Cloud of Witnesses
By Dave Hansen
January 1, 1996
When my wife, Debbie, and I and another couple arrived at the nursery after the midweek evening program, we discovered our toddlers playing church.
Here's how it went: The 3-year-old "parents" were taking the 2-year-old "babies" to "nursery," then the "parents" went to "meetings." The attendant said they'd played the game over and over all evening.
We laughed out loud, but we glanced at one another's eyes; we knew how sick it was. Our children's first word to describe the gospel ministry was "meetings." It wasn't a cuss word they'd learned at the neighbor's. This was home-grown heresy.
I didn't do anything about it. I started things, I planned things, I taught things, I organized things, I ran things, I built things—of course I had a lot of meetings to go to. Isn't that ministry? It sounded professional when I said it, but coming from our babies it sounded horrible, like a betrayal. It occurred to me that I was the one playing church.
ALEXANDER WHYTE'S LARGE LIFE
G.F. Barbour's "The Life of Alexander Whyte" (out of print) began to dissolve the glue that pasted together pastoral ministry and human management technology. This old book about a nineteenth-century Scottish Presbyterian pastor taught me deep inside, wherever things like paradigm shifts occur, that pastoral ministry is not the exercise of a pastoral technique; it is a work of Spirit, soul, gospel, and life.
Whyte was born January 13, 1836, in Kirriemuir, Scotland. He was raised in a single-parent home, an only child, an illegitimate child, in extreme poverty. When Whyte's mother wouldn't marry him, his father moved to America where he eventually fought in the Civil War. His mother raised Alexander to work and worship. His first promptings to ministry came before ...
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