the one thing

The answer:



 the name (and often) picture of the pastor or priest is in almost every real church ad, but is never in ads students make after reading what the Bible says about church.






That should be a (probably literal) mike-drop moment!

Jeremy Myers:

"there is not a single passage in Scripture which commands or even provides an example of the current popular pattern of gathering in a building on a certain day of the week to listen to one person stand up and talk about the Bible for thirty or forty minutes.
It is just not there."  -Jeremy Myers, full article link

Now, before reading any further, guess how many times the word "pastor" shows up in the whole Bible..  That is your question B: guess how many times the word "pastor" shows up in the whole Bible..
Make a note of your answer, then  scroll down quite a bit to see the answer to question B, and to see question C.

read below.














The  word "pastor" shows up a total of ZERO times in the whole Bible.

Huh?

The plural version, "pastors" shows up only once, as pastors are mentioned, in passing, in the Ephesians text you read for the church assignment.  Note "pastors" is mentioned only in the context of other "leaders": apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers:

  Ephesians 4: 11-13 The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers,  to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,  until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

All American pastors know that  the Bible knows nothing of a weekly meeting where a pastor leads the service, is usually the main one speaking, and  preaches a sermon, but we are all afraid to admit it.

You know it, because you just did the research yourself.

The pastor is nowhere commanded in the Bible to be the main speaker in a church meeting, or to preach a sermon.  Remember in the Corinthians scripture you read that every time the church gathers "one person has a song, one has a tongue, one has a revelation."  It never seemed to occur to them that one person was up front (there was no "up front"), and be the only one speaking.  Everyone got to share..Wiki-style, open-source style.  Can you imagine if you "interrupted" the sermon at church this weekend?  Has that every happened?  It was just normative church in the Bible days.

SOOO..question  C for your Moodle forum:
  question C:

Why do you think  this shift  (from the Bible days where pastors were only a small part of the leadership to our day...at least here in the West...pastors and priests and sermons seem to be very central to church) has happened, and what might it mean?