Given the choice between a lectern (or even a really sturdy music stand) in a classroom and a pulpit in a sanctuary, I'll take the lectern every time. I'll also opt for the one-on-one ministry of the Word over sermonizing, too. I'm haunted by a comment made by one of my seminary professors years ago. "Consider," he counseled us, "where else during the week the people you're preaching to have had to sit for thirty minutes listening to someone talk." That was in the late '80's. Almost twenty years later, it's no more likely that those listening to sermons on Sunday morning are any more practiced to giving sustained attention to monologues throughout their week and attention spans certainly aren't any longer now than they were then.
For the last fourteen years I've served in an associate pastor role that has allowed me to concentrate on teaching in the contexts of adult education and one on one discipleship with minimal responsibilities in the area of preaching. I don't mean to disparage preaching at all. I recognize its importance and am grateful for those who devote themselves to it. In fact, I'm an auditory learner who enjoys listening to sermons and lectures. It's just that when I'm on the giving end, I prefer the dialogical nature of teaching. I like being able to stop and ask "Am I making sense?" or having someone stop me to ask a question. I realize that in part my reservations about preaching are due to my own shortcomings such as my prideful worry that I'm boring my hearers and my unbelief that the Holy Spirit will use the words he inspired (despite my inadequacies) to accomplish his gracious purposes through biblically-grounded preaching. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I still prefer speaking with people as opposed to merely speaking to them.In his A Christian Directory, Richard Baxter includes a section on the importance of what he called "Christian conference, exhortation, and reproof." Essentially, it's about the necessity and benefit of believers conversing with each other about biblical truth. One of the advantages of such discourse, he says, is that it supplements the ministry of public preaching:Your fruitful conference is a needful help to the ministerial work. When the preacher hath publicly delivered the word of God to the assembly, if you would so far second him, as in your daily converse to set it home on the hearts of those that you have opportunity to discourse with, how great an assistance would it be to his success! Though he must teach them publicly, and from house to house, Acts xx.20, yet it is not possible for him to be so frequent and familiar in daily conference with all the ignorant of the place, as those that are still with them may be. You are many, and he is but one, and can be but in one place at once. Your business bringeth you into their company, when he cannot be there. O happy is that minister who hath such a people, who will daily preach over the matter of his public sermons in their private conference with one another! (Part IV, Chapter XVI, Motive X).
Later, Baxter enumerates more advantages of spiritual conversation including the following which is the best articulation of why I prefer teaching that I've come across:5. Interlocutory conference keepeth your auditors attentive, and carrieth them on along with you as you go. And it maketh the application much more easy, by their nearness and the familiarity of the discourse; when sermons are usually heard but as an insignificant sound, or words of course. 6. You may at your pleasure go back and repeat those things which the hearer doth not understand, or doth forget; which a preacher in the pulpit cannot do without the censure of the more curious auditors. 7. You may perceive by the answers of them whom you speak to, what particulars you need most to insist on, and what objections you should most carefully resolve; and when you have satisfied them, and may proceed. All which it is hard for a minister to do in public preaching; and is it not a great sin to neglect such an advantageous duty? (Part IV, Chapter XVI, Motive XII).
When I came across these thoughts from Baxter, I was reminded of an article by David Powlison called "What is Ministry of the Word?" (Journal of Biblical Counseling, Winter 2003, pp. 2-6) in which he distinguishes among three mutually supportive aspects of the communication of biblical truth. The first two, the public and private ministry of the Word, are those with which we are probably most familiar. The former refers to the proclamation, exposition, and application of Scripture that good sermons consist of. The latter refers to personal study of and meditation on Scripture in private devotions or "quiet times." While acknowledging the necessity of both for cultivating spiritual maturity, Powlison rejects the idea that they are sufficient: Perhaps you've heard it said, "If people would only sit under good preaching and meet God regularly in private devotions, they wouldn't need counseling." That statement is well intended. It's even partly true. Lots of personal problems are transformed by public ministry of the Word and by private ministry of the Word. But the statement is completely untrue in its premises and its conclusions. A central purpose of good preaching and private devotions is to create mutual counseling and wise counselors! When any personal problem is in fact truly transformed, then a wise counselor of others has been produced. Fruitful interpersonal ministry of the Word is the main proof that sermons and devotions are worth the time and effort.
