There are a lot of men at Third preparing for pastoral ministry and the question often comes up, just how much formal education is appropriate beyond the MDiv (most of the guys at Third are getting an MDiv since we are in Louisville near Southern, a great seminary–so that decision has usually been taken care of).

Recently, a friend of mine reminded me of the great work that I’d not looked at for quite a while, The Preacher and Preaching, edited by Samuel Logan. James Montgomery Boice, the late pastor of Tenth Pres has an essay entitled, “The Preacher and Scholarship” in which he addressed this very question. Here is his advice:

1. Get all the formal training you can. Not everyone is in a position to do long years of formal academic training. Sometimes financial concerns hold one back. At other times a job opens up, and it seems wise to accept it. But these circumstances aside, if the possibility is present and the student has ability to do further work, it is good to get the training before taking up a ministry. For one thing, it is hard to do it later. Many ministers will confess that the pressures of pastoral work, demands of a growing family, and burden of administration have all but eclipsed serious reading or study from their schedule. Work toward an advanced degree if possible. One of my predecessors at Tenth Presbyterian Church, Donald Grey Barnhouse, used to advise young ministers that if they knew the Lord was returning at the end of four years, they should spend three hours in intensified training and only then use the last year in full-time service (95).

Getting a PhD is not easy and it is costly in more ways than one. It is a burden financially, sure, but in many instances (mine included) it requires certain sacrifices to be made by all members of the household. Thus, he advised the pursuit of “all the formal training you can” only “if the possibility is present.” For some men, the possibility is simply not present–and that is God’s providence. Thankfully, the lack of a formal education does not keep a pastor, an elder, from studying, and learning, and growing. As Boice wrote later, “The preacher who is not continuing to learn is limiting himself unnecessarily.”

May all of us–whatever stage we are in–have wisdom!

Greg made the point in last Sunday’s sermon at Third Avenue that the church is not a day spa, catering to the needs of her members as if they were clients. This means that pastors, especially those who preach, have a great responsibility to prepare themselves before God to give the congregation what she truly needs: the Word! This was a point made by a Baptist, Isaac Backus, way back in 1789. He encouraged congregations to support their pastors adequately so those ministers of the gospel had the time to devote to study. Backus knew time in the study would bear fruit in the pulpit:

I confess, a little Learning, and less Study, may furnish a Man with such discourse as may please some weak Persons, ‘that judge of a Sermon by the loudness of the Voice, and affectionate Sentences, or can fancy themselves to be fed with the Ashes of jingling Words, and Cadency of Terms in a Discourse. But Alas! The seeming Warmth of Affection that is stirred by such Means, is as short-liv’d as a Land-flood that [hath] no Spring to feed it. He that will do the Souls of his People good, and approve himself a Pastor after God’s own Heart, must feed them with Knowledge and Understanding, and endeavour to maintain a constant Zeal and Affection in them, by well informing their Judgments, and such an opening of the Mind of God from the Scriptures, as may command their Consciences: And this is not to be expected, but from him that labours in his Study, as well as in the Pulpit. Mistake me not; I know the the Success and Fruit of all the Studies and Labours of Men that preach in the Gospel, is from the Grace and Power of the Holy Ghost; but the Assistance of the Spirit is to be expected by us in the way of our Duty.

Those of you preparing for pastoral ministry in seminary–be encouraged, your time is time well spent. Those of you preaching, make sure to spend quality time in the study beforehand, lest you give the people “Ashes of jingling words” and rely simply upon “Cadency of Terms in a Discourse.” That may be pleasing to the ear, but it leaves congregations wishing for something more substantial.

My response to Keith’s post of last week about the preacher who encouraged his hearers to deploy self-deception as a means of self-help would be that it isn’t all that surprising. Evangelicals routinely fudge about the number of people attending their church or that are on their membership rolls. Sermons in our churches also frequently decry the evils of society, but say nothing about the evil in our own hearts — allowing us to think that we are practically perfect in every way. We all know that only Mary Poppins is “practically perfect in every way”, and the rest of us are just deceiving ourselves if we think we are. So, yes Keith, it is an outrage. Turn off the bad preachers and turn on some opera or something else more edifying.

In preparing for my James sermons I began perusing other sermons on the texts I had for the week. I found a John Piper sermon called “where does child-killing come from?” based on James 4:1-10 (http://www.desiringgod.org/library/bible_books/James.html. Seeing the title I began panicking that I had missed the whole point of the text (what I considered to be friendship with the world means enmity with God). After looking at Spurgeon and other commentaries I was pleased to see I had not fallen off the rocker, but I wondered where Piper was going with the sermon.

The sermon by Piper is an example of what Greg posts about on his “other blog” concerning proof-texting a political point. I appreciate Piper’s God-blessed ministry, but what do we make of this particular sermon? Do the other elders think Piper went too far with this emphasis? Was he an expositional preacher on this given Sunday? If so, how does one know when he can make efforts to move this far in a sermon?

David Fitch, pastor of Life on the Vine Chrisitan Community in Long Grove, Illinois has written a series of three posts about expository preaching for the Leadership Blog Out of Ur. In the first post, “The Myth of Expository Preaching and the Commodification of the Word,” Fitch argues that expository preaching promotes individualism. Pastors think they can, on their own, get to the heart of a text’s meaning and the person in the pew thinks he can individually apply that text to his life.

