The new (global) village priests
The past
Remember the enormous cassette collection that once resided in your church library? All of your pastor's sermons were there for you to browse, sign out and listen to. If you wanted to listen to the sermons of the pastor of another church, you either needed to know someone who went to that church or go through the laborious task of ordering tapes by mail.
Then the digital revolution began to rumble and transform our media consumption habits. MP3s came along and after a while a 30-45 minute sermon was easy to distribute virally or via a website.
The present
Fast forward to 2011. As newer technologies like podcasting and live-streaming become ubiquitous, previous barriers to obtaining content like geography and cost are suddenly insignificant. Any given pastor is as close as your connected device, his books and sermons available at little to no cost. The “global village" effect now permeates every area of life.
So more Bible teaching is available but most of it is generated, not by your local church pastor, but by someone at a distance.
The virtual pastor
Enter the virtual pastor–a.k.a. the new global village priest. The virtual pastor is someone who exerts significant influence over your spiritual growth and development to the point where his influence is more prominent than that of the pastor of the local church of which you are a member.
As technology continues to invalidate the strictures of geography, more complexity has been added to the concept of accountability. In the case of the virtual pastor for example, to what degree are we to submit to the authority of someone whom we've never met or spoken to, or even been in the presence of, for that matter?
Some are more than willing to be the new global village priests. Take for example the recent controversy that erupted after a recent online dust-up in which long-time pastor John MacArthur publicly took church planter Darrin Patrick to task for a short section in Patrick's new book.
When defenders of Patrick's ministry offered rebuttals to the criticisms, MacArthur's team seemed incredulous that a controversy over his words even existed. At MacArthur's web site the official response to other church planters and defenders of Patrick was to not be “so thin-skinned." In addition they were advised to, “Listen. John has more than 50 years of preaching faithfully, more than 40 years in the same pulpit–don't you think you ought to listen?"
Patrick's response was admirable but a little confusing. He started by acknowledging that MacArthur had been a big influence on his ministry. He then spent several paragraphs defending himself against each of MacArthur's criticisms. But then he issued a caution to those who have been quick to be critical of MacArthur. “Please remember," he says, “that we all need to be corrected from time to time."
A statement by the elders of Patrick's church stated that they had asked him to respond to the concerns and then to, “meet with Dr. MacArthur privately to resolve any outstanding concerns." They also added that, “We as an elder team do not feel that Pastor Darrin's words in the questioned section need to be reworded or recanted."
So, according to Patrick and his elders, mistakes were not made but the correction was welcomed. The question is why do these local church elders feel it's necessary to so thoroughly respond to objections they believe are unfounded, especially ones made by the pastor of a church outside their geographic proximity?
Only in the global village of today's technological world could a pastor in California make a critical comment about a book written by a pastor in St. Louis and in less than 24 hours have started a controversy with thousands of Christians across Canada and the United States.
My point here is not to deter you from listening to or reading this or that influential teacher, but to drive toward a way of being that that sets as a priority the teachers and leaders in geographical and spiritual proximity to you.
We would all do well to remember that just because someone can say something loudly enough for everyone to hear doesn't mean that it demands a response. In a time when more people are saying more things more loudly than ever before, we'll quickly exhaust ourselves.
Below the post at www.gty.org is a display of what can only be described by coining a new term for a condition called ASD–Attention Surplus Disorder. There are 140 comments spanning some 30,000 words written by people who it's safe to say probably have one or two local church issues of their own that they could have been attending to.
Of course, I've just added another 750 words to the repository of this particular controversy, and I too have local church issues that need tending to. So do you. Let's get to them.
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