The Pastorate: Both Local and Universal

My hometown suffered some recent tragedies entirely uncharacteristic of our self-image. Whether it is a little self-deceiving to believe it, we still see Colorado Springs as a sleepy, small town with lots of churches and conservative Christians (though in reality we are well over half-a-million is size, and mostly unchurched). With two “mass” shootings in the last two months, we are forced to take a second look at what is going on in our city. The pastor is uniquely poised to do exactly that because of what they are given to work with.

This has helped remind me that the pastor's job is always a combination of the local and current, and the universal and unchanging.

The Pastor’s Job is Intensely Local

The local congregation is a kind of focal point for the kingdom of God here on earth, like a child’s magnifying glass used to focus the rays of the sun on a dry leaf. The great and eternal truths of God are intensified when believers gather together to hear the Word of God, pray, and disciple each other. The presence of God is magnified when brothers and sisters in Christ join together to worship. Life with Christians over a period of time reveals things that would not be seen otherwise. The pastor learns what lies in peoples’ past, walks with them through some of the most difficult times you can imagine, and even gets to dedicate babies and baptize new believers. These events provide a local flavor for the pastor that cannot be developed if he or she has their study door closed and head in the sky. Some pastors neglect people for their study and thus miss the beauties and developed wisdom of living with people. Some seek broad acclaim and use their local congregation to reach the next rung in the ladder, thus using something God intended as an end as a means for their own glory.

The best pastors in our past were able to use their local congregation to meet the ends of both pastoral wisdom and deepening theological acumen (think of Jonathan Edwards on the American frontier and Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones during WWII). A pastor, as Scripture envisions him or her, is a theologian of sorts who lives, breathes, and works among a particular group of people in a particular setting. The local provides us with the warp and woof of daily life and naturally affects the pastor's work. But the local cannot subsume the universal.

The Pastorate is Inescapably Universal

In the local church, the pastor has the responsibility of communicating the truths of the faith once and for all handed down to us by the saints and communicated in Scripture. The pastor's text is (or, ought to be) the Word of God in all its full and varied wisdom. While we live within communities that experience their own seasons of blessing and cursing, the pastor is at their best when they bring the universal and unchanging truths of Christ to bear upon each season.

In our community's most recent tragedy, our congregation prayed for the loss of a sister congregation across town and reached out to them in Christian brotherhood, and those of us who have connections to those touched by the tragedy are reaching out as we can. But we also must talk about Christ. When the press of the current events seems the strongest, the church must remember to glorify the one, true hope of us all, Jesus Christ. Our Sunday text for the weekend of the latest shooting was Colossians 2:6-15. It was fitting for the church to emphasize Christus Victor on a weekend when we feel the weight of sin, and the despair into which it leads many. We must, as Paul admonished us, avoid false philosophies about human nature and false political utopianism, and keep ourselves rooted in the victory of Jesus Christ.

When the church proclaims the universal truths of Christ in an ever-changing world, we are the most relevant and the most powerful.

Great Conteporary Text on Preaching

Timothy Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Viking, 2015).

I am a preacher, but I have a hard time listening to most sermons. I have learned over the years that I end up being frustrated or disappointed when I listen to most preachers speak to congregations on Sunday mornings. Often I am disappointed by the lack of biblical exposition and depth, and every now and then I am offended by the trite manner the Bible and its truths are handled.

Maybe I am too picky. Maybe I am a bit of an elitist when it comes to good sermons and what they ought to do. But I do know I have a conviction that handling the Scriptures for congregations and communities is a big deal and it demands hard work and prayer. Even though some pastors often sound like second-rate stand up comedians when they talk there is nothing silly about what we do when we preach.

If you are a pastor and you are not learning at least one or two things from Timothy Keller, let this book on preaching be your starting point. Having preached for decades in the spiritual clay of the north eastern United States and many of those in the middle of Manhattan, he has a lot to offer pastors on the ins and outs of effectively preaching the gospel to our culture. His book, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism, is broken into three sections where he addresses “Serving the Word,” “Reaching the People,” and “In Demonstration of Spirit and Power.”

Keller makes one thematic point a few times in the book in a few ways: the preacher’s job is to be simultaneously faithful to Scripture and to God’s people. To that end he does a wonderful job defending the centrality of expository preaching, discussing how to make us of the whole of Scripture to preach the gospel and Jesus Christ, preach to a post-Christian culture, and providing an insightful outline of what it means to preach from the heart and to the heart. As a Pentecostal I find it ironic that the shortest portion of the book has to do with preaching in the power of the Spirit, but there is still much to commend in that he says.

I do not think I exaggerate if I say that almost every preacher would do good to read this book and put much of it into practice. As with all texts on preaching and communication there will be suggestions that do not fit everyone’s gifts and personality (and Keller recognizes that), but there are still plenty of marvelous and effective principles contained in each section.  If you have not paid attention to your craft in a while, or if you have spent too much time trying to sound like the guys and gals on TV, this book is a must.

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"When I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness"

Emotional exhaustion; physically tired. I didn't expect it to take so much out of me, but it did. I have done it over and over for nearly 24 years, but it still surprises me when I walk away drained to the bone.

