Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Multi-site pastors

I was intrigued by John Pehrson's piece in the e-news for today about "multi-site pastors," i.e. pastors who oversee the life and ministry of a local congregation but who leave the preaching to a video feed from a "tall steeple" (or more likely "megachurch") preacher. Like John, I don't know what to think about this phenomenon. My first reaction is that the best preaching is done by preachers who know the congregations they are preaching to. (I heard Tom Long say this at a workshop once) But there are many gifted pastors who are not gifted preachers, and their gifts might be put to better use if they were delivered from the burden of weekly preaching. I wonder if this model might be modified to something like this: a cluster of churches who are served by a group of Ministers of Word and Sacrament and Commissioned Lay Pastors, with one of the group designated as The Preacher, with his/her sermons shared via video from one of the congregations. Ideally, each congregation would take it in turn to host the preaching. This would preserve the personal contact. Obviously the technical aspects would have to be worked out, but the idea interests me.