Relating Faith by Knowles Robert;

Author:Knowles, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Authentic Media

The resulting hungry flock: ‘the bleating of the lambs’

Unfortunately, moreover, it is not only true prophets, teachers and theologians who are alienated by such abuses of hierarchical power, by such institutionalized resistance to biblical content and formation. Many, many people – and not just true prophets, teachers and theologians – church-hop or move between churches because they simply can’t get the practical theology and the practical wisdom they need these days to help them with the various life crises that come along.

Even as a youngish theologian, I get a constant stream of folks coming to me who are starving for biblical content and formation because the church no longer feeds the flock. The other night I spent about two hours training somebody how to be in relationship with God in a way that involves the Holy Spirit’s formative activation of biblical speech-acts (see Chapter 1 above). That person had attended church for thirty years without having been trained in what to do in order to have such a relationship with God. But it took only two hours to train them!

In other words, when you silence the true prophet, the teacher, and the theologian, you don’t get ‘the silence of the lambs’ – you get the bleating of the lambs.

The problem, then, is not so much to do with church hierarchy per se but, rather, hinges on distorted church structures and hierarchies that presuppose false ideologies and that block truly prophetic, biblical relational theology and its formative outworking.

Genuine church leadership, though, does not ‘lord it over’ the other but lifts up the other: serving the changing needs of individuals as they grow into their unique personhoods, relationships, giftings and ministries; and forming unique churches with unique every-member ministries that match the unique gift-profiles of their particular members.62

And genuine church leadership does not play ‘critical parent’ or ‘nurture parent’ to folks who are perpetually rebuked or suckled as though they were infants (even if that’s what church members want). Rather, genuine church leadership manages both to exercise leadership and to encourage adult-to-adult relating, free of distorted power dynamics.

Unfortunately, though, many are those who have church- hopped because distorted church structures or hierarchies suppressed their unique individualities, personhoods, giftings, ministries and relationships beneath conformity to an alien ideology, to an unbiblical true-prophecy-and-true-theology-sup- pressing ‘system’, to the flock-starving irrelevance of abstracted (i.e. de-relationalized) repetitious patronization.

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