It's not bad - don't get me wrong. I have tried very hard to handle the Word of a jealous God to his people and simultaneously be faithful to it, to Him, and to them. And sometimes it takes the energy out of whatever reserves I thought I had. I never seem to sleep well the night before. Sometimes what the Word has to say is full of hope and joy, and sometimes I talk to people who are walking in darkness and pain. In either case, and every case in between,  my mind, body, and heart are left wrung out.

But it is for the good of the church, and of the people of God. At least I tell myself that. Maybe I missed the boat and everyone in the room walked away thinking, "That was nice. What's for lunch?" and I walked away ready for a nap. Maybe a life was stirred by my inevitably inadequate attempt to talk about the One True God and bring people to the foot of the cross or the threshold of an empty tomb. By the grace of God, may it be.

I do it over and over, like mowing my lawn or shoveling my driveway in the middle of a blizzard. There always seems to be a reason to do it again, a need that rises to the surface like a stubborn weed. Or maybe the weekly repetition has caused my words to sound like the ticking of the clock on the wall. It's there, and we know it's there, we just don't hear it anymore. But I tick on. Pastors keep keeping time according to the rhythms and motions of God's kingdom in a realm that listens to different clocks and follows flashier time pieces.

Nonetheless, the Word of God is sharper than any other tool we can use, and by the work of the Spirit of God, makes its way into the deepest recesses of the human soul. Deeper than we can even see within ourselves.

So, I will fitfully sleep, awake grumpy that I tossed and turned too much, but I will get up and go at it again. It is more important than some other, sleep-friendly substitute, and it is what I was called to do. So the fire burns and my bones quake, anticipating the next week.

The Pastor - Bearer of Knowledge

"For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts." Malachi 2:7

You believe most of what you believe on the basis of authority. How do you know the history you know? You were not there, but others were and you take them at their word. How do you know the earth revolves around the sun? You can observe a phenomena, but for centuries humans observed the same rising and setting and came to the wrong conclusion. Now, however, you have it on good authority from people who can do the math that you cannot. How do you know the antibiotic you were prescribed by your M.D. will do you any good? She said so.

Ours is an age of experts who acquire knowledge about several crucial specialties, and we place them in high esteem if they have done their job well. We come to them for knowledge we do not have to cure diseases and repair trucks. The average person on the street (including the average church-goer?) does not see pastors as this kind of professional, but according to what God says about his spiritual leaders they are specialists who do the work necessary to acquire and dispense a special kind of knowledge that others do not always have the time to learn themselves. And then it is entirely appropriate for people to come to God's spiritual leaders for that knowledge.

"Knowledge" is not a general, throw-away term, even in Scripture. It refers to a specific kind of reasoned and tested belief that is far more than mere opinion. Everyone has opinions about God, not many have genuine knowledge of him. Knowledge, when someone attains it, puts a person into contact with the way things really are. Opinions are certain kinds of guesses or desires about reality, but knowledge is connection to reality - a relationship between what you believe to be true and what is actually true.

God says his priests - what we might today call pastors - "guard knowledge" with their lips. In other words, they are doing the hard work of gaining true and accurate insight into who God is, and then teaching the same. Ideally, and you might say "strictly speaking," pastors do not dispense opinion, unless they have not done their job well. But if they have, people can listen to them talk about God and his dealings with humanity and gain knowledge about him. This truth about God's spokespeople puts the role of pastor into an interesting and significant light.

Pastors gain and dispense knowledge in ways similar to the traditional and well-known professions of experts. Pastors are not paid opinionators, but are tasked with getting to know God, his Word, the Gospel, and telling people what they know.

Pastors are not at the back of the cultural bus. Culture sure things so, but they are not. Knowledge about how the good life is to be lived is not in the realm of lawyers, politicians, media, and celebrities who do not know God. They all hand out opinions about how it is to be lived, but unless it coheres with God's vision of the good life, it is all balderdash.  

Pastors ought to do the kind of work necessary to make themselves trustworthy bearers of the knowledge of God. The text I quoted from Malachi is in the context of God getting frustrated with priests who did not actually do this. This was their charter, and instead they settled for corruption and they "caused many to stumble by [their] instruction" (Malachi 2:8).

This vision of pastors and spiritual knowledge puts the church right back in the thick of things. Our current culture has dismissed the church as insignificant by defining her out of significance. The church - and the religion she teaches - is private, psychologically helpful pabulum. But nothing could be further from the truth if the pastor and the church do their jobs, gain actual knowledge about God, and hand it out to the world around them.

(You can track my series of posts on The Pastor by following the tag.)

The Substance of Sermons

When you read the works by C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers intended for popular consumption you can tell they have read and understood Nietzsche, Freud, and Hegel. You will hear echoes of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the theology of Augustine and Aquinas.

When you hear many modern-day sermons you hear echoes of Osteen, sitcoms, popular movies, motivational speakers, and books written by professional coaches.

I wonder why the modern American church is largely unprepared for the challenges it currently faces? 

