Facets of Ministry in a Fragmenting Consensus

Changing times can bring confusion and uncertainty. In the Western world today we find ourselves on the cusp of a cultural shift of tectonic proportions. The old modernist paradigm, with its emphasis on reason, objectivity, and a meta-narrative of progress, is being overturned by a postmodern perspective claiming feeling, individual stories, and pervasive doubt as its rallying cry. The two worldviews are competing for the prize – dominance in the moral and social consensus – with the postmoderns presently a length in the lead, and the moderns fading fast. The finish, however, is still a way off.

Meanwhile the Christian community is trying to field a horse in the race as well, and is marshalling resources to assert its own worldview claims. But trying to make ourselves heard above the din of secular media, culture, and education is a daunting task. In the process, questions have arisen concerning the role of church leaders in the evangelicalism of the twenty-first century. How should pastors and lay leaders approach the work of building the Church in this new age that is struggling to be born? What kind of leaders do we need so that we can compete in the conflict of worldviews?

Some have put forward a model of a post-evangelical, emerging church, in which the pastor serves largely as a kind of congregational facilitator, helping people to connect with their story and with one another in a community of seekers and pilgrims. Others insist that the way forward is through the past, in an ancient/future church where the pastor serves above all as liturgist and prophet, leading the people of God to anchor in the safe harbor of unchanging truth aboard the sturdy vessel of traditional worship.

Undoubtedly both these views on the Church and her leadership have something valuable to contribute to defining the shape of the ministry in a postmodern world. But each must filter its paradigm through the grid of Biblical truth. For in the end, only a ministry shaped by the clear teaching of God’s Word can expect to enjoy the blessings of His favor.

Jesus Himself is our model for leadership in the congregations of the Lord’s people. Whatever shape the paradigm of church leadership takes in the days to come, it must hew very closely to the pattern established in Christ. But what is that pattern?

THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS
This is not the place for a thorough examination of Jesus’ ministry as a model for our own. Instead, I want to look briefly at the summary of His ministry that Jesus presented in His great High Priest prayer in John 17. Here we find the Lord rehearsing before the Father those aspects of His ministry by which He commended Himself to God. We may observe six facets of Jesus’ ministry which He chose to highlight here.

First, Jesus declared that He sought the glory of God only in all He did (vv.1,4). Jesus bore witness to the true nature of God, His covenant, and the workings of His grace. He sought to clear up the confusion about God and His ways that had settled on the people during several centuries of legalistic, works-righteousness teaching. He invited them to recover the Old Testament ideas of God as loving Father, righteous Judge, only King and Lord, and Savior of the world. Christ made the point emphatic by claiming to be the very incarnation of this Deity – God in human flesh. For Jesus the driving force in all He did, the thing He sought by every means at His disposal, was the glory of God, the exaltation of His name and the advance of His Kingdom.

Second, in fulfilling this mission of bringing glory to God only, Jesus was faithful in obeying the Word of God, and in teaching and proclaiming it (vv.6,14). Jesus was not an innovator of clever new ideas.  He was not a rabbi seeking to create a new school of traditions or interpretations of the Law. Nor did He seek to preserve ancient traditions for their own sake. He claimed that everything He did and all His teaching were from God, that His words were God’s words, and that His every action, faithfully represented what the Father had sent Him to do. He invited all who heard Him to compare His works and teaching with the words of Moses and the Prophets, and He rested His authority on what had been written in the Scriptures of the Old Testament, citing them over and over in defense of His actions and words. He came as a Servant to suffer and die, and to teach His followers to put their trust in God and in Him. All this He found support for in the written Word of God.

Third, Jesus demonstrated the centrality of prayer for His brethren (v.9, and throughout this chapter).  Jesus seems to have conducted His entire life and ministry in an envelope of prayer. His disciples would often discover that He had slipped away for an extended season of prayer. Frequently He would erupt into prayer in the middle of some public setting. At such times it seems He simply brought to the hearing of those around Him a conversation that had been going on between Him and the Father at an inaudible level. He taught His disciples to pray, and He assured them that He prayed for them and would continue to intercede for them. Indeed, His ministry at present, at the Father’s right hand, includes a burden of intercession for all His brethren (Hebrews 7:25; 1 John 2:1).

