I thought we should start off the New Year right by reminding ourselves of an essential role we have as pastor-teachers.
Take some time right now and watch this message I delivered to those about to enter ministry. My challenge to them is the challenge that you and I will face every week this year: to preach the Word.
—Chuck
If I may borrow from Charles Dickens’s famous opening line, Christmas can be “the best of times, and the worst of times.” As pastors, we have them both, don’t we?
Who hasn’t cringed in September as stores drag out and display the artificial Christmas trees? Who hasn’t felt uneasy about the obligatory exchange of gifts with individuals you hardly know?
Something about those annual experiences can make them seem like “the worst of times.”
But they don’t need to be.
We dare not miss an important dimension to hanging tough. It is the thing that keeps you going. I call it a dream. I don’t mean those things we experience at night while we’re asleep.
No, by dream, I mean a God-given idea, plan, agenda, or goal that leads to God-honoring results.
Most pastors I know don’t dream enough. If someone were to ask you,
What are your dreams for this year? What are your hopes . . . your agenda? What are you trusting God for?
Could you give a specific answer? I don’t have in mind just ministry objectives or goals, although there’s everything right with those. But what about the kind of dreaming that results in character building, the kind that cultivates God’s righteousness and God’s rule in your life?
A church as God intends it is not a gathering of people who sit back and listen to one person preach. Instead, one life touches the life of another, who then touches the lives of people in his or her sphere of influence—those whom the originator would never have known.
To make it even more exciting, those recipients, in turn, touch the lives of others also. That is a contagious ministry.
The medical profession models the idea of multiplication very well.
A church that is strong in grace is attractive for many reasons, not the least of which is the absence of legalism.
Just as most non-Christians don’t understand the good news of Christ, most Christians do not understand the remarkable reality of grace. I know of no activities more exhausting and less rewarding than those of Christians attempting to please the people around them by maintaining impossible legalistic demands. What a tragic trap, and the majority of believers are caught in it.
When will we ever learn? Grace has set us free!
That message streams throughout the sermons and personal testimonies of the apostle Paul.
When considering church growth, we must think strategically . . . we must preach creatively . . . and our worship must connect. Absolutely. But we must also be careful.
A marketing mentality and a consumer mind-set have no business in the church of Jesus Christ. By that I mean, Jesus is NOT a brand . . . human thinking does NOT guide God’s work . . . and the church is NOT a corporation. The church of Jesus Christ is a spiritual entity, guided by the Lord through the precepts of His Word.
If we sacrifice the essentials of teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayer on the altar of strategy, creativity, entertainment, and “relevancy,” we have abandoned the main reasons the church exists.
We should build on those essentials, not attempt to replace them.
The local church has begun to assume the lengthening shadow of a business—and the church has no business being a business. Biblically, the church is not a corporation. You won’t find the word board in the Scriptures. That’s a corporate term. You won’t find the word chairman either. We need to take these things seriously!
So let me encourage you to do some original work regarding the role of pastors, elders, and deacons in the church. Be sure you’re doing your study from the New Testament, because there was no church in the Old Testament. You won’t be able to start until Acts 2—that’s where the church begins. Acts gives you a model of the church, but it doesn’t talk about how a church is ordered, what we often call “church government” (that’s another corporate term). Revelation doesn’t address it either.
You and I need to be good students of the letters of Paul if we hope to understand the church.
In my more than fifty years in the ministry, the Lord has brought in and taken away many friends and coworkers. As hard as it always is to lose those I have mentored and developed—both staff and laypeople—I try to affirm their decision to follow God elsewhere. That’s what the church in Ephesus did for Apollos when he sensed God’s leading to leave:
And when he wanted to go across to Achaia, the brethren encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him; and when he had arrived, he greatly helped those who had believed through grace, for he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, demonstrating by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ. (Acts 18:27–28)
Please observe, when he was led to leave, they “encouraged him” to go. We pastors need to realize that God does not intend for all the faithful folks to stay at our church. We want that, but God’s plan is greater than ours. We never need to pour on the guilt or try to manipulate someone who senses the need to follow God elsewhere.
Last week I shared with you one of the marks of a mentor that we all enjoy: affirming others with trust. But there’s another side of the coin that’s just as important. Good mentors also address weaknesses. For example:
We pastors think of ourselves as those who mentor others. For a moment, however, put yourself in the shoes of someone being mentored. If you had a positive mentor somewhere in your past, think back to what that relationship meant to you then.
When a mentor believes in you, trust comes along with it. He trusts you when he is not around. I’ve always appreciated how Paul applied that trust to Priscilla and Aquila: