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About Jesus Steve Sweetman My Journey Through The Ecclesiastical Maze Part - 19 Introduction
To The Shepherding Movement The
“Charismatic Movement” began in the 1960’s.
This movement was marked by the Holy Spirit engaging Himself into
the lives of many nominal believers in the ecclesiastical maze.
I use the term “nominal believers” loosely because I’m not
convinced that one can nominally believe.
Many of these believers were part of mainline
denominations that had little interest in the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, they had no place to express their new found
excitement in their church. There
were also many people in non-Pentecostal/Charismatic Evangelical
churches who also experienced a new reality in the Holy Spirit.
Now that’s a mouth-full – “non-Pentecostal/Charismatic
Evangelicals”. How far
have we progressed, or should I say regressed in the ecclesiastical maze
by boxing ourselves into such confined organizational structures?
I sincerely doubt if the apostle Paul would have been interested
in being trapped into such a confining corner.
Anyway, these Christians had the same dilemma as their mainline
church counterparts. They
didn’t know where to go to express their new-found relationship with
the Holy Spirit. I was one
such person. One time my
friends and I had a prayer
meeting in a basement Sunday school room, but
someone had to go and speak in tongues loud enough for someone else to
hear, and that did us in. So
many of us found ourselves outside of the traditional church back then. Remember
Some
people formed themselves into newer style para-church organizations.
Since I‘m using all these technical words, I might as well
throw another one in. Para-church
groups are organizations that don’t consider themselves a church.
They are groups that align themselves along side the traditional
church and provide a specific service that the traditional church
doesn’t provide. The Full
Gospel Christian Businessmen in the 1970’s was one such group.
Back in the early 1970’s I was the youth representative to the
board for our local Full Gospel Christian Businessmen. While
these groups were forming in the Charismatic Movement, certain Bible
teachers were emerging as leaders in the Charismatic Movement.
They would often teach at conferences around These
teachers felt the need to bring more order to the Charismatic Movement
since many of us were no longer part of the traditional church.
They thought that many of us were “lone- rangers”, meaning,
we weren’t relating to others in the Body of Christ, but were left to
struggle away on our own.
Up
to this point these five teachers had been emphasizing
“discipleship”. Jesus
told the twelve apostles to disciple all nations. (Matthew 28:19) In
simple terms this meant, “go and help people to follow me”.
So in the early 1970’s the “Discipleship Movement” appeared
on the scene as a sub-group of the Charismatic Movement.
In those days we were all encouraged to find people who we could
disciple. This movement has
had a profound influence on many churches in the ecclesiastical maze.
Much of modern day discipleship can be traced back to the
“Discipleship Movement” of the 1970’s.
As
time went on, the “Discipleship Movement” blurred itself into the
“Shepherding Movement”, thus the “Shepherding Movement” was
born. Don’t you just love
all these names? I think the
apostle Paul should have called his ministry “Gentiles for Jesus
International”. Don’t
you think that has a nice ring to it?
Paul could have incorporated his ministry, issued tax receipts,
and freed himself from a great financial burden.
The only problem with that is that I don’t think they had such
tax credits back then. O
yes, there might be another problem too.
It probably wasn’t the will of the Lord. In
the early 1970’s my friends and I were following the teaching of these
five men and by 1977 we joined ourselves to this movement.
In 1977 a man named Jim Covert, who became a good friend to all
of us, moved his family from Virginia, The
whole idea of “shepherding” was to provide “personal pastoral
care” for people, with the emphases on the word “personal”.
Inherent in the teaching was the fact that a pastor of a
congregation of hundreds or thousands could not provide proper personal
care for those in his congregation.
To solve this problem, each local group would have a leader who
would care for a limited number of families,
normally no more than ten or twelve families. That
leader would have another man that would care for him, usually in
another city. That was
called “trans-local authority”, something that caused some
controversy. Each family
that the local leader would care for would have families “under”
them that they’d care for. And
those families would have families under them that they’d care for
too, and on it went. Such
care would be very personal in nature.
It wasn’t just theological teaching.
Such care would include helping families with their finances,
with parenting issues, and with husband and wife relationships.
We were all encouraged to shepherd others in these ways.
Personally,
I thoroughly enjoyed those days. I
benefited mostly from the relationships I had with others, but I did not
fully support the shepherding teaching as being Biblically accurate.
In order for me to justify my participation I considered
shepherding a modern solution to an old problem of pastors not caring
for God’s people. This
consideration was based on a presupposition that the way we pattern
church is evolutionary in nature. This
means we can structure church to best fit our societal needs, and not
follow any New Testament pattern. It
took me a number of years, but I no longer believe in the evolutionary
nature of the church. My
major disagreement with the shepherding teaching was the fact that
everyone was to shepherd others, thus making us all shepherds.
The word shepherd is simply another word for pastor, and the New
Testament clearly states that not all Christians are pastors, and those
who are must be qualified according to certain criteria that the New
Testament set forth. Therefore,
all of us should not have been shepherding others. Inexperienced and
young pastors caused some problems in some locations.
Some shepherds were counseling and advising others in error. If
you’d like to read more of my thoughts on the “Shepherding
Movement” you can click the following link.
http://stevesweetman.com/articles/shepherding.htm Pastoring
problems aren’t exclusive to the Shepherding Movement.
Pastoral abuses have taken place throughout the ecclesiastical
maze. There’s the over-emphasis on “pastoral authority” that has
harmed many in the Body of Christ. There’s
the point that many pastors see their position as a career or an office.
Those who hold to this
thinking should not be pastors.
In my estimation, there are many pastors who should not be pastoring, while others in the congregation should be pastoring. Many men who have a real calling to shepherd God’s people can’t function in this calling because the traditional church doesn’t recognize or understand the true nature of a New Testament pastor, leaving these men in their pews as spectators in the ecclesiastical maze. |