Presbyterian Bishops?

One of the more unbiblical things that the Reformation seems to have done was get rid of bishops.  The New Testament clearly says that the early church had an office of episcopos, which literally means “overseer” or “supervisor.”  (See Philippians 1:1.  There are several other mentions in the Pastoral Epistles.)  The tripartite shape of ecclesiastical ministry — bishops, elders, and deacons, in addition to the laity — was articulated very early in church history, in the work of Ignatius of Antioch.  The Reformers would have been wrong to dispense with bishops altogether.

They were no doubt reacting to what bishops had become in the West, which was all too often tyrannical, corrupt, mercenary, hypocritical men swathed in ridiculous pomp.  Bishops had too much power and some of them abused it horribly, which caused the whole institution to be debased and defiled.  The very word has been radioactive to many Protestants ever since.

Even today, bishops seem to imagine themselves to be ecclesiastical CEO’s and allow all kinds of benefits, honors, compensation, and privileges to accrue to themselves.  We Presbyterians don’t have bishops, but we do have “Executives” who sometimes see themselves in the same way.  They can become exactly what the Reformers were trying to unload, as if all that were offensive about being a bishop were the title.  Of course, it's about the power.

But if we look carefully at Presbyterianism, we may see that we did retain a kind of  episcopal office reimagined in a different form and given a different name.  We drained the office of as much corrosive power and venality as possible, even hiding every connection to what bishops had become so well that what I am about to say will surprise most Presbyterians.  The episcopal office emerges in Presbyterianism in the role of the Moderator.

Our polity makes a point of preventing Moderators from degenerating into knots of corrupt power, at least at the presbytery and synod levels.  In our current practice, Moderators are unpaid.  They usually serve one-year terms.  The Book of Order gives them almost no explicit power of disposition or decision-making.  Moderators oversee and preside over meetings of councils, and they represent councils in ordaining and installing elders.  Often they have a seat on whatever board manages the council’s work.  

I believe we do not pay enough attention to Moderators.  We do not recognize their authority or the continuity of their office with the biblical episcopacy.  We treat the role as little more than an honorific.  Sometimes it’s almost like an onerous job people get by turns, if we can convince them to do it at all.  

But I have found Moderators to have amazing and remarkable wisdom and insight.  Most have been active and committed presbyters for many years, and they have invaluable knowledge of the community and institution.  I have learned to trust and defer to Moderators at the presbytery level, even when they seem to be doing things “out of order.”  They can have a kind of moderatorial intuition from the Holy Spirit.  Because even if we don’t take Moderators seriously, God does.

In my view, we denigrate Moderators when we make them adhere to imported and non-Christian procedures that demand adversariality, foment divisiveness, and drive to premature decisions.  Moderators should embody the principles of inclusiveness, openness, mutuality, and equality embedded in our polity.  They should have a missional sense about what a council is doing.  They should be about fostering honest and civil communication, discerning the body, and finding real consensus.  They should be trusted.

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Why the PIF is a flawed and faulty tool for evaluating ministry.

As many Presbyterians know, “PIF” stands for Professional Information Form.  Ministers fill out this long document when they are open to receiving a new call. 

The content and process of our PIF ensures that our call system has the dignity of a beauty pageant, the sensitivity of speed-dating, and the spiritual depth of an episode of American Idol.  It is a routine in which we are encouraged and even required to place on display our most ego-centric, personality-driven, shallow, superficial, achievement-oriented projection of our selves.   

After completing it, I craved nothing so much as a two-week silent retreat and a full-body cleanse.  

Apparently, if the PIF is to be believed, Presbyterian congregations are interested mainly in being served by ministers who are exceptionally good self-promoters.  Humility is not considered a positive trait. 

Imagine Calvin having to fill out this PIF.  How about Dorothy Day?  Any saint of the church would simply roll their eyes and shake their head when confronted with this absurd bureaucratic instrument.  They would wonder where, in God’s Name, these Presbyterians came up with such leadership values.      

