The Pastor Has No Clothes! Moving from Clergy-Centered Church to a Christ-Centred Ekklesia by Jon Zens.
Protestantism carries on with the practice of making the "pastor" the focal point in church. In The Pastor Has No Clothes, Jon Zens demonstrates that putting all the ecclesiastical eggs in the pastor's basket has no precedent in the New Testament. Using 1 Corinthians 12:14, Zens shows the usual and traditional way of doing church contradicts Paul's self-evident remark that "the body indeed is not one part" and then goes on to unfold from that Epistle how the living church functions "with the many parts." Jon critiques the traditional pastor doctrine from various angles by combining two new essays and a response to Eugene Peterson's The Pastor: A Memoir, with three past articles and excerpts from his response to Dr. Ben Witherington's review of Pagan Christianity.
The pulpit stand for the authoritative Word of God, its public reading and preaching. The pew, through long usages has become a symbol for hearing and reception of that word. Is this what the church boils down to: pulpit and pew? You would think us by the prevalent way the church functions. But the author shows that the "pulpit and the pew" were unknown in the New Testament, and instead the church was vibrant, organic church life, enriched by the participation of everyone "in the body of believers."
