Cowering Behind the Pulpit

I frequently check on a blog by a Baptist pastor. He recently posted a question on whether things like degrees and seminaries actually get in the way of "pastoring". Of course I have some opinions on the subject, but my comment grew out of hand. I finally decided to post my diatribe here as an article and link to it from a comment on his blog.

Though I work in a theological institution, I wonder what the net result would be for ministry if we stopped awarding degrees, stopped listing our 'titles' before or after our names and simply focused on being shepherds.  -- Registrar Ramblings

This is a dangerous question: it's a question that can lead to all sorts of unpleasant decisions. If you ask this question and genuinely look for the answer, there's a good chance you'll end up very unpopular in---even cut off from---mainstream Christianity.  You might not end up where I have ended up---I'm not quite arrogant enough to think I embody the perfect seeker---but you end up somewhere equally uncomfortable.

Somewhere along the last 2000 years, we've developed the idea that there is to be a human center of attention in a gathering. In Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy (big 'O' Orthodoxy) that's a priest who essentially controls your access to God. In Anglicanism or Lutheranism that's a kinda-sorta priest who takes you into the Holiest (although you're allowed in there on your own). In baptistic circles that's a preacher or lecturer. Even in "brethren," who claim otherwise, there is a tendency to elevate a man to stand between them and God.

As I have pointed out before, it's entirely appropriate for an individual to take the group to God; that's the whole idea of a priest. The problem is, once that person becomes the center of attention, we've started down the slippery slope that leads to idolatry.


Now let's complicate things: God has spoken to us in the written Word. That is, He has spoken to us rationally. Christianity is not merely intellectual, but it's not anti-intellectual either. That means there is a need for teaching and understanding in Christianity: the key in Romans 6 is knowing. We ignore that to our own peril.  But when we reduce Christianity to an intellectual pursuit, we emasculate it. It's not about knowing answers, it's about knowing God.

This is reflected in the modern Christian culture where leaders are seen as quasi-scholars. Formal education is seen as preparation for Christian leadership, and the "main event" is someone lecturing the congregation. I need hardly remind you that's not what I see in Scripture. Rather, it sounds remarkably like how the Lord characterized the Pharisees: they had the right answers, but scrupulously avoided having those answers affect their lives (Matt. 23).


Let's assume for now that preaching really is central to a church's meetings. Let's assume the basic Baptist format is correct: sing a few hymns, pray, put some money in a plate, listen to a sermon, go home. I don't think that's what Scripture teaches, but let's assume for now that it is.

It only takes mediocre intelligence to preach a brilliant sermon. It doesn't even take spiritual life: unbelievers do it all the time. Anyone can drone on for 45 minutes with a captive audience. Anyone can sound intelligent when they've hours to prepare for a 45 minute lecture and no fear of cross-examination.  Anyone can throw in a few Greek or Hebrew words to cowe their audience.

I'm frequently amazed when I meet seminarians who seem to consider themselves intellectual heavy-weights. I'm met really smart people; many of them are Christian, very few are in some form of public ministry. The ones who are, are rarely formally trained. The smart people I know went to school for Math or Engineering, even Computer Science or Theoretical Logic: they typically didn't go to seminary (although there are some exceptions).

More's the pity, if seminaries required courses in math or logic, we might be spared a lot of the nonsense I hear so frequently.

But the lesson here is, the tendency is for ego to get in the way. We formed seminaries to make sure people in "ministry" have some grounding in the Word of God (I think that was a mistake, but let's ignore that for now). Somewhere along the way, we developed that into the idea that "ministry" is an academic or intellectual pursuit. And then, amazingly, those in "ministry" began to consider themselves intellectuals. 

How soon we forget: "For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, [are called] But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;" (1 Cor. 1:26--27, KJV).  As a rule, God doesn't call or use heavyweights. There are exceptions, of course, but the fact is, there is an incredible idolatry in the Church today; where men's intellect, gifts, talents, and abilities are worshiped. This ought not to be.

But I've heard some wonderful sermons, I really have. They're not typically what one would call "brilliant," although I wouldn't say they weren't...  I'll share two examples:

I heard one man speak who basically quoted Scripture for 45 minutes. It was almost like he just took a bunch of verses and put them together with "and" or "but" every once in a while. If you didn't know your Bible well enough to catch what he was doing, it still made sense; but if you knew your Bible, it was awe-inspiring.  You can't learn that kind of thing in school: you learn it sitting with a Bible in your hands for hours on end, day after day.

