Episode Details

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I’m training a bunch of would-be, could-be pastors at Campus Bible Study, and it occured to me that I should figure out what it is exactly that I’m training them to become.

What does it mean to be a ‘pastor’ or an ‘overseer’ or a ‘gospel minister’? What is the purpose and nature of these roles? What makes for a good pastor?

Over the next little while in The Payneful Truth, I’m going to dig into these questions from a few different angles and see what we might unearth. In doing so, I won’t pretend for a minute that it will be a comprehensive (or even adequate) total picture of pastoral ministry and leadership. But I hope to achieve two things:

* to give pastors and pastors-to-be some fresh or clarified thoughts about the nature and purpose of their work;

* to help non-pastors in a number of ways: to encourage you to support, pray for and appreciate the work of your leaders; to have better expectations of what pastors are and do; and to understand more clearly how your own gospel ministry (and the gospel work of all Christians) relates to the work of pastors (hint: very closely!).

Where to begin?

I guess one way to start would be to look at the various titles that are given to ‘ministry leaders’ in the Bible and ask what those labels say about the role. We could look at ‘overseer’, ‘elder’, ‘shepherd’ (which is what ‘pastor’ means), ‘worker’ or ‘fellow-worker’ (a very common Pauline term for himself and his ministry colleagues), ‘leader’ (in Heb 13:7, 17), and possibly ‘man of God’ (in 1 Tim 3:17 and 6:11).

This word-study exercise would tell us something—for example that the role had something to do ‘watching over’ people (overseer), or that it related in some way to a shepherd looking after a ‘flock’ (pastor), or that it involved labour and toil (‘workman’), and so on. But as a way of understanding the nature of ‘pastoral leadership’ it would be a limiting and potentially misleading way to proceed. Which aspects of the ‘shepherd’ metaphor apply and which ones don’t and with what emphasis? Is ‘elder’ just about having authority as a mature person, or does the title require that the person is actually old?

Understanding pastoral leadership by focusing on the titles or labels would be like trying to understand doctoring by focusing on the words used to describe doctors—medico, general practitioner, surgeon, physician, clinician, quack, sawbones—and constructing a model of medical practice from the meaning and derivation and usage of those words.

In fact, I can see the journal article now:

The word ‘clinician’ comes from the Greek ‘kline’ meaning ‘bed’, and there are multiple instances in the literature of the ‘clinic’ word-group being associated with the practice of medicine as a ‘bed-side’ or ‘bed-ward’ or ‘bed-oriented’ activity. ‘Clinic’ is bed language. Clinical medicine is thus unavoidably bed-centric. To practice medicine is to ‘visit the bed’, and doctors today who see their patients at impersonal so-called ‘clinics’, far removed from the beds of their patients, have lost touch with the essential character of doctoring.

It would be funny if it wasn’t also a bit sad (because I have read many a theological article that argues in exactly this fashion).

Words are the building blocks of meaning, but they don’t convey meaning until they are assembled into sentences and paragraphs. We discover what ministry leadership is like—its nature and function and purpose—by looking at the sentences and paragraphs of the New Testament that describe its nature and purpose and function.

Like those in Acts 20, for example.

In this passage, Paul is giving the pastoral leaders of the Ephesian church an e