Dear Pastor,
Whether you are from a mega church, or a tiny house church, whether you have still training to be one, or have been one for decades, there are some things I wish to share to you as a mere member of the church. I’m not a pastor and I’m not training to be one; nor have I gone through the rigours of your training nor agonised over the same things you have. But I wish to tell you my heartfelt thoughts from my special vantage point, as a mere member.
Over the past year or so I have had the privilege of interacting intimately with men of your ilk. I have quizzed them, dined with them, consulted them, laughed with them, served with them, and prayed with them. Many times, we expressed the same disappointment and even despair with the current state of affairs, and I wish more other pastors could hear their thoughts. They seem almost voiceless in this world. But I know God is working.
First, please preach the word faithfully. It’s not a noetic exercise relevant only for certain strata or education levels. The congregation relies on it. The word of God is not a book to be consulted, it is not a culturally or historically outdated document; most of all, it is not a rulebook that frightens us into submission. The Christian church is not built upon the quintessential ideas and abstractions of the Jewish and early-Christian peoples; it’s built upon the word of God. Every word is breathed by God, and is essential for our growth in righteousness. (2 Tim 3:16) As Christopher Ash showed so brilliantly, the church is governed by prophets like Moses who mediate between God and His people. In the Old Testament, the kings’ most feared opponent was not an enemy from without, but the enemy from within: God’s prophet. Today, you are a preacher of Christ, the perfect Prophet of the people of God.
If thus the words of God are not spoken, then what is the organising principle of the church? If you do not preach, then there is nothing to protect us from the winds of culture and politics. If you do not preach, your flock will stagnate and see church as a place for old friends to grow old with. There will be an identifiable pattern: young Christians eager and free to serve; and old Christians jaded and lazy. This pattern perpetuates as a cycle because no one is preaching faithfully. People are crying out, there is a famine of the word in many churches. Just like in 1 Samuel, the corruption of Eli’s household leads to the famine of the word of God; but we can also have a self-imposed famine if our pastors aren’t making faithful preaching a priority.
Second, please preach the word with authority. However, authority isn’t derived from the pulpit, your office as a pastor, nor from your theological education. You preach with authority if you preach His word. In Mark 1:22, we see the difference between the preaching of Jesus and the scribes. The pastor shouldn’t concoct, reinvent and innovate from the words of the bible. The pastor shouldn’t improvise or be unique or creative, especially when preaching a passage during a particular holiday season. It is not a litany of poorly pieced messages. You are not famed teachers of various traditions trying to build exclusive domain expertise. You are not like the teachers of Confucius who try to make much of pithy (and dubious) writings from his disciples. You are armed and equipped with the entirety of the word of God. Hebrews begins: ‘long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…’ It is complete. Rely on it, mediate on it, preach it.
A sister who’s a scientist once challenged me: “if you question my work as a scientist, then I’d first have to ask about your credentials. Likewise, unless you are theologically trained, you shouldn’t question your pastor.” Unfortunately, this is casuistry par excellence. It never occured to me that paper qualifications ought to silence curious questioning. By this reasoning, we’d be unable to hold the feet of our ‘highly educated’ pastors to the fire. Don’t pile degrees to cement your authority. You are not an expert in Jesus; you are the mouthpiece of Jesus, and his word is already complete. No one is beyond reproach.
So if your authority is borrowed, then please show your work, reveal your reasoning through the passage. Resist the temptation to make claims because you can. It is true that Jesus favoured the faith of little children, not because they would naively believe everything He said, but because they tended to trust and obey with less worries and doubts. Logic is not our enemy. The bible is not a scientific book, but it’s message is not unreasonable. So try to explain what you preach and don’t gloss over logical leaps.
Third, please preach the word with clarity. It is understandable that you specialised in certain systematics, and have much to say of the passage in its original Greek. It’s possible that based on your hours of research, pouring through academic debates, you have finally come to a position that’s fair and respectful. But when you preach, preach the word and its meaning to us. Don’t give a lecture; don’t teach – preach. Tell us what it means to the original audience, tell us how it fits with the purpose of Christ, and tell us how it ought to change our thinking and behaviour. Give us a simple idea to take home, don’t tell us about the meanings of all the words in Greek unless necessary, don’t tell us about what the academic disputes between some Robert and another Wilson – unless absolutely essential. There’s a great difference between providing background and painting a context. Give us the latter. Please preach with conviction, and make sure you sit under the word and have been moved by it.
Fourth, please preach with relevance. This doesn’t mean you conform the shape and meaning of the text to our culture. It means you’ve worked out the biblical implications, and are able to point out how these implications challenge our prevailing culture. As Karl Barth allegedly said, pastors are to preach ‘with the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.’ It means you need to love to read (or at least try), and from many sources. In this age where the access to the internet is ubiquitous, Christians are constantly under different kinds of cultural and intellectual assault. You ought to be wary of them, and ought to help challenge our sometimes unconscious, settled thoughts. You cannot afford to be cloistered in a corner, thinking Christian thoughts daily.