The Pastor: Vital or Vestigial?

I believe things are changing enough both inside and outside the church that we need to begin revitalizing the role of the pastor in the congregation and the community.  Do pastors still have a significant role to play in a culture that prizes highly specialized and licensed scientific, therapeutic, and legal professions?  Can pastors still influence people and communities for God's kingdom?  Is it time for the pastor to learn more from the CEO than the theologian?  Do the people in the pews really want practical advice for daily living, or are they desperately in need of divine activity in their lives?  Our answers to these questions and so many more like them will shape the daily and weekly work of the pastor, the shape of our churches, and the role of the Christian in our culture today.

Without romanticizing the past, it can be said that there was a time in Western communities when the pastor was considered a leading expert on all things important.  For example, Puritan pastors started schools like Harvard and Yale.  The ranks of theologians were the same as the ranks of the pastors in the local parish.  We are still able to gain a great deal of pastoral, theological, and philosophical guidance from sermons preached in the English language 300 years ago.  Newspapers printed the Sunday sermon of the local pastor.

Things have changed,  and not for the better.  In very few circumstances is the local pastor seen in this light.  Rarely, if ever, is he or she known as an expert on human affairs and consulted as such.  If they actually are an expert on theological issues, those issues are considered so inconsequential by both the culture and the congregant, the pastor may as well be a published Ph.D. on Medieval Unicorn Literature.

Tracing this sad turn of affairs would be a complicated journey indeed, but it is useful to survey part of the cultural landscape as it is now.  With the knowledge and information explosion, there is simply more to know and the days of the "renaissance man" are probably over for good.  There can no longer be a single person out there who can be consulted on every issue.  Whereas there was a time an advanced degree covered almost every significant idea and intellectual trend, that simply isn't the case anymore.  It is impossible for a single individual to be deeply informed about every significant issue so they can speak to it wisely and creatively.  How much do you know about the international sociological consequences of fair-trade? Are the fair-trade advocates right?  Are you intimate enough with your Neo-Darwinism that you can speak to the alleged biological and molecular mechanisms invoked by its supporters?  How versed are you in current materialistic, secularist philosophy?  Have you developed a theology of the body robust enough to address the wave of homosexual activism?  And on it goes.

But it is more than just the information explosion.  There are other cultural trends the pastor and church are up against.

Western culture is simply turning more secular in its outlook all the time, turning the pastor into a de facto vestigial organ of society.  And we are not doing ourselves any favors, either.  Degrees in pastoral ministry focus more and more on simpler and simpler things, turning the theologians of our age into middle-level managers of volunteerism.  Pastors no longer carry their own torch of spiritual knowledge and wisdom into the marketplace, but have extinguished it in favor of the practical tips and tricks of mass production.  It allows us to fit in and succeed, after all.

My hopes with these posts is to lay out a vision in which the pastor is able to see their vocation as vital.  But that can't happen until the pastor transforms the way they think about their place in this world.  We cannot expect to have a sanctifying effect on the lives of those around us or the culture in which we swim unless our churches grow deeper in the wisdom and power of God.  We cannot have churches that grow deep until we have pastors who do the same.  It begins, and all too often, ends with the pastor.

Pastors Becoming Comfortable in an Uncomfortable Culture

Recently Thom Rainer posted some thoughts on "Ten Areas Where Pastors Need to Be Trained for the 21st Century."  There are a lot of good things to think about in the list, but two stuck out to me as being of particular value for the American pastor to figure out right now:

2. A non-Christian culture. Our nation is fast becoming a non-Christian nation. While we lament the relative decline in the numbers who follow Christ, we must also accept the reality that those in our community cannot be assumed to be like us, or to hold our values.
 3. The decline of cultural Christians in churches. The Pew Research project confirmed the dramatic increase in the numbers of people who have no religious affiliation. For our churches, this development means that most people do not feel cultural pressure to attend churches. More and more, those who are there are convicted Christians and not Christians in name only.

A quick moment's reflection on these two items should lead us to a sobering conclusion - if they are true we must relearn how to engage the culture around us.  And I believe they are true.

American Christians and pastors need to become more comfortable in a culture that is less and less comfortable with them.  I believe we still have a mandate from God - we might associate it with the Cultural Mandate (Gen 1:26) - to impact the world around us for the good and glory of God.  But we just can't rely on the 'same-old' way of doing and seeing things.  More and more, Christianity is foreign, misunderstood, and disliked in our culture.  So now we strive to make it native to new generations and powerfully true.

Secondly, we can no longer rely on our simple presence in a community to be a draw to those who don't attend.  Rainer is right that fewer people feel any kind of compunction to attend church (they need to come back for their kids' sake, they need to at least be Creasters, the Church can help them through a serious crisis, etc.).  So, the church needs to learn how to earn its place in the community.  I believe a church can be the health and heartbeat of a community and city, so now we need to be proactive about becoming exactly that instead of expecting people will assume we already are.

Can I put it in these terms? The entrepreneurial church, not in doctrine but in vision, will survive and eventually learn how to thrive.

