Reforming the Ministry
Some Suggestions How to Get out of the Hole the Seminaries Dug for Us

It’s not my fault; really! I never wanted to be a pastor. Oh, I knew as soon as God regenerated my heart that being a Christian meant total commitment to Jesus as Lord. But I never thought that would require pastoring a church. When God brought me to faith in Christ, it was a total life and worldview transformation. Therefore I thought that “ministry” meant helping people change from what they were to what God wants them to be. Yet, when I looked at what churches and pastors did (or didn’t do), I failed to see how it related to the Lord’s work! The average church seemed more like a social club for the spiritually inclined. Pastors were the social directors, spending most of their time trying to create entertaining programs while playing politics and sipping tea with little old ladies. Their preaching was either a never ending series of gospel messages to the already “converted” or saccharine “sermonettes for Christianettes” i.e., painless collections of pious anecdotes with all the spiritual nourishment of a Diet Coke. OK, so maybe I had some bad experiences. Even so, I was not so much called to the ministry, as dragged in, kicking and screaming every step of the way.

As an alumnus of four different evangelical seminaries, and now having been in the ministry for 23 years, I am painfully aware that my “professional” training was woefully inadequate. Seminaries just do not do what they promise to do; prepare a man for the ministry. Think for a moment about the average seminary professor. He is usually bright and adept in academic subjects. But because of our morbid fascination with accreditation by secular authorities, he’s had to run the humanist gauntlet in graduate school and Lord knows what kind of nonsense he’s picked up along the way. Furthermore, since he’s spent up to 12 years in institutions of higher learning, he’s never had much of an opportunity to actually have a ministry in anyone’s life. He’s seldom led anyone to saving faith in Christ or discipled a person into a stable Christian life. How could he? He’s been too busy becoming proficient in ever more irrelevant areas of his academic specialty. Then, if he has the right degrees (preferably from prestigious secular universities) he becomes a seminary teacher. And what can he teach? Why those same arcane areas of his academic specialty!

What kind of graduates do such seminaries produce? If the prevailing state of the average church is any indication, sincere men who try their best but often don’t have a clue. I once counseled a young seminary graduate who thought God was calling him to the mission field. I first asked if he’d ever had a cross cultural ministry in our city, learning to communicate spiritual truths in someone else’s language. Well, no, he’d been way too busy trying to pass Greek and Hebrew to study a modern language, let alone learn to think in one. I then asked, how had God blessed his ministry of evangelism and discipleship with English speaking people? Well, he admitted, he’d never actually seen someone come to faith in Christ because he’d never had the opportunity to actually “do” much evangelism while in seminary (though he did get an B+ in Evangelism and Missions 101). You see, seminary cost quite a lot of money and he’d been working to keep his educational debt under $30,000. I then asked “How has God used you in witnessing to the people you work with?” At this point, the young man dropped his eyes and mumbled that he had never actually shared the gospel with anyone! Needless to say, though accepted by a foreign missions board, he returned from the field before his tour was up. He just couldn’t cut it. And neither can most of his fellow graduates.

The men I have the most sympathy for are the young, conscientious students who love the clarity and precision of the Reformed faith, have read deeply of the Puritans and great Presbyterians and painfully (and sometimes in spite of their formal education) managed to line up all their doctrinal ducks in the right order. But their seminary education never told them what to do with all their wonderful theology. They are like those “home improvement” men with an incredible collection of tools, but no idea how to fix a leaky faucet or hang a picture. I’ve listened to such brothers preach heartbreakingly, theologically precise sermons (praise God for sermons with no heresies!) but they just didn’t have a clue as to how it related to real life. How could they, they’ve never had a chance to live outside of the theological cloister! And the ones who trained them haven’t either!

Seminary graduates are thrust into the ministry, with an expensive education, and told to fish or flounder. Many just can’t take the heat and end up selling insurance. The ones with good interpersonal skills and no controversial opinions become managers of endless church programs. The skilled bureaucrats climb the denominational ladder (and end up designing the curriculum for future pastors!). The one’s with no firm convictions and a slick style join the church growth movement and create “seeker friendly” churches (and if successful, become the denomination’s superstars!). Of course there are notable exceptions, but sadly, it all too often seems that they are just that, exceptions.

