Part 3: Characteristics of Spiritual Leaders

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of spiritual leadership from 1 Timothy 3:1-16.

“Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer, he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money.

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He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.

Deacons, likewise, are to be men worthy of respect, sincere, not indulging in much wine, and not pursuing dishonest gain. They must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience. They must first be tested; and then if there is nothing against them, let them serve as deacons.

In the same way, their wives are to be women worthy of respect, not malicious talkers but temperate and trustworthy in everything. A deacon must be the husband of but one wife and must manage his children and his household well. Those who have served well gain an excellent standing and great assurance in their faith in Christ Jesus.

Although I hope to come to you soon, I am writing you these instructions so that, if I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth. Beyond all question, the mystery of godliness is great: He appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.”

This is the Word of the Lord. Let us pray.

As we turn, Heavenly Father, to some issues that are contentious amongst us, help us to hear your Word clearly and so be worked on by your Holy Spirit that our lives and our ministries grow in conformity to this blessed Word. For Jesus’ sake, amen.

Because I wear three or four hats, I end up doing different things, and part of my work is to minister in different parts of the world. This has had the effect that I’ve seen pastoral styles of ministry across many different cultures. It is worth reflecting a little on how pastors are viewed in different cultures.

Three or four years ago I was in South Korea, two or three trips back. On a Sunday morning, I preached in a church (that shall remain nameless) of about 30,000 people: four congregations of 7,500 each. At the end of the last service, the pastor led me out, and bodyguards formed a wedge to clear the crowds so that he and I could pass out to a chauffeur-driven limousine which picked us up. He and I got in the back, and the limo driver started us off through the streets of Seoul, and the police, who were looking after the traffic as people got out of this vast congregation, stopped and saluted as we went by for blocks around until things sort of thinned out.

It may be that he can do that week after week and not get corrupted. I have to confess it was fun, but I don’t think I could do it very often. For a couple of minutes there, I was thinking about immigrating to Korea, but not very long ago, I was in a country in Africa, sub-Saharan black Africa, a country that shall remain nameless.

There is a broad band of countries right across central Africa where there is a very, very common expression. The expression is, “The pew is higher than the pulpit.” What they mean by this is there has been a vast movement towards urbanization and growth in education that has transformed all the dynamics. In Kenya, for example, there was no university until 1963. Now Nairobi alone, the major city in the highlands of Kenya, has four universities, and there is another at Nakuru.

So suddenly you’ve now got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young university-trained Africans, whereas until very recently and still in substantial measure, most African pastors had been trained in the bush … grade 4 education, grade 6 education, grade 8 education, plus a couple years of Bible institute, and of course, they’re just not capable of handling the vast numbers of urbanized, better-instructed, better-trained young people that are coming through.

The net result is that pastoral ministry, even in Christian families, is very often despised. That’s too strong, but nevertheless, you want your children to go into the government or you want them to get into a multinational, or you want them to get a good job at a university, but you don’t want them to become pastors. That’s a rather different way of looking at pastors from Seoul, Korea, I would have thought.

Formerly in the West, pastors, especially in the Anglo world, very acutely so in England, being a pastor was part of the honorable big two or big three of professions. In Britain you sent one son into the military and another son into the church. There was a certain kind of respectability bound up with going into the ministry, taking on the cloth, whatever.

Even when I was a kid, there was at least some of that around in some circles, but you have to be right in the heart of the Bible Belt, Tulsa, Oklahoma, or someplace like that, to get an awful lot of respect for pastors today. Try being a pastor in New England and see how much social respect you get. Then it’s more complicated yet.

There are all kinds of studies that have shown that the number of expectations congregations have of their pastors has multiplied over the years. Sixty or seventy years ago there were three or four expectations: preaching, certain visitation, marriages and funerals, and one or two other things. Now most such surveys have about 13 different categories of what is expected. Guess what begins to get chopped?

Moreover, our cultural forms of expectations of relationships affect things. In Korea and other Asian countries, there is often an underlay of barely suppressed Confucianism, which thinks in terms of hierarchical polarities, who is up and who is down. The teacher is up; the learner is down. The pastor is up; the layperson is down. That is the way their polarities work.

