How to Stay Sharp as a Pastor

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0:00:00 – (Lig Duncan): All of us ought to be trying to get better, and all of us need to figure out how to learn somehow. Doctors are expected to do it. Accountants are expected to do it. Counselors are expected to do it. Attorneys are expected to do it. Teachers are expected to do it. Pastors ought to do it.

0:00:25 – (Matt Smethurst): Welcome to this episode of the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts ministry. My name is Mat Matt Smethers, and I’m Lig Duncan. And we’re going to be talking about continuing education for pastors both informally and formally. Lig, I can just say, as someone who went to seminary, has a seminary degree, and is now in the grind of everyday ministry, it can be easy to just start to coast and only kind of feed on past learning rather than creating, carving out time to continue challenging myself intellectually, reading theological books, staying abreast of current trends.

0:01:11 – (Matt Smethurst): It’s difficult with the demands of pastoral ministry. So let’s just talk first about informal ways for pastors to stay sharp. Why is that important?

0:01:21 – (Lig Duncan): Well, one, because the pastoral ministry will grind you up. You have to live with people in their sorrows. You have to see some really hard things, and then you can be faithfully ministering and you can face some real challenges, relational challenges, political challenges in your own congregation. It tempts you to cynicism and discouragement. And I’ve always found that the pure study of God, the pure study of His Word, was a blessed relief from some of those realities that you have to find if the chairman of your board of deacons is trying to get you fired.

0:02:00 – (Lig Duncan): To be able to go think about God or study the book of Isaiah or listen to a series of lectures on CS Lewis or anything to get me away from being caught up in the grind of the moment. Remember my first love. Remember that I got into this because I loved God. He saved me. I wanted to tell other people about him, and I’d like to know more about Him. And I think I’ll minister to people better if I do. I think every minister has to find what works for you to keep filling up the tank.

0:02:36 – (Lig Duncan): And it’s different for everybody. But I think almost all of us like to listen to sermons by other ministers. There are other ministers that particularly speak to us. For me growing up, Eric Alexander’s preaching was tremendously encouraging. So Sinclair Ferguson’s preaching was tremendously encouraging. I’ve been helped by John Piper over the years. I just have a variety of ministers that I listen to that edify me and can build me up so that I Can then pour myself into the congregation.

0:03:12 – (Lig Duncan): But all of us need to find a way. How are we gonna continue to grow in our knowledge of the Lord? How are we gonna need to grow in our knowledge of Scripture? We never know our Bibles well enough. I mean, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve thought, I’ve been studying the Bible for 45 years professionally. Why don’t I know the Bible better than I know it? And it makes me want to go study things when I have that feeling, when I’m working through a passage or you’ve preached through a Bible book before and you’re listening to somebody else preach on the passage and.

0:03:53 – (Lig Duncan): And you go, how did I miss that? I preached through that Bible book. That brother just brought out something that was plain as the nose on my face and I missed it. I’m forever doing that. I’ll hear a sermon, I’ll be edified by it. I’ll go back and wonder what I did with that passage. And I’ll go back and I’ll look and I’ll go, oh, how did I miss that? He was so right about that. And I totally missed that. I didn’t say anything about that in the sermon. So all of us want to keep faith.

0:04:20 – (Lig Duncan): Filling up the tank. We will be able to edify people better, but it’ll also be good for our own souls. And again, it’s different for everybody. Everybody didn’t have to go do a PhD or do some sort of formal track thing, but all of us ought to be trying to fill up the tank.

0:04:37 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. And I’m convinced this has to be a discipline just like other things in life such as exercise and healthy eating, even something as enjoyable as reading for those of us who are pastors, who are go getters, and we want to constantly be kind of doing more ministry. And sometimes even just, you know, it can be responding to emails that just taking up a lot of time. We have to carve out moments to not just be still in the presence of the Lord, but to be going deeper in sharpening our minds and edifying our hearts. My associate pastor Kyle is relatively new to the position, and I’ve told him that I want him spending 30 minutes a day on the clock reading some kind of Christian book or theological book.

