Build a Culture of Discipleship

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Ligon Duncan: Congregation members should not underplay tangible care, whether that’s helping somebody move, taking them food.

Matt Smethurst: One of the promises in our church covenant, we will rejoice at each other’s happiness and endeavor with tenderness and sympathy to bear each other’s burdens and sorrows.

Ligon Duncan: Beautiful, Matt

Matt Smethurst: Welcome everyone to the everyday pastor, a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt Smethurst

Ligon Duncan
And I’m Ligon Duncan. A liittle slower. Sorry about that.

Matt Smethurst
That’s okay.

Ligon Duncan: It’s the afternoon. It was the coffee draft that I just took there.

Matt Smethurst: Lig Duncan in the flesh, and we’re going to be talking about how to foster a culture of discipling. So in the previous episode, we thought about pastoral care, and how a pastor can care for his sheep throughout the week, but also from the pulpit. But I think it’d be worth ligand thinking through how we can, not only ourselves as pastors, care for the sheep, but how we can equip the sheep to care for one another. And I think we have to start with a kind of load bearing passage that you already have referenced in a previous episode. I’m just going to go ahead and read it so Ephesians, chapter four, Paul writes, And he that is Christ, the Ascended Christ gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers to equip the saints for the work of Ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. And he goes on to talk about not being blown and tossed by the wind, the winds and the waves. And you made, you made a great observation. I never thought of it quite like this before, in a previous episode, you said that that pastors are being called to build up the body of Christ so that they themselves would be able to build up one another. That’s, I think that’s that’s well put. One way I’ve thought about it is that pastors are the supply line. Members are the front line, actually, and our job is, as it says, to equip the saints for the work of ministry. The members are responsible for the mission, the job of pastors, like good trainers and coaches, not in the sort of like life coach sense, but we are, we are training, teaching, forming people to take spiritual responsibility for one another. Yeah. How did you do that as a as a senior pastor, how did you foster a culture of taking spiritual responsibility for.

Ligon Duncan
Well, we’ve hinted this at this in our conversation previously, so let me jump right in here, one one way. And by the way, I’m not claiming that I did a great job here. I can point to a lot of other churches that have done a better job than this, and maybe we will during the course of this conversation, but I first wanted to pour myself into the elders of the church and into those who were going to be elders of the church, so that they viewed themselves as shepherds, not members of sort of a glorified spiritual board of directors, because there’s a business model. Some churches don’t have elders. They just have a board of deacons, but But whether it’s a board of elders or board of deacons, they really view themselves as a board, not functionally as shepherds, not functionally as overseers, not functionally as those who are bishoping to use that New Testament, verb. You want the elders to view themselves as shepherds. And maybe this is a bigger problem in Presbyterianism, because you sometimes you have sort of a three office view with a real hard distinction between the minister and the lay elders. Should

Matt Smethurst
be the D. The bigger problem would be D, okay, functioning as pseudo

Ligon Duncan
elders. I’ve just noticed, you know, when I see healthy Baptist churches with a plurality of elders, those elders know that they’re supposed to be engaged in ministry in the church. And I think I find in the Presbyterian world sometimes that takes some work, right? So I that was one thing I want to make sure I was

Matt Smethurst
investing in. I can talk you out of a teaching elder ruin elder distinction,