So in Korean education, the teacher is right up there next to God, and in fact, at high school level, many Korean students are told not to look their teacher in the face but to keep their heads down and copy out their notes. Everything he says is very important. You don’t challenge them. Whereas in Western culture, the whole name of the game is to challenge everybody just in general principle whether you know anything or not. You just challenge everybody. Likewise, in a Western PhD program, part of the aim of the exercise is to get people to think independently.

I just moved offices at Trinity, and in my other office there was a blank wall behind me, and I had above my desk a little saying that my wife had needlepointed. It’s a quotation from C.S. Lewis, “He is not a tame lion.” If you’re familiar with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you remember the passage exactly. Aslan has died and has turned death backwards. The table of death is cracked, and the resurrection life is pulsating again. The children then afterwards want to play with Aslan, and they are told, “Aslan loves children. That’s true, but he is not a tame lion.” It’s a great line.

A few years ago I had a Korean come in starting a PhD program. This was his first interview. He came and sat down in front of me, and I could see his eyes going up and down to this quotation. Being the spoilsport that I am, I didn’t want to enlighten him. I couldn’t really expect him to know English literature, but after about 45 minutes into the discussion, he said, “Excuse me, sir. Is that you?”

You see? He was bringing his Confucian structures with him about who is up and who is down. There are probably some other students now who believe that I’m not a tame lion, too. Nevertheless, that’s not why I put it up there in the first place. This was not part of my gift of intimidation. No, this was actually a reverent quotation.

But now we come to North America, again, where democracy is next to God. What does congregationalism look like in a democratic culture? Suddenly you realize that the cultural expectations all around us begin to play into our reading of Scripture, whether we live in Seoul or whether we live in New York City.

One of the advantages of reading of history, as is one of the advantages of travel, is to be exposed to different ways these things are playing out, and you begin to ask, “Well, is at all relevant? Or is this a call to go back to the book so that Scripture reforms us on front after front after front? How much of what we do is mere tradition?

In other words, even the most elementary awareness of such variation should make us very conscious that we must listen more attentively to Scripture and take our primary cues from what God has disclosed to us so far as we can understand it.

Last night I focused almost exclusively on chapter 3, verses 1–7, with the qualifications for an elder/pastor/bishop. This afternoon I want to jump around a little. We will go through the rest of the chapter rather quickly in due course, but I want to pull in a number of different things that are said by the Pastoral Epistles about ministry.

It’s the one place where I’m going to be partly topical in this series, because I think that there are some points that we simply must not overlook for want of the ability to cover the entire three sets of letters. I shall organize what I want to say now into five points.

1. In addition to the qualifications for elder/pastor/bishop listed in 1 Timothy 3, there are several others that are mentioned in these epistles.

A) At all costs, avoid favoritism.

1 Timothy 5:21. That is very hard to do. There are just going to be some people we like, and it’s all right to like them; and yet, if tensions begin to mount in a church, and you are perceived to handle things based in part on your preference for one person over another, then your authority as a minister of the Word will be called into question. Part of the loneliness involved in pastoral leadership is the crucial importance of avoiding partiality, of avoiding favoritism.

B) Pursue all godly virtues.

1 Timothy 6:11–12. (A passage we’ll look at more closely tonight.) In other words, it’s not just a question of meeting a certain finite list of qualifications found in 1 Timothy, chapter 3, and say, “All right, I’ve met those. Now I’m in.” 1 Timothy 3 does not present itself as an exhaustive list. It’s a crucial list for the purposes at hand, but it’s not an exhaustive list. There is a more fundamental question.… Are you passionate about pursuing all of the excellencies that are bound up with Christ? But we’ll come to that one again tonight.

C) Expect difficulties and be persistent in the face of them.

Second Timothy is especially strong on this point. Let me mention just a few verses. Second Timothy, chapter 2, verses 3 and following:

“Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs—he wants to please his commanding officer. Similarly, if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor’s crown unless he competes according to the rules. The hardworking farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops. Reflect on what I am saying, for the Lord will give you insight into all this.”

The first part of that, you see, is, verse 3, “Endure hardship …” Chapter 2, verse 15: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.” What is presupposed, then, is that there will be need for detailed, hard, continuous study.

Put that verse into its context. The immediately preceding text reads, “Keep reminding them of these things. Warn them before God against quarreling about words; it is of no value, and only ruins those who listen.” Then, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved …” The very context of this study is the presupposition that there will be doctrinal conflict. Part of your ability to handle things as they come up emerges out of disciplined, detailed study for the conflicts that you will face. Chapter 3, verses 10–15:

“You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them.