Fifth, please don’t treat your church as an enterprise. Much as we all like, there’s not much you can do to activate idle Christians, or to unleash the latent potential of lazy ones. So please don’t spend too much time in meetings strategising and creating fancy events with fancy catchphrases. I trust that Christian mobilisation will occur as a result of prayer and inspired preaching – not from getting people to sign up and providing incentives. We are all terrible sinners, and the more you help us grasp that, the more we value the precious grace of Jesus – the more then we may be moved to live a radical life. The bible is replete with these examples. That’s why it’s so often repeated: those who have ears, let them hear! The prophets didn’t come up with any plans to help people feel emotional with mawkish declarations, songs and crocodile tears – they preached passionately.
Sadly, only a remnant will trust and obey. Tell us about Hebrews 11, the men and women who had faith; who, though utterly flawed, obeyed and acted faithfully. Many died without seeing the future God promised them. They were sawn in two, tortured and ridiculed. Not all of us are prepared to do that, and so we can’t expect that the church is always a happy family.
As a pastor told me over dinner – those who don’t have confidence in the word resort to activities. If true, this is a tragedy. So please please focus on preaching, and preaching well. A brother told me that if I ever wanted to be a preacher, I should intern at a church that would require me to spend hours upon hours to prepare a message, not one that would ask me to spend hours upon hours visiting, organising, planning. Project management is not unique to the church, so please please spend more time praying and preparing for your upcoming sermon, it will have far deeper effects on your flock than you imagine.
Sixth, I pray that you recognise that no one is ever safe from preaching “over and under the line.” Helm loved to tell us how preaching over the line leads to religion, and preaching under the line leads to liberalism. Just because you have certain theological leanings, went to a ‘conservative seminary’, count good theologians as your favourite authors doesn’t mean that you are automatically preaching faithfully. We shouldn’t assume that. Every sermon you preach is an opportunity for you preach faithfully or fall. There are many clear teachings in the bible that don’t need equivocality, they are clear as night and day. The role of women in preaching, the doctrine of predestination, the severity of sin and so on. We know you might have to deal with unhappy members, but I pray that you’d be more concerned about an unhappy God.
Seventh, I pray that you recognise that your life outside the pulpit matters. By extension: your family life matters. Like it or not, your flock is observing you and your interactions with your family. We may have the misinformed or downright erroneous notion that our pastor is more moral than us. We know that this is not true; but we can’t always help it. More importantly, it simply matters that you model what you preach to us. It doesn’t mean that you have to do it perfectly – or even excellently. It simply means that your family life should be informed by what you preach. Therefore, what your wife says speaks volumes about your preaching. If your wife is able to articulate with the same confidence how important God’s words are, it demonstrates that you are a man of your word; and it demonstrates that you have managed to apply it at home.
More importantly, it demonstrates that whatever you do is not merely one man’s agenda. Your wife shouldn’t be the stereotypical unthinking, and even ‘unimportant’ housewife that handles the emotional and administrative matters of the husband, like the wives of presidents and famous prime ministers like Churchill – to which society likes to overcompensate by declaring that “behind every successful man is a woman.” Rather, her enthusiasm for the word proves that whatever you try to do in church is not your brainchild; and it demonstrates the quality of your “husbandry” in the marriage – you nurture and lead her with the word. Even more admirably, her desire to reach out to the women in the church through word study paints a perfect picture of what it means for a husband and wife to play complementary roles. I shed a happy tear when I see this beautiful union at work in the church.
Finally, I pray that you recognise that you are but a man. You are not a moral hero. You don’t have to be, because the church is not a place for moral people, and neither is it your task to moralize. You don’t have to be perfect, because if you base your preaching on your moral life as a standard, we will all face a crisis when you inevitably fall. It’s not that “no one’s perfect”, it’s that you were never asked to be, and you are simply a mouthpiece God. Naturally, this means that you do need to make attempts to practice what you preach; and you need to make the same attempts as we do to have accountability partners, to sit at the feet of other preachers, to be mentored, to be rebuked, to struggle with infidelity or pornography, or self-doubt and depression; to confess your sins.
Tell us about your struggles, let us pray for you as well. Take time off, have a holiday, resist the temptation to think that the church can’t do without you; but make sure the word of God is preached faithfully in your absence. Recognizing your inadequacies also means you shouldn’t be afraid of apologising. I greatly admire preachers who recognise when they misspeak on the pulpit, sometimes for comments they thought weren’t loving. What I admire even more is when a preacher admits that he made a mistake with the previous week’s preaching. This demonstrates that he’s human, and that he’s always ruminating upon the word of God, always directed and sitting under its authority. He doesn’t dare to misspeak God’s words.
The principal of a seminary told us that there were times when he simply couldn’t figure out the meaning of a text in time. And so for that week, he would apologise to the congregation, and take a break from preaching consecutively from a book, opting instead to use a sermon from another book that he’s more familiar with. This is humility, and it’s wonderful when our pastors demonstrate that.
*Edit: A sermon on Acts 6:1-7 today also reminded me that members have a part to play as well. We need to help keep the pastor free to perform his preaching duties with excellence by using our gifts to help care for and serve the church in other ways.
So pastors, please do not remain supine. No one is asking you to change the world or the church, just preach faithfully, and keep doing so until the Lord calls you home. Hopefully then, you’ll realise that you have far less problems than imagined, and you actually have to do far less than expected – yet with exceeding spiritual value.
Yours in Christ,
Fatpine.
fatpine 