The Pastor as Leader - Part 4 (Final)

This is a four part series. Click here for the introduction to what this panel was about and who the participants were. To read part two of the discussion, click here. For part three you can go here.
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How do you implement change in a congregation to a plurality of elders if they’re not accustomed to that model?

K: (jokingly) Start a new church!

C: This applies to any question of change. How do you do it? One thing you don’t do is go in with two guns blazing. You teach them from the Bible whether it’s this or that. You teach, you love and you gain their trust. There are certain things that are going to be tough and you get to know them. You discover their fears and concerns and patiently bring them along or else it will end up in WWIII. You need to pick your battles wisely.

D: Expository preaching goes a long way. Just preach a few years with them. If you’re a hobby-horse type person they’ll see that. If you’re applying Scripture well they will trust how you’re using the Word and trust if you’re moving in a different direction from what they’re used to. If you’re new to a situation, people at first don’t trust you.

P: It’s great to let people know that you’ve been changed personally by the Word yourself. You want to cultivate a foundation that you live according to the Word and create an atmosphere within your church that is subservient to Scripture. If someone has an idea, help them think in biblical terms. Let people know that you’re a person who is guided by Scripture and that you’re growing in your own study of the Word.

K: Combined with that, we have to be careful that we don’t expound the Scriptures only from the pulpit. You have to be willing to face people one-on-one. For example, you can do it through a men’s meeting or with individual men. You can’t just hide behind the pulpit. You cannot just say things behind the pulpit that you’re not willing to say to people face to face outside of the church context. Take the time to get to know people.

Are there one or two experiences that have really shaped you as a pastor?

P: In college, I remember a meeting with John MacArthur and his pastoral staff where he rebuked them for focusing on program at the expense of people.

D: I’ve learned to be quiet and listen more than talk. It’s easy to get tired, frustrated and cynical in ministry.

K: You come out of Bible school thinking that you know all the answers. Don’t put too much stock in expository preaching. It is God who saves people. There is no technique in saving people. You need to be patient with people and get real with people. Visiting people in hospitals really shaped my ministry.

P: Planting a church has been a significant challenge for me.

D: There are many times when Satan will attack you and your ministry if you’re doing the right thing. Don’t let depression take control of you because it’s so self-focused.

K: Beware of talking about certain things with people you love at certain times. Beware of checking e-mails at certain times. Beware of answering certain phone calls.

P: You have to guard your heart.

C: Suffering is going to shape you.

P: Don’t think you’re the best thing that ever came along.

C: Get rest.

How do you stay relevant in preaching?

K: I read the Word while keeping in mind that you’re living in the world. I’m a news junkie so I have an idea of what is going on in different areas of life. I try to imagine myself preaching to an intelligent 8 year old.

C: You have to know people and be willing to serve the church. Know the Word of God.

D: I don’t think the question is being relevant but being biblical and then ask how you can make the Bible relevant.

P: Relevancy is just being genuine. If you’re genuine with people and in your preaching then people will relate to you. Baxter talks about studying people and listening. Get inside people’s heads and discern the disconnection between truth and life. How are you going to reach into people’s hearts? Understand what people’s motivations are. If you’re thinking in these terms then you will reach into the hearts of people. If you’re an irrelevant person, you will have an irrelevant ministry and an irrelevant church.

C: If you’re really studying the Word and you’re going through life with people, you will be astounded by how much it applies to all areas of life. There are a million principles there that you can use in real life situations, so much so that you need to hold back. It is an enormous privilege.

D: There was a story of a lady who didn’t feel judged because of the love from members of the church.

How important do you think it is for a pastor to be relevant to the people of the congregation, if they come from a different culture?

P: It’s the same thing with being relevant in preaching. Love the people. Love the Word.

C: Get to know people. Ask questions. You need to be quiet sometimes. You need to have fun with them sometimes. You get to know people better through real life experiences.

Ideally, what should the process look like for someone wanting to enter into the pastorate in the local church? Is there a difference between ordaining a pastor and ordaining an elder?

D: In our church, we’re lacking elders. We’re doing a ‘Timothy’ program where leaders are trained into eldership. You give them opportunities to serve in the easier situations first. If someone does desire to be an elder, sit down and have a long talk with that person and really question their motives for entering into the pulpit. Church and seminary must work hand in hand.

C: I agree. If you have the opportunity to work with mature men, take it. I was in the ministry at 22. I started in a small church. I had an opportunity to work with an older man, my predecessor at Trinity. I wish I had that earlier.

D: There is no rush to get into the ministry.

C: The world is not holding their breath for you to enter.

D: Men who rush into the ministry get burned out easily. Get involved in a church and make it known that that is your goal.

Is there distinction between ordaining an elder and a pastor?

D: I think pastors are ordained, but not elders. Although all elders are equal, a pastor has a distinct role of teaching the church so should be set apart. You need to have an ordination council in that case. With regard to elders, their ordination exam is based on voting within their church.

C: I don’t see the notion of ordination in Scripture at all. Sometimes ordination councils are all hype and improperly focused.

P: I would differ from David. Our view is that every elder is ordained in the same way. There is no distinction between elder and pastor. The process would be the same for both. You go through the list of qualifications from 1 Tim 3 and Titus 1. Then the church is called upon to examine him. If needed, an outside council is called in to appoint elders.

D: One huge benefit with ordination councils is the interdependence of churches in that process.

C: I agree with the idea of interdependence. We have 8 elders at Trinity, but I have no authority over them. You have to be careful that you don’t overburden them.

How do you keep meetings short?

D: Excellent question. Be in control. Put time limits on your agenda. Cut off conversations if you have to. Stick to what is important. You have to be pleasant in how you do it. Have a clear beginning and end.

C: There is a matter of balance. There are some people who want to move on and there are certain things which must be discussed thoroughly, so you need wisdom.

(To David) How did your upbringing as a PK (Pastor’s Kid) influence you?

D: My parents protected us from a lot. My parents did not have unrealistic expectations. It was a loving environment. My parents were normal. There was a consistency between the pulpit and the home. If you’re preaching love but screaming at everyone at home, people will see through that. There were certain privileges. I would travel with my dad to ordination councils. You sleep over at people’s houses. There were a number of church splits but my father protected me from that. My father had a lot of passion.

The panel discussion ended here with a time of personal discussion between students and panel members.

The Pastor as Leader - Part 3

The first two sections of this panel discussion can be found here.

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Church discipline is something that is not really practiced today. What kinds of experiences of church discipline have you had and how do you deal with it? How do you discipline unsaved children? Is there a distinction between a baptized member of the church and unsaved children of members?

C: Yes. I wouldn’t discipline those who are not part of the church.

K: With regards to church discipline, there is the discipline of the preaching of the Word of God. If the Word is consistently preached and applied properly then you can avoid many problems. There is a gradation of church discipline. Excommunication is a last resort. If prior steps are taken properly, then that will not be the end result. If you’re speaking about unbelieving children, you can’t really discipline them. You need to preach the gospel to them. There is nothing more to be done beyond that.

C: You need to be careful about how you deal with children growing up in the church. It’s a balance between making it too easy and too hard for them to enter the kingdom of God. You need to counsel parents to be wise about how they deal with their child’s salvation.

K: Be careful that you don’t put children on a pedestal. Children who ended up in Bible college were exalted in the church and some of them are now apostate. The ones who were shunned are the ones that stayed the course to this day. We encourage our children to trust in Christ, but until they’re out the door and on their own you’ll never really know their spiritual state. You need to be careful. Often youth ministry is allowing children to believe they’re saved when they’re really not.

C: I highly recommend A Child’s Profession of Faith put out by Jim Elliff of Christian Communicators Worldwide.

K: Children often come to parents and talk about spiritual things. Children want to please and you need to be careful. At the same time, my wife believes she was saved when she was 6 years old. On the other hand, there were many times I responded to altar calls, but was not really converted.

C: For each of my children who wanted to be baptized, I had another elder examine the authenticity of their faith because I couldn’t trust my own motives.

K: You’re looking for God’s grace to be manifested at the age level appropriate to the child. I have baptized as young as 8 years old, but I was very careful about that.