Pastor as Missionary

I am a member of a denomination that built itself through an emphasis on evangelism, especially

overseas/missionary efforts.  As a result, in the 100 years since our founding we have become the world's largest Protestant denomination.  There is a simple reality about us - we send out a lot of missionaries to all kinds of difficult and exotic corners of the earth to spread the gospel.

Since I was a kid I have had the privilege of getting to spend time with some of these extraordinary people.  Now, when I was young and we ate a meal with a missionary to Africa I was admittedly more interested in my French fries than them, but thankfully times have changed.  As a pastor I again have the chance to spend time with them and I have learned to ask probing questions and listen intently to what they have to say about the establishment and life of the Church beyond our American and Western borders.  More often than not, I talk with Americans and Westerners who have had their vision of the church radically changed (maybe more properly "broadened") by their non-Western experience and their commitment to other cultures.  They see the world and the church differently than most of us Westerners do, and I think the differences are significant.  The church is growing "over there" (by leaps and bounds, actually), and it is languishing here.  The church is thriving through all forms of persecution "over there" and we struggle mightily with each change in our political winds.

What do they know that we don't pay attention to? How does the church get built and grow in places hostile to the message and lifestyle of the gospel?  I am interested.  And I think I see a few answers coming from their work, both explicitly and implicitly, that the American Pastor needs to learn.

Whether you like it or not the cultural landscape underneath the American church's feet is changing radically.  Our culture is becoming - some would argue has become - more post-Christian than it has been in a very long time.  As a result I think we have a lot to learn from those who faithfully and fruitfully proclaim the gospel around the globe.  The role of American pastor looks more and more like the role of missionary.

Enculturation
One way to get a fish to recognize the water it has been swimming in is to take it out of the tank.  Missionaries from the West to other parts of the globe have the privilege of that experience being thrust upon them.  American pastors born and raised in the American culture now have the responsibility of self-imposing this culture shock.  We are accustomed to a certain set of broad values, to a way of talking about people and things that pervades the way we view them, a way of talking about the value of other cultures that tints our perspective, and to ways of presenting the gospel that may have more to do with a diminishing cultural milieu than we recognize.  If things are changing around us, and I believe we would be naive to think they are not, we must come to terms with two things: our foundational identity formed by Christ alone, and the new shapes and forms of culture around us.

The Reestablishment of Church as Culture
The conversation about the relationship between Church and culture is vast, complicated, fascinating, and necessary.  But my simple addition to the current conversation is that pastors must begin to see church life, not as an extension of the culture around them, but as an alternative culture.  The church is a culture-making institution in this world guided by Christ that cannot isolate itself or leave culture to secular elitists.  This vision of the role of church and pastor in culture is necessary for our impact in our developing post-Christian world, but it cannot be spelled out in great detail by me for you.  You, pastor must learn to do the serious and probably hard work of getting to know the city and community around you in order to become the kind of influence Christ can empower you to be.

Be it implicitly or explicitly, the people in our pews have learned to take their cultural cues from political debates, their favorite form of media, their technological entrapment, television and entertainment.  And they take some of their spiritual cues from the cultural cubicle that is their church.  Their attendance is spotty and the influence we have on them reflects their unconscious priorities.  It will take a radical new vision of the church to turn things around, and it must begin with the pastor pulling themselves out of their theological stupors.

Lifetime Commitment
I believe the age of the short-term pastor is finished.  At least is should be.  We can no longer have the impact we need to if we hop from congregation to congregation every few years looking for that place that "fits" us just right, recognizes our leadership potential, pays us what we are worth, and is larger than the last place we served.  Our culture needs no more spiritual carpetbaggers.  It needs long-term pastors who are willing to sink roots, make friends, build families, suffer losses, endure hardships, celebrate joys, and die well among the same group of people.  It is obvious that churches need pastors, it needs to become obvious to us that communities need pastors.

In my experience with overseas missionaries, those with the greatest impact have taken the time to get trained, learn the culture, and plan on spending as much time on the field as they can.  In years past they simply "packed their coffins."  They literally left for the field with their belongings packed in their coffins.  They had every intention of staying there until God called them home.  Contrast that with what is often a self-obsessed evangelical celebrity pastor culture and then wonder aloud about the progress of the church "over there" as compared to here.

I Belong To A Denomination...On Purpose

Every year about this time I, along with all my fellow Assembly of God ministers, am asked to renew my credentials.  This means I do a few things - I update personal information, pay my annual dues, and reaffirm my agreement with our Doctrinal Statement.  I have done this for years (15 to be exact), but this time it gave me a reason to reflect on a couple of things.

I pay to be a part of a denomination - to be precise, we are a "cooperative fellowship."  When I first interviewed to receive my credentials I was asked what the local denominational authorities existed to help me with.  I had no idea.  But 15 years later I have grown to appreciate what the network of pastors, ministers and missionaries means to my vocation.  In addition, I have seen the benefit of accountability and restoration in the lives of many pastors who would not otherwise have it if they were on their own.  Many younger ministers begrudge their annual dues, but I have grown to appreciate what they represent and facilitate.