Ligon Duncan
I think you will. That’s another story for another day. I won’t even go there. But my point is, I think you would agree in this. I wanted to make sure that those men understood the spiritual labors that they needed to undertake in the congregate. Wasn’t just pastor, that’s your job to go visit. I mean, one of the happiest things, one of the first visits that I made after I became the pastor, there was a the wife of a congregation member that had been diagnosed with cancer before I became the pastor, and she was on her death bed in Baptist Hospital right across the street. And so it was. Really right across the street from the church. So I didn’t get in my car. I walked across the street to go see her. Before I could get there from the church, less than a five minute walk, one of my elders was already there. And I I just, I cannot tell you what that meant to me. Yeah, you know, I’m going to visit this lady. He’s already there. He’s sitting in the room when I walk in. And so I just wanted to make sure I was cultivating that amongst the elders. Because if you can get your if you can get the leadership of the church invested in that spiritual ministry, then they’re your partners in getting the rest of the church to minister to one another. I’ll brag on my elders. They did a great job in this area. Let me brag on the women in the church a little bit. Not super long after I had been the pastor, maybe three years into the pastoral ministry, the women in our congregation really did a good job of caring for people that were in crisis situations. So if you had somebody that was facing a serious illness, they were really good at tangible care to members of the congregation in that area. If you had somebody who had maybe they’d lost a job, the women were very involved in sort of short term, tangible mutual care. Well, some of the women that led that program came to me and they said, you know, we think we’re doing an okay job here, but there are a lot of people in our congregation that are in long term situations, and we think they’re falling between the cracks. So like you might, you might have a family who had had a child born with serious birth defects that are permanent in their consequences and which require then unusually intense care over a long duration of time that as you I’m sure you’ve seen this Matt, that that brings in challenges in a marriage. I mean, it’s one thing to be able to survive children just coming into the home. It’s another thing when there’s, you know, hourly care for the rest of your life with no end in sight. Yeah, and so they said, We think there’s some things like that in the church that we’re not doing such a good job of, and we want to work with the deacons on figuring out how we can do a better job of caring in that area. So I set up a meeting for them to sit down with the deacons Executive Committee, and the deacons say, This is amazing. How can we help you do this? And the women said, well, actually, we think this is your job, your your deacons, but we want to and I look, I know there’s some churches that have women as deacons. I’m not trying to get into that. I’m just in my church, we had an all male diaconate, but the women said, this is your job. We want to work with you, but we want you to take the lead on this. This is what you’re so I had wonderful people in the conversation that initiative God’s kind of mutual ministry in the church. So it was my job to just keep fostering that. I needed to, I needed to make sure the younger people that were coming up caught the same bug, that because these people were probably more in the middle age of the generations in the congregation, but the younger people were dialed in on a lot of Neighborhood and Community Care in ways that the older generations weren’t. So a lot of it was just kind of fanning the flame. They were not spectators. They were not sitting on the sidelines watching the real action happen out on the field. They were, like you said, they were the front lines, and my job is to equip them for the work of service, yes, so that they can build up the body and and that means I want to lead by example. You know, I want to be involved in that too, but it’s not them paying me to do that for them. It’s me equipping them to do that mutual ministry to one another. So I tried to start with leadership, Matt, say, add a voice to the good things that were already happening. Do what I could to squeeze out the idea that, hey, our job is really to vote on stuff and to tell this is what we’re going to do, and get out there and minister to people so that the elders are doing a real spiritual ministry to people, not just voting on things. The deacons are doing tangible ministry to people. And then they’re they’re the cheerleaders with me, to the whole congregation for tangible care. You know, they’re selling the whole congregation with me. They’re the walking, talking, living, breathing. Example of it say, Hey, see what that Deacon is doing. See what you know, see what the women in the church are doing over there. Yeah, do that? Do what they’re doing. So that was my thing. Now they’re. Are. I mean, there are wonderful churches out there that you and I both know that are that did a better job than my congregation did in that area. But as a pastor, that’s what I was trying to do. I wanted us to recognize, yes, I have certain responsibilities, because you do pay me and I’m it’s a privilege to do those things, but I’m not a substitute for what only you can do for one another. You know, the whole body needs one another, and if we’re not all ministering to one another, the body’s missing out on something that it could be benefiting from. So everybody has something to give that is a healthy thing and that shouldn’t be opposed. I mean, that Presbyterians want to be congregational in that kind of way, in the same way that Baptists, who are by conviction, policy wise, congregational, that’s a natural thing to encourage in that setting. But Presbyterians want to be congregational like that too. And again, as you said, That’s Ephesians four. I mean, you can’t argue with Ephesians four. The end of that section says so that the proper working of each individual part of the body causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love. So that’s where Paul is going. You need every individual part of the body working for the growth of the body to build itself up in love, and so all of us ought to have that as an aspiration in our pastoral ministry.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, you’re saying there’s a responsiveness. So I could think of, you know, two ditches or two sides of the, you know, I think, I think Luther said, Satan doesn’t care which side of the horse you fall off, as long as you don’t stay on. Okay? So you could have pastors who are just passive and and lazy, frankly, and just expect everyone else to do the hard work of ministry. Obviously, we’re not commending that, but we’re also warning against a kind of micro managing pride that would lead a pastor or a group of pastors or elders to think that the ministry totally rises and falls with them and that they’re, you know, especially if you know you’re a staff pastor, you’re the paid professional, and everyone else can come and watch you. You know, get on a show every Sunday. To put it crassly, you’re calling for something that’s not passive, but that is appropriately responsive. And I think that’s one of the best ways to use an overused modern word to empower people to to lean into initiating ministry themselves, is to know that you want them to do that. You’ve kind of you’ve set them loose to do that, and you’re going to provide forums to champion those things. Now, I’ve heard it said there are different categories that elders need to think about when it comes to ministries in a church, for example, I’ve heard the categories of maybe bless, catalyze and own or something. So bless would be we’ll pray for you. That’s great. We hope it goes well. We support you in prayer. Catalyze means, we’ll we will perhaps talk about it publicly. We might encourage members privately to be involved own means. There’s probably going to be church resources going toward it. It’s going to be kind of a fixture of our church. Now, in order for elders to even be in the position to make that judgment call, that presumes that members are coming to them with ideas. So I’ll just give you an example. In our little church here in Richmond, people have asked us a lot, are we going to have this program or that event. When are we starting this? And we’ve often said, Well, we’re really wanting to kind of see what our members are already involved in, and kind of follow the Holy Spirit’s lead in that regard. So three examples I’ll just tick off. One. We do Saturday evangelism at Virginia Commonwealth University, largest public university in Virginia. We do that on Saturday afternoons. Number two, a youth group. Most churches have a youth group. We’re a church plant. We’ve sort of started to build out a youth group. Number three would be a sidewalk counseling ministry called speak for the unborn. Neither of those three things was something that in an elders meeting, we said, You know what? We really need to be doing evangelism at VCU. We need a youth group doing meeting this often, doing these things. Of course, we’re all full throatedly happily pro life. That was members taking initiative and then us coming behind that and saying, hey, we’ll pray for you. We’ll support you in our Sunday evening prayer service. We’ll hear about what the Lord is doing. So that’s a good word. We don’t want to be passive, but we do want to be responsive. So some of us, like myself, who were discipled to great effect in in college. For example, we were kind of trained under the model of weekly one on one mentoring. And that’s a wonderful thing, if it can happen. But I have noticed, as a pastor in, you know, certain stages of life that’s just not super feasible. So cast a vision like in four what. What does it look like to be discipled and mentored in various stages of life?