I heard one man speak who was a terrible speaker, but he caught my attention in spite of that. He spoke about Someone he knew, not about a book he had read. Everything he said, every gesture of his hands, even his intonation all indicated that he really wanted people to see past him, to see the One he had met.  You don't learn how to do that by taking a course, it's the outcome of spending time on your knees and your face, getting to know God.

Those were both worthwhile speakers: those were sermons that spurred us on to meet God, not to admire the brilliance of the speaker.

When Moses came down from Sinai, he didn't know his face was shining. He had met God, there were other things on his mind than his own brilliance. Someone who is aware of their brilliance hasn't met God yet.


Now let's say the main event isn't just sitting to listen to a lecture. What does Christian shepherding look like?  When Paul talked about "labouring," he wasn't talking about flying into a city, holding some meetings, eating in a few people's houses, and then leaving with a "love gift".  He was talking about going hungry, getting stoned (with rocks, not recreationally), getting beaten, having people try to kill him, getting shipwrecked. It wasn't that he came into town to deliver some sermons and then he left. He worked.

I'm not sure I know what that looks like.

If we just isolate that to the idea of teaching (and of course Paul didn't); we find that the congregation was free to ask questions or interrupt (1 Cor. 14:26--35), and that Paul spent a considerable amount of time going into people's houses to teach them more or less privately (Acts 20:20).  It wasn't a Sunday job, it wasn't even a "week of meetings." He held private lessons in people's homes.

See, giving a series of pre-written lectures isn't labour: it's public speaking.


But shepherding isn't just teaching: teaching and shepherding are related, but I see nothing in Scripture to indicate the teachers and shepherds are the same people (although I see nothing to indicate they can't be), never mind them being the same job. Shepherding is about feeding, grooming, caring for. I once heard someone speak on shepherding out of Genesis 31:36--42.  Read it: shepherding's about sitting up in the frost at night, fighting off the wolves and the bears, and having your wages changed ten times. It's about bearing the loss of the sheep you lose, not just saying "oh well." It's about going to bed last and getting up first, it's about going hungry while the sheep fatten up.  It's a tough job.

But Jesus called them to Himself and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. "It is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave;  just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many."  -- Matthew 20:25--28, NASB

The idea in Scripture behind leadership (and shepherding is certainly leadership) is the servant washing the feet, not the CEO sitting in an office. A servant doesn't expect those he serves to stop what they're doing when he comes into the room. He doesn't expect people to get his permission before making decisions. He doesn't expect to be quoted. He doesn't expect to be wined and dined. He does what needs to be done.

One reason I am fellowshipping in a liturgical church is, there is the sense that God is present. Yes, there is a priest up front, but his presence is dwarfed by God's. That reality is  reflected in almost every line of the liturgy, even in the layout of the building. There's a reason the pulpit is off to one side, rather than front-and-centre.

Perhaps I've said enough for now.

Everyone else is doing it...

I got this comment on an older post this week:

If we get our eyes of [sic] our own needs and what we expect from others and go to the meeting for the LORD and Him alone then God will bless. We gather together for His glory don't we?. Our motives for going to the meeting shouldn't be the people or the speaker. Is not the Lord's presence good enough for us?

The comment was with respect to some comments I had made on a meeting I attended last summer. It was posted anonymously: I have no idea who wrote it, and I'm fine with that. But I wanted to make some points about it. I have no idea where or with whom the commenter meets to worship, but for the sake of argument, I'm going to pretend it was written by someone in an assembly much like the one I left. So you see, I'm not really replying to Anonymous, I'm using this comment as a basis for a discussion. Let me re-iterate that: I've no idea what Anonymous had in mind when s/he wrote that comment; but it resonates very well with many comments I heard in my time among "brethren," and I want to comment on some of those things.

Ten years ago, I might have written the exact same paragraph. But ten years have passed, and I've thought a lot about this stuff in those ten years. And in that time, some things have changed. With that in mind, let's look at this in some depth.

The first thing I notice is the phrase "If we... then God will bless." This indicates that God's blessing is something we earn. Someone else has already said, "God blesses because He is good, not because we are." The Scripture is full of example after example where God blesses those who are not obedient: isn't that the essence of the Gospel? "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).

We can't manipulate God. I'm not saying that God's sovereignty infers our actions don't matter: I'm saying that we can't bribe God with our good behaviour. God blesses those He loves, regardless of their deserving to be blessed. God blesses out of grace, not obligation.

