Thursday, August 9, 2007

Hey! There is a perfect pastor! (pt 1)

Hey! There is a perfect pastor!

A friend of mine sent me an email the other day. He recommended I check out a news article at http://www.larknews.com/august_2007/secondary.php?page=1. It seems an ingenious group of postmodern, computer engineers have developed and now market a perfect pastor. Actually, it’s a virtual pastor. More precisely, a virtual preacher. Now, congregations can be happy. Very happy, in fact. After all, that is the goal of church these days, you know?

Lark News enjoys posting spoofs on the latest church trends and views. This is no exception; and I'm going to run with it.

According to this pseudo-article, there is some soon-to-be very successful company has the ability to come to a church and provide a perfect pastor. The company takes a detailed survey from the members to find out what each one wants in a pastor (hair style, dress, mannerisms, accent, personality, preaching style, etc.). Then they filter the “needs” of the people through a bunch of computers. After eighteen months of fine-tuning their perfect pastor, the church gets exactly what they want: a pastor made in their image.
This is beyond the postmodern. This is post-mortal. This is a post-mortal pastor; actually a meta-mortal pastor. A designer pastor. The future is now, and the Church of Jesus Christ has leaped from church-lite to church-sci-fi, going where no man (or woman) has gone before.
I like sci-fi. It’s my favorite genre for movies. And I’ve thought long and hard trying to imagine what the church might be like twenty, fifty or one hundred years from now. This new fangled virtual pastor, which is really some adjustable, electronic, projection device for religiously itching minds, isn’t too far from what I expected. I imagined something more along the lines of a virtual church, not just a virtual pastor. Perhaps that is coming? Maybe it would be like Star Trek - The Next Generation’s holodeck. The holodeck was a large room with a super computer that projected a virtual reality of one’s choosing. Church by holodeck would provide individuals with a perfect church, a perfect pastor, a perfect staff, and a perfect congregation. Or would it?
However, I tend to think that given our Western proclivity toward narcissistic individualism and penchant for convenience, we would far prefer to put on virtual goggles complete with a sensory suit to get the full experience of a church made in our image, without having to travel. We would wear our suits all the time, and when we wanted to “do church” we would merely hang the goggles on our faces and go for the experience. Church could happen at the office, or in the home, at the Mall, or Starbucks, or, heaven forbid, while sitting on the bathroom throne.
I also enjoy progress: the new, the different, the better. Change is good, advancement is good, improvement is good (of course not always). As an American modernist adapting to postmodernity, I often get restless with the old, the traditional, the repetitive and redundant. This post-mortal, virtual pastor should appeal to me. But it doesn’t and in my opinion this virtual thing is not good. Here’s why:
As Evangelical Christians who hold to the historical truths of the biblical Faith we have an objective standard against which to evaluate things – the Bible. Only secondarily, if we are consistent with the teachings of Scripture, should we evaluate things subjectively. This means we should carefully appraise this new trend against the clear teachings and derivative principles of God’s Word. This is what it means to be wise. To be unwise is to accept or reject this innovative technology merely because it fits (or doesn’t fit) our culture, our era, and our preferences for most things new, different and better. As long as humans race faster and faster into ever-changing ways and times the Church is going to have to continue to learn to live consistently with the unchangeable Word while living with the new ways and times. By the way, here’s one for you: could a future AIE (artificially intelligent entity) be a Spirit-filled pastor?