Ligon Duncan
Well, I think you’ve, you’ve, in part, already sort of helped the answer in that you can have one particular model of what mentoring looks like, and you can go looking for that and not find that, and then declare that you can’t find mentoring in the church when it looks different ways, and it’s it can vary generationally. You know, I too, grew up in a culture where that kind of one on one mentoring was highly valued. It was being done not simply by pastors or by church officers, but by involved members. Men and women were were picking out one person and investing in them. And I’ve had people that have had that experience and come to a church, and if they can’t have that exact same framework, well I’m I’m not being mentored. But that can look different ways. And I do think you have to respond generationally and culturally to that. There are, there are some cultural settings where that is just not the way it happens. It happens in a more natural, organic way. It may happen, not in a one on one environment, but in a smaller group of environment, maybe a circle of four or five or six people together. But there’s a lot of the Christian life that can get caught in that kind of a smaller environment. So I would say, if you are a person that has come maybe out of a para ministry where there’s been a lot of emphasis on an older, godly person investing in you, personally, spending a specific amount of time with you during the week, you may go to a place where there’s actually mentoring that you can pick up. And they’re never, ever gonna say, Okay, we’re gonna meet Tuesday at breakfast. We’re gonna work through, you know, this book of, you know, of Ji packers, or we’re gonna memorize the topical memory system of the navigators together. They may not look like that at all, but they’re still mentoring to be had. So I told you in a previous episode, when I got to Jackson, Doug Kelly told me, my senior colleague in systematic theology said, you are going to take John Reed Miller out to lunch every week. I did not go to John Reed Miller and say, Would you mentor me remind people who that is. And so Reed Reed was the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson from 1952 to 1968 and if there was a figure close to J Gresham machen in the southern Presbyterian Church, it was Reed. Reed was unbelievably influential in the southern Presbyterian Church.

