precision connected to truth or principle matters.
Tolerance is fuzzy. Our conversation is fuzzy.
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So, the word, pastor, which is so important in our conversation, has become a useless word.
We're at a point now that our very important word, pastor, has no precise meaning. It means whatever the person using it wants it to mean. It communicates nothing precise.
It means anything and everything.
And, therefore, it means nothing.
That's a problem.
We must repent.
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