Richard L. Mayhue
Current changes beginning to overtake many congregations could distinctively mark the twenty-first century church. A growing number of respected evangelicals believe that the present redirection of the church toward being less biblical and more acceptable to man will ultimately lead to a Christ-condemned church. By using Scripture to answer the questions “What is a pastor to be and do?” and “How can contemporary ministry be shaped by biblical mandates?” the church can obediently realign herself with God’s revealed purposes for the bride of Christ. In this manner, it is possible to achieve a biblically balanced, complementary relationship between understanding God’s will for the church, engaging in pastoral ministry as defined by Scripture, and preparing a new generation of pastors for ministry as outlined by God’s Word.
Crossroads. Transition. Crisis. Uncertainty. Restlessness. These words express the perception by many evangelicals regarding the status of the church and pastoral ministry. Few disagree that a call for redirection has come to the evangelical church in the twenty-first century.
For example, consider John Seel’s 1992 survey of twenty-five prominent evangelical leaders.1 The leaders expressed their views on the general state of evangelicalism at the end of the twentieth century. Eight dominant themes emerged from their responses:
We acknowledge these alarming trends, believing that decisions made in this decade will reshape the American evangelical church for much of the century to come. Thus, the future direction of the contemporary church is a legitimate, preeminent consideration. Unquestionably, the church faces a defining moment.2 The real contrast in competing ministry models is not the traditional versus the contemporary, but rather the scriptural compared to the unscriptural.
THE MOMENT OF DECISION
Having arrived at the proverbial “fork in the road,” evangelicals must decide between two alternatives. The first is an approach to ministry that is characteristically, but not necessarily exclusively, need-based, man-centered, consumer-driven, and culturally defined. These emphases generally depend on and change with the latest directions in psychology and sociology, which after attempted integration as coequals with Scripture, supposedly provide a scientifically validated, relevant ministry for the contemporary computer/ media-oriented atmosphere.
The second option features a redemptively centered, God-focused, biblically defined, and scripturally prioritized ministry. In this book we champion this latter model, which looks to the sufficiency of Scripture as the revelation of past, present, and future works of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit that have the utmost relevance, now and forever. The church must look to the Scriptures and address the challenge of shaping contemporary ministry with biblical mandates.
Arguably, no time in church history has more closely approximated the first-century beginnings of the church than now. Our ancient brethren faced a pagan, pre-Christian, and premodern culture. Similarly, the contemporary church encounters a pagan, post-Christian, and postmodern world. The essential biblical model of ministry of the first century has never been more appropriate than it is today.
Pastoral Ministry attempts to balance the tensions between temporal and eternal considerations and between divine and human factors in ministry. God’s character, God’s revelation, and God’s will have not changed although time and culture have. How should a balanced ministry reconcile the two sides? We reason that the timeless should define any particular moment in time, not the reverse. Christ has been and will remain the Chief Shepherd (1 Pet. 5:4), the Good Shepherd (John 10:11, 14), and the Great Shepherd (Heb. 13:20). Pastors will always be His undershepherds and laborers in the church that He purchased with His own precious blood (Acts 20:28) and continues to build (Matt. 16:18).
Pastors assume a huge responsibility when they accept the unequaled task of exhorting and reproving on Christ’s behalf (Titus 1:9). Paul’s word about this stewardship to the Corinthian church almost two thousand years ago is sobering:
Let a man regard us in this manner, as servants of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. In this case, moreover, it is required of stewards that one be found trustworthy. But to me it is a very small thing that I should be examined by you, or by any human court; in fact, I do not even examine myself. I am conscious of nothing against myself, yet I am not by this acquitted; but the one who examines me is the Lord. Therefore do not go on passing judgment before the time, but wait until the Lord comes who will both bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and disclose the motives of men’s hearts; and then each man’s praise will come to him from God (1 Cor. 4:1–5).
The twenty-first-century church in general and pastors in particular face the following crucial questions:
And foremost of all, when we stand before the Lord of glory and give account of our stewardship, what will be the answers to these two questions: What will we say? and, far more importantly, What will He say?
