Village Shepherd

There are always difficulties in Christian ministry, at whichever level you're involved in it, from church cleaner to the Archbishop of Canterbury. There's always someone who'll find fault, and if like the Archbishop, you're a subject of media interest, then I should imagine Christian ministry can be very difficult indeed and perhaps something of a burden.

One of the problems for those who are up front in ministry - leading services and preaching - is that they themselves can develop a following. Those who become well known preachers may find that people flock to hear them, but that those followers don't necessarily build a relationship with God and so fall away if the preacher disappears for any reason. In other words, the preachers develop a personal following, and far from pointing people towards God, their own personal charisma may at times actually detract from God.

Most priests discover that on moving to a new parish, some members of their new congregation disappear never to return, because in some way the new priest doesn't quite match up to the old one. And it can be difficult in team ministry if the numbers in the congregation drop dramatically for one preacher but increase dramatically for another.

Perhaps this is more apparent now than in previous generations, because people today tend to have higher expectations of their preachers than perhaps their ancestors had. We're all used to top quality entertainment from television and radio, and expect nothing less from those who have been trained to lead in church. And just as some television shows have higher ratings than others, so some preachers have higher ratings than others.

Why should this be a problem? It sounds like healthy competition which should keep all preachers on their toes and giving of their best. But competition isn't always healthy and can lead to tensions and hostilities and divisions within churches.

St Paul discovered that competition isn't necessarily healthy when he had to cope with the congregation at Corinth. Far from being healthy, the competition had sparked off factions within the fellowship which had become dangerously divisive. We know from the opening paragraphs of St Paul's first letter to the Corinthians that the church in Corinth was rich in spiritual gifts, but we soon learn that despite those gifts, there were real problems.

You might think that anyone who can speak in tongues or who is a spiritual healer must be a very spiritual person indeed, but that may not be so. Spiritual gifts don't necessarily relate to spiritual fruits. Someone was recently described to me as "a born-again Christian, but full of venom", a description which horrified me because of its implications. And it sounds as though there was something of that going on in the church at Corinth.

In the Corinthian church some people claimed to have been baptised by Peter and so were Peter's followers, some to have been baptised by Apollos and so were followers of Apollos. And this had caused serious divisions within the congregation, each vying for top place. Paul says to them, "Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul?" And he goes on to say, "For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel--not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."

Because churches are like families, there are always tensions. You can't choose your family, and you can't choose your church family either. Some try to do just that, and they're the people who take offence and leave when something happens in the church which upsets them. But they soon find that in their new church, eventually they get upset all over again over some different issue, take umbrage and have to move on again to yet another church.

Churches provide families where we really can learn to love, because all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds and with all sorts of different ways of looking at things are part of the family. In churches we have a great opportunity to experience and work out the message of the cross in practical terms. We can discover for ourselves what Christian love really means.

Being united in Christian love doesn't mean suppressing all discussion so that everyone believes in exactly the same way. On the contrary, it means facing disagreements and actually hearing other points of view with enough humility to accept that no-one gets it right all the time. It means rejoicing in different sorts of worship and learning as far as we are able to love those who think and act in a completely different way. But above all it means distinguishing between love of God and love of the leader. Those who can only worship if they have the "right" priest, aren't worshipping God at all. And those who can only worship if they have the "right" service probably aren't worshipping God either.

As Christians we must keep our eyes upon God the whole time. It's very easy to stray from the path without realising it, to begin to keep our eyes on the leader rather than upon God, and even to put the leader on a pedestal and treat the leader as God. And once that begins to happen, factions soon start to develop within the church and far from being a centre of love, it becomes a centre of strife and bitterness, where the best spiritual gifts in the world are no use at all.

This was the situation in Corinth and St Paul dealt with it, but let's make sure it never becomes the situation in any of our churches, by keeping our eyes always fixed upon God and following only him.