It is obvious from the sociological irrelevance of modern evangelicalism that the contemporary church has lost its salt and dimmed its light. There are thousands of pastors who are sincerely doing their best, but are handicapped by their lack of training. What is a Biblical pastor actually supposed to do? While not intended to be exhaustive, I’d like to share some of what God has pounded into my head over the last 15 years. Believe me, I do not claim to have all (or even many of) the answers, but at least I can share my mistakes.

First and foremost the most fundamental quality of a pastor is something that no academic institution can teach: mature Christian character (cf. 1 Tim 3:1ff). A pastor first, last and always must be a man of God, a man submitted to the Lordship of Christ, a man who loves God’s law and is personally committed to making it work in his own life. If it doesn’t work in his life, he’s not going to work it into anyone else’s. But no seminary I attended ever asked me about my own spiritual life. Oh, we knew that we were supposed to have “devotions”, but no one ever told us what they were supposed to be or how to actually go about doing them (well, one school did offer a course in eastern meditation, but I didn’t take it!). I learned, painfully, that if I wanted to see God’s power in my ministry, it began by getting on my knees, in humble submission to God, with the Scriptures open. God’s law, His principles, statutes and commandments had to be worked into my own life before I ever had a hope of making it work for others.

Secondly, our cultural concept “ministry” needs to be replaced. The pastor’s job, according to Ephesians 2:11-12 is to train and equip the saints for their work of service. Thus the pastor is not the “man with the ministry” but the man with the ministry of training others for ministry. Ministry must be divorced from vocation. Every Christian has a ministry, i.e., a gifted calling that every individual saint is given by God to exercise dominion in the areas God has entrusted to them (cf. Gen 1:28, 1 Cor 12:4-7). The ministry of every Christian is to build up the body of Christ by bringing a fully orbed Biblical world view to bear on family, friends, work, time, wealth, recreation, etc. The ministry of the pastor is to preach, teach, encourage, exhort, admonish and discipline his people in developing this orientation (2 Tim 4:1-5). Yes, the pastor has some special ministries, such as preaching and administering the sacraments. But even these are given to strengthen God’s people for their work of service. Thus rather than trying to make the church the center of the Christian life, the pastor needs to break down the walls and help his people take the power of the resurrected Christ out to where they live. No program can do this. No spiritual social club can accomplish this. No twenty minute sermon once a week will change people’s hearts. And no church can possibly afford the number of highly trained experts to personally oversee people’s lives to see that it is done. We don’t have to. God has already provided the perfect mechanism for accomplishing just this task. It’s called the family.

The Directory for Family worship, adopted by the Church of Scotland in 1647 (republished by Greenville Seminary Press, SC), mandates that heads of households are responsible for daily, family worship. It was a disciplinable offense if a father failed in this duty. The family is the training ground for dominion. As Rushdoony has said, the home is a child’s first church, school and government. It is the responsibility of the parents, not the church, to teach their children how to internalize the word of God. The law of God is to be the center of the home (cf. Deut 6:4ff), and fathers are to train their children in applying that law in daily, practical ways (e.g., Josh 1:8). Yet an article I recently read had the pastor catechizing the children once a week in his office. But this is the father’s job! Wouldn’t the pastor, the children, and the entire church be better off if he focused his time and energy training the fathers to do what God has clearly called them to do?

A pastor must be careful not to destroy the integrity of the family. This same article had the minister visiting people in their homes three afternoons a week. I’m not sure what kind of church the author pastors, but the only people home in the afternoon in my church are young housewives. Now what is a pastor doing visiting young women when their husbands are at work? Not only does this give an appearance of evil, but it undercuts the husband’s spiritual authority. If the wife has a problem or question, Scripture requires her first to go to her husband (1 Cor 14:35). The husband, as the covenant head of the household has the primary responsibility to teach and encourage his wife. Granted, there may be issues a husband is not yet able to address (or he may be deficient in his duties). But then the wife should ask to see the pastor, with her husband present.