In broader terms, there is benefit in belonging to a specified network of relatively like-minded ministers.  It is true that we all belong to the Church universal, but if that is the only group of church leaders we belong to we will belong to nobody when push comes to shove.  We are human and we need support, friendship and fellowship on incarnational, not theoretical, levels.

But with denominational specificity comes doctrinal specificity.  And here, there arise a handful of issues.  Through the years I have wrestled with a few things: the culture of my denomination as opposed to its theology, doctrinal specifics my denomination has traditionally regarded as central that I do not, and a few specific areas of potential disagreement with the statement itself.

As to the culture of the Assemblies of God, there is a broad spectrum of church expression given the missional and entrepreneurial DNA of our denomination.  But that does not mean that there have not been times in my ministry life when leadership has strongly implied that if I am not doing things their way I am doing them wrong.  But as a wise leader once told me, "The beauty of the AG is that I can listen to those things and then go home and do church the way God built me to do church."  This piece of advice kept me from leaving more than once while I listened to cultural pressures from pastors different from myself.

As for doctrinal disagreements, my study and convictions have aligned me with our Statement of Fundamental Truths, though my sense of what is primary is a little different than our traditional formulations.  This does not keep me from being a part of the AG.  What it does is provide an encouragement to be a part of the theological growth of the movement.  If I agree broadly and feel there are areas of growth in specifics, why not be a part of the movement and help build it from within?  I don't know of a reason not to.

I went ahead and renewed again this year, and I think it will be a good thing.

A Vision of God Changing

"I don't expect less of him, I just assume less."

My friend has a very bright, analytical mind.  He grew up in a good Christian home, his father was a pastor in a small town for many long years before he passed away, and my friend's faith is strong and deeply rooted.  But if you were to talk with him seriously about his faith he would have posed questions that cause most Christians, especially those raised in evangelical homes, to squirm a bit.  "If the Bible says we pray over the sick and they will be healed, why aren't they?"  "What about those untold numbers of people who have died because of evil in the world, especially if they have never had the chance to respond to the Gospel?"  He was never punchy or pushy, but he was always honest about these kinds of questions.

For the last year or more he has suffered a great deal.  His body has not done well.  Some might even call his condition a kind of long-term death sentence.  But he was strong and healthy when he got sick, so what has been taken away from him was room his body had to spare.  There is no denying, however, that it has taken its toll.

We had not met for lunch in a long time so it was good to be able to get together and talk over how things have gone over the last few months.  The last time we talked was not long after the diagnosis and there were still questions to be answered and programs of treatment to be prescribed.  Now, on the other side of a year, things were different.  What was once an unknown has now become a murky burden.  It seems the more complex the diagnosis, the harder it is to settle in on a single, obvious means of treatment.  What were once hopeful medical prescriptions have become semi-successful, body-draining events.

Suffering is changing the way he understands God and life under God. But that is a good thing.  His mind is still sharp and searching, but this time he sat across from me and answered the question about how things have gone between him and God over the last several months by replying, "I don't expect less of him, I just assume less."  I think this statement reveals a deep and helpful shift toward trust in God that we all need to hear.

Instead of simply assuming that God will act in certain ways because we think he ought to, can we be ready to take what life and God give and remain confident in him?  Must we have all our questions answered to our personal satisfaction before we give God the privilege of our belief in his existence and goodness?  What does God have to do for you (that you find acceptable or beneficial) before you will let him off the hook?  And if God is in our personal defendant's chair waiting for the jury to come in, then who exactly is the god we worship?

Hundreds of years ago three young men were persecuted in a pagan land for their belief in the God of Abraham.  Their unswerving devotion to him brought them to the hearth of a fire built to burn people alive and they were asked to change their minds.  They answered that God was powerful enough to save them from the fire, but if he chose not to do it, they knew he was God anyway and they would not recant.  Here is a belief in the reality of the existence and goodness of God that has nothing to do with what we get from him or how he meets our personal, felt needs.  It is a belief that is grounded in reality - in truth itself.  God exists, he is good, he deserves my worship, and he has made provision for his children in this life and in the one to come.  So then, why would I change my mind on the edge of the fire?

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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Pastor - Go Ahead and Preach Christ

"...the only mission strategy which will encourage our congregations, usefully employ our clergy, enable history-changing and kingdom-of-God-anticipating ministry, and enable us to evangelize with any degree of faithfulness and power is the preaching that there is salvation in no other name.  To ministers let me say this as strongly as I can.  Preach Christ, preach Christ, preach Christ. Get out of your offices and get into you studies. Quit playing office manager and program director, quit staffing committees, and even right now recommit yourselves to what you were ordained to do, namely the ministry of Word and sacraments. Pick up good theology books again: hard books, classical texts, great theologians. Claim the energy and time to study for days and days at a time. Disappear for long hours because you are reading Athanasius on the person of Jesus Christ or Wesley on sanctification or Augustine on the Trinity or Calvin on the Christian life or Andrew Murray on the priesthood of Christ. Then you will have something to say that's worth hearing." Andrew Purves, The Crucifixion of Ministry, pg. 44

The Christian Church and Pastorate ought to take these kinds of challenges seriously.  Are many pastors and churches in a place from week to week where what is being communicated is really worth hearing, or is it a warmed-over version of pop-psychology and self-helpism?

