6 The Missing Community
CHAPTER SIX
THE MISSING COMMUNITY
I was raised in the “Jesus and me” privatized, individualized Christianity of the fundamentalism of the ’60s and ’70s. The closest our church got to an actual functioning, ministry-oriented body of Christ was a rare pastoral visit and the Wednesday night prayer meeting. No one knew my father and mother—I mean, really knew them. No one had a clue what was going on in our home. No one helped my father to see through the blindness that allowed him to live a double life of skilled deception and duplicity. No one knew how troubled my mother was beneath her encyclopedic knowledge of Scripture. No one knew. We were a Christian family in active participation in a vibrant church, but what we were involved in lacked one of the primary and essential ingredients of healthy New Testament Christianity: a trained, mobilized, and functioning body of Christ. It was Christianity devoid of Ephesians 4, 1 Corinthians 12, and Hebrews 3:12–13.
For much of my Christian life and a portion of my ministry, I had no idea that my walk with God was a community project. I had no idea that the Christianity of the New Testament is distinctly relational, from beginning to end. I understood none of the dangers inherent in attempting to live the Christian life on my own. I had no awareness of the blinding power of remaining sin, which was discussed in the last chapter. I had no idea that I was living outside of God’s normal means of sightedness, encouragement, conviction, strength, and growth. I had no idea how much consumerism and how little true participation marked the body of Christ. I had no idea of the importance of the private ministry of the Word to the health of the believer. I had no idea.
I have now come to understand that I need others in my life. I now know that I need to commit myself to living in intentionally intrusive, Christ-centered, grace-driven, redemptive community. I now know it’s my job to seek this community out, to invite people to interrupt my private conversation, and to say things to me that I couldn’t or wouldn’t say to myself. I have realized how much I need warning, encouragement, rebuke, correction, protection, grace, and love. I now see myself as connected to others, not because I have made the choice but because of the wise design of the one who is the head of the body, the Lord Jesus Christ. I cannot allow myself to think that I am smarter than him. I cannot allow myself to think that I am stronger than I am. I cannot assign to myself a level of maturity that I do not have. I cannot begin to believe that I am able to live outside of God’s normal means of spiritual growth and be okay. I cannot allow the level of my spiritual health to be defined by my ministry experience and success or by my theological knowledge. I cannot let myself be lulled to sleep by the congratulatory comments on ministry weekends by people who mean well but really don’t know me. I cannot let myself think that my marriage can be healthy if I live in functional isolation from the body of Christ.
Since, as one who has remaining sin still inside of him, it is right to say that the greatest danger in my life exists inside of me and not outside of me, then wouldn’t it also be the height of naivety or arrogance to think that I would be okay left to myself? No, not for a moment would I forget or diminish the convicting ministry of the indwelling Holy Spirit, but I would posit that the Spirit uses instruments (his transforming Word brought faithfully by his people and empowered by his ever-present grace).
Having said all of this, it is my grief to say that individualized, privatized Christianity still lives. Sadly, it lives in the lives and ministries of many pastors who have forged or been allowed to forge a life that is lived above or outside of the body of Christ. It happens this way for many pastors. Their spiritual life became immediately more privatized when they left their home church to go to seminary in another city. For many, the seminary became their primary spiritual community, a community that was neither personal nor pastoral in the way it handled Scripture and related to the student. Having graduated from an environment where, for three or more years, they were not pastored and had a rather casual relationship to a local church, they are now called by a church that doesn’t really know them. This is all magnified by the fact that they are not joining the church per se; no, they have been called to lead it. So they are not entering into a situation of naturally expected peer, mutual-ministry relationships. They are not afforded the normal expectations and protections that anyone else is offered when they join the church. It is a potentially unbiblical and unhealthy culture that does not protect the pastor and does not guard his ministry from danger.
Pastor, you know that every day you give personal empirical evidence that you have not yet arrived. Every day you think, desire, say, and do things that point to the existence of remaining sin within your heart. Since this is true of each of us, is it not also true that we need to live in a willingly submissive commitment to God’s normal means of protecting and growing his still-being-sanctified children?
A THEOLOGY OF ESSENTIALITY
I want to consider with you three very familiar passages of Scripture that need a second look, particularly for how they speak into normal pastoral culture. Before we look at these three passages, I want to first give you the helicopter view of the ministry of the Word in the life of the local church. The Bible envisions two essential, interdependent, and complementary ministries of the Word. First there is the public ministry of the Word. This is the regularly scheduled public teaching and preaching of God’s Word to gathered groups in the church. This ministry makes up the formative discipline of the church. Every member is discipled from the pulpit with the same body of foundational perspective-altering, life-shaping truths. Here all of God’s people are placed on the same tracks and headed in the same direction. Because this public ministry of the Word is done with groups of people, it must be general in its consideration of audience and therefore in its application. God gifts and sets apart certain people for this important formative ministry.