0:05:29 – (Matt Smethurst): And the reason for that is I know his personality. He’s such a relational machine. He’s a hard worker.

0:05:39 – (Lig Duncan): Right.

0:05:39 – (Matt Smethurst): He’s not the kind of guy I’m worried is just twiddling his thumbs and wasting his time. And therefore I know that if I don’t tell him, you, you must do this, that he just won’t. But that’s actually a way that he is going to serve our congregation is by filling up his tank, sharpening his mind, feeding his heart so that he can better minister to others.

0:06:00 – (Lig Duncan): That’s good. That’s really good. And knowing a fellow pastor like that, that’s a gift. He didn’t know what a gift that is for you to know that about him. And all of us wish that we could be more like a guy like that, who loves the ministry, works hard at it, loves to be with people, because I find my. I do love the part of pulling back and reading a book on my own and having nobody bother me. So I have a special appreciation for pastors that just want to be out there on the front lines all the time. But you’re right, they too need to have their tank filled up.

0:06:37 – (Matt Smethurst): And there’s also something to be said for reading not just great theological minds, but good writers. I think it actually helps me stay fresh when it comes to writing sermons and coming up with illustrations, thinking, for lack of a better word, cinematically right in word pictures, which is going to make our preaching more fresh and compelling by God’s grace. And so, yeah, when it comes to informal ways to stay sharp as a pastor, I think these days, there is actually an embarrassment of riches out there.

0:07:15 – (Matt Smethurst): I mean, there are so many wonderful publications and publishers. You know, everything from Banner of Truth to Crossway to others who are just churning out rich resources. But also there are, you know, TGC hosts Themelios, which is a theological journal that is free and comes out four times a year. That’s a way to kind of stay.

0:07:37 – (Lig Duncan): The Carson center has unbelievable riches at TGC that, you know, a full commentary online of the Bible, things like this. Absolutely. Those are tremendous resources. Yep.

0:07:49 – (Matt Smethurst): TGC has a bunch of courses that you can go through that you can encourage your lay leaders to go through. And also there’s a new page at TGC, just tgc.org pastors. If you just go to tgc.org pastors and bookmark it, that will constantly be basically channeling all of the pastoral content that TGC produces in one place, which is a wonderful thing to just check out on a normal basis. Anything else you would commend before we think about formal ways to grow?

0:08:28 – (Matt Smethurst): Anything else, just informally you would commend?

0:08:30 – (Lig Duncan): I mean, I think there’s been a lot of criticism of the conference culture of our generation, say, the last 20 years, and there are things to criticize about it, to be sure. But I find that a lot of pastors use that as a time for spiritual refreshment and connection with their fellow pastors or elders.

0:08:50 – (Matt Smethurst): And I think that’s really good.

0:08:52 – (Lig Duncan): And buying good books that maybe you can’t get in your hometown. I’m always looking for a good theological bookstore. I like watching what walking through conference bookstore areas and finding stuff. So there is a role for that. And I think there are plenty of opportunities still out there where that’s an informal way of edification that can be helpful. It’s bite sized, it’s not sustained necessarily, but it can provide spiritual refreshment. And so I have seen that used positively.

0:09:30 – (Lig Duncan): Another thing that you can avail yourself of talking about the written material that is out there when you think about. You and I were talking about the chronological Bible that you’ve been using from crossways, but the study Bibles that exist out there. I mean, I remember when the NIV study Bible first came out, but now you’ve got an ESV study Bible. You’ve got the King James study Bible that Joel Beekie did.

0:10:00 – (Lig Duncan): You’ve got the Reformation study Bible and I’m a study Bible nerd.

0:10:04 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, and the NIV Zondervan study Bible, which I think might be different than what you’re referring to, the one Carson and Baselli edited.