In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”

Chapter 4, verse 5: “But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.” There is no sense or feel that this is sort of a puff job, is it? But I’ll focus on just one. I mentioned those three; I’ll focus on just one more.

D) Watch your life and doctrine closely. Let all see your progress.

First Timothy, chapter 4, verses 15–16: “Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” In other words, in watching your life and doctrine closely, others should see your progress. You must be a growing person; both in your understanding of teaching, of doctrine, and in the quality of your life, and others should see it. If you’re static, get out of the ministry.

If you’re in a church for 5 years, the most discerning people in the church should be saying things like, “The sermons just keep getting deeper and better.” They should also be saying, “You know, our pastor was prayerful when he first came, but now his prayers just bring me right into the very presence of God. It’s just more wonderful to watch all the time.”

One of the reasons why pastors in many parts of evangelicalism at large move on after 3 years is because they’ve shot their wad after about 18 months. After about two and a half years, they’ve repeated it. After 3 years, they’ve repeated it again, and so it’s about time to move on, isn’t it?

Whereas the person who really is devoting himself to study and growth and understanding of the people, of the text, of the culture, of the applicability, of evangelism, of the text again, more theology, historical theology, of the people, again and again, inevitably they turn out to be people who are so growing themselves that there are not a lot of sheep there who are just itching for him to move on. They’re being fed.

I recall one theologian teaching at an institution not all that far away, a teacher who shall remain nameless, who a couple of us approached a few years ago. We were sitting down, chewing the fat, talking about this and that and the other, and somewhere along the line, what we were reading came up. “What are you reading?” Well, he was reading a who-done-it and he was reading history and so on.

Then someone said, “What are you reading in your own discipline? In your own area of systematic theology, what are you reading these days?” His response, “Oh, I don’t read that anymore. I learned it when I did my PhD.” I thought the PhD was sort of a small edge to get you into a vast field so that you’re able to explore a little better the enormous treasures that are out there.

It’s a terminal degree only in the sense that you’re not still pursuing more degrees, but if you treat it as terminal and absolute, then it’s terminal all right! Horrendous! That fellow shouldn’t be teaching. He shouldn’t be a pastor. He’d make a really first-class janitor or something, but he really shouldn’t be a pastor.

2. It is intriguing that two other themes are often interwoven with passages about Christian leaders.

Those two themes are doxology and eschatology. Let me direct your attention to one such passage in the Pastorals. We’ll be looking at this one in due course a little more closely, but let me read these verses, 1 Timothy, chapter 6, verses 11 and following.

“But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called.… In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Christ Jesus, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ …” Eschatology.

“… which God will bring about in his own time—God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen.” Doxology. That linking of themes is not uncommon. It is not found only in the Pastoral Epistles. To give you one more example, I will read 2 Corinthians, chapter 4, beginning at verses 7–12, and then pick up a little bit more in 15–18, where, again, you find these two themes tied to pastoral ministry.

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.

For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.” Here is a tension between life and death, a tension still there. And now it breaks out. Verses 15 and following:

“All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.” Doxology. “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.” Inaugurated eschatology. “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” Eschatology.

Very commonly do we find Christian ministry tied to the joint themes of doxology and eschatology. Doxology keeps our vision high. It enables us to avoid self-focus, to eschew self-love. It enables us to understand how the context of ministry itself must be an expression of obedience to the first commandment: to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength.

It enables us to be careful about those sneaky little bits we like to put in that draw attention to ourselves. How can we draw attention to ourselves when we have a God like this? Doxology. Then eschatology keeps us remembering what is important. It keeps us filtering things so that we’re not snookered by mere transience. So here’s the second reflection, then. It is intriguing that two other themes are often interwoven with passages about Christian leaders; one is doxology and the other is eschatology. At this juncture I should perhaps say something about …

3. The call to ministry

Come back to 1 Timothy 3, verse 1, “Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer, he desires a noble task.” Now this business of the call to ministry, a vocational call, has been enormously disputed over the years. I’m sure that the few things I’m going to say now are not going to resolve all the questions, but one of the things I want to stress is the diversity of forms of call in the New Testament.

Here, the beginning of this call is in a person who actually desires this ministry; that is, this beginning of call is coming from within the heart of a Christian who wonders, “Could I do that? Should I be thinking about this?” But it’s not the only passage. It’s not the only passage in the Pastorals.

