Working with Fellow Elders (Part 1)

Ligon Duncan

You know, we look for gifts, we look for personality. We look for success in the secular world and leadership in that setting. Because it’s very tempting to pick the most successful guy. Oh, he’s successful. Let’s make him an elder. And Paul, Paul says, you know, I’d kind of like to see that guy’s character, how it plays out at home and in his relationship with people at the church and in his relationship with people in the community.

Matt Smethurst

Welcome back to the everyday pastor a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. I’m Matt Smithers and I’m Luke Duncan, and we’re going to be talking today about working with fellow elders. And before we get into the discussion, we don’t want to assume that every listener, every pastor, has other elders, but it is something we want to commend, because we think that the Bible holds out a pattern, even a normative pattern, in the New Testament, not just of a solo elder, as in the preacher, but actually of a plurality. I would say that the first thing to know about elders in the Bible is that they are plural. That’s right, they show up. In fact, I remember LIG when I was taking a seminary class and there was a visiting professor who will remain nameless, who was arguing that the New Testament does not prescribe, require a plurality of elders. And it led me, admittedly, to disengage a little bit and to go on a little journey through my New Testament. And just in a matter of about 10 minutes, I think I found 20 places in the New Testament where the word elder shows up as elders. And so let’s just establish that. Why is it important for pastors to care about having a plurality of elders, obviously, because we want to be faithful to scripture. But why is it such a gift? Well,

Ligon Duncan

one thing is, we want to be biblical, and you’re exactly right. In every part of the New Testament that speaks to the government of the earliest church, you find a plurality of godly elders giving leadership. One example would be in Acts. CHAPTER 20, when Paul is meeting with the leaders of the church at Ephesus, they are called in Acts. CHAPTER 20, verse 17, elders in the plural, presbuteroi. And by the way, elder and bishop in the New Testament is the same office. In fact, I think you could say elder is the name of the office Bishop is the function of the office. Elders. Bishop. Elders oversee, they guide, they care for, they watch over the flock. And they’re called elders in verse 17, in Acts chapter 20, and the elders are said to be bishops in verse 28 so if you, if you look at Paul, Peter, Luke in the book of Acts and James, every single one of those passages will testify. Every single one of those those sets of writings will testify to the plurality of leadership by elders. The Greek word for elders in the plural is presbuteroi. You hear, you hear the word from which we get Presbyterian, which, by the way, just means old man. But in that case, of course, it means a person who’s spiritually mature. The other spiritually mature. In Christ, there are older brothers. In Christ, presbutero and Episcopal is the name behind overseers, or bishops. You can hear the name Episcopalian from that, but it means someone who watches over or guides or cares for and, and, by the way, you’ve quoted a couple of times as we’ve had conversations from Hebrews and and and and obeying your leaders everywhere in the New Testament, where leadership is talked about, it’s not one single individual, it’s a group of godly men that are watching over the flock and Baptists and Presbyterians over against some of our very good friends in the evangelical world have said we really do think the New Testament tells us how we’re supposed to do life together. And I would argue this, Matt, your church government teaches theology. I mean, it just does. It’s unavoidable. Your church government teaches theology. And if submitting to the brethren is an important part of the Christian life, and the New Testament says it is, then how can you do that? If you only have one leader, who does he submit to? And so unless that leader himself has to submit to other leaders, how does that? How does that happen in the Christian life? And so it has been one of the great it’s a personal blessing to me to have ministered. I’m sure it is for you in a context where I am not the one. Who is calling all the shots? Yeah, I am part of a group of men. Sometimes you have wisdom that I don’t have. Yeah, I started out in ministry as a much younger man than a lot of my elders in the church, and they have saved my bacon so many times my instinct, would we need to do this? And well, look, and I’m not sure we need to do that. And nine times out of 10, I’ve looked back and thought, yeah, they were right. I was wrong. And that dynamic of being able to submit to the brethren in decisions that are important for the life of the church has just been a blessing to me, but it’s rooted in biblical conviction. And just like you went after that lecture and study, are there passages that are particularly significant to you in the New Testament that you Well,

