The Argument for "professional" Pastors...

This may come across as self-serving, but can I make a case for full-time, professional Pastors? By "professional" I mean that he or she gets paid to do it and doesn't do anything else. Let me just say that my wife and I happen to pastor an amazing church full of people who really want to take care of us, so I'm not really writing this for our benefit specifically. It's just a general discussion. Good. Here we go.


First, to answer the question "what do you do all day anyway?" Let's just say that anytime you try to get a large group of adults and about as many kids to all move in the same direction at roughly the same time, you'll have some practical details to work out. By "some" I really mean LOTS. Believe it or not, the work of God actually has a very pragmatic side that your Pastors never expose you to.


Second, people's crisis don't follow bankers' hours. Your Pastors don't shut off their phones at 6pm. If you call me at 2am with a broken heart, I'll answer. I do it all the time. Oh yeah, and we work on Sundays. And Saturdays. And Christmas. No complaints, either. It's the best job in the universe.


Then there's the spiritual point, which actually inspired me to write this. I'm reading 1 Chronicles during my morning devotional time right now, and in chapter 24, after David has made plans to build the Temple, he assigns divisions of Levites to serve in it. Context, as always, is important.


David is not inventing something new; he's going back to the way it used to be, when the Ark resided in the Tabernacle in the wilderness. It was God who'd set aside the Levites for the work of the Temple, to serve him and to minister to Israel, and Israel had drifted away from that over time. God had been decentralized. After a time, Israel became unwilling to devote much in the way of resources. They no longer defined themselves as a people who had been rescued from bondage by God, and then taken through the wilderness. They were a kingdom now, a regional power, and a force to be reckoned with. What did they need God for? They were doing great on their own.


I mean, they'd left the Ark of the Covenant to languish in pagan hands for years. That symbolic gesture says everything. Earlier in 1 Chronicles we see that the first thing that David does when he ascends to the throne is to recapture the Ark and move it back into Jerusalem. The lesson on priorities is critical. It's the same lesson that the book of Ezra teaches. When Israel comes back from Exile, the first thing they do is rebuilt the altar so that they can resume worship. Remember that they were surrounded by enemies; it was a significant risk to put off building the walls. First things first. David applies the same thinking in reestablishing the centrality of the Ark.


So, to the point: setting aside people, like the Levites, is one of the ways that we give first priority to God. In so doing, we put our money where our mouths are in more ways than one. There's the giving issue, since that's how our Pastors are paid, but there's also the idea that we're taking these men and women, the vast majority of whom are intelligent, educated people, out of the market economy. We're devoting people who could be doing something more "productive" to something that seems more nebulous. In David's time, that person would have been taken out of an agrarian culture, where every pair of hands mattered in terms of sowing crops, harvesting, caring for animals, and so on. Devoting 38,000 people to service in the Temple was a significant economic risk. We do the same thing with Pastors today. They could be bankers, or lawyers, accountants or college professors. Most of them have that level of education. Instead, we free them for a life of vocational ministry.


Ultimately, it's a slap in the face of consumerist idolatry and quasi-religious capitalist ideology. By setting people aside for ministry, we are tithing people whom God will use for his purposes. We don't get to be in control of their time. We don't get to impose standards of productivity, or evaluate their job performance using spread sheets and pie graphs. Profitability is not the goal. We get to let go of all of that, and trust God to use these people as he sees fit. It's just another example of the way we keep God at the center, by letting go of the need to control and evaluate.

So...that's my argument. Thoughts?