With one simple click of the mouse, Christians can be pastored by their favorite pastor. Regardless of the miles between them, open your web browser and in just a few keystrokes, your preferred preacher is pastoring your soul…except, not really. Here’s one unwitting example:

Last week the Internet announced the resurgence of Mr. Resurgence. Mark Driscoll, the embattled former pastor of the now defunct Mars Hill Church in Seattle, who rejected his board’s restoration process, attended a Christian conference in Dallas where he was compared to Jesus, is no longer pastoring a local church, and has now launched a new website. According to reports, “The site acts as a history of sorts for Driscoll, with access to his sermon series and blogs, as well as the online home of the Driscolls’ ministry. Those who sign up are given access to exclusive content.”

Fair enough. Like any public persona, Driscoll has a dedicated following whom, I’m sure, wish to keep up with him and his endeavors. However, I find Driscoll’s new site troubling, but not because I’m interested in the accusations and/or behaviors that led to Mark’s orbit away from Mars.

My problem with the website — and others like it — is simple: It’s called, “Pastor Mark.”

Some (maybe most) folks won’t understand why this is inappropriate. Others will suggest I’m making too much of it. They’ll say titles are merely honorific and largely meaningless. But I don’t think they are, especially this one.

My ache is about a mutating virus sickening the contemporary church: Christians have either abandoned or never understood what a pastor is. And there is no pastor without a church!

“Pastor” comes from the Latin word for “shepherd,” and is not used frequently in the New Testament. Most notably, Paul uses “pastor” in Ephesians 4:11. Now that you know where to go Bible hunting, let’s cut to the root: A shepherd without sheep is just a dude with a stick! (Tweet that!)

When Jesus speaks of shepherds and sheep, His terms are local and vocal: “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice (John 10:3b–4).” Being a Pastor is rooted in local communities of care and guidance.

The Interweb is not a local community of care.

There is no doubt that people can be blessed and taught by what they read and hear on the Internet, but they cannot be pastored. I know this, you know, as a pastor.

In today’s church, pastoral care has come to mean almost anything but pastoring. It now means conference speaking, unique views on your website, book publishing contracts, and driving donations to your 501(c)(3). It’s happened because increasingly, Christians have lost any meaningful connection to local churches. We are swirling disturbingly downward in an ecclesiological dump tank wherein locally-rooted community’s of faith no longer matter.

What we now identify as pastoral activities are the same slippery seductions that have led to countless ministerial downfalls. Couple this with the breakneck rapidity in which abused church members are dismissed and the “pastor” redeemed; the fervency with which followers defend their favorite, but distant, celebrity pastor when s/he has rightly been exposed as living counter to their public professions; or when a popular, public Christian graduates church and it becomes hard to deny that the folks on the ground, the local people, the actual church just don’t matter all that much.

“Pastors” can now write, preach, and teach faceless masses without having to know the names of anyone but the employees working on their “team.” It is a disembodied view of “the body;” a Christian audience without the reality of a church. Churchless “pastors” want people to buy their books, read their blogs, retweet their thoughts, and pay money to attend their conferences, but they don’t actually want people.

If this makes you a pastor, then Kim Kardashian is one.

Being a pastor means being a shepherd, not in macro, but in micro. It means weeping over coffee with a husband who has lost his wife while speaking words of healing, comfort, and life. It means physical presence, holding trembling hands, and offering broad, dry shoulders to absorb the tears of the hurting. Being a pastor means sitting with students as they tell their parents long-kept secrets. Pastoring means walking with people through cancer diagnoses and baby dedications; it means hospital waiting rooms and preparing yet another Sunday school class. Being a pastor is opening your heart and laying your soul bare before a particular and peculiar community of people in the hopes that together you are drawn toward God. There is no doubt, the gospels picture Jesus speaking to crowds, but more often we see Jesus spending time with people.

Websites, books, and conferences make you a spokesperson. They don’t make you a pastor.

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