Look for example at 2 Timothy, chapter 2, verse 2. “And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others.” That means that somebody ought to be out there snooping around church after church after church, senior elders, wise heads, saying, “I think that God may well be raising you up to pass things on to other people as you have received things.

Maybe first with testing in various capacities in the church, but finding ways to get these people to get more theological training, more exposure, more ministry. That’s now coming from somebody else. It’s not coming in the first instance from self; it’s coming from somebody else. That was the first stage of my call to ministry.

My first degree was chemistry and mathematics at McGill. I think it was my third year, and at the end of the academic year, the pastor of the church I was going to came up to me and said, “Don, I want you to be my assistant this summer.” I said, “You know, there are a lot of young people in this church. You’ve got me confused with somebody else. I’m doing chemistry myself. After here, it’s Cornell to do organic synthesis. Thank you very much, but you’ve got that one wrong. Sorry.”

He said, “No, no, I want you to be my assistant this summer. I know exactly who you are and what you’re doing, and I want you to be my assistant,” whereupon we had a nice knockdown, dragout argument, and I won. I wasn’t his assistant. I went and worked on air pollution for the federal government that summer. On the other hand, it was the first niggly dig as to whether or not I was going to spend a life in chemistry, and it didn’t come from inner motivation; it came from a pastor.

So I want to ask you, you who are pastors, “How many people have you dug into like that? Hmm? And if you haven’t, why not?” Here we have a good example of it, don’t we? Second Timothy, chapter 2, verse 2. Of course, there are other instances. In Acts, chapter 13, verses 2–3, where you have people already connected with a ministry of a local church.

The Spirit, himself, moves presumably now through a prophetic word such that two are then commissioned by that church to go out and do specific transcultural, transnational ministry. Thus, you have the beginning of the missionary movement reported in Acts. There are others if I had the time to go through them.

Every year at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where I teach, the district superintendents come in and spend a day, half a day, with the faculty. Often various discussions and seminars in the afternoon and then often a meal together and we talk about all kinds of things. Sometimes, those meetings, quite frankly, are not much more than a waste of time, and other times, they’re really quite helpful and productive.

In any case, they’re good at making sure that there are links between the district superintendents and the faculty so that we begin to know each other and trust each other and find out what we are doing. But I shall not soon forget a meeting we had about a dozen years ago now … quite a long time.

There were probably 90 of us there, 45 or 50 faculty and about the same number of district superintendents, and we were broken up so that we were more or less evenly divided, about eight at a table, and at each table, we were supposed to tell each other about our respective calls to ministry. It took us about an hour and a half.

There was one person at each table who had to write them all down as quickly as possible. Then at the end of that hour and a half, the one designated person at each table sort of summarized everybody else’s at that table before the whole crowd. So in the space of one long afternoon, I heard summaries of about 90 different calls to ministry.

It was fascinating. They were all over the map. If you were trying to look for sort of common experiences, they just weren’t there. “Well, you know, I was doing nuclear physics, and I was shaving one morning, and the Lord said to me just about as clearly as can be, ‘Ken, I want you in the ministry.’ What was I supposed to do? I went in the ministry.”

Others said things like, “Well, you know, I don’t know when I was called. I’ve always wanted to do that. Since I was I was a little boy, 3 years old, I’ve known that God wanted me in the ministry. I’ve always wanted to be in the ministry. I don’t remember when I was converted. I was brought up in a Christian home, and the Lord got me very young, and I’ve been called for the ministry since I can remember.”

And others saying, “Boy, I wrestled over this one a long time. I mean, this was not what I was going to do. I was not going to be a minister like my dad. Absolutely not! I struggled for five years! Do you realize what the Lord had to do to me before he got my attention? I had cancer. I was a terminal case. And now here I am in the ministry.”

They were all over the map. You get the story. You make it up, and we had it! But as I listened to these stories again and again and again, I found a couple of commonalities. One of them was an unrequited passion for the gospel. There came a time in these people’s lives where they just couldn’t do anything else. How they got there was very varied, but that was the commonality.

Now, I know, there is a sense in which that ought to be true for all Christians, that the gospel is the center of our lives whether we’re doing chemistry or digging ditches or changing nappies. Whatever we’re doing, the gospel must be the center of our lives. But there comes a time in the lives of some people when that is so central that it must occupy one’s vocational passion as well. Very often it’s a mix of these things that bring people to genuine ministry, isn’t it?

