23. Being watchful
23
Being watchful
Every true minister, then, watches, in the words of the apostle, for the souls of his people.1 An ordinary minister’s everyday work embraces many duties and offers many opportunities, but through all his duties and through all his opportunities there runs this high and distinctive duty of watching for the souls of his people. A minister may be a great scholar, he may have taken all sacred learning for his province, he may be a profound and a scientific theologian, he may be an able church leader, he may be a universally consulted authority on ecclesiastical law, he may be a skilful and successful debater in church courts. He may even be a great pulpit orator, holding thousands entranced by his impassioned eloquence. But a true successor of the prophets of the Old Testament and of the apostles of the New Testament he is not, unless he watches for the souls of men.…
Great talents, great learning, great publicity, great popularity,—all tend, unless they are taken great care of, to lead their possessors away from all time for, and from all sympathy with, the watchfulness of the New Testament minister. Watching over a flock brings to you none of the exhilaration of authority and influence, none of the intoxication of publicity and applause. Your experiences are the quite opposite of all these things when you are watching over your flock. Your work among your flock is all done in distant and lonely places, on hillsides, among woods and thickets, and in cloudy and dark days. You spend your strength among sick and dying and wandering sheep, among wolves and weasels, and what not, of that verminous kind. At the same time, all good pastors are not so obscure and forgotten as all that. Some exceptionally able and exceptionally devoted and self-forgetful men manage to combine both extremes of a minister’s duties and opportunities in themselves.
Mr. Moody,2 again, is a great preacher, preaching to tens of thousands of hearers at a time; but at the same time, Mr. Moody is one of the most skilful and attentive pastors that ever took individual souls in hand and kept them over many years in mind.
But [such] are completely exceptional men. What I want to say to commonplace and limited and everyday men like myself is this: watching for the souls of our people, one by one, day in and day out, that, above everything else, that, and nothing else, makes any man a pastor of the apostolic type. An able man may know all about the history, the habitat, the various species, the breeds, the diseases, and the prices of sheep, and yet be nothing at all of a true shepherd. And so may a minister.
*From Bunyan Characters, First Series (2nd ed.; Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1895), 261-62.
1. See Hebrews 13:17.
2. D. L. Moody (1837-1899) was an American evangelist who attracted large crowds during two preaching tours in the United Kingdom (1872-1875, 1881-1884). Whyte wholeheartedly supported Moody when the latter came to Scotland in 1873-1874. See G. F. Barbour, Alexander Whyte, (7th ed.; New York: George H. Doran Co., 1925), 162-65.