Proclaimer Blog
Terminology may matter
I've been thinking a little this week about what we call ourselves. Partly that's because I'm taking a session this evening on why and how we should love our people. I guess the two key words are minister and pastor.
- Minister, I might suggest, is sometimes overused. It comes, of course, from the Greek, leitourgos. That means servant. Or diakonos. Similar idea. It's a good word for what we do. Although, as far as I can see, as a noun it nearly always used in terms of our relationship to Christ – a servant of Christ, a minister of Christ. It depends to be our default word with all its cognates – we minister to a congregation, we do ministry. I want to keep this word in our vocabulary.
- But I also want to reclaim the word pastor, that is shepherd. This is also a biblical paradigm and, I might suggest, is a more common word in terms of how we relate to our people (rather than how we relate to God). It implies a certain level of care and compassion and is modelled on the shepherding of the Chief Shepherd.
I'm certain we want to jettison neither description. But I wonder if we prefer one over the other. Why? And I wonder, further, whether we are detached from the original meaning of both words to make them biblically meaningless in our own context. "He's our minister" they say. Do they mean servant? "He's our pastor" they say. Do they mean shepherd?
Brothers, let's reflect prayerfully on what God calls us to be.