Matt Smethurst

I mean, you mentioned one of the key ones, acts 20 where, not only do we see a reference to in in the English translation, elders and overseers, yeah, but also this injunction that you ought To care for the flock of God. Amen. So elders, our bishops, are pastors. Amen, interchangeable terms, referring to the same office. We see the same thing in Titus one, and also in a place like First Peter five, where Peter writes, so I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that’s going to be revealed shepherd the flock that is among you exercising oversight. It’s God’s provision and gift to us, because none of us brings everything to the table like you. You mentioned that so often, the collective wisdom of the whole turned out to be the way of wisdom. I’m so grateful that in planting River City Baptist here in Richmond three years ago that I didn’t start as the sole elder, and I understand church planters have to do that sometimes, but I was able to have two other founding elders, and that was so enriching for me, not just spiritually, to kind of have a band of brothers there from the beginning, but to be able to also say to the congregation, we decided, rather than just I decided, yes, there’s something really precious about that. And I think the Lord knows how much we need our weaknesses to be balanced out, how we have blind spots and need others to be able to help come alongside of us and help us lead more effectively. So you have a lot of experience. I mean, you were senior minister for nearly 20 years in Jackson. That means you’ve worked with a ton of elders over the years. I think Mark Dever, one time said, probably the single most beneficial thing in my ministry has been my congregation’s recognition of my fellow elders. Talk to me just about your experience serving with other elders and how that was administered. Well, I first of all, I grew

Ligon Duncan

up in the home of an elder. My dad was an eighth generation southern Presbyterian ruling elder. So for eight generations, back in the Duncan and McDowell line, there had been men that had served as elders in local churches. And so my dad had it in his bloodstream, and I got to watch that as a young man. And really, this is one of the first things I said to my elders at first Pres. I said, I’m young, you know, I’ve got a lot of growing to do, but I can look at things from your perspective, because my dad was a ruling elder, and I know how ruling elders think, and so

Matt Smethurst

define our terms. That means he wasn’t a vocation. I think you

Ligon Duncan

might talk about staff elders and lay elders, whereas Presbyterians would talk about teaching elders and ruling elders, and so he was not on the church staff. He wasn’t paid for doing his work, but he was deeply involved. He’s on the life led church elder visitation, called upon to teach, called upon to lead the church in prayer, called upon, together with the other elders, to make decisions about the life of the church purchasing property, whether we’re going to build a building or recommend to the congregation that we purchase property or build a building, they had to make a lot of wisdom decisions. And in his day, they were fighting for the theological integrity of the church, because we were in a denomination that had compromised its commitment to the Word of God, and so I saw him agonize over leaving a denomination that his family was in and that he had been baptized in, and that I had been baptized in, to go to a denomination that was going to be faithful to the Word of God and preach the gospel. And he wept over that he was leaving his cousins and his friends, and they were calling him a fundamentalist and all these kinds of things. And so I got to see a man have to do what all elders do, whether they’re staff elders or lay elders. You have to have a theological backbone, you have to have conviction. You have to have a humble pastoral. Art. I gotta watch that growing up, you

Matt Smethurst

have to be willing to disappoint people you and people not to like you, yes and somehow, to not just make people feel loved, you have to really love them. You have to really love people and also disagree with them, yeah, and have them feel disagreed with and loved, that’s

Ligon Duncan

right, and it’s very, very difficult to do. So I that was a privilege for me. And then I had really good pastors who were good models of, you know, a teaching elder or a staff elder in a local church. And I got to work in churches where there were healthy elderships. Maybe one testimony that I’ll give you is the first week that I was a pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson in september of 1996 we had a lady in the congregation that had been in the process of dying of cancer, and I our church, First Presbyterian Church sits right across the street from the Baptist Medical Center in Jackson. It’s one of the largest hospitals in Jackson, and so I got the call that Carol was dying and that I needed to get to the hospital. By the time I got to Carol’s room, one of my elders was already there, and I just thought, thank you Lord that I have elders like this. This guy’s a lawyer at a big law firm, and he beats me to the hospital. No one told me. No one told him to go. No, yeah, it’s I just thought, Okay, thank you. I’m not in this alone. So I’ve had those kinds of men in my life to serve my congregation alongside