My reaction to this section of Purves' book regards the need for the church to present a clear alternative to our culture's move to the social and moral left.  Right now our general drift is in the direction of progressive social reimagination, and all it really takes for the Christian message to stick out is for it to be proclaimed clearly.  But that simple step has a couple of prerequisites: clarity and courage.

Christian pastors need to be clear on what they believe, and not what the spirit of the age would like them to believe and proclaim from behind pulpits and in the public square.  It is the testimony of history, and is the testimony of our current state of affairs that the closer a church gets to the spirit of the age, the worse things go for the church.

Secondly, we need the courage to go ahead and stick out.  The Christian faith has always been on the side of truth, and the Church has always outlasted cultures that disliked and even persecuted them.  Don't let the secular left fool you - the arguments are on your side.  You don't need to emote to gather support for your cause.  You can present things like reality and knowledge.  And you have the Creator and Sustainer of all things going ahead of you.

Our Work is Soulish

“The pastor lives on the belief that Christ holds everything together.” M. Craig Barnes

That line means more and more to me all the time. What pastors do is not predicated on our abilities to “make things work” or get people to do the things we want them to or look the way we want them to look. Our work is soulish. That means we can’t always see or touch what we work with, and just try and measure success!

The holiday season always makes for a busy benevolence fund, and this season is no exception with life so hard for so many right now. I sat across from a man the other day who had nothing but the clothes on his back and what he had in his hands. As we talked I was torn over what I could do for him. He needed the right place to say so he could look for work. He needed cash for a new ID and food stamps. He needed clothes and food. He simply needed about anything anyone could give him. What on earth could a shepherd of souls give a guy in his situation?

The more I let him talk, the more he revealed about his walk with God. Before he lost everything he called himself a Christian, but he let the simple success of his life become his god and he lost track of the One, True God. His life became wrapped up in his own vices, and they ate him alive. But now, with nothing, God had his attention. God is speaking through His Word like never before. God is waking him up at night to prepare him for what he needs to do. The more I prompted him down these paths, the more he sounded like the Psalmist. Over and over he would say that he was learning that it was better to have nothing and have God than have all the riches in the world and lose his Lord.

Before he left, we were able to find some clothes in the church and I gave him some resources and the number of our food pantry. He’s been there before and he will be back again. We did what we could on that day to help his immediate, physical needs.

But the pastor lives in the belief that Christ holds everything together. It isn’t the food, the half-way house, the clothes we gave him that will hold him together. It is Christ. Maybe he needs to be in the place because that is exactly where God wants him; it is exactly where God can speak to him. And if his future is going to be more God-breathed than his past, he needs to listen to the Lord in his poverty and brokenness before a job and money and a place to live tempt him to forget again.

Pastors and churches do what we can to help the immediate and very real needs of people and families. But if we forget that it is Christ that holds everything together, what have we given anyone?

Recapturing the Vocation of Pastor

M. Craig Barnes
The Pastor as Minor Poet: Texts and Subtexts in the Ministerial Life
Eerdmans, 2009.

In my perfect world the kinds of books ministry majors in Bible colleges and seminaries would read are exemplified by this offering by Barnes. Instead of the corporate style leadership models and the slick gimmicking of church growth seminars, future pastors would soak in views of pastoring that begin and end with biblical influences and remain solidly against the reigning cultural models. Barnes has written such a book.

The goal, it seems, is to clarify a confusion pastors live with right now – what it means to be a pastor. It seems to be a great problem if men and women are entering professions they can’t properly or deeply define, but I think he is right. We have simply let the role of pastor be defined for us in recent decades and we need to work to recover its true meaning.

The image Barnes uses to control the book is that of pastor as a “minor poet.” Major poets are the larger-than-life biblical and historical figures who change almost everything, but the vast majority of us fit into the “minor poet” role as we work on translating the truths of God into a fuzzy and broken world. All in all, I think the metaphor is a helpful one. From time to time it seems a bit stretched, but it really comes home in some of the final chapters as Barnes uses T.S. Elliot’s “The Three Voices of Poetry” to help define the pastoral vocation. I was surprised at how helpful that rubric was.

The book is short but important. If you are a pastor, I challenge you to pick up this book and others like it to re-ground your vocation and break away from the definitions placed on you from the outside. If you know someone wanting to be a pastor, give them this book and see how it strikes them. I found it encouraging, helpful and needful at the same time.

Who Is A Pastor, Anyway?

Craig Barnes has written a wonderful book on the vocation of pastoring in his The Pastor as Minor Poet. While I intend to write up a more formal review, I thought I would take a few excerpts to reflect upon first.