Matt Smethurst
And let me just say to those highly nerdy listeners, he did not mispronounce Gresham. It is not Jay Gresham matron, it’s Jay Gresham matron, seriously

Ligon Duncan
true. That’s absolutely right. Ned stone house drill that into me in the in the biography, Reed was from Pennsylvania. He had pastored in Pennsylvania, Western, West, West Virginia, Ohio. He had been the president of an African American Presbyterian denominational undergraduate school, a college in either Knoxville or Atlanta, and then came to teach in the philosophy department at Belhaven College, now Belhaven University. Then he had church planted in Jackson. Then he had come to first pres, and then when he retired from first pres, he pastored a tiny little church in Macon, Mississippi. So this is a guy with

Matt Smethurst
tons of experience and wisdom, and so you’re told,

Ligon Duncan
I’m just taking him out to lunch because he’s an old guy and he likes the company, likes to be around young pastors and that sort of thing. Well, Matt, I’d just push his button and I’d sit back there and eat my lunch, and he would tell me stuff about life that was just unbelievable. It was mentoring, if ever mentoring existed, but it wasn’t set up that way. You know, it was me going out to lunch with him, man. I came to crave those times with him. So it may be that the older person doesn’t say, I want to disciple you, or you don’t go to the older person and say, I would like you to disciple me, but it may be going out for a cup of coffee, or being a part of a small fellowship of people that get invited in the home regularly, where you build a relationship and stuff starts rubbing off on you that that changes your life, grows you in grace, gives you an example, you know, and I had, there were tons of people like that in the congregation that I got to be around, and I felt like I was being mentored by some of these older saints in the congregation and and young people in the congregation could have benefited in the same way that I did from those relationships, even though they wouldn’t have maybe looked like a mentoring relationship that you would have. If you were in navigators. So I think whatever your experience has been, if you can get time and attention from Wiser saints, and they may be older wiser saints, there’s plenty to learn out there, and it may be casual and not formally organized by the way, I do want to say to my congregation members, you do have an obligation to invest in the next generation somehow. I don’t know how it’s going to be. It’s not same for everybody, but all of us have to be thinking about the next generation and investing in them somehow. And it may be for some people, it may be just showing hospitality and welcoming people into their homes and just getting to know their lives a little bit. For other people, it may be leading a small group or a discipleship group or something. I had a lot of people in the congregation that did things Yes, like that. For some for some people, it was identifying businessmen and saying, I’m going to try and share the gospel with him, or I’m going to try and mentor and build up that person again. I had elders and non elders that did a lot of that in the church very deliberately. I do want to encourage my congregation to think about, how are you going to pass along what the Lord has taught you to somebody else and but it’s not always going to look the same.