0:10:12 – (Lig Duncan): The new one. Right. I’m talking about the old one, which was really good. The old one was really good. Kenneth Barker, I think was involved in it then, but. But Carson & Co. Did the most recent NIV. I like study Bibles. I like the articles that they generate. Reading through those articles can be an edifying thing. I like reading through the notes of study Bibles on particular Bible books. So let’s say I’m getting ready to preach a sermon series on First Chronicles and Two Chronicles. And I’ve never, ever preached on that before.

0:10:44 – (Lig Duncan): Reading through study Bible notes is a quick way to get up to speed on content and issues that you’re gonna. Now, you’re still gonna wanna use commentaries and you’re gonna wanna dive into the text. But the notes to study Bibles can be a great way. And I’ve even done that devotionally. I’ve decided, okay, I’m gonna read through the notes to the ESV Study Bible devotionally this year. And so that can be a way. There are a lot of printed resources that can be utilized for either developing greater command of the Scriptures or for edifying you in certain doctrinal areas.

0:11:29 – (Matt Smethurst): Even over the last year, I have tried to do a deeper dive into the doctrine of union with Christ, into thinking about the Lord’s Supper and the doctrine of the Trinity. Just making sure that I have my head around how Christians have thought about these things for 2000 years.

0:11:50 – (Lig Duncan): So good.

0:11:51 – (Matt Smethurst): And am not inadvertently either misleading my people in some of my language or robbing them of some of the wonder and the joy that could be theirs if they have a better grasp on how doctrines are not so much a list as they are a web. And they are interconnected in this beautiful way such that if you poke one, there are going to be ripple effects elsewhere. And we want our people to view it that way.

0:12:19 – (Matt Smethurst): Now, we want all pastors, we would encourage all pastors to be seeking to carve out this time to grow, to feed their minds, to stay sharp. But also for some pastors, it might be a wise thing to see if they can pursue another degree. So as the chancellor of a seminary, talk about the benefit for a pastor in the trenches of ministry, considering some kind of further education.

0:12:50 – (Lig Duncan): Well, I actually encourage elders at local churches to give their pastors study leave. Kind of like you did with Kyle. Okay, if we get vacation, you want to spend that vacation on your wife and your family. You are loathe to carve out any of that vacation time and use it on study. If you give study leave and say, we want you actually to go study in addition to your vacation, that provides tremendous opportunity and impetus for edifying, you know, self edification. So I encourage elders give that time to your pastors, just like you would weekly want your pastor to be.

0:13:41 – (Matt Smethurst): It’ll come back to benefit you.

0:13:42 – (Lig Duncan): It will benefit you. You will never regret your pastor having done that extra study. And so it can be a pastor could go do a thm, or a pastor could go take courses without ever intending to graduate with anything, but have concentrated blocks of time, maybe a week intensive course, where they went and studied something that was edifying. And again, it allowed them to decompress from the pressures of the work in the local church, pull away from the demand.

0:14:20 – (Lig Duncan): You can be in the middle of preparing. The phone call comes, you gotta drop everything and you’ve gotta go to the hospital, or you’ve gotta go to the house, or you’ve got to go to where the car wreck was. Put them in someplace where they can just concentrate on God, on the Bible, on studying. That’s a very refreshing thing to do. But there’s something about having to engage your intellectual faculties in a project that you’re just going to get it in ways that you wouldn’t sitting at a conference.

0:14:56 – (Lig Duncan): And I think some pastors need to do that. And I think. But let me say, I think we not only need to do that for our own edification, but the fact of the matter is theological education has already changed in our time and it’s not going back. And the old system where a significant majority of the ministry going into, say, the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in America went through a certain number of seminaries, that’s going to be.

0:15:27 – (Lig Duncan): It’s going to be more and more diffused. People are going to be. There are going to be different pathways of education going into ministry, which is going to mean we’re going to need more pastors who are involved in theologically educating the next generation of ministers. Because the few seminaries that used to have a monopoly on that don’t have the monopoly that they used to have. And I’m always looking for pastors who have academic credentials who are willing to teach. There are electives that they’re able to teach. Sometimes they come in and sub for professors that are on sabbatical. That ends up being, by the way, a real refreshing thing for them. For a pastor to be able to come teach doctrine of God for a week and get away from the grind of ministry and think about God and help young people that are preparing for gospel work to think about God, well, it’s just a wonderful thing. I had that experience as a pastor when I was a pastor at first President Jackson for 17 years.