There are sometimes very harsh cutoff between leaving the youth group and entering the ‘adult’ congregation. They reject all authority and don’t become members of the church because they want discipline.

K: There’s a spiritual problem

C: It probably manifests itself at home.

D: People who don’t want to become members are suspect. Their conversion is questionable.

C: You need to teach them. After you’ve taught them, they no longer have an excuse about what church membership means.

K: Baptism is a declaration of becoming part of the church. There is no distinction in the NT.

Do we blur the line between a church member and church attender?

P: What is your philosophy of membership? You don’t minister if you’re not a member.

D: You do have to be patient with people because culturally they are not accustomed to the idea of church membership. You need to allow people to grow in the Lord and give them time to accept the idea.

“Spiritual journey” is jargon that is floating around today. Their argument is something like, “When did Peter (the apostle) ever become converted?” How do we strike a balance between true conversion and people who are simply interested in spirituality?

K: Theologically, you need to be very careful about using the apostles as paradigms for conversion experiences. The disciples don’t come into that full new covenant awareness until the Holy Spirit is breathed upon them. There needs to be whole soul commitment to Christ (John Murray).

What should I be looking for in young people in terms of evidences of conversion, especially when their educational background is minimal?

K: Start with the basics.

C: You want to look for basic signs of life. Is there a desire to pray or know Christ or conviction of sin? There have to be some indications of change in their lives by their fruit.

K: Jesus Christ is a person. He calls us to follow Him. A Christian is a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is not someone who simply fills out a card. It is someone who commits to following Christ and obeying His commandments. Therefore, we need to tell people what the Bible insists on and then expect a response from there. If we use all the right words, if they’re not converted there is no point in teaching them to obey Christ.

D: Just continue to faithfully preach about Christ and talk about sin. Invite people to come and talk to you and take them through a gospel like Mark. God is sovereign and He will call people to Himself. We have to keep in mind that Jesus sometimes almost discouraged people from following Him, to count the cost and so on.

C: There is an urgency to preaching in the sense that you may never see them again.

K: Bill Hybels once said that when you’re talking to people about the gospel you are calling upon them to make the biggest decision of their lives. You need to give people enough information to make that decision and the time to make that decision. Jesus never hurried people into conversion, but taught them accordingly. When you’re asking people to come to Christ, you’re asking for the greatest thing that can ever occur.

C: Sometimes, God is doing things in people’s hearts that you may never know about.

P: There is great freedom to be a Calvinistic evangelist. You can confront people without any anxiety because it’s not up to you at all. George Whitefield wept for their sins because they wouldn’t themselves. It’s easy to despair early on in ministry because there is no fruit, but it will come.

K: Spurgeon was once criticized for not seeing people right after the service. But “if the fire is lit on Sunday it will stay lit on Monday and Tuesday.”

The Pastor as Leader - Part Two

Part one of this leadership seminar can be found here. (Sorry it took so long to get to the next installment!)

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On the topic of evangelism: Do you see a difference between pastor and evangelist?

K: Yes. I think there is a gifting in evangelistic ministry. In another sense, all pastors and Christians are responsible for sharing the gospel with others. There is an evangelistic gift. We sorely need people today who can preach the gospel to the lost in a way that people respond to positively. We have to seriously examine the 70-80% dropout rate from high school ministry to university/college ministry. We have to examine how much they really have known the truth. That’s an enormous problem. My wife works in a medical office for a year, and because of bad experiences people no longer attend the church.

C: I’d agree with Kirk. There is a gift. Would you say that there are people who are not pastors but have that gift? (addressing Kirk)

K: Yes. I would agree with that.

C: There are a couple of guys like that in our church. They are creative in the ways they share the gospel with others. You want to put these people into positions of leadership.

D: One of my problems with evangelism is its narrow track. It’s inviting people into your home. A pastor is an evangelist in proclaiming the gospel every Sunday, when you preach you’re speaking about the glory of God that encourages others to be passionate about sharing God with others. I believe that evangelists must also train to be pastors as well.