My dad used to always tell me, "Clumsy, don't forget that Moses was wrong to strike the rock, but water still came out." There is nothing more common in Scripture than God blessing people who don't deserve it. There's nothing more common than God blessing in spite of the ones receiving the blessing. Ecclesiastes says the race is not to the swift, the battle is not to the strong (Ecclesiastes 10:11). Blessing doesn't come to those who deserve it any more than brimstone rains down on sinners. God blesses out of His overflowing heart.

The day will come when God will judge---brimstone really will fall down on sinners eventually---, but that day is not yet. The goodness of God leads to repentance (Romans 2:4), it doesn't flow from it.


The second thing I notice is the implicit assumption that the Lord is present: "Is not the Lord's presence good enough for us?" This is one of the very points that eventually drove me from the "brethren". The verse that underlies the "brethren" movement is Matthew 18:20, "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (KJV). The "brethren" are confident that the Lord is present in their meetings, because He is wherever "two or three are gathered unto His name."

I've spent some time discussing this elsewhere, but the whole "the Lord is present" thing becomes a rabbit-hole very quickly. The question that really needs to be asked is, how do we know whether there are two or three gathered in the Lord's name? This becomes the crux of the question. If gathering in the Lord's name is a moral thing, then it may be difficult or impossible to determine whether that's really going on. And if it's individual, then it becomes that much harder.

"Brethren" more or less evade the question by reducing it to one of format: gathering "unto His name" essentially reduces to gathering "in the same format as us." If you ask "brethren" what it looks like, they inevitably bring up whether a group has a pastor/priest/clergyman and wether they have a denominational title. In either of those cases, the gathering is "to a man's name" rather than "to the Lord's name." Now, the significance of this is overwhelming. What it essentially infers is, regardless of moral failings or even outright sin in the group, the only real test is format. As long as the meetings are conducted a certain way, then the Lord is present... regardless of how much sin or impurity is tolerated in the group.

Please understand I'm not accusing anyone of immorality here: it's not my contention that "brethren" tolerate evil. It is my contention that their test of the Lord's presence in the group is merely one of format.

But I realized in the last few years that the whole issue of whether the Lord is present really gets turned upside-down when we consider the "gathered in my name" as a moral test. If it really means "because I said so and that's enough for you" (and I believe it does), then there are any number of true believers in any number of places that are gathering "in His name." And as surely as I find a church---any church---where there are two or three such people, then I have found a place where the Lord is present. But by the same token, as surely as I find a place where the format is correct but the moral test fails, then I can no longer rest on this verse as proof of His presence.

Notice I haven't even touched on the issue of whether the verse was ever intended to be the test of where to fellowship. I'm not at all convinced this is true... although it might be.


The third thing I notice is built on the second: the idea that the Lord's presence is "good enough," that I ought to be content to go to the meetings and just be faithful there.

The problem is this: the idea that I can just go to meeting to meet the Lord, regardless of the others there sounds good; but it breaks down under any scrutiny at all. Let's start with the obvious: suppose I just go to the Kingdom Hall to meet the Lord, and because I've gotten "[my] eyes off [my] own needs and what [I] expect from others," is that valid? Can I be sure the Lord is pleased with that?

See, the problem with the line of thinking that says "I don't need to be critical, I just need to go with a right heart myself" is, the logical conclusion must be that any church will do. If what I need to do is "be faithful where I am," then I might as well just go where I like the music or the youth program and be faithful there. It doesn't matter whether it's a Roman Catholic or Lutheran church, whether it's "an assembly" or a cult---so long as I am personally faithful, everything's all right. There is no other conclusion that can logically be drawn from that line of thinking.

In fact---and this applies specifically to "brethren"---"brethren" left the Church of England because they had serious problems with what was happening there. But if the right thing to do is to get my eyes off the other people and be content to meet the Lord, then the "brethren" were wrong to leave. And if I view that through my "exclusive" glasses, then the only right thing for "brethren" to do is to return to the point of departure: they all need to confess their schismatic actions and come back into the Anglican fold.

See, "brethrenism" breaks down as soon as the same tests are applied to it as to everyone else. The double standard is glaring.


Now, the comment Anonymous left wasn't necessarily wrong. In fact, there's a lot of truth there... but there is a certain level of over-simplification. At some point, it matters very much indeed what the others in a meeting are doing. This is not the Old Testament: we don't have a physical place where we've been called to gather three times a year. In those days, this comment would have been right-on. Hannah's faithfulness in praying at Shiloh was not affected by Phineas' and Hophni's immorality. But in the New Testament, the tests we use are moral. We aren't called to gather to a place, but to a Person: that's a moral action. And under those conditions, the moral state of the group matters very much.