Fourth, Jesus taught His disciples the importance of guarding and keeping one another in the faith by means of ongoing mutual accountability (v.12). How often do we find Jesus asking His disciples if they have understood His teaching, or chiding them because they did not? Sent on preaching missions, the disciples understood that it was necessary to come back and give an account of their work, even as they (and we) will on that great day when Christ returns. He taught His disciples to be accountable to one another as a way of being accountable to God in the present, and of preparing themselves for the day of judgment, when the works of every one of us will come before the scrutinizing eye of the Lord (1 Corinthians 3:13-15).

Fifth, Jesus showed the importance of relationships sustained by encouragement and affirmation in the joy of the Lord (v.13). Encouragement – building one another in the love and purposes of the Lord – is a great source of joy and hope. Jesus taught these simple everyday folk to believe that they would rule in His Kingdom, would bear powerful witness before kings and courts, and would be able even to bind the forces of evil in the spiritual realm. He assured them they had a significant work to do in helping to realize the Kingdomof God. He made them believe that God cared about them, had chosen and would use them, and that the fruit of their lives and labors would endure forever. And thus doing He instilled great joy and abiding hope in them.

Finally, Jesus demanded that His followers consecrate themselves unto holiness in the Lord, that they might be one together in Him (vv.17,19-21). The pursuit of holiness is more important, Jesus taught, than the articulation of every jot and tittle of right doctrine. While He would not abide distortion of His teaching, and neither should we, Jesus did not seem as concerned that His disciples should acquire a fully fleshed-out outline of the system of doctrine, or even of the content of all the books of the Bible; rather, He demanded that they focus on becoming one together in the Spirit, taking on the holiness of the Lord and laying aside the ways of the flesh. If anything was to separate the followers of Christ from one another, let it be the intimacy of their knowledge of the Lord as shown in their holy, righteous, and compassionate way of life.

Thus Jesus recommended His own ministry to the Father as He prepared to suffer for the world and for His chosen people. In so doing He seems to have been assured that what He had accomplished during His earthly sojourn was precisely what the Father had sent Him to do. His atoning sacrifice would be the capstone of this ministry, the embodiment of everything else He had done in drawing His people to Himself.

Jesus’ ministry thus provides a pattern by which we must measure our own ministries as the shepherds of God’s flock.

SENT LIKE JESUS
“As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). Thus Jesus commended His own work and ministry to those who would be taking it up from that point on for the sake of building His Church and advancing His Kingdom. What are the implications of Jesus’ pattern of ministry for ours today?

Whether our chosen paradigm is post-evangelical, ancient/future, or some other, we all must take seriously the Lord’s word that we have been sent into the world, and sent to the Church, according to the pattern He established for us during His earthly sojourn. Let me suggest just a few implications for the work of pastoral ministry for each of the six facets summarized above.

1. Seek the glory of God in all you do. We must not become so identified with, any particular perspective, program, or paradigm that we end up exalting it above the glory of the Lord. We are called to bring heaven down to earth, as it were, and to lead the people of God into the very throne room of His grace, there to experience the glorious heaviness of the Lord. If we insist that all we do must reflect some preconceived notion about what our church, and what the Christian life, should be, we may well box ourselves out from encounters with God’s glory. If we seek the Lord and His glory, to realize His presence and radiate His love, we will lay hold on every viable vessel, every apt approach to which His Spirit may lead the Church in the world, and our churches as part of that.

2. Ground all your life, ministry, and teaching in the Word of God. We must not be concerned above all to make sure that everything about our ministries, lives, and teachings faithfully reflects either our postmodern or ancient/future convictions. Instead, let us work hard faithfully to display and declare the always-contemporary Word of the Lord in all we say and do. If we would be indicted by the world or our brethren for anything, let it not be for being too postmodern or too traditional. Let it be for our insistence that everything about us and our churches satisfy the demands of the Word of God, which alone is able to equip us for every good work.