Matt Smethurst
It’s really comes down to spiritual initiative. Is what we’re wanting to foster and and and encourage in our congregation. So are you member coming to church, for example, on the Lord’s Day with eyes for others. With eyes for the person who might not have anyone to talk to, with eyes for the elderly saint who might be lonely or ailing. Are you fundamentally coming with the understanding that you need your family and they need you, and that you’re actually called by King Jesus to take spiritual responsibility for them and vice versa. That’s, that’s the purpose of a church covenant, yeah, and that’s what binds together members of the Body of Christ. There, there is a article that TGC published a few years ago, and I think the title is, I was discipled by.dot.my church, which is a little counterintuitive, because many of us have had individual disciplers, but it’s a beautiful, brief, simple article about how a person just realized I have grown so much of my faith just simply by turning up on The Lord’s day and making my life available to people throughout the week, and that’s what I try to commend to my church members. I try to say to them, Listen, no matter how long you’ve been a Christian, if the third person of the eternal Trinity resides inside of you, you have something to offer others. You are not under qualified. You might not be an official mentor, but no matter how much you think you need to grow, you can do spiritual good to someone who in this church. Are you reaching out to taking the initiative to do spiritual good to Hey, do you want to meet up to read the Bible together? Do you want to meet up to pray? It’s actually not that complicated, but it’s that kind of vision. And there is no book I know of outside scripture that casts this vision more compellingly than the appropriately titled The Compelling community, by Mark dever and Jamie Dunlop, that is one of the most useful books I could commend and I incur. I had our whole core team read it. It cast a vision for the kind of community that the world can neither understand nor explain. Because Jesus said in John 1334, and 35 by this, the world will know you are my disciples. And we’d expect him to say, by the way you love them, and there’s truth to that, yeah. But he says, By this, they’ll know you’re my disciples, by the way, you love one another. Yeah, I think of the scene in in home alone, the original home alone, where you know he’s final. Macaulay Culkin is is finally missing his family, and he’s sad, and he’s walking home in a blizzard, the sad music is playing, and all of a sudden he looks and he sees this, this beautiful home inside of which is a Christmas party. And he looks through the windows, and there’s warmth and laughter and food and a fireplace, and it’s clear he wants in, or at least he wants that with his own family, yeah, and I think the local church ought to be similar to that, in the sense that people ought to be able to look through the windows of the local church and see something that’s not available in the cold tundra of the world. Now, some churches say, Well, we’re just going to do away with church membership. It you can belong before you believe. Well, that would be like if the people inside that mansion said, you know, we’re being kind of exclusive, let’s remove the door, yeah. Well, if you remove the door, if you don’t have a door, you’re not going to have the warmth in the party, right? But if you shutter the windows, you’re not going to have a compelling community. And so it’s good. That is a book I would commend as the compelling community by Mark and Jamie. All right, switching gears, same topic, but more difficult question, what happens when you’re pastoring people, and there is, there is crisis, so you’re trying to equip members to understand that, that they can be competent to counsel other, to one another. I mean, we’re all we’re all counselors. The only question is, are we good ones? Yeah, but there are times where, clearly, there is a problem or a crisis in someone’s life, and the person just feels out of their depth. Maybe you feel out of your depth. So when is it wise for a pastor to, for lack of a better term, outsource to a professional? That

Ligon Duncan
is a tough question, and I think we have to know ourselves in this area. We have to know, we have to know and appreciate the limits and capacities of our own discernment, you know, because my wife studied marriage and family therapy, and so I benefited from what she was studying as she was on her way to becoming a licensed professional counselor, and because she had to study medications and things of this nature, I became sensitized to the kinds of things that people were encountering. And so I started develop hunches that, okay, this person definitely needs the kind of good, rich biblical counseling that folks like ccef, you know, one of the things I’m impressed by, David palace and everybody involved in C there’s, it’s not take two scriptures and call me in the morning. It’s really searching. There’s, there’s spiritual surgery and analysis and and prescription going on there. It’s not simplistic, but sometimes you look into a situation and you say, there may be something else going on here other than just say, for instance, a spiritual struggle with anxiety. And I have a friend, guy, Richardson, who was actually the president of the Jackson campus, and he had been a professional counselor, had had done his his doctoral work in counselor education, and on one occasion, he was talking to a woman who had been to her pastors about a crippling anxiety problem that she had been dealing with for years. And in the course of their conversation, he went over some of the same sorts of spiritual things that you would probably go over with somebody dealing with anxiety in the but then he said to her, have Have you been to your doctor for a medical checkup recently? And she said, Well, you know, actually, I missed my checkup this year. And then he said, Look, I want you to go to your doctor, and I want you to ask him, would you please run tests on my thyroid? Well, sure enough, when she went to her medical doctor, she had a thyroid problem, and it was directly impacting the anxiety issues. And you could have talked to her about union with Christ, and you could have talked to her about the providence of God and the how Jesus loves her till the cows came home, and until you address the thyroid problem, she would have still been having that anxiety problem. So it’s not that spiritual counsel doesn’t matter. It’s just sometimes there’s other stuff going on with people that you want to know about. I began to develop just sort of hunches and instincts, you know, when I’m talking, when I’m talking with folks, and I’m, I’m I’m dealing with the real spiritual issues, but we’re not going anywhere. Sometimes I’m wondering, Okay, what else is going on around this? And it’s not always a medical thing, and sometimes it’s other issues that they haven’t told me about, somebody struggling with assurance. And then after you’ve been talking with them for six months, you find out that there’s this ginormous secret sin in their life that they haven’t told you about, and you go, Oh, hello, I can tell you now you’re struggling with assurance. If you had told me six months ago, I could have been a lot more help to you. So a lot of times, it’s what you don’t know that’s keeping you from making progress with a person, sometimes that’s something medical, and so I do think pastors especially need to develop number one, instincts for how to recognize those things, and then two resources that you trust, that you can send people to, because you cannot trust everybody out there who are professional. Hospitals in your community. Sad to say, in our town, we knew there were psychiatrists. If you sent somebody that psychiatrist, they were going to get a prescription. They weren’t going to spend 15 minutes with them, and they were going to be sent out the door. You had to develop Who can I trust in this area? And so I spent time building a network. Okay, these are counselors that I can send someone to, and they’ll work with me. Because, you know, there’s spiritual issues to be dealt with here, but there’s something else that needs to be dealt with, too. So I just, I tried to build a network of people that I could trust, that I could send somebody to, and and then try to work alongside, you know, whatever those issues were,