This calls to mind Paul's exhortation that we "Let the word of Christ dwell in [us] richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom..." (Col. 3:16). In today's church there is certainly a great deal of emphasis on preaching and devotions but are we neglecting the importance and necessity of believers learning how to skillfully bring biblical truth to bear on each other's lives?
Technorati Tags: Bible, Christianity, preaching, teaching, Richard Baxter, David Powlison, biblical counseling
In a section of his A Christian Directory addressed to new converts, Richard Baxter beautifully describes the power and value of godly friends to aid us in our spiritual maturing:
If you have a familiar friend that will defend you from error, and help you against temptations, and lovingly reprove your sin, and feelingly speak of God, and the life to come, inditing his discourse from the inward power of faith, and love, and holy experience; the benefit of such a friend may be more to you, than of the learnedest or greatest in the world. How sweetly will their speeches relish of the Spirit, from which they come! How deeply may they pierce a careless heart! How powerfully may they kindle in you a love and zeal to God and his commandments! How seasonably may they discover a temptation, prevent your fall, reprove an error, and recover your souls! How faithfully will they watch over you! How profitably will they provoke, and put you on; and pray with you fervently when you are cold; and mind you of the truth, and duty, and mercy, which you forget! It is a very great mercy to have a judicious, solid, faithful companion in the way to heaven.
I can think of two possible responses to that description. Baxter's words will either elicit a yearning for the kind of friendship he portrays or sincere gratitude for the friend(s) who serve us in the manner he describes. Yesterday I enjoyed the fruits of such a relationship with my good friend Sean. Sean and I have known each other for about 17 years. In that time we've ministered together and shared our fears, joys, anxieties, hopes, temptations, sins, and offbeat sense of humor with each other. We've tried to help each other live in the grace of God and live out our newness in Christ.
Yesterday I told Sean about some weights on my soul and asked him to pray with me which he did readily. He prayed for an extended period of time with remarkable thoroughness. His was not a prayer of vague generalities and well-worn cliches but one of specificity that evidenced both his knowledge of and concern for me. From early on in our friendship Sean's uncanny ability to read people struck me and it continues to do so. His discernment is extremely keen. In the course of his prayer he ministered to me in a number of the ways Baxter depicts, exposing and encouraging my heart with the truth of God's goodness and the full and finished work of Christ on my behalf. He didn't shirk back from praying for change I need to undergo out of fear of possibly hurting my feelings yet there was not the slightest trace of judgment or condemnation in his voice or words. His prayer left me thinking, "God is so much better than I can ever fathom."
While Sean was praying I got a brief glimpse into life as it should be. This was aided by the fact that his toddler son was in the same room of Sean's home, periodically squealing and laughing as he played with one of his toy trucks whose engine and horn sounds are pretty loud. Initially I found this distracting but it didn't take long for me to realize that this is what real Christian spirituality consists of - people who love each other acknowledging God's presence in the course of life's routines. A very great mercy indeed.
I know. I committed the cardinal sin of blogging. I haven't posted anything for over a week. Fortunately, my hiatus was not due to illness or any other emergency. I've just been giving my attention to some other things on my plate that outweigh keeping the blog current. Not only did I fall behind in posting here, I also fell way behind in reading the blogs I usually check on a daily basis. I shuddered to see how many entries I had missed when I finally checked my Bloglines subscriptions. Had I tried to get caught up I'd still be reading so I'm sure I deleted a lot of good stuff. I was even more nervous about seeing how many subscribers I lost due to my inactivity but I guess it pays to be quiet sometimes because there are actually more than there were before my hibernation. Anyway, I intend to get back to posting more regularly even if it may not be a daily occurrence.