In the second post, “The Myth of Expository Preaching (Part 2): proclamation that inspires the imagination,” Fitch describes the preacher as needing to “fund imagination.” Instead of going sentence by sentence through the text in an expository fashion, he needs to “describe the world as it is via the person and work of Jesus Christ, then invite the hearers into this reality by calling for submission, confession, obedience, or the affirmation of a truth.” It gets a little fuzzy here but suffice it to say Fitch is encouraging pastors to invite their listeners into the divine drama of Scripture along the lines of Kevin Vanhoozer’s recent work–emphasizing that much of the biblical text is in narrative form not simply “a propositional textbook of religious facts.”

In the third post, “The Myth of Expository Preaching (part 3): responding to Scripture as a community,” Fitch said preachers need to avoid giving their congregations “to do” lists and start proclaiming the reality of how the world really is in light of the good news. If we do that, “we cannot help but be changed and engage the world differently. Our character changes, our view of the world changes, the way we see the poor, our money, our children—everything changes. In Christ, by the Holy Spirit, ‘the eyes of our imaginations are opened, and we receive a new self.’” At his church, small groups gather to review the Sunday morning texts and seek ways to apply the passages to their lives.

Let me say that I love that fact that Fitch is taking preaching seriously. The church desperately needs pastors willing to recognize that with the call to preach comes a responsibility to handlle the Word of God wisely. Nonetheless, I find several aspects of his analysis troubling.

First, expository preaching, if done well, should shatter individualism by making its listeners increasingly dependent upon God and His word. According to Fitch we are so affected by the Enlightenment (the individual defines reality) and its postmodern descendants that we cannot even process the words of a sermon satisfactorily. I’m not prepared to give either the Enlightenment or Postmodernism that much credit, yet. I have enough confidence that the language and the truths of Scripture are simple enough that a faithful pastor can preach and an attentive congregant can understand without Derrida getting in the way.
Second, he has created a caricature of expository preaching to critique. No doubt there is expository preaching out there that is “sentence by sentence,” stale, and that treats the Bible as a storehouse of facts, and not as the diverse collection of history, law, poetry, wisdom, gospels, epistles, and apocryphal literature that it really is. The irony of his critique is that I think true expository preaching–that intends to let the text speak for itself–will uncover the nuances of these texts beautifully. I think there certainly are preachers who are so quick to turn a text of scripture into a “How to be a better husband” sermon that though they think they are preaching expositionally, it feels more like a topical sermon. Is that what Fitch is criticizing?

During the course of the past year, an increasing number of college students have attended and even joined the body of Christ at Third Avenue. A few months ago, I spoke to a handful and mentioned five ways I thought Third Avenue Baptist Church could serve them. By God’s grace, should we continue to grow, it is my prayer that our investment in college students would continue to be along these lines:

1. We want to teach you the Word of God – to know it, love it, and live it.

2. We want to disciple you because we think you need more than knowledge; you need a life to follow.

3. We want to instill in you a love for God’s church. She is the one institution that the gates of Hell will never prevail against and yet she is ignored by so many in your generation.

4. We want to encourage you in your desire to fulfill the Great Commission and partner with you as you engage in evangelistic ministries through on-campus evangelical organizations.

5. We want to equip you stand for the truth in a world that is unsure truth exists.

We know that we will fulfill these goals only imperfectly, but as a church near more than one university, it is our prayer that we are constantly moving in this direction.

I wrote a review this weekend of Brian McLaren’s book, The Last Word, and the Word After That. You’ll be able to see the whole review in the May/June issue of Modern Reformation, but here are a couple of paragraphs from it.

Finally, it should be noted that The Last Word is conspicuously lacking in any emphasis on, or practically any mention of, the cross of Christ. Perhaps that is unintentional, but whatever the case, it is at least strange that a book which focuses so intently on hell should so assiduously avoid discussion of the means God has given for avoiding it. Maybe the explanation for all this lies in the fact that McLaren’s gospel is so socially oriented, so focused on the present, that it has no obvious place for concepts like atonement, substitution, propitiation, or eschatological salvation. Yet those are the ideas which lie at the very heart of the cross’s meaning. It is therefore not surprising that a gospel which downplays those concepts will also wind up downplaying the cross. Ultimately, McLaren is so careful to avoid the uncomfortable “legal” language of evangelical Christianity, and so intent on making the gospel a matter of the here-and-now rather than the there-and-then, that he ends up leaving the cross itself with nothing better than a tenuous foothold in the Christian gospel.

McLaren set out with his “New Kind of Christian” trilogy to rescue the Gospel from irrelevance. By approaching Scripture from a decidedly this-worldly perspective, by revisiting the teachings of Jesus with postmodern sensibilities, and by stating the gospel in terms of social justice, he hoped to make the Christian faith attractive to a new generation. In the process, however, what McLaren has finally presented is a gospel so nearly emptied of eternity, so tethered to the here-and-now, that it really has no ability at all to offer a full and lasting hope. After all, as Paul wrote, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”