Matt Smethurst
some pastors probably are tempted to, as it were, under qualify themselves, and think everything is is beyond my pay grade. And I know, and no, actually, you can probably come alongside someone and help them, because it is a both and it’s not, oh, I think there’s more going on here. So we’ll, we’ll no longer have someone meeting with this brother or sister to read through Scripture. I mean, Martin Lloyd Jones book spiritual depression is enormously helpful. It might not be everything to say about potential causes of depression, yeah, but it’s not less than that, yeah. But other pastors might be tempted to kind of over qualify themselves, as it were, and think that that they have the experience, wisdom training, capacity to deal with all manifestations of fallenness in the human body and brain. I just think that short sighted and naive. Now the danger, of course, is when we think, say, medication, for example, can get us to the right destination. I think of it more like if your windshield fogs up and you find yourself in a ditch, medication can get you back on the road with a default windshield, it can’t get you to heaven. It can’t get you to the right destination. You need the wisdom of the Spirit and the Word of Truth to get to where you’re trying to go. But it can be a common grace help a common

Ligon Duncan
issue. I’ve been joking about the fact that because you have twins right now sleep is at a premium. Well, sleep can have an enormous impact on people. So one of my closest friends and colleagues, godly, Christian minister and professor, went through a period of two years where he was really struggling with sleep. It affected everything in his life. It affected his marriage. It affected his assurance. It affected everything. And if I had tried to deal with him spiritually, as if sleep was not a problem, that’s malpractice. As a pastor, I’ve got to both address the spiritual issues, but also that’s a reality. If you don’t have sleep, it’s going to impact everything we are, body, soul, realities. That’s what we are. Yes, you got to pay attention to the body, and you got to take pay attention to the soul. And there’s an interplay,

Matt Smethurst
absolutely, I think it’s in his great book praying with Paul that da Carson, you know, world class biblical scholar, says sometimes the godliest thing you can do is get a good night’s sleep. Yeah, not stay up and pray all night, but get a good night’s sleep as you think about the pastor’s toolbox and any other resources or tools or just words of wisdom. You would commend to pastors as we close this episode, as they think about how to encourage members of the church to take care of one another.

Ligon Duncan
Yeah, well, we’ve talked a little bit about tangible care, and I do think congregation members should not underplay tangible care, and that’s whether that’s helping somebody move, you know, helping help them load up the U haul, taking them food during a medical situation or during while you were expensive.