The heart of the PIF is the set of four essay questions.  They address success and fulfillment, growth, leadership, and change.  Apparently, these are now the most important categories that all ministers and churches have to relate to.  Maybe we think that if we can get ministers to refer to and define themselves in such terms then these things will somehow start happening in our churches, and that that would be a good thing.   

And yet, strangely enough, these words are not prominent in the New Testament.  One searches in vain for much talk about “success” and “fulfillment;” neither word appears in the NRSV at all.  “Growth” shows up in Scripture mainly regarding nature or the body, or as a synonym for “become.”  The New Testament does talk about “change” a bit more, but when it isn’t used eschatologically or about Jesus’ transfiguration, it means repentance.  I wish the PIF was talking about this kind of change of thinking and direction, then we might be getting somewhere.  But it clearly isn’t.  And while the epistles do have a handful of references to leaders in the church, in the gospels, the “leaders” are almost always Jesus’ enemies. 

While Scripture may not care about success and fulfillment, they are important categories in our culture.  We use these big words for building up the individual ego.  They stereotypically define the meaning of life for most Americans.  When the PIF wants me to relate a “moment” in my recent ministry when I felt good about myself and something I did,  it wants me to wallow in and polish what feeds my personal self-esteem.  Like that matters.  Like that is anything but spiritually toxic.

The PIF asks me to describe the ministry setting to which I believe God is calling me.  We understand that God’s call comes through and to a particular place.  But if I am only looking in one direction for one kind of ministry, does that not make it more difficult for me to hear if God calls me to something else?  This question asks us to lose ourselves in a fantasy about our “dream church.”  It could easily prevent us from developing a relationship with a real situation.  God almost never calls us to the familiar, desirable, and the perfect.  What if a committee reads what I have written and decides, “Well, we’re not anything like that.  It is pointless to contact this guy”?  What if that’s where God wants me to be?  Maybe God calls churches and pastors out of their comfort zones to work and build something new together?  I have seen this happen repeatedly.

Another PIF question wants me to talk about the “areas of growth” have I identified about myself.  The virtue here, presumably, is self-improvement.  The minister is encouraged to show off her/his ability to spin shortcomings into strengths, a skill that apparently our churches feel they need in a pastor.       

Finally, the last question is about when we have “led change.”  There are two things going on here.  

First of all, the word “led” raises that question of leadership.  The Book of Order lists the qualities and tasks of a pastor.  Significantly, “leadership” isn’t one of them.  This is because there is only One Head of the Church, Jesus Christ.  Pastors are disciples just like every other member of the church.  Some disciples may be a little farther along the Way.  This makes them good examples and possible teachers.  It does not make them authoritarian “leaders” with coercive power.  Ministers lead by asking questions, encouraging, suggesting alternatives, sharing expertise, and speaking out of their experience.  They do not lead by having a goal — change! — and manipulating others to attain it.  We are sometimes called “teaching elders,” not “leading” elders.

Secondly, we see here again our fetishizing of “change.”  We assume that the church needs change more than anything.  It doesn’t even matter what kind of change we are talking about, we seem to be at the point where any change is better than keeping what we have.

How often do churches want to hear about the real change that Jesus is about?  That kind of change involves, well, taking up your cross, renouncing your life, and giving up all you have.  At most they seem to want advice about how to adapt to a changing religious marketplace.  By “change” they mean moving to guitars in worship, or improving the church’s use of social media.  How do we attract millennials?  How do we change without alienating the older people who donate the most?  Churches mainly want to know how they can avoid real change by making these provisional, superficial adaptations.

What does it mean that Louisville can come up with PIF categories that bear no reference to the New Testament or even the Book of Order?  Why do we have to conjure things like this from scratch, relying on the imaginations of GA entities or people sitting in offices in Louisville?

What if we started evaluating ministers based on something related to Jesus, like the Beatitudes?  Does this person exhibit poverty of spirit?  Purity of heart?  Is she a peacemaker?  Does he hunger and thirst for justice?  What does that look like in their ministry?

What if we discouraged ministers from talking about themselves, but relied on how their vocation is perceived by people they have served with?  Congregants and colleagues might provide a better measure of someone’s faithfulness.

Such a strategy might work for the twin document, the MIF (Ministry Information Form) that churches are asked to complete, which has identical problems.  Only these are filled out by a committee.

