I am a big fan of getting together with a bunch of theologically-minded guys and spending a few hours together now and then talking about what we have been reading, working through issues that come up in our ministry, or mulling over big questions we have been asking and wrestling with. The preferred setting for this is a pub or coffeeshop, although I'm also perfectly happy to do so while working under the hood of a car, or walking down a city street, or sitting in my living room.

John Stott wished for this sort of thing as well, as a means for ministers to keep their minds sharp and to build each other up. He writes of this being a good practice with a proven historical track record in his book, Between Two Worlds:

I often find myself wishing that local clergy gatherings, whether denominational or interdenominational, could be more effective in stimulating thought. When we meet, we are no doubt obliged to transact some business, but we could also encourage one another in study. The second half of the eighteenth century was the great time for the founding of societies for English clergy, especially evangelicals. The first was Samuel Walker's 'Clerical Club' in Truro (c. 1750), whose purpose was to 'strengthen each other's hands in the work of the Lord'. During the following years about ten others arose in different parts of the country. 'Why may we not meet to pray, when others meet to play at the bowls?' asked Thomas Robinson of Leicester. 'Why may we not have deliberative assemblies, when others of our brethern have their dancing and drinking assemblies? Why may we not seek to edify each other, whilst they care not if they corrupt one another?' The most famous and influential of these clubs was the Eclectic Society, founded in 1783 by John Newton, ex-sea captain and slave trader, but at that time Rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the city of London, and his friends. They met every other Monday. 'We begin with tea,' wrote Newton (the teapot is preserved in the Church Missionary House in London); 'then a short prayer introduces a conversation for about three hours upon a proposed subject, and we seldom flag.' He added that the group deserved to be called the Royal Society since 'I trust the members are all of the royal family, and the King Himself condescends to meet with us.' (190)

Not mentioned in Stott's list is the 'White Horse Inn' of Cambridge, or even Martin Luther's frequent practice of having students over to his home for dinner and home-brewed beer to talk about all kinds of different issues; undoubtedly there are many more groups like these. This sort of thing is, I think, a very healthy practice and worth engaging in on a regular basis. Blogging, of course, is one outlet for me to work through all kinds of things I read and think about and questions I am working through, but I would never substitute it entirely for face-to-face conversation with friends, colleagues and mentors. That kind of interaction is invaluable.

So, who'd like to go get a drink or a cup of coffee?

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One of the best known works of the Puritan minister, Richard Baxter, is The Reformed Pastor, written around 1656 while he was vicar of St Mary's Church in Kidderminster. The content had originally been composed by him for an association of ministers from Worcestershire, and Baxter had intended the book to help them in their efforts to form godly, worshiping communities in that county.

Having been on my shelf for some time (and now that I am post-serminary and thus afforded time to read whatsoever I desire), I began to read the book the other day. I was immediately taken by something in Baxter's dedication, where he urged his fellow ministers to be intimately involved in the lives of their parishioners. The responsibilities of a pastor went beyond what took place during a Sunday service; it included the nurture of the families and individuals within the congregation, visiting with them to teach, admonish, and encourage them in the faith. Baxter makes six points in regard to these responsibilites (slightly paraphrased here):

1. People must be taught the principles of religion, and matters of greatest necessity to salvation.
2. They must be taught it in the most edifying, advantageous way.
3. Personal conference, examination, and instruction, hath many excellent advantages for their good.
4. Personal instruction is recommended to us by Scripture, and by the practice of the servants of Christ, and approved by the godly of all ages.
5. We should perform this great duty to all the people, or as many as we can; for our love and care of their souls must extend to all. If there are five hundred or a thousand ignorant people in your parish or congregation, it is a poor discharge of your duty, now and then to speak to some few of them, and to let the rest alone in their ignorance, if you are able to afford them help.
6. It is not less certain, that so great a work as this is should take up a considerable part of our time.

This being only the dedication, Baxter does not elaborate on the points made, but something of the importance he attaches to this aspect of pastoral work comes out already in this short list. Just a few pages later, however, he issues a far more urgent plea to ministers for engaging in pastoral work among their flock:

You have put your hand to the plough; you are doubly devoted to [God], as Christians, and as pastors; and dare you, after this, draw back and refuse his work? You see the work of reformation at a stand; and you are engaged by many obligations to promote it: and dare you now neglect the means by which it must be done? Will you show your faces in a Christian congregation, as ministers of the gospel, and there pray for a reformation, and for the conversion and salvation of your hearers, and for the prosperity of the Church; and when you have done, refuse to use the means by which all this must be effected?

Baxter continues by saying that this aspect of their work as ministers is just as important as their preaching. This kind of involvement in the lives of the members of a congregation fosters a relationship in which the minister demonstrates great love and care for the parishioner and, in turn, the parishioner is given to humbly respect and submit to the authority of the minister. Now, this is not a totalitarian sort of authority, but the authority of one who has been called by God to shepherd his flock in a certain place. The authority is not derived from himself, but from his call and ordination to faithfully teach and proclaim the whole counsel of God. And his carrying out of this work is solely for the purpose of nurturing the faith of the congregation, for building them up and edifying them in order that they might increasingly live for the glory of the Lord, and as faithful witnesses to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

For this reason, a minister's work does not take place only within an hour and a half time slot on a Sunday morning; in reality, it is a task that is never crossed off his 'to-do' list. Baxter understood the gravity and immensity of the minister's calling, and that is why he wrote this book. I am really looking forward to going deeper in this book and learning from Baxter's pastoral wisdom.

