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CHAPTER 1
Rediscovering Pastoral Ministry
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. 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:
1. Uncertain identity — a widespread confusion over what defines an evangelical.
2. Institutional disenchantment — a perceived ministry ineffectiveness and irrelevance.
3. Lack of leadership — a lament over the paucity of leadership in the church.
4. Pessimistic about the future — a belief that the future of evangelicalism hangs in the balance.
5. Growth up, impact down — a confusing paradox without immediate, clear explanations.
6. Cultural isolation — the post-Christian era has fully arrived.
7. Political and methodological response provides the solution — unbiblical approaches to ministry are emerging.
8. Shift from truth-orientation to market-response ministry — a redirection from preoccupation with the eternal to concern for the temporal in an effort to be viewed as relevant.
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. 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:
• What is the pastor to be and do?
• How should the church respond to a rapidly changing culture?
• What does God consider relevant?
• How concerned is Christ with the traditional and/or the contemporary?
• Are the Scriptures an adequate basis of ministry today?
• What are a pastor's ministry priorities?
• Under whose authority does a pastor stand?
• How shall we distinguish between the God-called pastor and the counterfeit?
• Who defines the need for ministry: God or men?
• What direction does Christ want for His church in the twenty-first century?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. He traced the lineage forward to Norman Vincent Peale and then to Robert Schuller. It appears that Schuller has significantly influenced Bill Hybels, the most visible current evangelical proponent of a "church the unchurched" philosophy of ministry. 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."
John MacArthur, sees the church becoming like the world. 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. 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. 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.
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.
H. Richard Niebuhr documented the confusion that prevailed during the early and middle twentieth century. Thomas Oden updated the dilemma into the 1980s. He lamented that the entire twentieth century evidenced confusion over the role of the church and the pastor. 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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Pastoral Ministry"
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Copyright © 2005 John MacArthur.
Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
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