We submit that God will use His Word as the benchmark by which He will commend or condemn our labors in His church. He will not inquire whether a ministry was traditional or contemporary, but He will ask, “Was it biblical?” Our ministry will either be in accord with His will or in opposition to it, as Scripture expresses it: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17).
THE CHURCH ON THE WRONG WAY
A reasonable expectation would be that after two thousand years of existence, the church should know and understand exactly what God intended her to be. Yet just the opposite seems to be true.3
It appears that the way of religion in American culture has become the way of the church, a wrong way. Sheler concluded that culture is having its way with Christianity instead of Christianity having an influence on culture:
The social critics among us, and the consciences within us, increasingly wonder if we have lost our moral compass and forsaken our spiritual heritage. Yale professor Stephen Carter, in his recent book The Culture of Disbelief, blames this cultural decay on what he believes has been a growing exclusion of religion from public life. “We have pressed the religiously faithful . . . to act as though their faith does not matter,” Carter argues.4
Francis Schaeffer called this phenomenon “the great evangelical disaster.” He succinctly summarized the situation:
Here is the great evangelical disaster—the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. There is only one word for this—namely accommodation: the evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age. First, there has been accommodation on Scripture, so that many who call themselves evangelicals hold a weakened view of the Bible and no longer affirm the truth of all the Bible teaches—truth not only in religious matters but in the areas of science and history and morality. As part of this, many evangelicals are now accepting the higher critical methods in the study of the Bible. Remember, it was these same methods which destroyed the authority of the Bible for the Protestant church in Germany in the last century, and which have destroyed the Bible for the liberal in our own country from the beginning of the century. And second, there has been accommodation on the issues, with no clear stand being taken even on matters of life and death.5
Encouragingly, recent years have seen a rash of books calling the church back to the primacy of God and Scripture. They strongly warn that the church is slowly but surely being culturalized.
David F. Wells, the Andrew Mutch Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, has recently written a landmark analysis of American evangelicalism in the 1990s. He noted,
The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today but, oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world—in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift from God to self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational.6
Wells argued that it was the influential and liberal preacher, Harry Emerson Fosdick, who popularized the ministry philosophy that begins with man’s needs rather than God’s will.7 He traced the lineage forward to Norman Vincent Peale and then to Robert Schuller.8 It appears that Schuller has significantly influenced Bill Hybels, the most visible current evangelical proponent of a “church the unchurched” philosophy of ministry.9 In a sense, Fosdick’s philosophy of ministry lives on long after his death.
Noted historian George Marsden warned evangelicals of the encroachments of humanism on the church. He concluded that “while fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs have erected doctrinal barriers against theological liberalism, more subtle versions of similar sub-Christian values have infiltrated behind their lines.”10
John MacArthur, sees the church becoming like the world.11 In a positively provocative fashion, he compares the many similarities between the decline of the church in England during Spurgeon’s day a century ago and the faltering American church in our day. MacArthur notes the parallel path and common distinction of spiritual deadness shared by the liberal modernists of a century ago and evangelical pragmatists today. They both have an unhealthy aversion to doctrine.
Os Guinness provided several probing analyses of the modern church and evangelicals.12 They include The Gravedigger File, No God but God, and Dining with the Devil. In these three works he wrote about the secularization of the church, idolatry in the church, and the modern church growth movement, respectively.
“Selling Out the House of God?” a Christianity Today interview of Bill Hybels, illustrates the tensions existing in today’s church.13 This article was occasioned by the increase in probing questions that pastors wanted to ask this highly visible, consumer-oriented church pastor about his ministry basis and style. Many fear that if the next generation takes the path Hybels now travels, it, too, will arrive at the same destination as the modernist movement did earlier this century.
Consider this recent warning:
Evangelical pastors and theologians can learn from the mainline experience of placing relevance above truth. We must avoid the lure of novelty and soft sell, which, we are told, will make it easier for moderns to believe. Methods may change, but never the message. . . . We are called to be faithful stewards of a great and reliable theological heritage. We have truths to affirm and errors to avoid. We must not try to make these truths more appealing or user friendly by watering them down. We must guard against a trendy “theological bungee-jumping” that merely entertains the watching crowd.14
Interestingly, this clear call to a biblically bound ministry did not come from the conservative wing of evangelism. Rather, it is a warning to evangelical churches from one who is attempting to bring revival within the liberal, mainline United Methodist Church. He cautioned the church to avoid the user-friendly route of church ministry because the end is predictable: within a generation or at the most two generations, churches will lose their spiritual direction and life.