I am convinced we have a crisis of definition in the evangelical pastoral world. We don’t know – and I include pastors in this – what a pastor does or what his or her role is in a church or society. That might come off as a little over the top, but I grow more convinced of it all the time. Barnes notes:

The hardest thing about being a pastor today is not the long hours, the demanding congregations, the eclectic responsibilities, the fishbowl existence, or the relentless return of Sundays. Those who have taken the vows of ordination have long shouldered all of that as the yoke of Christ. But only within the last two generations have the clergy been forces to bear an additional burden that is far from light – confusion about what it means to be the pastor. (pg. 4)

And I think it only gets worse the more churches give into the pressures of becoming part of the entertainment culture our congregations live the rest of their lives in. This add the pressure of the unquenchable thirst for “more” and for amusement at every turn. The church is something different, and the pastor is someone different.

Most of the leadership models within the pastoral world are of no particular help at all. Barnes writes just a few paragraphs later:

Much of the current literature on leadership that is being taught in our seminaries has come from secular universities such as the Harvard Business School. It’s presented as if the principles of corporate management can easily be baptized for leaders o congregations. (pg. 5)

They can’t. Though churches balance budgets and pay bills they are primarily the work of Christ. And though pastors need to be comfortable reading and understanding balance sheets, they are not accountants or corporate leaders. They are primarily and always spiritual shepherds.

There is so much to say and to reflect upon.

Can Be Summed Up In Two Words...

Craig Groeschel
The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living as if He Doesn’t Exist

My thoughts on this book can be summed up in two words: Sigh and Yawn. First, the sigh.

I have been intrigued by this book for a while and finally picked it up at the local store looking forward to hearing a pastor talk about believing in Christ while living as if we don’t. The phrase, “Christian atheist” is a provocative one and it presents interesting inroads into some pastoral work.

Instead of thought-provoking work, the book is a string of stories supported by a few verses here and there and punch-lines. Every chapter goes like this: catchy title, story of the down-and-outer, verse, repeat story and verse four or five more times, a little bit of surface Scriptural work, punch-line. I don’t know exactly what I expected when I picked up the book, but I was fairly underwhelmed with the product.

The Yawn is pretty self explanatory. Every chapter was essentially the same with variations on the stories and themes. All the actual biblical and spiritual work was simple bordering on simplistic. The illustrations – not unlike many sermons preached each week – overwhelmed the biblical insights and the vision of Christ this topic could have developed.

If you are looking for a simple and easy to read pick-me-up with lots of stories, this book really might be a help to you. If, however, you want to really dig into the very real problem of “Christian atheists,” this book might come up a little short for you.

(On Amazon)

Looking for the Right Kinds of Leaders

Mike Adams is a bit of an iconoclast - a radical atheist turned Christian while an academic. He now authors columns that deal with the academic world, and from time to time touch on the state of American Christianity. This article, "Searching for Bonhoeffer" is a short and to-the-point criticism of the loss of doctrinal bravery in many of our churches. Though his particular whipping-boy is the mega-church, I am confident that his assessment applies to more places than we might at first imagine.

Though he does not mention Bonhoeffer in the article, he refers to a pastoral character that is not swayed by the spirit of the age, finds depth of meaning and lifestyle in Christ, and leads others through a world that mocks evangelical commitment. Adam's last two paragraphs are challenging:

Our culture is in rapid decline as we enter the Obama/post-Christian phase of American history. People are in search of bold and fearless pastors who will take a stand against evil in blunt and uncompromising - not coded and esoteric - language. In the end, pastors who refuse to mold the Gospel to accommodate the spiritual needs of the seeker or the financial needs of the church will be the last ones standing.

I predict that many of the mega-churches of today will be the shopping malls of tomorrow. When it is time to foreclose and go packing someone is going to have some heavy equipment to move. At least no one will have to pick up their cross.

Pastors Preaching

For our denomination’s area meeting this Spring (what we call District Council), I was asked to give a workshop session on combining an expositional preaching style with what you might call week-to-week applicability/relevance/practicality, etc. The basic issue I was asked to address is the reason why so many evangelical churches have moved away from sermons that begin and end with a biblical text – the fear of irrelevance. The talk I gave, The Dogma is the Drama, emphasized the need to begin with a commitment to Scripture and keep in mind what you might call the prophetic element; the present-day realities and needs of the congregation.

I was asked a question at the end about how a pastor can go about building this kind of point of view and effectiveness from week to week. I gave an off-the-cuff answer that was pretty thin (sorry, Bob!). But after a little more reflection, I might have a better answer. So how does a pastor go about getting to know both Scripture and the culture well enough to build a pulpit ministry that is faithful to Scripture first and foremost, and yet speaks wisely into current issues and cultural settings?

Literacy
First of all, there is no substitute for biblical literacy, and because it should go without saying, I won’t spend any more time on it. But what does need to be said is that pastors need to deepen what else they read. We are in the business of handling the mystery of the gospel of Christ, and thus we should be in the regular habit of reading thoughtful and intelligent books. We ought to put down Olsteen and pick up the Stotts. We should read a little less off the “Christian Inspiration” shelf and a little more off the “Theology” shelf. Most of what passes for Christian best-sellers are pretty thin on substance, and if that becomes our primary mental diet, we ought not be surprised if our sermons follow form.

