The Word of God is Sharper than any Two-Step Self-Help Program

I watched a service last night from a large mid-western church. I was appalled enough to actually feel like punching somebody in the face. I rarely feel like punching someone in the face, but Nehemiah did (Nehemiah 13:25), and I did, so let me explain why.

As soon as I saw the sermon series was on how to be happy as a Christian, my hackles were up. The "text" for the sermon was a single verse read very quickly and undoubtedly found in an online word search for "happy." The text was promptly dropped. The other passages referred to in the sermon were either mentioned and not read, or utterly abused. The amount of eisegesis was astounding. A couple of theological concepts were raised, but used in an overtly self-serving and flatly heretical way. Jesus did not shed his blood on the cross so that you could live a stress-free life. God's judgment does not precede his mercy (or we would all be gone, including this "pastor"). The points in the sermon were all lifted from local daytime talk shows in the segments when Dr. HelpMeGetSkinny arrives and tells you how to handle your caloric intake during the holidays. I am not joking - the sermon  gave the earth-shaking advice that you ought to drink more water, exercise, and control your portions. Then the bulk of the sermon time was devoted to C-grade stand-up comedy.

I have two pieces of advice.

First, if you attended that church or one like it over the past weekend, you need to run away as quickly as you can. If you hear sermons like this from week to week you are actually being led away from Christ and his grace, not brought closer to him. You are being taught how to be more like the world, not like Christ. And if you think that what I described is a Christian sermon and is the kind of thing the Bible actually teaches the people of God, then I suggest you save your tithe, stay home, and just watch TV. You will get the same ideas with better production value and you don't need to send in your money.

Second, if you preached this sermon over the past weekend, shame on you. You need a run-in with a Jeremiah or a Nehemiah. You need someone to pronounce "false prophet" over your YouTube and Vimeo accounts. You abused Holy Writ and shamed the Sacred Desk. You took what precious little time you have with the people who attend your church and flushed it down the toilet. Your shallow Bible-mangling sermons are part of the reason the evangelical church is not taken seriously in our culture. How could it be, when you are incapable or unwilling to plumb the depths of God's Word and the sacred task of preaching, and connect the Word of God to the lives of people?

You, pastor, have at your disposal the truths and power that once turned the world upside down and you have settled for lukewarm get-alongism. The Word of God, if you can learn how to wield it, is a sword sharper than any two-step diet program.

The vocation of pastor is serious stuff. The task of preaching should never be taken lightly. Pastor, you need to either relearn or learn for the first time how to handle Scripture well. Then you need to learn again how to communicate to people the depths and the riches of something that actually has the power to transform lives.

I pray the American church learns how to leave behind this crass and meaningless consumerism. I am not holding my breath.

The Dangerous Call Of Pastor And What To Do About It

Paul David Tripp, Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry. (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway 2012). 227 pages.

Paul Tripp is convinced there is a systemic problem with the pastoral culture.  It may have its roots in the seminary culture and a system of education that turns the faith into something simply academic, it may have other roots in the way pastors view and treat themselves as believers who are somehow set apart from the normal course of discipleship that they preach to others, and it may have roots in church culture where pastors are not treated and handled as humans who need church community and the ministry of the gospel of grace.  In any event Paul Tripp unpacks what has gone wrong and where we find evidence of these malfunctions in how pastors live, minister, and are viewed by the church culture.

The book is broken into three sections: Examining Pastoral Culture, The Danger of Losing Your Awe, and The Danger of Arrival.  In the first the author builds a case that the dysfunctions he has seen through the years in pastoral ministry are not localized, but common among pastors, and possibly more ubiquitous than we would want to know.  This section is also deeply concerned with how we have put ourselves in this situation.  In the second he begins to trace a set of solutions through the need for ministers to maintain a deep and sincere sense of the greatness of God.  We are not the all-in-all that God uses to minister the gospel.  That would be him.  In the third section he addresses the problem of pastors losing sight of who they are as sinners in need of grace under the rule and goodness of God.  Our positions often lend themselves to heady successes or life-destroying failures.  In each and every case, the pastor is a sinner saved by grace and in need of pastoral direction themselves.

I found many of Tripp's ideas and prescriptions helpful, and the kinds of things I hope I will come back to over the years of ministry God may grant me.  I also saw myself and pastor friends in the sad stories he relates detailing where ministry can take its toll in life, family, and devotion.  Beyond a simple exposition of what has gone wrong, Tripp's pastoral heart is exposed as he reveals things about his own short-comings, and spends a great deal of time offering solutions to the problems.

Pastors are not above being ministered to by the gospel they preach.  They are not necessarily recipients of the truths they try to impart just because they work on it from week to week and deliver successful sermons.  They are people who need to sit under their own preaching, have circles of people they trust who can do the hard work of pastoring them, and they need the right kind of open community of friends that a congregation provides.  That last thought struck me as especially significant.  We have created an atmosphere between pastors and churches where there is a manufactured disconnect between the two, which easily leads to short-term ministries and unrealistic expectations.  Maybe a bumper sticker is in order, "Pastors are people, too."

This would be a great addition to the pastor's shelf to be pulled out in times of personal burn-out or distress, or in a season where a pastor needs to remind themselves of what makes for a healthy and long-term life of ministry.  It would be helpful for boards and elders to read.  In it they will find an honest exposure of a pastor's heart and life and find ways to be a significant support to them, and in turn, to the congregation they serve.

