A lot of the Christian news items have seemed unpleasant lately. One of the major denominations is splitting (the United Methodists), others are declining in numbers. The Catholics have been beset with sex scandals, and so have the Southern Baptists and some other Protestant groups.
Much of this stuff is not really new; it’s been going on for a long time. It is only now coming into the light. I suspect there is a lot more still under the radar that may still come out. I got married in 1970; about ten years later, I found out that the pastor who performed our wedding had been caught having an affair with the church pianist, and was forced out of ministry.
A lot of the problem is the current church system, with a salaried pastor essentially running everything. And most pastors have very little supervision from anyone, no matter what their denomination. Even if a local congregation has elders or a church board, it is not that hard for a pastor to have a lot of say in who gets on the board, or even to run off anyone who disagrees with him. (I have seen this happen repeatedly over the years, starting when I was in high school, clear up until three years ago!) I may have more to say about some of these issues later, but for now I want to describe something from my past experience that has influenced my views on how a church can be operated.
For nearly eight years I was part of a group of students and former students from the old Cincinnati Bible College that operated a store-front mission church in a slum in the Lower Price Hill neighborhood of Cincinnati. It had been operating for a while before I got there. They had had a part-time pastor (back then, part-time preaching gigs paid about $25 a week). He had gotten mad about something and quit, and told some of the neighborhood people the church was going to close. Others who were involved in the church disagreed. One couple who were friends with me and my wife asked us to join them to help keep the church open.
This was not a big operation. The core group was about ten to twelve people, most of whom either were or had been students at the Bible college. Some were married, some were single. One was a single man in his 50s, a recovered alcoholic and former Catholic. Most of the time there were other students who came down for services and often worked with the children, but the main group were the core that kept it running.
We ended up with a different way of running the church than the standard pattern. We didn’t bother hiring another part-time pastor; we couldn’t afford a full-time one, and several of us were just as qualified as the last one. So we took turns with the public duties. One of us would lead the singing, another would preach, someone else would handle the Communion meditation and serving. And we used an informal “men’s meeting” to deal with business; anyone who attended was welcome to join us. I know, keeping it to the “men” will provoke wrath today, but this was 1971, when the Women’s Movement was barely beginning. And if the ladies did seriously disagree with one of our decisions, we went back and did it over. We met at least once a month, more often if needed. We also had an informal gathering of the core group at a home on Saturday evenings once or twice a month. We talked things over there as well, although decisions were not made there.
We also developed a different pattern for decisions. We did not vote; we talked things out until we could reach a consensus that we could all accept. It may have taken longer, but it actually made for more harmony in the long run.
A few years later, the owner of the building we were renting offered to sell it to us. To buy it, we had to incorporate as a non-profit organization under state law. So we did, and made a set of corporate by-laws to submit to the state. We still did not hire a pastor. We were not comfortable using the term “elders” for our board; Larry, the ex-alcoholic, was the only one of us who was over 35. So the by-laws provided for a “provisional board” until there were enough men suitable to be “elders.”
The board was a small group, although we were open to having anyone who wished to come and sit in on the meetings. We still made decisions by consensus, rather than taking formal votes.
Over time, most of the original group did scatter; others came in to join; and we continued to operate in the same way—no pastor, a board working by consensus. Students from the college still came down to help with the programs, and some became part of the core group. My wife and I left after eight years.
As far as I have been able to find out, that church is still in existence. The last I could find out, there still is not a definite pastor. I don’t know how they are deciding things. The Bible college closed its doors in 2019; I suspect that will make it harder for the church to draw Christian students to help as they did in the past.
Compared to most churches with the standard pastor arrangement, this may seem odd. But there is some historical background that says it has happened in the past. In “The Churching of America 1776-1990,” the authors, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke documented that the two fastest-growing religious groups in America after the Revolution were the Baptists and Methodists. The Methodists in that period did not have local pastors; they had “circuit-riding preachers” who traveled a route among a group of churches, showing up at any particular location maybe once every two to three months, or even less. The rest of the time, the church operations were in the hands of the local people. The early Baptists tended to have preachers who were not formally educated, and most supported themselves, often by farming, rather than living on a salary from their church. In the early 1800s, they were growing almost as rapidly as the Methodists.
Over time, both groups did change. By the mid-1800s, the Methodists were the largest Protestant group in the US. They began to switch from circuit riders to local pastors living in parsonages, serving one church. And their growth dwindled. The Baptists kept on longer; in the late 1800s they began opening seminaries to train their pastors, and their growth slowed also.