This weekend I’m presenting at the Renew Conference in Fresno, CA. Jason Locke, the very capable preaching minister there, left the field wide open in terms of what I could present. That’s always a mixed bag. If you’re assigned a topic and flop, at least you can tell yourself you were put in a corner – which, my wife tells me, no one ever does to Baby. But I digress.

I’ve opted to talk about pastors and churches as community leaders for the common good. For two years I’ve served as a board member for the Peninsula Clery Network, most recently as President. Our goal is to connect clergy to one another and with civic and governmental officers and agencies. Surprisingly I have found that most Christian clergy have no imagination that their vocation connects with civic and community leadership. We do not see ourselves as community leaders. I can conceive of several reasons for this. Among them:

• Most congregants just want their ministers to care for them and their needs. Anything else is a waste. “We’re paying you, Buddy.”
• Ministers have a profound time crunch. In any week they have multiple public presentations, an organization to run, staff to oversee, visitation, and, ahem…blog post to write (late at night, of course).
• Ministers have believed that the state actually wants separation of church and state. Trust me (and I’m in California), local, state, and federal municipalities are dying for congregations to take leadership in their communities. Don’t believe either the mainstream or conservative media hype about this. It’s just false!

Churches and clergypersons have been decentralized as community leaders and we did it to ourselves. Not to put too fine a point on it: We abandoned our cities to work in our churches and now both are in decline.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is my hero. Though rightly remembered as a Civil Rights leader, King’s fundamental self-perception was that of a preacher. When King arrived as the boy-preacher at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, he did not come to start a movement; he came to preach. As a matter of fact, when he arrived he brought in hand a 39-Point plan to turnaround the congregation. In it were such revolutionary items as buying a new pulpit. What’s more, king saw himself as simply carrying on the family business. His father was a pastor, his grandfather was a pastor, and his great-grandfather was a pastor.

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