IDENTITY CRISIS
As the church succumbs to cultural and secular pressures, it is not surprising that biblically defined pastoral roles and the scripturally oriented content of ministerial training have experienced a serious challenge also.
Pastoral Identity
This confusion is not entirely new to the church. As early as the first century, Paul felt compelled to articulate carefully the role of the pastor. All succeeding generations have felt this tension with the corresponding need to reaffirm the biblical absolutes of ministry. Culbertson and Shippee noticed this ongoing tension:
Pastoral theology is for the most part a field without a clear definition: its precise meaning and component parts seem to vary widely from one denomination to the next and from one seminary to the next. The how-to of pastoral care and the component elements in the process of clergy character formation seem to be equally slippery. In all three fields, however, constitutive material seems to be taught either from a strictly scriptural base, or from a base of modern psychological and sociological theory as it has been appropriated by the church, or through a combination of Scripture and modern scientific insight—but rarely does the teaching of pastoral formation make direct reference to the fascinating history and tradition of the early church.15
H. Richard Niebuhr documented the confusion that prevailed during the early and middle twentieth century.16 Thomas Oden updated the dilemma into the 1980s.17 He lamented that the entire twentieth century evidenced confusion over the role of the church and the pastor.18 Oden strongly called for a return to Scripture in order to understand the pastoral office and role:
Scripture provides the primary basis for understanding the pastoral office and its functions. We will treat Scripture as the church’s book, rather than as the exclusive turf of the historian or social theorist. Pastoral wisdom has lived out of the key locus classicus texts that have enjoyed a rich history of interpretation long before the advent of modern historical research. We are free to learn from and use that research without being handcuffed by some of its reductionist assumptions.
Pastoral theology lives out of Scripture. When the pastoral tradition has quoted Scripture, it has viewed it as an authoritative text for shaping both its understanding and its practice of ministry. We do not put Scripture under our examination, according to criteria alien to it, in order to understand ministry. Rather, Scripture examines our prior understandings of ministry. It puts them to the test.19
Ministerial Training
Redefining the church leads inevitably to redefining the pastoral role. The latter then spills over into pastoral training at the seminary level. Predictably, a seemingly endless flood of current literature is calling for radical restructuring of seminary education.
In 1990 The Atlantic published a striking general assessment of American seminaries. This comprehensive study concluded,
If they are to succeed, this generation of seminarians must, of course, be educationally and spiritually sound, politically aware, as conversant with demography as they are with morality. They must be sensitive to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, but they must not drive us up still another wall with their convictions. We have been flogged enough; we know our shortcomings. When our future clerics speak, we want to hear powerful yet measured voices bringing out the moral dimension of life, and not only the politics of the left wing of the Democratic Party or the right of the Republican, masquerading as religious belief.
We want them to be people who in some tiny way reflect the mercy and goodness of God we want to know, not only His judgment. We want them to be people who see the goodness in us that we have yet to unleash, the potential within us to transcend our differences. In the end, I think, we are looking for those who will help us find that voice deep within us which is not our own, but calls us to do what is right.20
Consumer appeal in both ministry and pastoral training clearly marks the conclusion to this article and reflects much of the current literature.
A 1993 study commissioned by seven well-known American seminaries concluded, “The church, in order to maintain relevancy to its constituency, has had to devise new ways of ‘doing’ ministry or be faced with closing the doors. . . . This report . . . calls for a major restructuring of the seminary—form and function.”21
If we carry the consumer paradigm to its logical conclusion, it will be brilliantly consistent with prevailing contemporary theories but sadly unscriptural. In effect it reasons, “What the people want, the church should provide. What the church provides, pastors should be trained to deliver.” Taking it one step further, the ultimate result will be that “What pastors are trained to deliver, the church will provide. When the church provides what the people want, people will want more.” This eventually will create a virtually unbreakable cause-and-effect cycle that will render the American church impotent and condemned by Christ.