The pastor can nurture the men in his church by spending time with them (Hebs 10:24-25). An old adage says that values are caught, not taught. People have to see how the principles actually work out in your own life if you ever want them to apply them in their own. This means spending time together, and not just in church or Bible studies. Some of the best times of spiritual growth for the men in my church come when we get together to help a family move, grab a bite at lunch, punch holes in paper targets at the range, etc. It is at these times that the men loosen up and share what’s really on their hearts. And it gives me the opportunity to bring God’s law to bear on the specific situations facing their lives.

In line with this, the pastor needs to open his home and let the other families see how his works (or doesn’t) (cf. 1 Tim 3: 6, Hebs 13:2). Sadly, new members often tell me that in previous churches, they had never even seen the inside of their pastor’s home! I can understand that. When people come to your home, they see you as you really are. Every mistake, every flaw, every failing is clearly visible, from how you handle the fussy child, to how you treat your wife, to the pile of messy books stacked on top of the toilet tank. Some pastors cannot stand to be thought of anything less than perfect and fear that having people in their home might lessen their respect and authority. But God’s people need to know whether what he says on Sunday really affects the way he lives on Monday. Of course, this requires the pastor’s wife to be a gracious, godly woman with a spirit of hospitality. I have such a wife, but sadly many do not.

But what about that bulwark of the average church, the women’s ministry? We do not neglect our women. We have women’s studies, led by older women. They focus on teaching younger women how to be godly wives and mothers (cf. Titus 2:3-5). Our single women without Christian families are usually “adopted” by an older family with the wife discipling and encouraging them. But the men are the primary focus of our formal ministry. The men are taught to be men; men of God, and then required to exercise loving, gentle headship in their homes.

Once families understand headship and hospitality, the pastor can then help form small groups that share a common calling (cf. Rms 12:6ff). Since every household is responsible for exercising dominion in the area God calls them to, households with a similar vision can use the principle of the division of labor to more effectively carry out that calling. For example, at our church, some families are committed to the pro-life movement; they gather facts, picket clinics, and encourage the rest us in our prophetic witness against this monstrous evil. Others have a heart for foreign missions. Still others have a burden for evangelism. Several couples are legislative watchdogs. We don’t try to get everyone singing the same note, just trust in the sovereignty of God to make harmony out of the notes he gives each one to sing. And since it is the household that has the ministry, everyone’s involved. When someone comes to our session and says, “Hey guys, I think we should be doing this…” the session usually responds by saying, “Great idea, how can we help you to get such a ministry going!” A Biblical church has a plurality in leadership. Rather than one full time elder (and a couple of part time kibitzers) it can have as many leaders as there are godly heads of households. And yes, I am unapologetic in saying that apart from some specialized ministries to women, these leaders in our church are men.

There are other principles of course; this is an article, not a book. But maybe these few are enough to whet our appetite for a different kind of Christianity, and a different kind of pastor. The benefit of formal training for the ministry is that young men get to learn from the mistakes of others so that they don’t have to repeat the same errors over and over again. But sadly, powerful, life transforming churches are rare. And young pastors are often forced to reinvent the wheel because no one ever told them any better. We will continue our slide into apostasy and judgment until God grants His church repentance and revival. But God’s people cannot hear, unless God’s messengers tell them. And the pastors cannot tell what they have not been told.

It’s time for Christians to start exploring creative new ways to train pastors because the present system just doesn’t work. All the academic information a pastor ever needs could be fit on one CD-ROM for a minimal cost. Then, under the tutelage of a godly, older pastor, a young man could spend three years learning how to minister to God’s people rather than incurring debilitating debts that impoverishes his family. If older, wiser pastors would take younger men under their care, apprentice them in real ministry, the church could be reconstructed and God’s people led out of the wilderness.