0:16:32 – (Lig Duncan): I was part time at the seminary. I was adjunct and I would teach about a course a semester. And it was just wonderful to be able to leave the church and the pressures of ministry and go teach about God, teach about the Bible, interact with young people that were asking questions. What’s it gonna be like? Be able to tell em. Well, let me tell you what it’s gonna be like. I’ll tell you from this week what it’s gonna be like.

0:16:54 – (Lig Duncan): That was just a wonderful thing for me. I would say that the church, by allowing me to do that, was actually letting me do continuing education because I had to prepare lectures, I had to get things ready. And you learn a lot when you’re teaching. And so we see a lot of. We see pastors doing this in Demen programs. We see pastors doing this.

0:17:18 – (Matt Smethurst): Even the demons believe in Shai.

0:17:19 – (Lig Duncan): Even the demons believe. That’s right. Yeah. Thank you, David Wells and the demonization of the Ministry. Remember that old article that caused so much controversy? You know, I do see pastors. I’M thinking right now you may know the name Jonathan Landry Cruz. John is. He’s an OPC minister. He’s written several books. He’s written beautiful hymns. And he was in my Doctor of Ministry course in Charlotte a year ago.

0:17:50 – (Lig Duncan): And number one, I thought, well, what a blessing it is for me to have a guy like this in class. I mean, he could be up here teaching this class himself. And there he was, sitting in a Covenant Theology class for ministry, thinking through the implications of Covenant Theology for pastoral ministry. And he’s a guy who’s already edifying the church. He’s writing books, he’ll speak at conferences. He’ll be a guy who’s able to teach classes someday.

0:18:20 – (Matt Smethurst): But the point you’re making argument from the greater to the lesser even he hasn’t arrived. But he still knows his need for.

0:18:29 – (Lig Duncan): Absolutely.

0:18:30 – (Matt Smethurst): So how should a pastor think through? I mean, of course this is going to require case by case, situational wisdom because every, every situation will be different and some pastors just won’t have the ability to do it. But how should someone think through whether they should pursue an advanced degree? Because it’s not right for everybody.

0:18:47 – (Lig Duncan): No, it isn’t. And, and, and we were talking off camera and I have one. One of my early students at the seminary was not the best academic. You know, academics were not his thing. He was really interested in the material. He was really godly, and so he wanted to take it in. He struggled with writing and with testing and things of that nature. Now he has turned out to be a better pastor than I’ll ever be.

0:19:19 – (Lig Duncan): He doesn’t need to go do a PhD to edify himself. There’s gonna be a different way for that guy to edify himself. But there are gonna be some guys that have some chops to do some further study who ought to. And it’s gonna be edifying to them. It’s gonna be good for the church. And then they’re probably going to be able to have a wider application of that somewhere. I tell most of us can have some area that we have focused on that ends up being a blessing to the circle of ministers that we’re in. All of us usually have a, a little bit larger of circle of ministers that we associate with.

0:20:02 – (Lig Duncan): And I love to hear from guys that are experts in certain areas that I’m not an expert in. They edify me. So you were talking about the doctrine of God and want to go back and learn the doctrine of Trinity. Well, reading Scott for me, my president in Orlando, my junior colleague in the seminary, a man more than a decade younger than me. Good. Bit more than a decade younger than me, has written on doctrine of God and the doctrine of Trinity in ways where Scott Swain. Scott Swain, who?

0:20:32 – (Matt Smethurst): Remember was. I had him in seminary.

0:20:35 – (Lig Duncan): Did you?

0:20:35 – (Matt Smethurst): Because I started out at rts.

0:20:37 – (Lig Duncan): Oh, wow.

