Helpful and not so...
by bob hyatt
From Driscoll's Confessions...
(editors note: great post by bob ... and good insight on his part)
Helpful:
"I hit a particularly low point one day when a young couple knocked on the door of our home... We considered them friends until they came over to tell us they had left the church. They complained that since the church had grown a bit bigger and things were a bit busier, my wife and I had become less available to them...
We were stunned. We needed couples like this to help the church survive, not jump ship just because my wife could not drop everything to take this woman out to tea whenever was convenient for her. The odd thing was that they transferred to a megachurch in the suburbs, which made no sense because they would get no closer to that pastor and his wife than they had to Grace and me. Yet they knocked on our door unannounced to tell us we were not doing enough for them. It seemed obvious that they wanted us to bend over backward and promise to do anything to make them happy in order to keep them in the church...
In retrospect, this was a hard lesson, one that I have had to learn many times in the various seasons of our church. As a church grows, it also changes. And as a church changes, so does the accesibility of the pastor and his family. As the pastor gets busier with new people and responsibilities, some people are displaced and are not as close to the pastor as they had been. Displaced people are prone to expect the pastor to ensure that their access to him and his family will never change. If the pastor agrees to these demands, he will keep the disgruntled people but not reach any new people because the mission will shift from reaching the new people to pleasing the old people."
A good differentiation to keep in mind, I think...
Not so helpful:
"We continued to meet on Sunday nights until Christmas, when some of the arty types started complaining that there was a preaching monologue instead of an open dialogue, as would become popular with some emerging pastors a few years later. This forced me to think through my theology of preaching, spiritual authority, and the authority of Scripture. I did an intense study of the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament commans regarding preaching and teaching. In the end, I decided not to back off from a preaching monologue but instead work hard at becoming a solid long-winded, old-school Bible preacher that focused on Jesus. My people needed to hear from God's Word and not from each other in collective ignorance like some dumb chat room."
There are so many false antitheses here, I hardly know where to start. How about a quote from DA Carson, well-known critic of the emerging church? What was it he said? Oh yeah... "Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ."
Preach it D.A.!
Let me say this strongly-
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