In my line of work, one can easily get far. The possibilities for achievement are endless. If one masters several basic skills and is adept and friendly, the sky is not the limit but rather the likely destination. The problem is that all one becomes after successes have been measured by bank accounts and retirement packages is that one finds themselves in the unhappy position of being merely a religious professional. You see, I am a preacher. Let me say it gain, I am a preacher. Maybe you don’t see a problem. You even may be one of the clan and still see nothing amiss here. My fear is that many will swell the ranks of this strange amalgam. The religious professional is here to stay. And he is becoming more visible and is certainly leading the fray when it comes to church employees. Though congregations employ workers from janitors to “ministers” of recreation, it is the top dog, namely the senior pastor that holds the most coveted role. Once the exclusive domain of the call of God, now it is a job almost secured by a three year degree from a seminary. Of course, the professional must have his credentials, and the schools designed to make this figure the perfect fit for our contemporary world are churning out religious professionals like the Ford Model Ts, as from an assembly line. But what is it really that the contemporary church is need of? I suggest that it is not the professional pastor that acts like, and often is innocently mistaken for, an executive, but the dying breed of the voice calling in the wilderness. The church needs prophets! The church needs those pastors who will herald the message of another. The church needs ambassadors that have their method and message deployed from above not from below. Instead of smug sermons with sound-bites from the latest theatrical blockbuster or seasoned with statistics and illustrations, we need the pure unadulterated Word of God. The sermon has degenerated into a simple homily of three points and a poem, and what is worse, in many congregations all we have in reality is three poems and no point! The means employed by contemporary preachers in order to build their little, or as in most cases, their large kingdoms are the all too readily discernible tactics of business and advertising. The church is full of “Mad Men,” the Madison Avenue advertising corporates with their storylines and rhetorical techniques. Please stop the madness! Please God, stop this madness and keep me from this growing trend. As much as I want to succeed in life, I want more to be faithful to you! May our churches be bold to stand up and be different. Would to God that the speaker of God’s Words would once more thunder from the sacred desk those oracles of God that have nothing to do with consumer mentality and enterprising entrepreneurship. May the Words from our lips be clearly and unmistakably a message from above. Please God, send you prophets to these desert wastelands that are thriving on the riches of the world and shake them to the core. Do whatever it takes to make the church holy. If it means that she must be pruned, then give us grace to live through the painful process. Raise up Jeremiahs and Ezekiels, call out Amoses and Obadiahs. Bring back the Spirit of Elijah and may it rest on the life of men unchained by the religious professional’s code of conduct: winsomeness at all costs! Let them thunder anew that Our God Reigns. Let them scream from the housetops that it is fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Let the redeemed “say so” as a result of hearing the Scriptures proclaimed as never before, or maybe like the first five centuries, and certainly like the sixteenth through the eighteenth. Raise up men like A. W. Pink, A. W. Tozer, Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Bring us the workers who feed on the true manna and know how to feed their flocks. Again, dear Lord may it be that faith will come by hearing and hearing by the rhemata of God, the words of the living God. And put a stop to the dreaded creature, the religious professional!
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