An Interview with Paul: What might the Apostle say about the church today?

How should we lead the church?

New Testament scholar Andrew D. Clarke imagines what it would be like to interview the Apostle Paul about church leadership today.

The opportunity to interview the Apostle Paul about his perceptions of church in the early twenty-first century was an opportunity not to be missed.

Interviewer: Paul, could you start by telling us some of the most striking things that you notice about churches today?

Apostle Paul: The thing that amazes me the most is to see how church buildings now have such a high profile in every town and in some of the best city centre locations.
Interviewer: Did you ever foresee church buildings would be so large, so permanent and so centrally located?

Apostle Paul: No – our imaginations in the first century never quite expected this. But then, nor did we expect so many centuries would pass without seeing the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. Certainly these churches are amazing testimony to centuries of significant growth, development and influence.
Interviewer: Would you have liked to minister in these kind of churches?

Apostle Paul: I can certainly see advantages, but then I can also see disadvantages. The biggest advantages are public profile and space. Christians travelling through a strange city can immediately identify where believers are gathering. For many years, identifying whether there was a group of believers in a city was a major challenge to me on my travels.

These church buildings also offer an amazing space for large crowds to worship and hear the gospel proclaimed. Our Lord Jesus, of course, often spoke to very large crowds of my countrymen, and we also looked forward to festival days when the whole city of Jerusalem could offer loud worship to the Lord, with many musical instruments. These new buildings must be ideal for this. When I wrote to the churches in Asia Minor, Macedonia and Achaia, however, this was something I knew was not a realistic option – so I said little about it.
Interviewer: And the disadvantages?

Apostle Paul: Probably the same – public profile and space! As I look around today, it seems to me that ‘church’ is now identified either with a building, or with what happens in that building – at fixed times each week. It’s as if church comes down to a list of weekly activities, advertised on large notice-boards outside locked church buildings.
Interviewer: But, what about when church is ‘on’?

Apostle Paul: As I say, I’m excited about the opportunities for both teaching and worship, but I’m puzzled about how the mutual up-building of the body is carried out in spaces like this, and I’d be surprised if these buildings were good places to meet unbelievers.

Interviewer: How do you mean?

Apostle Paul: Well, I have always thought that regularly sharing meals together – as my countrymen have always done, as Jesus did, and as my fellow apostles did – would always remain an indispensable element of discipleship. As I see it, these church spaces, which are so good for proclamation and worship, don’t equally serve for table-fellowship.

One of my most painful memories was confronting brother Peter after he had taken to excluding some from the joy of sharing table-fellowship; and another of my saddest moments was when I had to write to the Corinthians and rebuke them for turning table-fellowship into something that was unrecognisably different from what Jesus instituted on the night he was betrayed. I believe that Christ Jesus wanted saints, for all time to come, to share meals together, around tables, in small groups, recalling that particular meal he shared with those who were apostles before me.
Interviewer: Does anything else strike you about these spaces?

Apostle Paul: One of the things I considered most important in my own ministry – and something I regularly commended for other leaders – was the overwhelming importance of sharing lives. After all, the message I preached was about the one who was descended from David, in the flesh. My travelling companion, Luke, recorded many examples of how I shared with unbelievers in their own homes, and how I strengthened the faith of believers also by sharing my life with them, often in their homes. On more than one occasion, I reminded the Thessalonians that both their turning to God, and their growing in Christ, were not simply on the basis of my words, but in the context of sharing lives on a particularly deep level. And the most important thing I left with the Ephesian elders was their memory of how I lived among them. I don’t envy those overseers today who try to reach out to unbelievers and who seek to bring believers to maturity in Christ without a similar dimension of spending frequent and long hours in the homes and around the dining tables of the people they love – modelling a whole way of life.
Interviewer: You mention the word ‘overseers’ – what did you regard as distinctive about the ministry of an ‘overseer’?

Apostle Paul: I had always intended that the key roles of overseers were both to teach and to care for a small number of people – in the context of the overseer’s own home, and in the manner of a family. It’s here that an overseer models being a spouse, a parent, a neighbour; and it’s here where the words they say will be measured against the lives they lead. It’s always been obvious to me that ministry would be deeper and more effective within a small number of especially close relationships – much as our Lord chose to do – which is why I placed so much emphasis on people imitating the way I live, and why I focused so much teaching on relationships in the home, that is between husband and wife, master and slave, parents and children. I imagine that in churches which focus more on sharing words than lives, it would be too easy for people, including leaders, to hide the true state of their relationships.

Interviewer: Does this mean that you don’t approve of youth and children’s ministries or adult-only midweek groups, where children and parents have times of worship and teaching, separated from each other?

Apostle Paul: I can see that so much is achieved in times like this. I’m not convinced, however, that it fully compensates for the set of close and deep relationships, where people of all ages engage with each other in a face-to-face way, recognising each others’ needs, and sharing in the responsibility of meeting those needs as a committed family. But I wouldn’t like you to think this is a new problem. Both in Rome and Corinth, the churches I founded looked as though they might divide and form groups which only welcomed people of a similar type, or set of beliefs, or nationality. On several occasions, I tried to challenge this by using the metaphor of the body – emphasising difference, a mutuality, an interdependence, an expectation of giving, rather than of receiving. Without this, it’s all too possible that people would think church is a place where I go in order to meet or mingle with people of my own type and ‘get my own needs met’. And further down the line, the upshot would certainly be that people would eventually stop looking outwards, having an eye to others, and reaching beyond their own kind.

Interviewer: Thank you very much, Paul, for sharing again with us.

PR 

Preview Andrew Clarke’s book, Serve the Community of the Church: Christians as Leaders and Ministers from the First-Century Christians in the Graeco-Roman World series (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).

http://books.google.com/books?id=UnrKVo10LPMC

James Purves reviewed Serve the Community of the King in the Spring 2005 issue of Pneuma Review.

See also the review of Andrew Clarke’s book, A Pauline Theology of Church Leadership (T & T Clark, 2008) in this issue.