0:20:38 – (Matt Smethurst): Way back in the day. And I took doctrine of God one from him, and it was remarkable.

0:20:44 – (Lig Duncan): Yeah, well, I didn’t have that experience in seminary. I was still working in the day where theistic mutualism was the thing.

0:20:52 – (Matt Smethurst): Okay, help me stay sharp. What is that? I don’t know what that is.

0:20:54 – (Lig Duncan): That’s a term that was invented just a few years ago to describe a tendency to change the classical doctrine of God in an anthropomorphic direction and to deny things like the impassibility of God or the immutability of God or the timelessness of God, the eternality of God, and to define them in more creaturely categories, more relational categories. That was still going on when I was in seminary in the 1980s, even in Orthodox circles.

0:21:35 – (Lig Duncan): And what’s happened in your generation, Matt, is there’s a whole group of young scholars, Baptists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, that they are on fire for robust classical Christian doctrine of God. And so much so, when I read Scott and heard Scott teach and read him write, read his writings on doctrine of God and doctrine of Trinity, I realized I need to change the way I say some of these things. I need to talk about this different.

0:22:10 – (Lig Duncan): My confessional instincts had kept me out of trouble, but I realized that I had not gotten the fullness of my own tradition. And when I encountered Scott’s writings, I just thought, man, I need to get better in that area. So it doesn’t matter your age, Matt. You can be an old guy like me, and there are young guys that are out there doing really good work that it’s going to edify you. If you’re a pastor, you’ve been a pastor for 40 years. Doesn’t matter. It’s still going to edify you.

0:22:38 – (Lig Duncan): You’re going to be excited about God in new ways again. You’re going to talk about God with a new excitement and a new knowledge. You’re going to be able to apply certain things to your people that they would have missed if you didn’t know those things. All of us ought to be trying to get better, and all of us need to figure out how to learn somehow. Doctors are expected to do it. Accountants are expected to do it. Counselors are expected to do it. Attorneys are expected to do it. Teachers are expected to do it.

0:23:09 – (Lig Duncan): Pastors ought to do it. Right? Right.

0:23:12 – (Matt Smethurst): One caution I think is worth giving, though, is that you don’t want to pursue an advanced degree as a means of escape from the humdrum nature of pastoral life. So, yes, one of the benefits is that it is intellectually stimulating and it kind of keeps you sharp and fresh. But the reality is pastoral ministry is hard.

0:23:36 – (Lig Duncan): It is.

0:23:37 – (Matt Smethurst): And you’re doing membership interviews and marriage counseling and having one difficult conversation after another. And if that is what’s motivating you to say, now I just want to escape and go give my best energy to something else, well, then that’s probably not the wisest motivation.

0:23:57 – (Lig Duncan): Hearty Amen, Matt. I think for me, and I think I may even have used the word escape, here’s what I. Here’s what I meant for me to be able to go and teach on the doctrine of adoption and have just a little while away from the couple that’s just lost a child or the controversy amongst the elders over some issue was not because I really wanted to be there and I didn’t want to be with my people. It was to recharge my battery so that I could go back in better prepared to serve them, more confident in who God is.

0:24:33 – (Lig Duncan): Those sorts of. So amen to you. It’s not that we want to go off somewhere and just hide and never come back. We’re not wanting to build our little tents on the top of the mountain.

0:24:43 – (Matt Smethurst): Do it because you want to be a better pastor, not because you’re just tired of pastoring.

0:24:49 – (Lig Duncan): I don’t want somebody coming to the seminary because they don’t want that sort of reality in the pastoral ministry. I want people coming to the seminary to teach who loved the pastoral work, not that they’re trying to escape it or cynical about it. They love the pastoral work. In fact, we really encourage our present professors to be pastorally involved in their local churches in some manner. It’s not the same for everybody, but many of them are staff pastors somewhere, and I want them to be able to say, not just, you know, 15 years ago when I was a pastor, X happened, but last week at the church, we were dealing with this. And I want them to love the local church. It’s easy to be cynical about the pastoral ministry because hard things happen.