That’s almost presupposed by chapter 3, verse 1. “So, you want to go into the ministry, do you? Uh-huh. All right. Think through this list.” Well, that presupposes now, you see, not only there is some inner dynamic but there is some evaluation going on by the person himself, by the local church who is beginning to assess whether or not this person meets the criteria that we dealt with last night.

For myself it was certainly a mix. That minister who first put a probe in my direction, I went off and did air pollution, but the same time that summer I was working with another chap trying to begin a Sunday School up the Ottawa Valley somewhere, and as I worked in the air pollution laboratories in Ottawa, I was having a blast.

It was a great research project. I had my own budget and great fun in what I was doing. But I discovered that in this chemistry lab there were two sorts of people: those for whom chemistry was god, and I didn’t belong to them, and those who hated it and could hardly wait for retirement. I was too young for that. I just didn’t belong there, you see?

Meanwhile, although I loved my job, and I could imagine doing it the rest of my life; nevertheless, more and more of my emotional energy was being captured by those kids in the Sunday School class up the valley. At the end of the summer, I remember driving home one night, singing an old chorus I learned in Sunday school,

By and by when I look on His face,

Beautiful face, thorn-shadowed face.

By and by when I look on His face,

I’ll wish I had given Him more.

Feeling dumb in some way. You don’t give anything anyway, do you? You just give back. It’s all his in the first place. Then in September I heard a man preach from Ezekiel 22, “I sought for a man to stand before me for my people, but I found none.” With the combination of this Scripture and the experience in ministry and this probing by a pastor, gradually I was turning around and turning around to.… Hasn’t that been true for many of you?

I guarantee that if we went through this crowd and ask how you ended up in the ministry, it would be just as interesting and just as diverse as my experience at Trinity. But I’ll tell you this.… If you don’t have a passion for the gospel being applied to people, you’re in the wrong field. If it’s just an intellectual game or it’s a power thing or you’re just good at people dynamics or you want to score theological points or whatever, get out of the ministry. We don’t need you.

4) A couple of observations about deacons

 I suppose that historically it is true to say deacons first emerge in Acts, chapter 6, verses 1–7, although the word deacon isn’t used there. Nevertheless, when a church is multiplying and growing, the apostles, who seem first of all to be responsible for almost everything, recognize that they must not let their own job description so multiply its facets that at the end of the day they lose the primacy of the ministry of the Word and prayer.

So they look for people to handle the distribution of food, especially when there are charges of injustice; and thus, this small group of men is chosen, people who are full of the Holy Spirit and the faith. Now when you come to lists like the one before us, 1 Timothy, chapter 3, verses 8 and following, what is striking about this list and all the other parallels is that the kinds of things that are required of them are virtually identical, sometimes in identical words and some in parallel words, to the kinds of things that are required of elders.

Well, how could they not be? We saw that the kinds of things that are required of elders are the kinds of things that are required of all Christian, even something like hospitality. Hospitality is specifically said to belong to the responsibilities of all Christians in a passage like Hebrews 13, but there is one vocational difference. Elders/pastors/overseers are always said to have the responsibility for teaching.

This does not mean the deacons may not, or cannot, or are mandated to keep their mouths shut under all circumstances. If that’s what you think, you’re going to have a hard job explaining Philip and Stephen, but on the other hand, that’s not the definition of their task. It’s not the job. It’s not the vocation. Their task comes along to help and to serve.

In this connection, then, I won’t repeat the list from verses 8–13. There are many, many parallels to the preceding list, but look at verse 14: “Although I hope to come to you soon, I am writing you these instructions so that, if I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.”

This, now, brings us back to what I tried to explain in the first address; namely, that with the various heresies that were circulating behind these churches, it was obvious that some of the false teachers were emerging from the leaders themselves, and that raised questions about what kinds of leaders we should be appointing, what kinds of elders, what kinds of pastors, what kinds of deacons we should be pursuing.

That’s why these lists are here, and now, you see, that is made clear. “I hope to come and see you in due course, but meanwhile, until I get there, I’m just laying this all out for you so that you get this sort of things straight.” The church, then, is God’s household, so it must be governed by God.

The church consists of people who live differently. They’ve been drawn out of the world, and now they are to live differently. You must know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is why you have all of these responsibilities laid on pastors, not only to get their doctrine straight but to teach people how to live in God’s household.

