On My Soapbox

Church peeps, let's try and stay away from the corporate mentality in the way we do church, okay? The church is not a corporation. So stop calling it an elder board. A corporation has a board of directors. But a church will have a body of elders. Stop distinguishing your "senior pastor" from your other elders. That's a distinction the New Testament never makes. A pastor is an elder and an elder is a pastor. Besides, the title "senior pastor" is reserved for Christ (1 Pet. 5:4). And how I wish we could get rid of the term "church." I love how Tyndale rendered ekklesia as "congregation." He was simply following the lead he found in Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German, in which Luther avoided the term "Kirche," preferring instead "Gemeinde." The equivalent in English would be "community." You see, an ekklesia is a group of people that have come together and have something in common, as opposed to a group of people that have come together and have little to nothing in common (that's an ochlos, or "crowd"). In Germany, you can drive into, say, "Gemeinde Lörrach" (the municipality of Lörrach) and then attend "die Baptistengemeinde Lörrach" (the Baptist church of Lörrach) on Sunday. Beautiful! 

And when we will ever stop referring to the pastorate as "the" ministry. Remember, those who served tables and those who taught the word in Acts 6 were both engaged in "ministry" (diakonia)! 

*Stepping off my soapbox.*