From Dissenting Title to the Largest Protestant Office

The word pastor entered common English religious use through the Reformation, when reformers rejected the sacrificial priesthood and needed a plain title for the person who preached and led a congregation. Luther, Calvin and the English and Scottish reformers each produced their own version of the office, and by the seventeenth century pastor had become the standard word across most of Protestant Europe and its colonies for the settled minister of a single congregation.

The office has multiplied rather than stayed still. Where the sixteenth century pastor served one parish for a working lifetime, the modern American landscape includes multi-site megachurch pastors overseeing satellite campuses by video, bi-vocational pastors who hold a second job because a small or rural congregation cannot support a full salary, and pastors of nondenominational churches answerable to no wider body at all. Mainline Protestant denominations in North America and Europe have seen membership and the number of full-time pastorates fall for decades, while nondenominational and Pentecostal congregations have grown, shifting where and how the office is actually exercised.

Recognition of LGBTQ clergy and of same-sex marriage divides the office sharply along denominational lines that do not track neatly onto older splits: some mainline bodies ordain openly gay pastors and others that share their broader theological tradition do not, and the disagreement has caused formal denominational splits within the last two decades.