This is God’s church. This is God’s sphere. This is God’s home. The church exists, then, to protect and to promote the truth of the gospel itself. It is the pillar and foundation of the truth. That is what is meant. So all is tied at the end of the day to the gospel itself. That’s why we go through these things. You must not think of the qualifications for ministry as a separate category, boxed out from everything else.

It’s tied in the end of the day to what the gospel is about, to how Christians live, to what is good for the whole church, to how you handle heretics. It’s tied to the whole thing, and at the end of the day, if it’s tied to the gospel itself, it’s tied to Christ. Hence, verse 16: “Beyond all question [literally, confessedly; this is what we confess] the mystery of godliness is great: He appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.”

At the risk of a great deal of caricature, one could argue that Reformed theology has tended to see the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament in terms of continuity. It was somehow predicted in the past, and it has now shown up here. Those sorts of voices write lots of books about how the New Testament uses the Old and so forth.

Dispensationalists tend to view things in terms of discontinuity, what has come about that is new. For in truth, the word mysterion either almost always or always (in my view, always) in the New Testament, in the 27 or 28 instances where it occurs (27 or 28 because of the textual variants), has to do with that which has been hidden in time past and now revealed.

So the old-line dispensationalists … the Henry Ironsides, the Scofields, people like that … they all wrote their book on mystery and mystery religion and the mystery of God and the mystery of the faith. They all wrote their little books on mystery, because they wanted to talk about that which has been hidden in the past and is only now revealed. That goes right up the nose of all the Reformed people.

And all the Reformed people really go right up the nose of all the dispensationalists because they don’t allow for anything new. So we can have a David Morris and a John Reisinger going up each other’s nose, can’t we? Let Paul sort it out. Romans, chapter 16. This time we’ll go up both their noses.

Romans chapter 16, the last three verses. “Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ …” So we’re talking about the gospel, the preaching of Jesus. That’s what we’re talking about. “… to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past …” All the dispensationalists please say, “Amen!” “… but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings …” All the covenant people please say, “Amen!”

The interesting thing is that Paul can put the two of them together and not be embarrassed. The same gospel he describes as the mystery that has been hidden in time past but now disclosed and which is being revealed through the prophetic writings, through the Scripture. It’s all there. Isn’t that interesting?

Now I wish I had another two hours to unpack these various passages, because I do think they can be put together, not in a way that will please all the dispensationalists or all those in the most static forms of Reformed thought either, but it is important to understand what massive themes Paul here is intertwining. It’s important to see that.

For those of you who are afflicted with insatiable curiosity along these lines, I have written a rather lengthy discussion of it in the second volume of Justification and Variegated Nomism. Now I wrote it really as part of the discussion of the new perspective, so that if you’re not into that debate, don’t worry about that book; it’s too expensive, too thick, and too technical. Don’t worry about it. But if this sort of thing is of interest to you, I tried to unpack some of it there.

Now here in 1 Timothy, chapter 3, Paul says that the mystery of godliness is great. This is a little more expansive an expression than that used in verse 9. The NIV has, “The deacons … must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith …” The Greek is literally, “They must keep hold of the mystery of the faith.”

Mystery there does not mean the truth; it means mysterion in the regular way, of that which has been gloriously disclosed in the coming of Christ, of the faith, the corpus of Christian truth. Godliness goes beyond that. It presupposes that, but then emphasizes also how it works out in all of our lives.

This has been worked out under the terms of the new covenant, and the basis for all of this is what we confess about Christ. “He appeared in a body …” Incarnation. “… was vindicated …” The NIV has “… by the Spirit …” Simply en pneuma in the original. I suspect it does not mean here by the Holy Spirit agency of some sort, but he was vindicated in spirit; that is, he entered into the spiritual realms after his resurrection and exaltation.

Thus, he was vindicated before God himself and “… was seen by angels …” Not just observed by them, but Christ revealed himself to them as the one who conquered death. He “… was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world …” This is part of what came in this great disclosure of the mystery that has simultaneously been there in the Scripture all along and is now fulfilled and in some measure has been hidden there and is now disclosed.

Then the last one, it seems to me, is out of order, but I can see why it’s put in at the last. “… was taken up in glory.” Bound up with the accession and exaltation. He is vindicated. These truths must be believed. They are at the basis of our understanding of the entire gospel. This is what we confess, and this is tied to our understanding of how to live and what leaders we will have to gospel commitments who will not allow lies or deceit or false teaching or false living.