3. Recover the centrality of prayer for the work of ministry. I continue to be dismayed at the appalling low state of prayer in the Church today. Ministers from whatever perspective seem more concerned about the outward aspects of the life of faith than the inner life of the soul.  The people in their churches reflect a similar concern. We give lip-service to prayer, but we do not labor at it with anything like the diligence and time we give to preparing a service of worship, planning our next program, or figuring out how to market our ministry. Without prayer – fervent, even ferocious prayer – we may not expect the Lord to bless any of our labors. Let us seek the wisdom of God in His Word, and commit to pray for one another, even for those with whom we disagree. Such prayer may so knit our souls together that the emerging division now threatening to derail the evangelical Church may be fused in one spirit of prayer, and a mighty outpouring of energy for revival may result.

4. Take seriously the need to be accountable to others. The growing trend of independent churches is alarming. The rise of pastors of such churches as authorities unto themselves by virtue of their “success” is even more alarming. The number of pastors falling into scandalous sin has not abated. We need to find ways of making genuine accountability more a part of our lives and ministries. The ancient Celtic idea of the anam cara or soul-friend may be the kind of meeting-place for accountability that post-evangelicals and ancient/future types can agree on as practical both within their own perspectives and across the growing divide with one another.

5. Make encouragement and love the hallmarks of your practice. We are slowly drifting into yet another season of division among those identified with the cause of Christ. It just seems to be in our genes. Early in this movement’s history fundamentalists denounced evangelicals, who looked down on them as country bumpkins and snake-handlers. Evangelicals expressed their doubts about Pentecostals, who smugly asserted their superior spirituality over their egg-headed detractors. Left evangelicals thumped right evangelicals for their lack of compassion for the poor, and right evangelicals whispered about the socialist leanings of those who criticized them. Do we have to do this yet again? Can we not find a way to let our speech be used to edify our brethren, rather than to condemn them as we aggrandize our own views? And can we not find a way to make encouragement and love more consistently the hallmarks of every aspect of our lives and ministry? How will the world know that we are truly the followers of Christ, if we cannot encourage and love one another in His name (John 13:35)?

6. Make the pursuit of holiness – Christlikeness – the goal of all your teaching, and of every aspect of your life. Paul knew what Christ was talking about, and he called his readers, including us, to purge ourselves of every worldly way and to bring holiness “to completion in the fear of God.” This means obedience to God’s Law. This means turning away from every worldly allurement that causes us to pursue idols of prosperity, success, or fame rather than the via crucis of the Lord.

Brethren, let the pattern of Christ be the pattern of your ministry. Here’s a challenge for you. Set up a matrix with these six benchmarks across the top and all the activities of your ministry, listed one on top of the other, down the side. In the boxes created describe in specific terms, under as many headings as apply, everything that you are doing, in each area of your ministry, to fulfill the pattern set by Jesus. Then, at the bottom of the matrix, outside the box, as it were, write down everything that’s left from your ministry list that you simply could not fit into that matrix. Finally, either so transform those “outside the box” activities as to make them fit the matrix, or simply put them aside.

We have been sent like Jesus to His Church and to the world. Isn’t it about time that we stopped trying to define our ministries by things that inevitably divide us, and to take up the example of Christ with greater consistency and resolve?

T. M. Moore is a Fellow of the Wilberforce Forum. He serves as Pastor of Teaching Ministries and Director of the Center for Christian Studies at Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church in Knoxville, Tenn. He is the editor of the series, Jonathan Edwards for Today’s Reader (P & R), the latest volume of which is Praying Together for True Revival. His book, Consider the Lilies: A Plea for Creational Theology, will be released in May, 2005, by P & R. Audio messages and lectures by T. M. can be secured from WordMp.3.com. He and his wife, Susie, make their home in Concord, Tenn.  He can be reached at nacurragh@aol.com. All Scripture quotations from the English Standard Version (Crossway).