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    Clergy Don't Shepherd: God 101
    Clergy Don't Shepherd: God 101
    Clergy Don't Shepherd: God 101
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    Clergy Don't Shepherd: God 101

    By Jesse Steele

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    About this ebook

    What holds the Church back? What is the "clerical system"? How does it affect the Church? Are "clergy" and "shepherds" the same? If we remove the "clerical system" from the way we "do" Church, does that mean we no longer have pastors? Explore these and many other questions in a reconsideration of Western Church Administration from the eyes of the Church in both the New Testament and in China.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJesse Steele
    Release dateFeb 14, 2013
    ISBN9781301946082
    Clergy Don't Shepherd: God 101
    Author

    Jesse Steele

    Today's news, yesterday.TM I'm an American writer in Asia who wears many hats. I learned piano as a kid, studied Bible in college, and currently do podcasting, web contenting, cloud control, and brand design. I like golf, water, speed, music, kung fu, art, and stories.

    Read more from Jesse Steele

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      Book preview

      Clergy Don't Shepherd - Jesse Steele

      Clergy Don’t Shepherd:

      God 101

      Jesse Steele

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2013 Jesse Steele

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced for sale in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      books.JesseSteele.com

      books@jessesteele.com

      Jesse Steele on Smashwords

      ISBN: 978-130-194-608-2

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      For personal enjoyment only, you are welcome to share this eBook with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete, original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by Jesse Steele. Thank you for your support.

      For my Grandmothers…

      Both to the Pearl, who loved the Church,

      And to the Entertainer, who stirred the pot

      Table of Contents

      For my grandmothers

      Introduction: Background

      Being and Doing Church Always Changes

      The Past: Review and Revamp

      The Clerical System

      What Is the Church?

      Gifts of Leadership in the Church

      Results

      Church Laity

      Church Leadership

      Apostles

      Concerning China

      Pastors Are Very Capable

      One Team, One Body, One Church

      Conclusion: What Does the Future Look Like?

      Introduction: Background

      The existence of clergy isn’t merely a topic about the Church; it’s also a question about Theology Proper. How limited do we think God is? We can’t understand God as long as we think we need—or that He needs—clergy. The same is true of Soteriology—Christ’s work at the Cross fulfilled the need for any sort of clergy. While we need deacons and teachers and Christian fellowship, clergy are a whole different ball of wax.

      The fact that clergy don’t shepherd isn’t merely a Christianity 101 topic; it’s a God 101 topic.

      I don’t believe that pastors are bad people. There’s a big difference between shepherds and clergy. Of course it’s not easy to explain the difference to a Church that has never known Christianity apart from the clerical system, which is why I felt the need to write a book.

      All through my college years at the Moody Bible Institute, and still after, I have asked myself what the Church should look like. Additionally, it grieved me that I could not have fellowship with all Christians, everywhere. Maybe that seems silly to you. Only God is omnipresent, after all. Why should I expect to have fellowship with every Christian? Nonetheless, this has always burdened me and finding a solution is one of the many things I look forward to when the Ancient of Days makes all things new.

      So, desiring to have fellowship with many Christians, I drove in my car, all over the map. I visited Christian fellowships, not because of any specific problem. I merely wanted to understand other Christians and how they understood the Lord when they congregate.

      The Moody Bible Institute sends their new grad school students to about three hundred different Christian ministries for this very reason—to drive home the point that there are many different ways that work within the single Body of Christ. After undergraduate school, I basically did the same thing, but unofficially.

      I would often listen to two or even three different preachers on a weekend. And, at the time, I didn’t know why I drove to see those Christians, other than that I loved them. It was similar to how Forrest Gump said, I just felt like running!

      Over time, people asked me if something was wrong with me because I didn’t stay in the same church every week with the same people, week after week. (For now, I’ll look past their assumption a ‘church’ is a location, making it possible to ‘stay’ or not.) Though they didn’t know it, that question was more discrediting to them than it was to me… You love Christians so much that you want to visit them in many locations—something must be wrong with you. That’s not an idea anyone should imply, but so many do, which has deeper implications that this book aims to address.

      We’re all learning. I like to think that they had the best intentions in asking. Time will clarify.

      Whether you agree with my choice or not, I humbly believe the experience qualifies me to say that I might know the Church better than the Church seems to know itself. Christian descriptions of other denominations would seem comical, if it were not so divisive—and those descriptions of each other are almost as inaccurate as they are identical.

      Many Christians try to tell me about those other guys—whom I sat with the week before, and the week before that, and before that—with whom I have coffee on a regular basis, whom I have on my mobile phone’s speed dial. To hear to Christians talk about each other so mistakenly, you’d never guess who they were actually talking about.

      Not all experiences were bad though. I mostly remember the wonderful people I met—people in many different denominations and fellowships.

      Finally, in 2009, Obama took the Presidency and I took a one-way flight to Asia two weeks later. My Church journeys in America were complete. Christians in Asia—with Asian culture to boot—made the perfect environment for digesting what I had seen for the previous two decades of my active Church life.

      After a year in Asia, the idea occurred to me to write a book about my experiences. Before my father’s passing, and before Brian McLaren was given the black hat, dad commented on A New Kind of Christian telling me, This method of using a story to convey an idea really helps the reader understand. A month afterward, another friend told me the same thing. Those conversations, and a number of other experiences, led me to a conclusion, perhaps a sign from God: I should share bout the diversity in the Church by writing fiction—a story where Christians actually talk to each other!

      I mean, after all, Christians talking to each other isn’t something you’ll find in the Theology section or in the news section or in the History section. Nope, you’ll have to go to the fiction isle if you hope to read about any substantial Christian unity. Hence, my first two books were fiction, Crossroads at the Day of Bapcitost and Crossroads at the Way and Churchianity.

      Considering the play script style of these first two books, bear in mind, in high school I cracked the code on Abbot and Costello’s Who’s on First. It literally came to me in a dream… They used an outline. I listened to various versions, noted cues they gave each other, and taught another thespian high school friend how to reproduce it, five minutes before the high school talent show. We won a standing ovation and the Green Weenie award. Few can really do a thriving, living, organic version of Abbot and

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