“Over the course of these fifty years I have seen both the church and my vocation as a pastor in it relentlessly diminished and corrupted by being redefined in terms of running an ecclesiastical business. The ink wasn’t even dry before I was being told by experts in the field of church that my main tasks was to run a church after the manner of my brother and sister Christians who run service stations, grocery shops, corporations, banks, hospitals and financial services. Many of these experts wrote books and gave lectures on how to do it. I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books that the size of my church car park had far more to do with how things fared in my congregations than my choice of texts in preaching. After a few years of trying to take all this seriously, I decided that I was being lied to”[
(Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection)
1 comment:
I am convinced what Peterson says is true. If we try and run our churches like businesses, we end up relying on how well we compete on a human level rather than relying on the promises of God. We are called to be different; let's act like we believe it.
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