Unknown Speaker
All right, okay,

Ligon Duncan
praise me. That is a big deal River City. My when I left the church as the pastor, my my wife still a member of the church, and I’m now, you know, devoting my ministerial energies to the seminary, she thought long and hard about, where do I want to put my emphasis? Now, I’m a church member here. I’m supposed to serve. She sings in the choir, and she’s involved in the women’s ministry, and she’s involved in the bereavement ministry, okay? And that bereavement ministry is a big deal because they are helping organize food for family and friends who are coming in from out of town for the funeral services. They do a meal for every family in the church that has a funeral and all of their family and friends that have come in and that takes a load off that family. During a really high stress time, and then blesses them with an opportunity to sit down and breathe with friends and family around them and not worry about all the details. That’s we probably do 25 or 30 funerals a year in that in that congregation, 2500 and so that’s an every other week thing. That’s a big deal that kind of tangible care is a big deal. So I don’t want to ever sell any of that short. But also, there will be people in the congregation that will very much benefit from doing biblical counseling training, like with a ccef, or with Southern Seminary, or at RTS Charlotte or Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. There are lots of places that you can go get a certificate in biblical counseling, and then you may become a real asset to your pastors and elders. Because, look, there are some things that women who know that I love them in the congregation and they love me, they do not want to come to talk to me about, right? And frankly, there’s some things that I don’t want to talk with them about, but they need a godly, competent Christian woman who they can trust, who knows some stuff, who can help them work through things. And I love knowing those resources are there in the church, right? And sometimes they’re very situation specific. So we talked about suicide a few episodes ago. You know, I had members. I could say, Look, you can talk with Margaret about that Margaret, under Margaret has lost a son. She knows what that is like. You can talk to her. And Margaret was desirous of going and helping people that were going through that there may be people cancer, loss of a husband, loss of a wife, loss of a young child, you know, all sorts of specific situations that equip congregation members to minister to one another and use the pastor. Just want to be aware of the life experiences that your congregation has had so that you can bring people together. You know, one of the things I always admired about Mark is Mark dever is always bringing people together who he thinks need one another. You know, this guy can can teach this guy something, and this guy can bless this guy in this way. Well, as pastors we want to be. You know that that congregation member has something to offer? This congregation member over here, and it may be a listening ear who has had almost the same experience and won’t be quick to say, oh, we’ll just do ABC, and it’ll all be fine, right? You know? No, actually, I’m still wrestling with that, and that’s seven years ago, you know. But here’s the hope, you know, and here’s how Christ ministered to me in that all of those kinds of things are a blessing in a congregation. A pastor just wants to keep fanning the flame. Everybody’s gonna have a different thing that they’re good at try and learn your flock well enough to know, you know, what that person has a lot to give in that area.

Matt Smethurst
One of the promises in our church covenant is, is we will rejoice at each other’s happiness and endeavor with tenderness and sympathy to bear each other’s burdens and sorrows. Beautiful that’s coming right from you know, Romans 12 mourn with those who mourn, rejoice with those who rejoice. What I often say is, which of those two things, mourning with those who mourn, or rejoicing with those who rejoice is more difficult. Usually, rejoice with those who rejoice, actually, because that means rejoicing with someone who got the thing you were praying for, one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in the life of the church is, say, an infertile couple rejoicing that the Lord has given another family their fifth kid. Yeah, you know that the Holy Spirit is up to something supernatural, maturity, people caring for one another, not only who have something obviously in common, but who have Christ in common? And I just think, just to wrap it up, that that we want our churches to be places where people know it’s a safe it’s a safe place to struggle, but not a safe place to sin, and that is, if we can keep that in view, if they know it’s a safe place to struggle, they’ll be transparent. They’ll walk in the light, because they’ll know they’re not alone. They don’t have to lurk in the shadows. But of course, just because every Christian is a struggling Christian doesn’t mean that we’re not fighting sin every single day. We hope this episode of the everyday pastor has been encouraging to you, and we hope that you will take some of these things to heart, if they’ve been useful, and commend them to your congregation. Most of these episodes are things you may want to share with other pastors, but maybe some of the stuff in this episode you could share with lay leaders or counselors as you try to foster this culture of discipling in your church. Please like, subscribe, do all that good stuff. Help us get the word out. Thank you.