This past weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to speak to a gathering of Church of the Nazarene pastors and staff in Indianapolis on bivocational ministry. This was a continuing education event for them, and I was honored to have been invited to be one of the speakers.
Although my focus was on bivocational ministry, during the seminar I veered off into another issue. Those who know me understand that is not unusual! I can chase rabbits with the best of them! I just believe that if something comes into my mind while I'm addressing something it may be that it is a word someone present needs to hear. In this case it was around the issue of spiritually immaturity and the biblical illiteracy that affects so many believers today.
Throughout my ministry I've heard pastors complain about the lack of biblical understanding found in so many of the members of their congregations. What I said to this gathering of pastors is that if they have been in their church for more than three years, and they are complaining about how their people do not know the Scriptures, that is their fault. John Maxwell often says that for the first three years you can blame your predecessor for all the church's problems, but after three years they belong to you. I think there is a lot of truth in that.
As a Resource Minister for 14 years I was in a different church almost every week. My wife and I would leave some services talking about how shallow the message was. There was no meat. There was very little Scripture and even less application to how the Scripture spoke to today's world. The people were being given milk and not meat, and in some cases it was 2% milk, watered down so much that it barely qualified as milk.
Perhaps one reason I spoke about this at the pastor's gathering was because of a book I am reading now, The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision by Kevin Vanhoozer and Owen Strachan. The authors point out how in the past the pastor's primary role was to be a theological teacher to the church and community, but now with all the expectations that people place upon the pastor that role has diminished in many churches. Too often, theological depth has been replaced with a feel-good message that may tickle the ears but has no power to change lives. We have given theological teaching over to the academic world and to the "experts" and given pastors the task of doing "practical" ministry. With this kind of separation it is no wonder that many believers are so weak in their faith.
Pastors are to proclaim the "whole counsel of God," and that requires that we take our listeners into the depths of Scripture. Of course, in order to do that we have to set aside time to study the Scriptures ourselves and prepare messages that are theologically sound and address real needs of people. We have to help them develop a Christian worldview, think biblically about the issues and challenges they are facing, and be ready to defend their faith against the critics and unbelievers they will face throughout their lives. We are losing our young people because we have not done that. Multitudes of others see nothing in Christianity that appeals to them because they cannot see any difference in the lives of Christians than what they are experiencing in their own lives.
I'm only half-way through this book so I don't know what advice the authors will offer, but I would encourage pastors to review the past six months of their sermons. Were they messages that challenged your people to go deeper in their faith? Did they challenge your people to think more theologically about some issue? Did they contain the meat necessary to promote genuine growth in the lives of your people? If not, what do you need to do differently in 2020?
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