However, before seminaries capitulate, they should study the history of seminaries and seminary education in America. Notable among many are Andover Seminary and Princeton Seminary, founded in 1807 and 1812 respectively.22 Both started strong, with seemingly unshakable biblical foundations, but with time and for various reasons, each succumbed to the demand to go beyond the Scriptures for both their doctrine and their practice. Conservatives agree that they long ago outlived their usefulness to the gospel ministry because they shifted from their initial high view of God and the Scriptures.
Any given seminary might change many things to make itself more useful to the church and ultimately the cause of Christ, but its emphasis upon biblical truth as the core of the curriculum should never change. David Dockery recently summed up seminary education in a new century like this:
We want to be able to teach the Scriptures in a creative and relevant way that models for our students that the Bible is normative and authoritative for the contemporary church—for their lives individually and for the church corporately. The Bible is an ancient document that is written to specific people in specific times in specific contexts. It nevertheless transcends those times and contexts because it is inspired by the Spirit of God, so it is both a divine and human document. It is a time-related document as well as an eternal document. Therefore, it speaks beyond its context and we want faculty who live out of deep commitment to the full truthfulness and complete authority of God’s inspired word.
Biblical authority is a much maligned and misunderstood concept in our contemporary world. People ask how can you believe that a book written 2,000 years ago has authority and relevance where we are now? The answer is because of its source. Its source is not just in the prophets and the apostles; it is in God Himself, who has actually breathed out this Word to us to study, to believe, and obey.23
TAKING A BIBLICAL APPROACH
We believe Paul made an absolute assertion with undeniable implications when he wrote to Timothy, “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17). This passage teaches not only a high view of Scripture’s authority but also its sufficiency, especially in formulating ministry plans and priorities. It demands that we begin with God and the Bible rather than man and culture in order to understand God’s will in ministry.
The ministry tensions, problems, and questions that our generation faces are not new. Malachi indicted Israel because they exchanged the glory of God for the way of the culture. Paul confronted the Corinthians. Jeremiah and Ezekiel warned against the proliferation of false shepherds in the Old Testament, as did Peter and Jude in the New Testament. The contemporary pastor must pay close attention to the lessons of biblical history, for they will surely be repeated in his generation. Therefore when we ask, “What is a pastor to be and do?” we must look to God’s Word for answers and not to the latest fads or theories that find their source in society rather than in Scripture, or in culture but not in Christ.
God has given several defining passages explaining who a pastor is to be and what a pastor is to do (such as, 1 Tim. 3:1–7; Titus 1:6–9; 1 Pet. 5:1–5), which the following chapters will discuss. But perhaps the most explicit books in the New Testament regarding the work of the ministry are 1 and 2 Thessalonians. A careful analysis of these pastoral epistles leads to this basic ministry description. A pastor’s primary activities include:
| 1. Praying | 1 Thess. 1:2–3; 3:9–13 |
| 2. Evangelizing | 1 Thess. 1:4–5, 9–10 |
| 3. Equipping | 1 Thess. 1:6–8 |
| 4. Defending | 1 Thess. 2:1–6 |
| 5. Loving | 1 Thess. 2:7–8 |
| 6. Laboring | 1 Thess. 2:9 |
| 7. Modeling | 1 Thess. 2:10 |
| 8. Leading | 1 Thess. 2:10–12 |
| 9. Feeding | 1 Thess. 2:13 |
| 10. Watching | 1 Thess. 3:1–8 |
| 11. Warning | 1 Thess. 4:1–8 |
| 12. Teaching | 1 Thess. 4:9—5:11 |
| 13. Exhorting | 1 Thess. 5:12–24 |
| 14. Encouraging | 2 Thess. 1:3–12 |
| 15. Correcting | 2 Thess. 2:1–12 |
| 16. Confronting | 2 Thess. 3:6, 14 |
| 17. Rescuing | 2 Thess. 3:15 |
Paul exemplified the character of a pastor and how that character relates to ministry conduct (1 Thess. 2:1–6). He described the nature of pastoral leadership in terms of a mother (2:7–8), a laborer (2:9), a family member (2:10), and a father (2:11–12). Though these texts do not exhaust the subject, they do point to Scripture as the appropriate source from which to draw answers to questions about ministry.
Christ’s letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2—3 raise the relevant question, “If Christ were to write a letter to the American church, what would He say?” This inquiry is purely hypothetical and will not happen because the time of written divine revelation has passed. However, the timeless truths of Revelation 2—3, revealed in the first century, are applicable to the twenty-first-century church because they represent the unchanging mind of Christ in regard to His church. We know what He would commend and what He would condemn.
The bottom line is simply this: Will we seek to be fruitful in ministry by depending on the power of God’s Word (Rom. 1:16–17; 1 Cor. 1:22–25; 1 Thess. 2:13) and God’s Spirit (Rom. 15:13; 2 Tim. 1:8) or on the power of man’s wisdom? Consider how Paul instructed the Corinthian church, whose curious preoccupation with their culture parallels the contemporary evangelical church’s comparable fascination:
For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised, God has chosen, the things that are not, that He might nullify the things that are, that no man should boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:26–31).
REDISCOVERING PASTORAL MINISTRY
We remain convinced that God’s Word provides the timeless defining paradigm for the nature and particulars of pastoral ministry. Scripture outlines what God wants a pastor to be and what God wants a pastor to do. Contemporary ministry in any generation needs to be shaped by biblical mandates.
We set before our peers the assertion that Christ must build His church His way (Matt. 16:18).24 If we desire to see God-pleasing fruit in our ministry, it must come from planting the good seed of God’s Word in the rich soil of diligent pastoral labor according to the Scriptures.
The statements of this chapter are not a call for a user-unfriendly church, a culturally ignorant church, or a seeker insensitive church. We have no desire to “unchurch the unchurched” or to promote an irrelevant dinosaur of a church. On the other hand, neither do we want to substitute the latest theories in sociology and psychology for the truth of theology. We do not want to confuse the common sense benefit of demographic statistics and analysis of culture with the far more important understanding of God’s will for the church, both for Christians and non-Christians. We ardently desire to let the important consideration of God and His revealed will in Scripture be the major focus.
A significant segment of evangelical churches and a growing proportion of evangelical literature seem to be distancing themselves from biblical priorities. Unbiblical imbalances among contemporary evangelicals are showing up in growing tendencies toward:
Because of these escalating trends, the church is increasingly in danger of equating religion with Christianity and “going to church” with salvation. The church increasingly substitutes human power for God’s power and peripheral talk about God for talk that centers on Him directly. The church increasingly confuses emotion with worship in Spirit and truth and the cleverness of man’s words with the power of the gospel. If the evangelical church remains on its present course, we fear that by popular demand the next generation may replace true Christianity with an impotent, idolatrous religion.
The remainder of this book could expand on these present dangers and deceits facing the evangelical church and ministry. Instead, however, it urges all of Christendom, both in America and around the world, to rediscover pastoral ministry as outlined in Scripture. Here you will find ministry that is biblically based, not demographically defined; Spirit-led, not market-driven; Christ-centered, not man-directed; and God-focused, not consumer-oriented.
BEING ABOUT THE FATHER’S BUSINESS
As Jesus engaged in His Father’s work, so must we. An anonymous writer vividly captured the essence of pastoral stewardship before the Lord with his exhortation to do God’s work God’s way according to God’s Word:
Stick with your work. Do not flinch because the lion roars; do not stop to stone the devil’s dogs; do not fool away your time chasing the devil’s rabbits. Do your work. Let liars lie, let sectarians quarrel, let critics malign, let enemies accuse, let the devil do his worst; but see to it nothing hinders you from fulfilling with joy the work God has given you.
He has not commanded you to be admired or esteemed. He has never bidden you defend your character. He has not set you at work to contradict falsehood (about yourself) which Satan’s or God’s servants may start to peddle, or to track down every rumor that threatens your reputation. If you do these things, you will do nothing else; you will be at work for yourself and not for the Lord.
Keep at your work. Let your aim be as steady as a star. You may be assaulted, wronged, insulted, slandered, wounded and rejected, misunderstood, or assigned impure motives; you may be abused by foes, forsaken by friends, and despised and rejected of men. But see to it with steadfast determination, with unfaltering zeal, that you pursue the great purpose of your life and object of your being until at last you can say, “I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.”