I have another pastor friend who always has at least four books going in four areas: theology, philosophy, science, and Bible. While that might be a heavy load for some, it is an example of where we ought to be headed. What was the last good book on theology you read that stretched you? Have you ever read anything by a Christian philosopher?

I would like to add to the list of potential books works by dead people. There is a perspective that comes from faithful Christians in different contexts that becomes invaluable to us over time. A thoughtful pastor ought to read Baxter’s Reformed Pastor – it is worth 100 current books on pastoral leadership. The journey of discovery, confession and conversion in Augustine’s Confessions is priceless.

Cultural Literacy
My original answer in the workshop was along these lines: I read a lot of things that frustrate me. Reading up on what the secular culture thinks about spiritual things can be very enlightening. At the very least, it helps to get us out of our comfort zones and puts us in contact with people who think and believe very differently than we do.

Francis Schaeffer is probably our modern North-star when it comes to this. He read, understood and could communicate with the disciples of Nietzsche. Can I read, understand and communicate with the modern disciples of Hitchens, Singer, and the like? If not, I might be unnecessarily limiting my spheres of influence.

The Weekly Conviction that Scripture Speaks
All this folds into how we approach Scripture. Do I need to “make” it relevant? Do I have to pull in some outside source to help the dry text communicate well? Do I need to buy illustrations off the internet about perseverance?

The Scriptural text is like the oven that bakes all the influences together into a tasty treat. All the flotsam and jetsam is consumed in the heat, and the various ingredients are subsumed by the larger purpose of the text itself.

The Vocation of Pastor

Eugene Peterson is a deeply important theologian for the evangelical world today primarily because he has wrestled against cultural stereotypes of ministry and pastoral work for decades. This makes some of what he writes esoteric, but more often than not it is simply prophetic. My calling to be a pastor was saved by one of his less known books, Under the Unpredictable Plant. In this Out of Ur post, Brandon O’Brien uses one of his more recent works to discuss the difference between jobs and callings, careers and vocations.

Definitions are in order. According to Peterson, a job is “an assignment to do work that can be quantified and evaluated.” Most jobs come with job descriptions, so it “is pretty easy to decide whether a job has been completed or not…whether a job is done well or badly.” This, Peterson argues, is the primary way Americans think of the pastor (and, presumably, that pastors think of themselves). Ministry is “a job that I get paid for, a job that is assigned to me by a denomination, a job that I am expected to do to the satisfaction of my congregation.”

Jobs are quantifiable. We may be better or worse at them qualitatively, but they are primarily about quantifying the outcomes of job descriptions. Vocations are entirely different. They are what we are called to do, and they are rarely quantifiable in neat and tidy ways. The calling of the pastor is very much this way. Is a pastor’s vocation about numbers on Sunday mornings? If so, I can tell of the personal anxiety and havoc they inflict. Is a pastor’s vocation measurable by budgets? If so, what makes him any different from a corporate middle manager?

Instead, the pastor’s calling is about things like souls, spiritual formation, Gospel communication, reconciliation, truth, and so forth. Try keeping track of that in Excel. The result is a conflict of pressures: the standard cultural model wants to put quantifiable categories on “pastor,” but the call and the actual week-to-week work resist at every turn. So, to which do we acquiesce?

According to O’Brien, Peterson notes:

And the struggle for pastors today, he continues, is to “keep the immediacy and authority of God’s call in my ears when an entire culture, both secular and ecclesial, is giving me a job description.”

What do we expect of our pastors from week to week?

Funerals Are A Pain

Funerals are a pain. And I don’t mean that in the sense that they are an annoying inconvenience – they are pain. They mark the passing of family or friend, and they stand as that public moment when we all grieve, love on each other, and make steps toward a new normal without the one we loved. As a pastor I sometimes get to watch as families deal with their loss while the pain is very fresh and sometimes the members of families are all at very different places at the same time. One thing I have never appreciated about some is their immediate tendency to try and brush aside the grief with something like, “at least they are in a better place.” Though that is true for those who die with Christ, and though that truth is part of the healing process, we ought not to short-circuit the process of death and grief so quickly.

A recent article in CT deals with the new book, The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come, by Rob Moll. In the article we are encouraged to think more about funerals as an act of spiritual formation and even community formation under Christ. We are, after all, people of a crucified and risen savior living in inevitable physical decay. We ought to therefore embody a community of resurrection – and remember that resurrection implies death. Rob Moll notes:

We live in a culture that has forgotten how to help people measure their days. Through medicine and science, we know more about death and how to forestall it than ever before. Yet we know little about how to prepare people for the inevitable. The church is a community that teaches people how to live well by teaching them how to measure their days. Put another way, when the church incarnates a culture of resurrection—one that recognizes the inevitability of death but not its triumph—it teaches people how to die well.

Have we become so obsessed with living well or living comfortably that we have lost sight of dying well as part of the spiritual act of the believer? If we have neglected this, does it betray a lack of confidence in the providential guidance of God in all seasons of life?

The article is very thoughtful, and I heartily recommend it.