Matt Smethurst

that shows what I really want to emphasize on the front end of this episode is that elders are fundamentally shepherds, yes, that brother understood his fundamental work to be a shepherd. Yeah. Elders are not fundamentally trustees, not fundamentally a board of directors, yeah. But are called to to pastor the flock, to know the flock, to lead the flock to the chief Shepherd, amen as under shepherds when it came to, you know, I imagine that as first pres grew, you worked with different sizes of elder teams. What are some of the things you learned about leading a group of elders as the senior minister? Well,

Ligon Duncan

I had, you know, it was a large congregation, and look, there are pluses and minuses to sizes of congregation. Smaller congregation, you can know one another better. You can be in one another’s lives more easily. It doesn’t require as much organizational structuring. Things can happen more organically and naturally in a larger congregation, you really have to plan for a lot of that stuff to happen, but we’re also able to resource a lot of ministry. We were able to help plant churches and send out a lot of missionaries. So I used to joke, our church would have been a medium sized Baptist church, but it was large for a Presbyterian Church, you know. So, you know, there, there are certain challenges that you have with the church that size. So I always had a large session, and that’s the nickname that Presbyterians call the group of elders when they’re together. We weren’t super organized when I got there about how those elders were going to get to all the needs. So you had kind of that parish model, yeah. So we did have to, kind of eventually. We actually, we had a guy join our pastoral staff that had been a campus minister. He was highly relational. He could, if he could make friends with a telephone pole. I mean, this guy was amazing. And I said, Billy, could you help me organize the elders, so that we’re not letting people fall through the cracks in the congregation. And so he actually paired up the elders and the deacons with groups of families throughout the congregation, and we just made sure that we were checking on everybody, as you might imagine, as often in churches, the women had been doing a better job of this than the officers had, and the women actually sort of spurred us on to doing a better job in this area. But the elders, many of them, were business owners and or with very responsible positions in their vocation. They wanted to be good shepherds. And we we read a book. First we read a book that Jim Boyce had written called Christ call to discipleship, and all of the elders said, we need to be better disciplers, because that elders are that’s the business we’re in. We need to be better disciplers. And then they read a book by an old Scottish minister named David Dixon called the work of the elder. And when they read that, they said, Oh, we’ve not been doing all the work that the Bible calls elders to do. We’ve been, I love the word you use. They said, we’ve been too much of a spiritual board of directors. We want to be. Shepherds. We want to be shepherds, teachers, elders. Not all of them are equally good at teaching in a public setting. There’s some of them that could, they could preach up a storm, and then there’s some of them that are going to be great in a one to one discipleship setting or in a small group setting, that would be really uncomfortable in preaching or teaching in a larger segment, and

Matt Smethurst

some and some praise God are going to bring financial, know how, or, you know, HR, and that’s great. It’s just not fundamentally what the office was

Ligon Duncan

true. So they all aspired to growing in what the Bible expects of elders there. And so that was a wonderful journey. My predecessor, by the way, my successor, David strain, has done a lot better job than I did in in carrying that on and and expanding the spiritual work of the elders of the church. But we, we grew a lot in those years together, and it was a privilege to watch them serve, and I got to see them in pastoral settings that, you know, just just made me proud to be associated with, with guys that were doing the kind of work they were doing.

Matt Smethurst

One thing I’m grateful for is that I was able to serve as a layout or a non staff elder for six years before I ever went on a church staff, so now that I’m, you know, serving as a lead pastor, I hope that it means I’m sensitive to and kind of dialed into what it feels like to not be on staff, but to still be charged with pastoring a flock. Let’s think about what we’re not looking for in a potential elder and what we are looking for. I mean, because this, this is, this is the million dollar question, it’s a lot harder to get rid of a guy than to bring on a guy. So we want to be cautious, but we also don’t want to be fearful. We want to understand Ephesians chapter four, that elders are gifts to the church from the risen and ascended King Jesus. And you know, if he’s giving giving gifts to the church, how dare we not unwrap those gifts and put them to use?