One thing we have to deal with these days is, we have multiple options in terms of where we gather. The Old Testament saints had no such options: they were to gather where the altar was. The New Testament saints didn't have this problem either, there was "the church in Ephesus," not "the churches in Ephesus." The Scripture only ever uses "churches" when it discusses a wide geographical area: there is no concept in Scripture that there would be more than a single church in a city or town. But apostasy has set in, the church is in ruin. We now have to discern where we are to gather.

The idea that we gather to meet the Lord, and can just sort of ignore the problems there doesn't hold water any more. It ignores the apostasy and the days we live in. It ignores the moral condition of the church. It ignores everything that's happened since the Apostles. It ignores the fact that there is a corporate identity in the Church: we're not just individuals. And it undercuts the very existence of the assemblies where these statements have been made. If individual faithfulness is really what counts, then there ought not to be any "assemblies" at all: they ought to have been content to be faithful in the Anglican church, rather than starting something new.


Now here's the kicker: I made the vast majority of my comments on "brethren" as an insider. It was not actually my intention to leave, but that's what eventually happened. And now that I've left, I am not in any way saying I won't go back. Yeah, going back would be painful: this blog has already been quoted to me, it would certainly cause me some trouble. There would be a lot of comments made to me, a lot of people would want some sort of public confession and retraction.

I left because I was looking for what guys like JND and JBS were looking for, and I eventually realized "brethrenism" has grown into something else entirely. The vast majority of people there are genuinely looking for the Lord... but I have concluded that we've built up a system that gets in the way of that.


More recently, I've been learning to worship the Lord---to gather in the Lord's name---in an Anglican church. Now that's a move that has prompted a few to question my sanity. And there's been the predictable responses: "Clumsy's got to find himself," "Clumsy's on a spiritual journey"---that sort of thing. And those statements might actually be true. But they fail to acknowledge the larger picture: I started this spiritual journey 20 years ago. I invested a lot of time into "brethrenism," I thought I had found what I was looking for there. But more and more, it became obvious that I hadn't. I've learned a lot of stuff along the way, and there's a lot more to learn. I'm not even close to the end of this one.

One thing I have realized is, what I'm looking for is not to be found in a system: it's to be found in a Person. It's not something I can find in Anglicanism or Brethrenism or Lutheranism. I can't put my trust in a church---any church. I need to put my faith and trust in the Son of God.


The Son of God has come here to die for me. And He's coming back to get me and take me to be with Him: that changes everything.


So I appreciate people who care enough to look in on me and pray for me from time to time. And I really appreciate people who have emailed, called, or discussed this over coffee with me. And Anonymous, I appreciate your commenting.

Looking back

A lot has happened this last 12 months, and more is coming. I started this blog last year to talk through some concerns and issues I was having with my fellowship situation. Over the year, I used this blog to discuss some of those issues. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I needed to withdraw from the assembly where I had been. That was last Fall.

At the end of October we started attending meetings in an Anglican church not far from our house. We've been attending the meetings there more or less constantly since, although we've been out sick and out of town a couple times. We still don't take communion there: they practice a closed table.

Some people from the assembly where we had been have called me: I need to return those calls. I'm not trying to avoid anyone: I've just been really busy.

I've come to some conclusions about the Church and my place in it over the last year. I've also come to some conclusions about my walk with the Lord Jesus. Some of those I'll share, others are very private.

One lesson I'm learning is to be quiet. Somewhere along the way, I got the idea that godliness is reflected in someone's willingness to speak up in public. I suppose that's common in some of the assembly circles where I've fellowshipped: quiet meetings are loudly discouraged by many.

I'm having to learn to be willing to never speak out loud in a meeting again. I'm having to learn that the Lord's will for me may well be to be quiet. I'm having to learn that I'm not the centre of attention. The Lord's place for me might well be in the back row, sitting quietly. I think part of the problem with being quiet is, the flesh loves to have attention. When I get used to speaking out in meetings, it might just be that the flesh in me is getting a high off the attention. Learning to be quiet is a very hard lesson.

I'm having to learn some humility in dealing with the children of God. For years I was able to just write off the vast majority of Christians as being "in the systems," confident that I was part of the remnant. My current position makes that impossible: and that's to God's glory too. And it's awfully hard to say "I'm not sure what I should be doing, or where I should be fellowshipping right now."

I'm having to learn patience: what the Lord has for me is a question I can't answer. I need to wait on Him to make that clear.

I'm having to learn to let God be God.

So at this point I have more questions than answers. That hasn't gone over too well in some quarters, but I can't really help that.