What If There Is No Pastor?

House Churches Can Still Have Biblical Structure

A lot of people reacting to you who either are or have been a part of the house church movement. One major confusion was, you know, well, what about house churches? You can have a church in a house. Of course you can, and you can still have structure and leadership and officers in a house church.

Everything, every essential ingredient can exist in any gathering place, outside, in a home. It's pretty wonderful that way, isn't it? Yeah. In a church. Yeah, it is. Let me ask you this, though, in regards to that, is it possible for a church to exist without one pastor?

Because a lot of times what happens with posts like this is that we get a lot of, what about-isms, right? Yes, sir. That kind of argument. What about the church that, you know, their pastor died? And of course, I think the actual example that was posted was like six years without a pastor.

There are probably some other issues going on if a church doesn't accept a pastor for six years. True, yeah. But if we were to shorten that length of time, is it still a church? Yeah, that's a great question.

The Need for Plurality of Elders and Succession Planning

So the first thing, a senior pastor, let's just use the nomenclature I'm not even comfortable with, but let's just say, because this is the majority, and we're stupid to think this is not the majority.

Let's just say there's a senior pastor who's known, who's the face of the church, who runs the place. Got it. And he has deacons that are kind of acting as an elder council. Now they're not elders. They have not been ordained as elders, which is, by the way, the equivalent of pastor or overseer.

It's like a pastoral ordination. In fact, we call our elders pastors casually around here. Our church refers to them as that. But let's say they have deacons who are running in the place of an elders, which is not something I recommend, but definitely common.

Then the pastor leaves, dies. One guy leaves, dies. They are technically without the office of a pastor. And let's say they're small enough to where they don't have a lot of associate pastors and there's not someone to be a pastor on staff because you're talking about the dismissal, the seeming apparent dismissal of the office.

Well, the first thing that, to go back in time, the first thing that pastors should do is create more pastors around them. There should be a plurality of elders to avoid the problem by which you're mentioning.

But let's say they didn't do that. Let's say no one is worried or thought about succession at all. And they're doing it the Southern Baptist way since the 1950s in Charles Finney, where they serve until some stranger comes in that is very similar to them in these mannerisms.

And then they start serving. And they have a pastoral search committee made up of the deacons. And we've been through all of these things. We know how it goes. Well, the deacons rise up and there's still a form of office and leadership.

The deacons are the ones who take the podium in the pulpit. There's some leadership acting that is not just some congregant randomly walking up and some guy looking around the room at the lights and going, well, I guess I'll talk today.

Leadership Still Exists When a Pastor Is Absent

So here's the plan, what we're happening. No, it's been appointed. It's been established. Even in the smallest of churches, there's a guy people's eyes are drawn to, to go, he'll probably take things.

It's how we recognize leadership in any culture, in any concept, even in our employment. Someone has the qualifications necessary to step in until you have a pastor ordained or appointed by the people who then become either your non-vocational, bi-vocational or full-time vocational pastor, depending on what cultural context you're in.

So I think it's kind of weird to say that you're without a pastor. You might be without an official pastor if you have no one trained and you're not dealing with a plurality of elders, which, by the way, is biblical.

But if you, so again, the Bible saves our butts again by giving us exactly what we should be doing. So now we're off away in our own way and going, we're creating our whataboutisms out of our mistakes.

Like, well, so what about, what if there's only one pastor in the whole place and he dies? Are we not a pastor now? Well, you were wrong in not having a bunch of pastors. Yeah. But you were wrong. So, yeah, so because you were wrong and not having a bunch of pastors around who could be a part of that leadership if something happens to a guy, then, yeah, temporarily, no, you were not revoked being a church because you have someone in place there to serve as leadership until eventually you appoint someone else to serve at that office.

Why This Argument Strengthens the Case for Church Leadership

So some of those arguments, I think, even enhance the importance.