Ligon Duncan

The first thing that you are looking for in an elder is character. I mean, it’s fascinating. In First, Timothy chapter three, verses one to seven, and in Titus chapter one, both passages written by Paul, both passages written by Paul, ostensibly to elders, Timothy and Titus, but really with his eye on the congregation, because right, Timothy and Titus, they are elders. They know what elders are supposed to be. So why is Paul writing this? Because he wants Timothy and Titus to read the congregation, because it’s the congregation. So they know what to identify. Yeah, they have to identify what is an elder. And the big thing that he lands on is character. You know, we look for gifts. We look for personality. We look for success in the secular world and leadership in that setting, Paul looks for character, and he especially wants to see it at home. How does their character show at home? And then how does it show in their relationship to other people? And so if you look at his qualifications, most of them are character qualifications, and they’re in the context of relationships at home and in the church and with a larger community, because it’s very tempting to pick the most successful guy. Oh, he’s successful. Let’s make him an elder. And Paul, Paul says, you know, I’d kind of like to see that guy’s character, how it plays out at home, and in his relationship with people at the church, and in his relationship with people in the community. And

Matt Smethurst

not just does he have character, but is he ministry minded? So, you know, we’re talking about lay elders, not not people who are formally entering into, you know, paid ministry, but you want to, I think, look for brothers who just want to get after it spiritually by doing good to others, who are constantly thinking about how others in the church are growing or not growing in the Lord. So I think one of the reasons we have that that in a list of qualifications that is emphatically not a skill set we do have first, Timothy, three, two, he’s got to be able to teach, to teach, and I understand that not to mean apt to preach, right, but apt to teach, simply meaning that, hey, here’s a brother who takes spiritual initiative in the Lives of Others, who knows God’s word well enough to apply to people’s hearts and circumstances in such a way that they leave helped, rather than confused? And I

Ligon Duncan

agree with you 100% and I saw that in my own dad. My dad was so nervous to get up and teach a Sunday school lesson or to speak in a large meeting and and yet. And he could teach you stuff about life that you know, that was just amazing. And so he did have that gift of teaching, but not in the formal way, behind a podium, doing a lesson outline, teaching you on history or dad’s teaching as an elder took took place in the context of relationships and mentoring and discipleship, and then how we related to other people when we were in groups like the elders together or in a congregational meeting, he was a good leader of people and a teacher of people how things could be done. So that’s a great point that you when we say that all elders, absolutely all elders, staff elders and lay elders, teaching elders and ruling elders need to be apt to teach that doesn’t mean they all have to be Martin Lloyd Jones, that that’s not what we’re looking for, but we are Kent. Does this person know the truth? And are they able to teach that truth in some capacity, in some way,

Matt Smethurst

and you don’t have to twist their arm to get them to care about the spiritual well being of others, that’s right. They’re exemplary. One of the most striking things about the list of qualifications it’s been observed is how ordinary it is. Most of these things are commanded of all Christians elsewhere, but elders are called to be exemplary in the ordinary. And one of the things I’m looking for in our church, and then I’m encouraging our our congregation, to be looking for are those who are, in a sense, already eldering without the title. In fact, our friend Bobby Jameson, who’s a pastor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he has an article at TGC titled elder before you, elder, which is adapted from his really excellent book, the path to being a pastor. He’s not talking about the path to being a vocational pastor. He’s talking about the path to being an elder. That would be a great resource to read through with, not only your current elders, but also anyone in your church who’s aspiring for ministry. So yeah, anything else in terms of what you’re looking for in an elder? Before we think about the reverse.

Ligon Duncan

Yeah. Well, one is if, if you’re going to be and you’ve already hinted at this, but if you’re going to be able to teach, you actually have to know about the truth and care about the truth. So an elder is going to be someone who knows his Bible, who is an interested student of the Scripture and of theology and cares enough about it to want to convey it to the members of the congregation for the sake of their growth and grace and that, again, it doesn’t that doesn’t mean that you have to be the local seminary systematic theologian to do the job, but you do have to care about the truth. And I again, my dad was he was not a great reader. When he read books, he read smaller books. I can remember him reading not the big book by Lorraine Bucha on predestination, but the little pamphlet by Lorraine Buckner on predestination. And I remember him at the breakfast room table looking at me and saying, Son, why hasn’t anybody ever taught me this before? He was excited about doctrine, yeah, but he was not a scholar, but he did care about the truth, and he got excited about it. And boy, if my elders care about the truth and are excited about it enough to want to convey it, oh, that’s a win. You know, I’m not looking they don’t have to be Steve Wellum, you know, they don’t have to be Scott Swain, but they do have to care about the truth and want to convey it to others. So I do think you’re looking for somebody that realizes the truth is valuable to know for the Christian life