Let me say one more thing about deacons in passing. Although as far as I can see in the New Testament there are elders/pastors/bishops and deacons, this does not mean that the New Testament warrants a bicameral structure; that is, a structure where you have (as in the US government) a House of Representatives and a Senate, a bicameral structure, and legislation must pass both houses independently. If it comes out differently, then you’ve got to have some sort of committee to sort of reconcile the two.

So now you want to get something through in the leadership of the church. “Yeah,” it goes by the elders; the deacons say, “No.” Now what happens? That’s a bicameral structure. As far as I can see, there is no evidence in the New Testament of the deacons serving as another house. In other words, I do not see warrant for a bicameral structure of church government in the New Testament at all. If that is the way you’ve set up elders and deacons, change it. It’s very dangerous. Finally then …

5. Matters of governance

 We need to think for several moments about matters of governance. Let me mention three things, all rather quickly.

A) What about numbers of elders and pastors?

Do we have one pastor and several elders? Is there such a thing as the pastor and a whole lot of elders? The discussion in this domain is very difficult, partly because we have sometimes failed to observe how the New Testament writers use the word church.

In the New Testament, the New Testament writers use the word church for the church of the city. So it’s the church in Jerusalem, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome. Even when the church is very, very, very big, as at some points in Ephesus and certainly in Jerusalem, where there is no way they could meet all together once persecution broke out.

They couldn’t use Solomon’s colonnade anymore. They had to meet in households all over the place, but still, you don’t speak of the church on First Street and another church on Second Street. No, it’s the church in Jerusalem, even though there were many, many … what shall we call them … house churches for the church in Jerusalem. But it’s the churches in Judea, the churches in Samaria, the churches in Asia.

In other words, in the earliest stages, there was one church in the polis; there was one church in the city, even if in normal meetings they met in households, because you’re trying to keep the unity of the whole thing all together. So then when you speak of elders, how did it break down? One in one house church and another in another house church? I don’t know. Two in this one and none in that one. There’s some sort of supervision over it? I don’t know.

But it’s disputes over that, you see, that has led to Presbyterians to move toward a presbytery form of government in which contemporary churches become the equivalent of the house church, and there is a group of elders in the area corresponding to the old city. That’s what sanctions a Presbyterian form of government.

But from my point of view speaking now as a Reformed Baptist, it seems to me the same insight can be responded to in a number of different ways. The fact of the matter is that our polis today, our city, is in many instances far, far, far bigger than anything that was meant by city in the ancient world.

The biggest cities in the Empire were about a third of a million in the time of the Romans. Our biggest cities, our megalopolises, start at 10 million. Well, by the time you have 20 million, you got all the people in the Roman Empire plus some left over. To speak of one church in that context, you see, is just a bit silly, because there is no sense in which they can be all held together. There are now in some cases hundreds of thousands of them.

So suddenly you’re facing.… What is the relationship between elder and the smallest unit? Short answer: we don’t know. What is clear, it seems to me, is that there is a responsibility of the elders/pastors over these house units, and these house units combine together to constitute the church in one place. Perhaps they moved around a wee bit from time to time so that their different gifts could get disseminated across the whole body. I don’t know. The text isn’t very clear.

What I am sure about, however, is that rules that go beyond the text turn out on the long haul to be dangerous, so that on occasion you have people saying, “Well, yes, they’re all elders in the local church, so they all have the same authority.” Who said? Why can’t some elders have more authority?

Supposing somebody has been an elder for 25 years and somebody else has just come on board and there are sort of trainee elders? It’s going beyond the text. Isn’t there a large case made for mentoring? Do you really think Paul and Timothy have exactly the same authority when they’re working together? So there is a place, thus, for elders boards where there are some who are more senior, more authoritative, more learned, more experienced, more disciplined, and who are responsible for training others along the line?

Be careful of dogmatic assertions that go beyond the text. What you can say is that there is no unambiguous evidence for pastor being a separate category from elder. I’m a little nervous about the number of Baptist churches around that have the vocational, paid guy called pastor and the nonvocational, nonpaid guys called elders.