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Pastors and the Centrality of The Gospel

Jared C. Wilson. The Pastor's Justification: Applying the Work of Christ in Your Life and Ministry. (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway 2013). 187 pages.

I really do believe the pastoral vocation is at a crisis moment. For too long we have been unable to biblically and faithfully answer the question, "Who is a pastor, anyway?" and so we have succumbed to models of leadership more suited to ice cream stand franchising than gospel proclamation.  Beginning with his own call to the ministry as a young age, and referencing his own evolution as a pastor, Jared Wilson does a wonderful job of dealing with the one thing necessary for the pastor's job - Christ and him crucified.

Jared Wilson is now all about the gospel though it wasn't always that way.  He notes that for a long time he was subject to the seeker sensitive model's way of  crafting a sermon and building a church.  His reflection on those years reveals that he was simply a moralist using Scripture to support his own wisdom.  But so it is, he argues, with any form of pastoring or preaching that does not begin and end with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In two parts of the book he takes 1 Peter 5:1-11 and then the five Solas of the Reformation to talk about the vocation of pastor and the centrality of the gospel.  He writes with a great deal of clarity and unblinking honesty.  He warns pastors against being "lily-livered" more than once, gets after the leadership cult in evangelicalism (an insidious temptation!), speaks bravely about the temptation to power, and presses the pastor to find their right place under Christ and the gospel.  And throughout it all he encourages ministers to let the truth and power of the gospel permeate their entire ministry, not just their preaching.  Throw out the "how-to" models and "7 Easy Steps" in favor of the never-changing good news of Jesus Christ.

I have a great appreciation for a book like this because it is both accurate and timely.  It begins with God's Word and then builds a genuinely useful model of pastoral work.  Pastors would do well to give the ideas in this book a long hard look and see where they may need to alter their course in the direction of the gospel.

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Mark Driscoll on Nightline

Outside of an "in house debate" on a couple points of Calvinist theology, I really appreciate a person like Driscoll who is willing to stand up for the essentials of the Gospel in a world designed to attack those very people.

Here is the video - good little segment.

HT: Between Two Worlds

More Egg On The Face

Craig Blomberg wrote a good post on what passes for biblical engagement in the once reliable National Geographic magazine. Over the last few years, NG has become more and more myopic on historical detail surrounding the life of Christ and the early church, manifesting itself in their infamous apology for their reporting on the Gospel of Judas. They were so anxious to produce a document that discredited the Christian faith, that their scholarship went right out the window.

Blomberg’s present issue is with a report on Herod’s slaughter of infants in Bethlehem.

But, gratuitously, and highlighted by a quotation box, they insert the claim that Herod almost certainly did not kill the babies two years old and under in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth. The sole reason given is that the report of this massacre occurs only in the Gospel of Matthew.

Blomberg goes on to detail the reasons why this is a simplistic view, and to recount much of the scholarship that has gone into supporting the detail that Herod did slaughter infants.

The big issue, in my view, is that the naturalistic presupposition built into most of our scientific world creates a blind spot where serious scholarship is done opposing an atheistic worldview. If we can all agree that we can begin as metaphysical naturalists, then we can a priori ignore all those crazies who disagree.

HT: Between Two Worlds

Looking For A New Gospel?

More and more I am beginning to think the primary problem with the emergent movement is that it asks the wrong questions, even silly questions. I imagine this stems from a driving need many emergents have to break out of what they see as an oppressive modern worldview and find new, irenic and inviting ground. But, in their critique of the last wave of theology, they have swung the pendulum to an extreme the other way and have unchained themselves from reason altogether (to paraphrase a famous syphilitic).

In the land of deconstruction the questions are no longer posed in terms of the relevance of the Gospel to this or that culture, it is the question of whether the Gospel needs to be new and remade. The cultural shift has gone so deep, so the argument goes, the old ways of defining doctrine and the Gospel have been exposed as unsalvageable. We now know we didn’t know anything back in those crazy halcyon days of the Enlightenment.

The latest set of silly questions comes from the Emergent Village blog. In this rather navel-gazing post, the author wonders about the emergence of a new gospel altogether. And in what is becoming standard fare, he sets it up with some straw man burning.

I wonder if post enlightenment overemphasis of Logos (as the written) has not resulted in the Modern inability to appreciate conversation, mystery and metaphor, and ultimately grace?

If anyone conversant with theology over the last 500 years thinks Protestantism has under-appreciated grace, they need to have their libraries examined. In addition, if anyone has pressed a Calvinist lately on the matters of predestination and free will, then they will have a much better sense of how appreciated mystery and metaphor are in our modern theological world. To say that grace and mystery are finally being grasped by the emergent movement is to be naïve and disingenuous.

But all that is set up for a couple of questions.

And whether blogging is not an expression of a need to return to some of the pre-modern ideas of “The Word”.

What limitations with the written are not overcome by the blogging paradigm? Are we repeating our mistakes?

If the gospel is both message (content) and medium (form), how is it “incarnating” into socially networked online culture? Is it in fact possible to “become flesh” in a virtual, non-physical environment?

The last pair of questions have real potential for reflection, but the author’s worries about blogging being significant in reforming the Gospel are a little silly. I don’t think that the activity of blogging is a matter for concern—the wondering question of whether blogging in the emergent universe will help bring a new gospel “incarnated” in a virtual world, is.

Let’s wrestle with communicating the Gospel with new media and figure out how to do it well. In fact, let’s communicate the free grace of God to whomever will click-on and read. Let’s not look forward to a day when we have altered the grace of God because we have found a new medium that communicates differently from the last new medium.