0:25:35 – (Lig Duncan): It’s easy to get burned out on it and want to escape. But I’m not talking about getting away because you don’t love that, but getting away so that you can go back in there and really throw yourself into the work.

0:25:48 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. And that’s one of the reasons we’re doing this podcast, because it is so easy to grow discouraged, disillusioned, cynical about the work of ministry. Just as it’s possible for any Christian to lose their first love in Christ, it’s also possible to forget why we got into this in the first place. That’s why we say we want to help pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry. So this is something we would encourage you as pastors to consider is, whether through informal ways or more formal ones, continuing to pursue education to stay sharp so that you will be more effective on the front lines of pastoral work.

0:26:23 – (Lig Duncan): Matt, we’ve talked a little bit about how to grow in our knowledge of scripture, why it might be helpful sometimes to pursue formal theological studies as a pastor. One thing we haven’t talked about is cultural issues. And I wonder, are there things that you do to stay abreast of cultural issues? Anything that you would commend to pastors? Bible believing pastors that want to be faithful to the word of God, but also who want to be aware of what’s going on in the culture, want to be able to speak intelligently about certain issues that their people are dealing with every day.

0:26:59 – (Lig Duncan): What are the things that you do?

0:27:00 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, I try first and foremost to just keep a pulse on what my own people are thinking about and processing and worried about. I do think it could be a tendency for us as pastors to be so dialed in to what’s going on nationally or internationally that we aren’t as dialed in to what our actual sheep are facing and thinking about. Having said that, as leaders, those who want to be out in front of conversations and trends, I do try to stay abreast not only of kind of the headlines in terms of current events, but also trends such as artificial intelligence and ways that these things could create or will create all kinds of ethical challenges for us in ministry and for our people in the, in the years and decades to come.

0:27:55 – (Matt Smethurst): Just to reference TGC again, that that’s one of the main things that they want to do for pastors, is to be kind of the best friend to the pastor by doing a lot of that, by basically gathering experts who have done the deep dives, who have done the research on issues that you just frankly don’t have the time to responsibly dive into. So, for example, you are thinking about in vitro fertilization, or you’re thinking about transgenderism, or you’re thinking about some kind of theological trend or whatever the Case may be TGC and other organizations are producing really helpful resources that can kind of bring you up to speed quickly on that.

0:28:37 – (Matt Smethurst): And so I would say that through online websites, through reading various cultural commentators, and I guess the last thing I would say on this lig is I try as a pastor not only to think about and address the obvious cultural issues that everyone can kind of see, but also to go a bit subterranean and. And think about, for example, expressive individualism, which is the soil in our modern cultural moment out of which so many of these societal evils grow.

0:29:13 – (Matt Smethurst): And so I’m constantly in my sermons, even if I’m not in every sermon denouncing a particular societal evil or using a 50 cent word like expressive individualism, trying to remind us that, you know, we do not belong to ourselves, we belong body and soul, to the Lord Jesus Christ, but that Satan is slithering in and trying to convince us that, hey, you’re gonna find freedom in life and joy if you do you, if you follow your heart, if you’re true to yourself.

0:29:40 – (Matt Smethurst): But that actually Jesus shows up and he says, no, it’s not express yourself, it’s deny yourself. It’s not follow your heart, it’s follow me. It’s not be true to yourself, it’s be true to me. And I think the more that we can catechize our people and disciple them into thinking about the fact that this is God’s world and we’re living in it for his glory, our enjoyment is a great way to just kind of undercut, even preemptively undercut, a lot of the challenges they’ll be facing.

0:30:13 – (Matt Smethurst): Even if we don’t know exactly what all of those challenges will look like in the years to come. What would you add for, you know, how do you stay abreast?