Not a distinction I can find in the New Testament. You call them all pastors or you call them all elders or you call them all both. You can make a distinction between vocational and nonvocational if you like. I mean, you’ve got vocational pastors and nonvocational pastors. That’s a pragmatic distinction.

But be careful not to go beyond the New Testament terminology because sooner or later it will come back and bite you. You’ll suddenly introduce a threefold office or you’ll have a pastor who is a mini-pope. Something will go wrong somewhere. You get away from the flexibility and the focus of New Testament terminology, and it will come back and bite you. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but in the next charge or three years down the line or 10 years down the line, it will.

B) Elder-rule versus congregationalism

On the one side, we can all quote texts like Hebrews 13:17. “Obey those who have the rule over you. They watch over your souls.” On the other hand, you have a text like Matthew 18. “Tell it to the church.” Or in 1 Corinthians 5, where the chap has been sleeping with his stepmother, and when the discipline is to be applied is when the whole congregation comes together, “… and I am with you in spirit.…” You’re meeting under the aegis of the Lord Jesus. Then you take this decision.

Certainly when Paul writes to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 10–13, he is writing to the church and telling them they ought to get rid of the false teachers before he, Paul, gets there because if they haven’t got rid of them by the time he gets there, he jolly well will do it himself. But that presupposes that the church has a responsibility, thus, to have a certain kind of final sanction over the elders.

So what do we mean by congregationalism and elder rule? I’ll tell you what the problem is. The problem is, once again, that we’ve absolutized both models. As far as I can see in the New Testament, it’s neither an IBM corporate model, with everything coming down from the top, humanly speaking, nor a democracy model with one person, one vote, and every vote counts the same; everybody is equally authoritative.

I doubt everybody in the church has the same biblical insight and the same wisdom and the same understanding of Christian doctrine and can vote on things. Both are silly on the face of it, and both the New Testament itself and streets of human experience have taught us that both sides can go wrong.

There are times when elders go wrong, and the church really ought to take hold, and there are times when congregations are very wrong, and elders really must take hold. There is a certain dynamic flexibility. Do you know why? Because we’re sinners. There is finally only one head of the church.

Although I do hold to the form of congregationalism that sees the final sanction in discipline and some other areas in the congregation itself, yet there is a responsibility for leadership in most matters in the elder/pastor/overseer precisely because it is the ministry of the Word. And that brings me to my last point. The important thing, it seems to me, is to recognize that …

C) The rule of pastors is ideally through the Word.

It is not, “Hey, look, I’m the pastor. When I say jump, you jump and ask how high on the way up.” It is through the ministry of the Word, which is why in a passage like 1 Timothy, chapter 5, verse 17, we’re told, “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching.” That is, there is a direction that takes place precisely through the context of teaching and preaching.

That means it is also important to recognize that the ministry of the Word is bigger than preaching. The ministry of the Word includes one-on-one instruction and counseling with an open Bible. It includes small groups. It includes training people how to use the Bible. It includes ABF groups. It includes all kinds of context where the ministry of the Word is filtering down and filtering down and filtering down so that people learn how to handle the Bible, teach the Bible, handle the Bible, teach the Bible, handle the Bible, teach the Bible.

Start some sort of Bible course, teach it two or three times, and make sure that somebody is watching how to do it, give them your material, watch them while they do it a couple of times, let them run with it, then you start another one. Do you see? That, too, is all part of the ministry of the Word.

The authority of the minister is not his own personal authority, but it is an authority that he increasingly gains as he is perceived by fellow believers to be handling the Word of God so well that at the end of the day, if people are disagreeing with him, they are disagreeing with almighty God.

You get someone who is very, very dogmatic and powerful, but who is handling the Word sloppily, or try to bless all of his opinions by proof-text, in his head, any person in the congregation can see this is merely demagoguery by another name.

But you show me a minister of the gospel who handles the Word so well again and again and again over years and years, and then when he makes a mistake and is caught at it, he is the first to admit it because, you see, he is not threatened by his own mistakes. He wants to come under the authority of the Word.

If somebody can show him a better way, he’ll take it, because he wants to be under the Word himself. On the long haul, that person gains a huge, even dangerously huge, personal authority precisely because he has proven to be a faithful minister of the Word of God. That is how the affairs of the church are finally directed. Let us pray.

And who is sufficient for these things? For these high purposes, Lord God, we beg of you, make us workers who do not need to be ashamed as we interpret the Word of God. For Jesus’ sake, amen.