I can't recall which of his books I read it in but I'm confident that somewhere years ago I read John Piper recommend that believers select a trustworthy saint from the past to serve as a spiritual guide through their writings. Of course, Jonathan Edwards served in that capacity for Piper and at one time I thought I'd follow suit. Ambitiously (and perhaps naively) I determined to make it my lifelong goal to forge through all of his works. That didn't last too long. Don't get me wrong. I've profited immensely from reading him and expect that I will continue to in the future. However, the combination of the density of his thought, the style of his writing, the small print (at least in the two-volume collection of his works that I own) and my aging eyes has made me reconsider.
I now have what I believe is a more realistic endeavor that will not require my reading the entire corpus of the author's work but one volume. The author is the seventeenth century Puritan pastor Richard Baxter and the book I'd like to complete before my dying day is his A Christian Directory which I've made reference to in the past. No, it's not a phone book (though it's certainly thick enough). Baxter called it a directory because it is a compendium of pastoral counsel or directions for Christian living; hence it's alternative title A Sum of Practical Theology and Cases of Conscience. Baxter divided it into four parts: Christian ethics, family life (or economics), Christian ecclesiastics (having to do with the ministries of the church), and Christian politics in which he addresses the believer's societal responsibilities to his neighbors.
The more I read the more I understand why Dr. Tim Keller has called it "the greatest manual on biblical counseling ever produced." Baxter had a wonderful way of dovetailing biblical doctrine and specific situations with which people struggle. He didn't leave orthodoxy hanging in the air in vague generalities but brought it into potent contact with concrete life situations. Nor did he settle for simplistic behavioristic prescriptions. As Kenneth Roth notes in an article titled "The Psychology and Counseling of Richard Baxter (1615-1691)": "Baxter's approach aims at internal insight and change because he realizes that it is the internal motivations from which the external behaviors and problems stem" (Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 17 (1998): 323).
One of the things I appreciate most about works such as Baxter's is the repeated emphasis that doctrine, in concert with the Holy Spirit's activity, is intended to illuminate and transform how we live. That's the reason counseling issues are of such great interest to me. I fear that a largely theologically illiterate church has prematurely concluded that the Bible is only peripherally relevant to the nuts and bolts personal and interpersonal problems we've come to associate with mental health professionalism. Mine is but one voice in a chorus lamenting the psychologizing of the faith. What Christian psychiatrist Jeffrey Boyd has declared of our larger culture is likewise true of the household of faith. "Homo psychologicus has replaced Homo theologicus."
But it's not enough to bemoan the current situation, at least it's not if it's to be corrected. We need to admit that the emergence and proliferation of the therapeutic mindset in the church is due in large measure to the absence of the kind of personalized pastoral theology that Baxter and his peers were so skilled in. When we preach to a congregation we do our best to illustrate and apply the truths about which we're speaking. It's more challenging, however, when dealing with a particular person facing a specific trial or temptation, to help him interpret his life in terms of biblical themes and see the relevance of the gospel to the uniqueness of his situation. What, if anything, does Christ have to say to a young mother so frustrated by her child's behavior that she literally bangs her own head against the wall? What motivates her to such self-destructive and unproductive action? What biblical themes and categories might inform our conversation with her? Is there a way to give her biblical help without merely hurling verses at her? Is it possible to explore with her the possibility (make that the likelihood) that sinful desires are the delta from which her behavior flows but to do so in such a way that she knows that she is being loved and not condemned? And above all, can we aid her in seeing that the gospel has far greater relevance to moms who bang their heads against walls than she had ever thought?
Many of the pioneers of secular psychotherapy understood their efforts as an attempt to address issues that had previously been framed and treated in a theological context. Freud wrote in The Question of Lay Analysis that the analyst's function could aptly be described as that of a "secular pastoral worker." And Carl Jung, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, wrote that "...we psychotherapists must occupy ourselves with problems which, strictly speaking, belong to the theologian." How ironic and tragic. Theses unbelieving men clearly saw their work as being about the same subject matter as that of the church. Today, the church has become so intoxicated from drinking from the therapeutic goblet, that its members are often resistant to the idea that theology is of any value for dealing with the complexities and pains of life.