0:30:21 – (Lig Duncan): No, that’s good. I think one of the things that you just pointed out reminds us none of us can be an expert in all of these areas, and pastors shouldn’t claim to be experts in these areas. And so we do need places where we can go. I have for years benefited from the work of, say, the center for Bioethics and Human Dignity to ask to get answers from a legal, medical, and ethical standpoint on things like in vitro fertilization and a whole range of fertility questions that come up. TGC provides that kind of material as well. But in both of those cases, that’s not my area of expertise. I’ve taught medical ethics before, but that’s still not an area of expertise.

0:31:09 – (Lig Duncan): So I want to make sure that I’M hearing from competent Christian lawyers, doctors, counselors, medical ethicists who have thought through these things for me and can distill the mountain of information that there is about it so that if I do speak to it, I speak responsibly. And it’s very easy in our day to get. Get somebody’s latest hot take on issue. It’s usually not very helpful. And by the way, the other thing you said is you want to try and get underneath things. I think that’s such a good word sometimes underneath the hot buttons of our day are far more important issues than the hot buttons themselves that we never pay attention to because our eyes are on the hot buttons and pastors need to think about that. And let me say the other thing that you said that I think is so important is Pastor, your congregation, not the Internet.

0:32:06 – (Lig Duncan): The Internet is not your congregation. Your congregation is your congregation. And thank heavens, 96% of them don’t know the latest thing that has been said in our neck of the woods on the Internet. They’re out there living their lives and, and they’re not watching what is on X or on Instagram or on social media somewhere. And so knowing what the issues are for your congregation is a big deal. My congregation in Jackson, I had 200 attorneys in the congregation. I had 200 doctors and nurses in the congregation.

0:32:42 – (Lig Duncan): And we were pretty close to the state capitol. So when things were roiling in the legal community or the medical community or in government, I was going to have. I had a lot of lobbyists in the congregation. There were going to be. I knew that those issues were going to be in their lives and I wanted to be able to be aware of those things. I’ve actually found people that could help me in that area.

0:33:07 – (Lig Duncan): I’ve got a guy that I can text at any time who’s a lawyer, he’s a Christian, he’s a journalist, and I can ask him questions about, hey, what’s going on in the. I see this big debate in the state about this. Can you tell me what’s going on? And I can trust him to give me good, competent analysis of a situation that otherwise I just have to be dependent upon whatever is being shared in the media that day, which is often not for any fault of the journalists themselves, but they just can’t be complete and they’re not immune to the desire to have a clickbaity title on something.

0:33:47 – (Lig Duncan): And so I can go to somebody who doesn’t have to draw that kind of attention to give me a breakdown on it. And Go, oh, I see what’s going on. There’s a big debate right now on school choice in Mississippi and there are people arguing this and that and the other. And so it’s really nice for me to have somebody that I can go to and, and say, can you fill me in on why people are saying this and why people are saying that? And what are the issues in the legislature about this? And just let me be aware of this. Cause I’m going to have people in my congregation, some of them that are having to vote on this, some people that are involved in lobbying for one side or the other.

0:34:27 – (Lig Duncan): I need to know what’s going on as a pastor.

0:34:29 – (Matt Smethurst): And we do want to disciple our people through these difficulties issues because if we don’t, someone else will. And there’s a role for a weather reporter who’s telling you what the weather’s going to be tomorrow. There’s a role for a meteorologist who is charting out what the weather is going to be like for the next few weeks. But there’s also a role for the climatologist who’s studying weather patterns over the course of decades.

0:34:56 – (Matt Smethurst): And as a pastor, we don’t want to only be the kind of climatologist that’s solely talking about these abstract cultural trends and is never having the courage to speak truth to power into, into and to confront societal evils head on. On the other hand, if we let the headlines dictate what we are worked up about and what we’re talking about, we’re just going to be that weather reporter and we’re not going to actually be prepared, preparing our people for a lifetime of faithfulness.

0:35:28 – (Lig Duncan): Well said.

0:35:30 – (Matt Smethurst): We hope this episode of the Everyday Pastor has been an encouragement to you. We would love it if you take a moment to share it with a friend or another person that you think could benefit from it. Because we do want to help pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.