The ministry is not some two headed cow. . .

The situation with respect to the pastoral office has become exceptionally murky.  Ordinarily you would think that time would explicate and elucidate something -- making clearer what was once less so.  It is surely not the case with the office of pastor among us.  We have mucked it up pretty badly.

In Walther's day, Lutherans were catholic with respect to the office of the pastor.  There is one episcopus, one bishop, in the congregation.  Walther believed it and acted as such.  No one dared question him, either.  C. F. W. Walther was simultaneously the pastor of the four Saxon Lutheran congregations (called the Gesammtgemeinde) in St. Louis (Trinity, Holy Cross, Immanuel, and Zion) -- not to mention President of Concordia Seminary and Professor of the same and President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.  No wonder he had to take some time off for nervous exhaustion!  He had helping preachers (fully ordained pastors) but they assisted and were not equals nor did each hold a portion of the office.  Walther was the pastor.  That was not simply true for Walther but for all the early LCMS congregations.  One bishop (pastor) and one congregation even though there many be other ordained pastors who assist him.

The early history of Missouri not only knew this but operated with categories consistent with this understanding.  We had pastors and assistant (assisting) pastors.  The pastor represented the congregation at the district and synod level but not the assisting pastors.  This was by no means a denigration of those assisting pastors or their abilities or their responsibilities but an acknowledgement of the history of the ministry.  A congregation has one bishop or pastor.  Period.  And then things went downhill.  

After perhaps a hundred years of this, somebody felt slighted and it was decided to change assistant pastors into associate pastors -- as if they were both the same but different people.  Alas a two headed cow was born.  It did not help that by then we had begun adding names and categories to the commissioned ministers and had already begun heading down the dangerous route that suggested that teachers were almost pastors but just carried out their duties in a different setting.  Then we ordered the offices in a way that would satisfy the almighty IRS and give to all -- every category and male and female -- the same vaunted tax benefits the government had once assigned to clergy.  Then we began adding all sorts of qualifying titles -- Senior Pastor, Administrative Pastor, Visitation Pastor, Executive Pastor, Youth Pastor, Minister of Music, Minister of Facilities, and you name it.  The genie was out of the bottle.  It did not take long before the old assistant pastor was gone and the once important distinctions erased.  We just had pastors (except for the invented titles that still exist only in District President's Standard Operating Procedures and in parish constitutions).  Every pastor was the same and if you had more than one pastor, the distinction between them was purely an artificial one.  In other words, a two headed cow.

There was something lost in the evolution toward an egalitarian understanding of the office in which we could permit no pastor to be different from another.  First of all we gained the idea that if you did not like what one pastor told you, you sought out counsel from the other(s).  Never a good idea to shop for pastoral care.  Why stop at your own pastors?  Why not visit every congregation to find if there is a pastor you find more meaningful and understanding and responsive?  Second, we presumed that each pastor acts alone or on their own and by so doing minimized both the importance of and meaning of unity.  That has not exactly been a minor problem for us and it does not help the situation when pastors in the same parish do not act in concert.  God forbid that any pastor should be asked to forgo personal preference on anything to conform to an ordinary standard!  Finally, the unity of the congregations is, in large part, a reflection of the unity of the ministerium -- the unity of the bishops.  If we cannot preserve such unity in one congregation, how can we expect to preserve it across the cities and counties and states where we are planted?  Two headed cows are always headed in different directions.

Of course the muddy mess was further corrupted by the Witchita recession of Augustana XIV and by the invention of lay ministers and unordained deacons who had faculties for the full exercise of Word and Sacrament.  Not to mention the development of Specific Ministers whose specificity seemed by many to be a slight to be corrected more than an acknowledgement of the unity of the office.  In the end, more two headed cows pulling us toward very different paths.

I would beg us to return to our former and first understanding -- not to elevate me or any but simply to acknowledge that this is way it has always been.  My part in this will long be over by the time anyone ever gets around to bringing it up to a Synod convention so I have no personal stake in this.  As one of this ubiquitous senior pastors with an associate and a commissioned minister also on staff, I can tell you that there is not a little confusion about who is accountable to whom and how this works out in practicality.  It would be good to clarify it once and for all and to return to the understanding of things that once shaped our Synod's approach to the office of the pastor.  But I am not holding my breath....