In a day or two, I will return to this issue with some thoughts on the place of this type of pastoral work in the church today.

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I remember reading the following, from Eugene Peterson's Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, somewhere before, a few years ago. When I saw that John Barach had posted it, I copied and pasted it here because it is characteristic of Peterson's incisiveness and wisdom, and his ability to systematically expose the rampant consumerism at work in American evangelicalism. Here he laments the way the pastorate has become just another tool used to satisfy the wants of the consumers in the pew.

For a long time I have been convinced that I could take a person with a high school education, give him or her a six-month trade school training, and provide a pastor who would be satisfactory to any discriminating American congregation. The curriculum would consist of four courses. Course I: Creative Plagiarism. I would put you in touch with a wide range of excellent and inspirational talks, show you how to alter them just enough to obscure their origins, and get you a reputation for wit and wisdom. Course II: Voice Control for Prayer and Counseling. We would develop your own distinct style of Holy Joe intonation, acquiring the skill in resonance and modulation that conveys an unmistakable aura of sanctity. Course III: Efficient Office Management. There is nothing that parishioners admire more in their pastors than the capacity to run a tight ship administratively. If we return all telephone calls within twenty-four hours, answer all letters within a week, distributing enough carbons to key people so that they know we are on top of things, and have just the right amount of clutter on our desks — not too much or we appear inefficient, not too little or we appear underemployed — we quickly get the reputation for efficiency that is far more important than anything that we actually do. Course IV: Image Projection. Here we would master the half-dozen well-known and easily implemented devices that create the impression that we are terrifically busy and widely sought after for counsel by influential people in the community. A one-week refresher course each year would introduce new phrases that would convince our parishioners that we are bold innovators on the cutting edge of the megatrends and at the same time solidly rooted in all the traditional values of our sainted ancestors.

(I have been laughing for several years over this trade school training for pastors with which I plan to make my fortune. Recently, though, the joke has backfired on me. I keep seeing advertisements for institutes and workshops all over the country that invite pastors to sign up for this exact curriculum. The advertised course offerings are not quite as honestly labeled as mine, but the content appears to be identical — a curriculum that trains pastors to satisfy the current consumer tastes in religion. I’m not laughing anymore.) [7-8]

Pastoral ministry is not about giving people what they want. Instead, it is about giving people what they need. While at first we may, with Peterson, laugh a little about this, we too must come to the point where we are not laughing about this anymore. When it is all said and done, this is not just a matter of wants versus needs, or likes versus dislikes. The reality is that this a matter of life and death.

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Towards the end of the lectures on preaching by Martyn Lloyd-Jones recorded in his book, Preaching and Preachers, he devotes one session to discussing certain things preachers should avoid. Lloyd-Jones, as many know, was an advocate of preaching through books of the Bible as opposed to preaching a number of sermons on a specific subject. His reasoning behind this objection is that preaching according to subjects

has the tendency to isolate subjects from their context in the Scriptures; indeed ultimately it regards the Scriptures as but a collection of statements about particular subjects. So one atomises the Scripture and forgets the whole; and, surely, the whole is more important than the parts...one loses the sense of the wholeness of the biblical message (245).

Additionally, Lloyd-Jones makes the case that to preach according to certain subjects does not square with a proper understanding of preaching, which I mentioned in an earlier post. This, he argues, is an even more important point than the first.

Why are people interested in 'subjects'? The answer is that they think they know what they need, and they only want to hear about the things in which they say they are 'tremendously interested'.

You must have gathered already that it is a part of my whole contention that they are not in a position, ultimately, to know what they need; and our experience of ourselves in the past, and experience as pastors of souls, teaches that so often their idea as to what they need is quite wrong. Of course the preacher may also be wrong in this respect, but this applies much more to the congregations. It is, I repeat, a part of our whole approach to this matter not to allow the pew to decide the theme of preaching and not to encourage them at all along this line; but rather to give them the whole truth, and to bring them to see that there are vital aspects of which they are ignorant and in which they are apparently not interested at all. They should be interested in the whole truth and every aspect of it, and we must show them their need of this.

Interestingly, Lloyd-Jones remarks that features like this are the heir of nineteenth-century liberalism.

It has often amazed me to notice how churches and preachers hold on to nineteenth-century methods when they have long since bidden farewell to the great truths emphasised especially in the early part of that century. This habit and practice of announcing the subject, and of having a choir, and a children's address—all these things came in during the last century; they were not done before that time. It was all part of that pseudo-intellectualism of the Victorians; and we are now experiencing a kind of hangover from this. I am calling attention to this because I feel that the urgent need today is to break free from these bad habits, this false respectability and intellectualism that was so characteristic of the end of the last century. These things have been dominating our services; and I feel they detract from the preaching of the Gospel and the centrality of the preaching of the Gospel (246-247).

Disregarding the pot-shots he takes at choirs and children's messages, I think he again makes some very valid points for our consideration.

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Continuing on the theme of pastors and ministers, although shifting gears a little, check out this audio-only clip. You can always count on Alistair Begg to touch a nerve, and that is no different here.

This subject hits closer to home because of the number of guys I know who have been searching for months or even years for a call, and yet to find anything despite the fact that it is so evident God has set them apart to do this. A lot of the problem, as Begg says, is that so many churches are looking for the "perfect pastor" and are essentially unwilling to believe that God uses even the weakest of us for His glory.

Any thoughts?

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