Matt Smethurst

and and to defend and to defend. So I’m thinking of, you know, the qualifications which also appear in Titus one, you know, of course, there’s the the focus on the moral character, as you said, but then there is Titus one, nine, he must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught. That’s right. Why? So that he may be able to give instruction and sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. That’s right, you don’t need a master of divinity degree in order to be able to do that. I’m not looking so much for how many books does this guy have on his shelf? How much has he read? How many conferences has he been to? But rather, what are his instincts? Does he have good biblical and theological instincts so that he knows when something doesn’t smell right. And does he have good pastoral instincts? Does he know how to speak a word in season, and as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, how to how to be gentle with those who need a gentle touch, and how to be firm where that’s needed. Some of it’s in the realm of soft skills, just just the realm of knowing how to relate to people in a way that’s going to be constructive

Ligon Duncan

along those very lines, that that is one of the things I got to see in my dad. My dad grew up in the depression with an alcoholic father who was mean and was a was a United States Marine in the Second World War and. Yet somehow, by grace, He did have a tenderness and a gentleness with people. And I always thought, how did that happen to you? And I think you know the only answer, God, the Holy Spirit. Now he also had an amazingly godly mother, and I’m sure that Miss Irene, as we all called her, had a had a huge impact on him. But I’ve always thought, I mean, dad was a man’s man in every sense of the word, and had faced unbelievably difficult challenges, and yet was really tender and gentle and patient with people. And I that that was something that I could say, yeah, he had backbone, but he also had gentleness, and I’ve always appreciated that combination. And

Matt Smethurst

this is not just Matt and LIG saying, hey, it’s easier to have elders who are gentle. This is the inspired apostle Paul. He says that elders must be sober minded. First Timothy 32 not violent, but gentle. First Timothy three, three and not quarrelsome. First Timothy three, three. That almost sounds redundant, yeah. And it’s kind of is, because it’s like Paul is at pains to say, if you don’t get it, I’m going to say it again, I’m going to say it again. I’m going to say it again. You don’t want contrarians, people who are I mean, you want people who think for themselves right, and who can be decisive in all the right ways. But you don’t want people who excel in and are fluent in the language of criticism. You want people who are fluent in the language of encouragement, who see the best, who believe the best, who endure all things, hope all things, believe all things. Matt, our friend Max mucker has, I’m just turning the corner here to what we’re not looking for in a potential elder. He has written a helpful list of nine red flags in a potential elder. And you can hear Mark dever and Jonathan Leman kind of riff on each of these in an episode of their podcast, pastors talk. I believe it’s, it’s the episode on transitioning to elders Part Two or something? Well, we’ll figure that out and put it in the show notes, but here’s this list of nine things. Nine red flags and a potential elder. One, a man who loves to debate and always seems to have a contrarian spirit. Two, a man who shows an unwillingness to submit to others. Three, a man who isn’t teachable. Four, a man whose children aren’t manageable. Five, a man with a quick temper and a pattern of unresolved conflict. Six, a man with a bad reputation in the community. Seven, a man with an unsupportive wife. In fact, I think I’ll just add like I think it’s a wise thing for pastors who are considering nominating a new elder or reaching out to a brother in the church to see if they’re interested to actually go to his wife first. What do you think about this? Is he fit for this? Because you see him on the home front in a way that we do not and of course, we know from the qualifications, as you alluded to earlier, being a good husband and dad is not a bonus. It’s a prerequisite. Number Number eight, a man who feels entitled to be an elder because he’s been successful outside the church. And number nine, a man who feels entitled to be an elder because he served faithfully within the church. Those are