2 Tim 4.5, “Do the work of an evangelist.” What does that mean?

K: It is inviting people into your home. Yes. But it is also men like Ravi Zacharias who are challenging the ideologies of the day. It is making a compelling argument for Christ and causing people to come to Christ without just calling people to repentance.

D: It’s interesting that the context of that passage is “Preach the Word.” It is the gospel that saves people. When you’re preaching the Word, even to believers, you’re telling people about what they’re missing without Christ.

C: There is an office of evangelism, but all pastors need to be evangelists. People need to know that you love them and care about them. Don’t preach Christ in an indifferent way. You’re speaking about eternal life and eternal death. You better come across that way, even if they don’t agree with your approach. The gospel ministry is about life and death. Don’t get discouraged because you don’t see a lot of fruit.

Do you disagree with add-on evangelism, i.e. tacking on a plea to sinners at the end of a sermon?

P: Spurgeon points out that you need to be strategic about when to add the gospel in a message. The gospel must be kept precious. It is a danger to keep using the same catch phrases and turning people off to the core gospel message.

K: Absolutely. In a way, you cannot separate evangelism from what we say. Everything we say has an evangelistic thrust to it whether we’re speaking to Christians or non-Christians, what we say needs to speak of the gospel. Without falling prey to superficial relevance, our preaching needs to be driven by careful thought about where people are at and what people are thinking. A pastor can easily lose touch with the current trends of the time. The key is to keep in touch with the times. It’s not to say that we’re not experts to modern culture, but weave the gospel through that in a way that sticks in people’s minds. You have to at least be aware of what is going on.

Eph 4:11—Are these offices still around today? How many are there? Would you have evangelist as a church office?

K: The office of apostle is no longer in force. There is a progression in the NT. This is the cause of confusion in the charismatic circles. The only one that is valid is pastors and teachers. You don’t have apostles in the sense of the Twelve, but you do have leaders in the church, not in the sense of divinely inspired words. There is a compelling force of what seems to work (e.g. Pentecostalism).

D: If you want to evangelize, evangelize. Support it, teach it, etc.

We often encourage others to be missionaries, but maybe we need to missionaries of our own culture.

C: You need to send people out to our own culture. The greatest need is to get people doing it. Historically, the church grows through personal evangelism. How you do that is tough. You, the pastor, ought to be able to come to prayer meeting and say that I witnessed to so and so. Then you start praying for opportunities. You have to put tracts and pamphlets in their faces so that people are not just writing checks to missions.

There are a few churches in Canada who have an office of evangelism, but their actual practice was paying a pastor to evangelize.

K: One thing we must keep in mind as Baptists is regarding our children as sinners. Bringing children into the world bears a deep responsibility to bring them into salvation in Christ. Churches need to take heed to the warning that parents must take the responsibility to do everything possible to secure salvation for their children.

D: One of the things to do from the pulpit is to address the children (given that children are in the service). It’s a powerful way of indirectly addressing parents and non-believers. Speak to the children throughout the sermon. Make them feel special although they don’t understand everything about it. Let them know that the gospel is also for them.

C: I agree with you 100%. Sometimes I forget to do that. One thing another pastor does is sit down at lunch and ask the children what they learned from the sermon. (He shared a story at this point.)

Can you give us some examples of personal evangelism?

K: I go to a gym and conversations sometimes arise (with men of course!). You don’t want to tell people you’re a pastor right away.

C: A couple of things. I am involved in are a soccer league where half the people are non-Christians. I have a barber who is a Jehovah’s Witness, even though I pay more I still go there so that I can speak of Christ.

D: A lot of evangelism is done through the church, through preaching. A lot of what I do is motivating people to witness to others. A lot of what I do is through the church, making inroads into the community in different ways, not trying to make the church too busy.

Let it Snow???

Winter finally arrived in Toronto and two area bloggers had some interesting thoughts on snow, ice and divine sovereignty. Kirk shares how he had to rejoice in spending the day without electricity (didn't that get cold, Kirk?) and Darrin tells us how his face was disfigured from a shower of ice pellets.

Both tell us it is good to rely on the Lord through inclement weather!

As for me, I think I may post on the benefits of mid-winter mission work in the South Pacific.