Napier Baptist

I have been asked to give a lecture/seminar to some students training for ministry. The irony is that I'll probably be the youngest and least experienced in the room! Anyway, my topic is "Ministry Traps to Avoid." No doubt my perspective from 18 months of ministry will be totally different from someone who's had many years of experience.

One of the things that has surprised me most since I've been in ministry is how few collegues I've found who will sit down and study the scriptures with me - even debate or argue about the scriptures with me. Many of my ministry collegues are happy to talk about techniques or projects but we rarely open our bibles to grapple with it and we rarely pray together. Coming from a Bible College environment where this was the everyday stuff of life it's been a bit of a shock. I remember a lecture series I heard Derek Tidball give on Baptist Leadership that looked at Biblical, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. In his reflections on contemporary perspectives he said how concerned he was that when he meets up with the young pastors he taught he asks them what they're reading and their reading list is based entirely on how-to manuals and contemporary culture books rather than any serious commentaries or theological works. For me, this is a very important ministry trap to avoid. The pull to place relevance and statistical credibility at the forefront of ministry (numbers do have their place though. Let's face it, if the church you pastor empties out and closes does 'it's not about numbers' really cut it?). I constantly hear the demand for the church to be relevant from many quarters (CEO style as well as emerging church). The question for me is, to whom are we first called to be relevant, God or society? It must be God. I hear it said that we need to take church to the world and I totally agree with the need to incarnate the gospel but I'm cautious of letting society define what church is. One person told me of how they have a group of people meet at a cafe to do the Alpha marriage course and that this was church for those people who went. This is a great idea and is working well but this isn't church! Again the question is who defines what is church, society or the Bible? The Bible has some clear ideas on what constitutes church and that must be our starting point rather than letting society define church in the name of relevance.

I like what Ian Stackhouse (author of The Gospel Driven Church) says when he's asked what his vision is for the church: "I don;t have a vision for the church. I have a vision to be a church."

I've recently come across David Hansen who's an author on pastoral ministry. I'm currently reading his book The Art of Pastoring: Ministry without All the Answers. Here's a relevant (there's that word again!) snippet:"When I began ministry, I had lots of books prescribing pastoral ministry - the so-called how-to books. I had books on how to preach, how to administrate a church, how to do pastoral counselling and how to lead small groups. They didn't help me. The authors assumed too much. They assumed that I knew what my goal was. They assumed that I knew what I was and who I was. They assumed that I knew why I was supposed to be doing the things they were teaching me about. But I didn't know what I was, or who I was, or why I was supposed to be doing the things I was supposed to be doing. And I didn't know how any of the things I was supposed to be doing fit into a coherent understanding of my call from God to be a pastor.
So I stopped reading how-to books. Instead I read theology, biblical studies and church history. I alternated between the disciplines. These books from the classical disciplines of theology didn't teach me how to do pastoral ministry, but they helped me immensly in my regular duties. I discovered that spending a day reading thirty pages of Karl Barth's Dogamitcs helped me more in my pastoral work than a hundred pages of how-to literature... These narratives pointed me to the fact that pastoral ministry is a life, not a technology. How-to books treat pastoral ministry like a technology. That's fine on one level - pastoral ministry does require certain skills, and I need all the advice I can get. But my life as a pastor is far more than the sum of the tasks I carry out... The thesis of this book is that people meet Jesus in our lives because when we follow Jesus, we are parables of Jesus Christ to the people we meet."