Ligon Duncan

so good, Matt, those are so good. And and that that’s and let me say social media reveals a lot of those problems. And I want to say a word to people that get on social media with their flame throwers, just you think through that list again, and what does that reveal about your character? And I think elders are careful with their words, and they’re gentle, and they’re sober minded, and they have self control. And how we act on social media matters how we interact with our words with other people. Matters that it that just reveals so much about character. Let me. Let me come back to the one about about wives I always observed that men with particularly godly wives tended to get elected as elders in the church, and I wonder if many of the women of the congregation looked At those godly women and said she respects him. He must be, he must be, he must be the kind of man that I want as an elder. Because I can, I can go down through our elders wives, and I can just, I can tell you how many amazing women were there, and they were known to the women in the congregation. And I think, you know, I’m thinking right now of Shirley and Mark Windham. And Mark is one of my best elders. He’s still a faithful elder there now. And Shirley was beloved in the congregation and a great teacher. And I’m sure that a lot of women said, you know boy Mark Windham. You know Shirley. Windham is one of the. Finest people I know. If Shirley Windham respects Mark Windham, I can respect him as my elder. You know, I’m sure that there were people that thought that way. And so that kind of points to what one of the things that Matt is saying in that list, yeah, yeah,

Matt Smethurst

absolutely. We want the under shepherds in a congregation to kind of emerge naturally out from the flock, meaning that we want to give the opportunity to solicit recommendations from the congregation, even just informally. Hey, who do you see among you who is taking spiritual initiative and discipling others and being a change agent in people’s lives and at least in our polity, the way we would go about it is that the elders would all have to agree unanimously, not on every decision in the life of the church, but when it comes to bringing on another elder, it has to be a unanimous decision among the elders, where the first step would be reaching out to the brother and saying, Hey, if you’re interested in potentially serving among us, please fill out this questionnaire. It is a long and involved document where, for the qualifications in first, Timothy three are functioning as a mirror, and the brother has to walk through all of them and reflect on his life, phrase by phrase. And then there’s a ton of other questions about theology and ethics and morality and pastoral instincts and all the rest. And then if things kind of move forward, we would bring him into an elders meeting. He would participate. And we would also have a time where we kind of put him on the hot seat, and we drill him with all kinds of questions. In fact, one of my favorite questions to ask is just, Hey, do you have any idiosyncratic views on anything we should be aware of meaning as you think about things in life you’re passionate about. It could be a theological issue or a political issue or whatever. Are you basically the only one among your friends that feels that way, just out of curiosity. And that’s not to say that it will screech the process to a halt, but it’s a chance to really get to know a brother. And then, in our context, we would then nominate the brother to the congregation at a members meeting, and then it would lay over for a couple of months, as the congregation has the chance to get to know him and his family. He would in one of our prayer services stand up and share his testimony in order to be better known. And then at our next members meeting, the congregation would vote to install him into the office. How does that differ from what the process? Well,

Ligon Duncan

again, because of the size, we had a process that was a little different than any place I’ve ever been. And so the practice varies in different conservative Presbyterian churches. But we would first of all have nominations from the congregation. We would we would send them out a card with First Timothy three and Titus one on, and as you make a nomination for the office would, do you think through these qualifications, does this? Does this man fit the qualifications of the Scripture? And then we would look at those nominations as a group of elders, and we would, we would make some judgments on who are the men out of this that that are qualified, we would have a training process where we would we would study theology. We would study pastoral ministry together. We would make sure that we knew where they were theologically, and ask the kind of questions that you you asked, any you have, any, any, you know, quirky views that nobody else holds, you know, talk to us about that, that that principle, by the way Don Carson is, I think, the first person that articulated it to me, that people don’t learn what you teach them. They learn what you’re excited about. And sometimes a guy will be really excited about this. It’s his view nobody else holds it, and he agrees with the 98% of everything else that, but the thing that he’s excited about is that thing, and so that’s what the people learn from him. Well, I want people to know the 98% of everything that we agree on and be excited about that, so we’re going to discern that in the process, and then the congregation is going to vote, yeah, and and the congregation will determine how many elders we get out of that election. It’s a similar process, in the sense that we want to do evaluation of character, understanding of their doctrinal commitments, their suitability for the pastoral work, and then vote on them. Have the congregation know them well enough. Same thing, testimony. We have written out testimonies. We prepare a booklet for everybody so they can read their written out testimonies. We give opportunities at meetings for people to get to know them. Et cetera. We have to go the extra mile to make sure that people know who they’re voting on.

Matt Smethurst

Man, there’s so much here to discuss. I think we should wrap up this episode. We’ll do another one on more practice. Considerations about elders, meetings and such, but we hope this episode of the everyday pastor on identifying elders, what we’re not looking for and what we are looking for in elders, has been useful to you. We would love it if you would leave a rating or a review so we can help other pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.