Tuesday Re-mix – This is a popular post from last year, updated and resubmitted for your consideration and comments.

If one of the objectives of the Reformation was to blur the line between the two “classes” of church members (clergy and laymen) which existed at the time, then I think Martin Luther would be terribly disappointed in the traditional American church of today.  We talk a lot about the “priesthood of the believer” and Spiritual gifts in every Christian and how we are all ministers, but the ministerial structure of our traditional protestant churches betrays us.  We still have two classes of members: professional Christians (ministerial staff) and the rest of us.  And, unfortunately, the rest of us are most often content to sit back and wait to be entertained and fed and ministered to by the professional Christians.  Any attempts by Luther and friends to truly mobilize the laity of the church seem to have failed pretty miserably by most standards.

Okay, okay.  Maybe it’s not quite that bad.  But even among our healthiest churches, there is often this understanding, this “norm” that has the professional Christians doing the work (and getting paid for it) and the rest of us just coming up under them and supporting that work however we can.  Our church offices and support staff are often geared toward that same paradigm.  Our budgets, our programming, our communications strategies, virtually our entire infrastructure in the traditional evangelical church is bent toward this same attitude of paying our ministers to do ministry so that we don’t have to.

Because of this, my heart aches for the traditional church.  I know there are plenty of non-traditional churches out there who are experimenting with other models…churches filled with people who have fled the traditional church in order to pursue …