It comes down to the basic question for a post-Christendom church: are we going to adapt ourselves to the standards of a secular and pathological society, or to Jesus Christ?

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Standing and Kneeling.

As a follower of Jesus, my main concern is discerning how he would respond to situations we face today, and acting accordingly.  Hence, in a controversy like this one over whether professional athletes should stand for the playing of the National Anthem, or “take a knee” in protest, considerations like “respecting the flag” or “free speech” don’t mean that much to me.  I have to consider what the Lord Jesus would have me do based on what he himself does and teaches.

1. In the New Testament I find no record that the Lord Jesus ever participates in displays or rituals of patriotism.  Did he stand in respect every time a Roman army unit went by?  As a Jew he could not possibly have accepted or recognized the graven images of eagles that they carried.  What we do know is that he was criticized by establishment figures for his lack of patriotic fervor in adhering to the Law that constituted his own people’s national identity.         
2. He was forced to stand when he was on trial before the Sanhedrin, Pilate, and Herod.  But his words to them, if he speaks at all, reflect and express humility, dignity, honesty, courage, and trust in God.  He pointedly denies their authority over him, even as they engineer his death.
3. He says that if you want to participate in the emperor’s system you should expect to be made to pay what the emperor demands (Luke 20:25a).  But we should rather worship and serve God alone, not conceding the Emperor’s claims at all.  “Give to God what belongs to God” (Luke 20:25b) he says; and it all belongs to God (Psalm 24:1).
4. The Lord says that his followers should, when someone in the gospel community offends them, bear witness to the offense privately.  If there is no restitution, the matter should come before witnesses, culminating with the entire group.  In other words, if someone in the church comes and tells me I am harming them, I am bound to repent of what I was doing and make amends (Matthew 18:15-17).  Extending this to society generally would mean that if my neighbor testifies to an injustice I am committing, I am bound to take their word for it and change my ways.  Arguing with them and/or changing the subject are excluded.
5. We know that Jesus always sided with the violated, oppressed, excluded, sick, disenfranchised, and abused.  Always.  (Eg. Matthew 25:31-46)  

We’re talking about football and other sports.  These are spectacles of entertainment, competition, and sometimes violence.  (It reminds me that for early Christians attending gladiatorial events was forbidden.)  The practitioners are often well paid, at least at the highest level.  In some sports, especially football, they incur some physical risk.  Many came out of poor backgrounds, or are members of minority groups.

We’re also talking about the arbitrary addition of a patriotic ritual to these events, which has nothing to do with anything about the game itself.  It is a mystery to me why we do this, except that it became a tradition sometime in the early years of baseball, probably around the time of World War I, is my guess.  And once you start doing something like this it immediately becomes nearly impossible to stop doing it without offending someone.  (Churches know this all-too-well, as national flags started appearing in worship spaces around the same time.)  This worked, I suppose, when a majority and their leaders could impose a common story on everyone.  

The problem we have now is that this common story is unraveling.  It is unraveling because of the facts which are now allowed to come to light, which had been suppressed.  The main fact, according to the testimony of Mr. Kaepernick, who began this silent protest, is rampant bias and brutality against members of the African-American community on the part of the American criminal justice system.  This is undeniable.  It is also nothing new.  But technology has advanced to the point that we now witness it on a regular basis.  Obviously, the  communities victimized by it always knew about it.  But now everyone does.

In a choice between participating in an arbitrary display of patriotism, and identifying with oppressed people, there simply isn’t any question at all which side Jesus is on.  The New Testament offers zero instances of the former, while Jesus does the latter all the time.  Not only that, but he is himself a victim of the same kind of brutality on the part of law enforcement that is chronically inflicted on poor and minority communities (Mark 15:17-20).

At the same time, it is hard to imagine Jesus having any interest at all in professional sports (although he has deep compassion for the people involved).  But he could very well suggest that, like with Caesar’s money, if you’re going to participate in Caesar’s spectacle you should expect to pay Caesar’s admission fee.  Even so, he sides with the hated and reviled, rejecting the claims of power and pride.

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