Leaders and Pastoral Agents
Lay people, volunteers, pastoral agents, community leaders are responsible to bring teaching the gospel in the forefront helping the clergy to evangelize people. Agents ramify in many ways to act and be in touch with the people in daily life and developing religious projects, socio-political and infrastructural.
- Jehovah's Witnesses consider every baptized Witness to be a "minister"; the religion permits any qualified baptized adult male to perform a baptism, funeral, or wedding. Typically, however, each such service is performed by an elder or a "ministerial servant" (that is, a deacon), one of the men appointed to "take the lead" in local congregations. Witnesses do not use "elder" or any other term as a title, and do not capitalize the term. They do not accept payment and are not salaried employees or considered “paid clergy”, but they receive donations from members of the congregation to help them with their everyday expenses. The religion's Governing Body may appoint any adult baptized male as an elder, but more typically assigns certain other committees (typically, at branch offices) to make such appointments on its behalf; appointment is said to be "by holy spirit" because "the qualifications recorded in God’s spirit-inspired Word" and because appointing committees 'pray for holy spirit'.
- In many evangelical churches a group (multiple elders as opposed to a single elder) of (non-staff) elders serve as the spiritual "shepherds" or caretakers of the congregation, usually giving spiritual direction to the pastoral staff, enforcing church discipline, etc. In some denominations these elders are called by other names, i.e.; traditionally "Deacons" in many Baptist churches function as spiritual leaders. In some cases these elders are elected and serve fixed terms. In other cases they are not elected but rather they are "recognized by the congregation as those appointed by the Holy Spirit (Acts 20:28) and meeting the qualifications of 1 Timothy 3:1-7."
Read more about this topic: Christian Clergy
Famous quotes containing the words leaders and, leaders, pastoral and/or agents:
“Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measures by results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)
“Modern man’s capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity’s capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)