What explicit things would Scripture say that touches upon the virtual pastor (better to say virtual preacher)? For one, a solid study of Scripture tells us that true preaching of the Word of God is the authoritative proclamation of the will of King Jesus through an ordained man to a community of people. The normal setting in biblical times was face-to-face and to an assembly of hearers, most often whom were professing believers, and often in the environment of worship. The means was by the Holy Spirit through the Word and through the Spirit-endowed preacher to a living audience. The point being is that the ordained servant (a living being) personally engages the assembly through the Spirit-endowed preaching of God’s Word. I argue that if you take the Word of God, the Spirit of God and/or the presence of a living man of God out of the picture it would not constitute true biblical preaching. The artificial preacher, whether mechanical, virtual or holographic, would not be filled with the Holy Spirit, hence this would not qualify as biblical preaching. Merely communicating a good sermon taken from another person who is not personally engaged with or presently engaging the community of people would not constitute the definition of biblical preaching. For example, reading an old but great sermon from Spurgeon would not be true biblical preaching.
A second explicit teaching from Scripture is that God’s clear design has been and always will be to take a redeemed sinner, called, gifted and ordained to service, and place him within a local community to serve up God’s Word privately (discipleship) and publicly (preaching). Whether we like it or not, God has never seen fit to place perfect, sinless, and flawless pastors in local churches; even if that is what people want. (Come to think about it, wasn't Jesus just that? Yet most people rejected him.) That’s one of the beauties and miracles of Christ’s redemptive work: to use sinners to serve other sinners for the glory of God. Aside from saying that no spiritually gifted and anointed person is good enough to preach, it seems to me that virtual preachers also circumvent God’s better plan of iron sharpening iron and sinner sharpening sinner. It also seems to be rather arrogant to assume that a preacher fashioned in our image is superior to one fashioned, gifted, and ordained by God’s design. Apparently God got it wrong all these centuries, but we can do it better.
A third thing, clearly tied into the above two points, is that the philosophy behind virtual preachers misunderstands the purpose and role of God’s Church. We are a community of sinners who trust in Christ as savior and master and are thereby immersed in God’s redemptive work and plan. Part of that plan involves transformed sinners who are in Christ, using their natural talents and supernatural gifts of the Spirit to serve one another. This is clearly taught in Romans 12, 1 Corinthian 12 and Ephesians 4. If a pastor and/or teacher gifted by God and given to the local church is not good enough for God’s people, then what about the evangelist? Or the Sunday school teacher? Wouldn’t virtual Sunday school or VBS or Bible study teachers be better than you? But let’s not stop there. If you don’t like how you are or are not being served, then let’s find a virtual servant, or some virtual device to replicate showing mercy. Better yet, how about if each person or family has a virtual thingamajig to replicate the gift of giving! Since church people are just as bothersome and disappointing as preachers and pastors, we would then have to have virtual church members. That way when we want to feel loved, or when we have a need for someone to rejoice when we rejoice or to weep when we are weeping we could plug into our virtual member. You know, just a few more steps and we’re in a matrix of cyber church! Will we need Neo to save us?
Fourth, this virtual thing, “Preacher EGHEAD” (electronically generated, humanly engineered, adjustable device) takes “having itching ears” (2 Timothy 4:3) to a whole new level. Actually, to a whole new dimension. It’s now about itching minds. One might argue that this EGHEAD can still present sound teaching. However, there is no great leap from accumulating virtual teachers according to our own desires, to gathering to ourselves virtual doctrines according to the our own desires. Let’s play out this scenario: people, who are so fickle, get tired of hearing old truths from the Bible. The Bible, after all, is so….yesteryear. Those truths are no longer true for me, or you, or him, or her, or us. Let’s put together a survey and find out what we all want to hear, make it a little more entertaining, but still relevant to our needs. Right. Like that will last. Soon people will get impatient because this EGHEAD might be meeting your needs, but not all of my needs, and I don’t have time to take a few applicable nuggets here and there. I need as much as I can get and need it now. You see, EGHEADS contribute toward deconstructing the Church; so postmodern. The Church deconstructed is not a Body, a new Temple building. It is something else. It would no longer have Christ as its center or its head, but it would have you. Or worse, me!

1 comment:

Kathy said...

Wow... what a ride! Really interesting, Don. Thanks for sharing.
BTW: did you just make up "EGHEAD" or is that what it is really called?