Because it is also important that God’s Word be applied with concrete specificity to the lives of individual believers so that they are clear as to what it looks like to follow Christ in the context of their particular situation and relationships, God has ordained a second, complementary ministry of the Word, its private ministry. This makes up the corrective discipline of the church. This ministry does not have a different body of content. No, it takes the general truths that everyone has been hearing and applies them with specificity to the lives of individual believers so that they can more concretely understand what it means to live in light of the things they are being taught. The radical Word culture of the church as God designed it drafts all of God’s children to be willing, envisioned, trained, and mobilized participants in this second ministry of the Word. Private ministry of the Word depends on public ministry of the Word to give people their formative foundation, and the public ministry looks to private ministry to counsel people into understanding the specific practical life implications of what they have been learning as the Word has been taught publicly. Neither ministry is a luxury. Each is an essential part of God’s bi-factoral, Word-centered growth strategy for the local church.
Now let’s apply this model to the life and ministry of the pastor. The first passage is Ephesians 4:11–16:
And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds
and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
As I work through these passages, you pastors who are reading through with me are going to have to resist the spiritual pride that causes you to hit the shutoff switch in the middle of the discussions because in your heart of hearts you really don’t think all of this applies to you. Ephesians 4 has a very clear “already–not yet” structure. Already each of us has been gifted with redeeming grace. Each of us has been indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Each of us has been blessed with a now-illumined Bible. But not yet do we fully and perfectly understand our faith. Not yet have we been fully matured into the likeness of Christ. Not yet is the deceptive war for our hearts over. We live and minister smack-dab in the middle, and in the middle God has set up essential tools for our protection and growth. None of us will be safe or healthy if we tell ourselves that we can live outside of these essential tools.
What are the goals of the “everybody-all-the-time” ministry that Paul lays out in this passage? The goals are unity of the faith, knowledge of the Son of God, and maturity in every way in Christ. The goals encourage us to humbly admit that all of us—yes, even pastors—live on the short side of these goals. None of us exists in fully unified communities of faith, none of us knows Christ as fully as he can be known, and none of us is fully grown into the likeness of Jesus. So what is the implication of that humble admission? It is that each of us—yes, even pastors—needs to joyfully submit to God’s means of bringing these goals into completion in our hearts and lives.
What are the dangers inherent in convincing ourselves that we can live outside of God’s normal means of personal spiritual health and growth? They are equally clear in this passage. If we attempt to do what we are not wired by redemption to do, we will be susceptible to lingering immaturity in specific areas of our life and to doctrinal error or confusion, and we will live in danger of being deceived. Think with me for a moment. Each of us is able to cite occurrences of each danger in our own circles of pastors. I have counseled pastors who damaged their churches because they had failed to grow up. I have experienced churches damaged by pastors who were moved away by the latest wind of fad doctrine. I was a self-deceived pastor, thinking I knew myself better than I did and thinking I was more spiritually well off than I actually was. These warnings are not just for the average Christian but for every member of the body of Christ. They call everyone in ministry to humbly admit that in the middle of the already–not yet, there is a war that is still taking place for the rulership of our hearts. And because there is, we all need the warning, protective, encouraging, rebuking, growth-producing ministry of the body of Christ.
Now, what methodology has God chosen to employ to guard, grow, and protect us? It is the public and private ministry of the Word. This passage particularly emphasizes the essentiality of private, body-member-to-body-member ministry. Again the words are specific and clear: “Speaking the truth in love . . . joined and held together by every joint . . . when each part is working properly . . . builds itself up in love.” There is no indication in this passage that any member of Christ’s body is able or permitted to live outside of the essential ministry of the body of Christ. But I think it is exactly at this point that we can be tempted to draw conclusions from this passage that it doesn’t actually teach. Because it ascribes to the pastor the responsibility of training God’s people for their member-to-member ministry function, I am afraid that we have unwittingly concluded that the pastor is above a need of what the rest of the body needs and does. But the passage never teaches this; it actually teaches the opposite. The pastor is in the unique position of not only training the body for this ministry but also of personally needing the very ministry for which he trains them. Remember, the words here—“every joint,” “each part”—do not leave much room for exemptions. Again, I think of it this way: if Christ is the head of his body, then everything else is just body, including the pastor, and therefore the pastor needs what the body has been designed to deliver.
First Corinthians 12:14–25 in ways presents this even more forcefully:
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.
The picture here is the body of Christ as a functioning organism of many mutually essential, interrelating, mutually contributing members. The interconnectedness and the interdependency of these members are so essential to the proper health, function, and growth of the body that Paul says it is impossible for one member to say to another, “I simply don’t need you,” or “I am able to function quite well on my own, thank you,” or “I have grown to the point where I no longer need what you have to offer.” In the context of Paul’s word picture of a healthy physical body, these assertions would take a denial of inescapable realities. So it is with the body of Christ. So it is, I would add, with the spiritual healthiness and ministry vitality of the pastor. He is a member of the body of Christ who himself desperately needs the ministry of the very body he has been called to train and lead. The model is of a man in need of help in training people to be ready to give him the very same help. You simply cannot escape what these passages are teaching.
Darrel stood before me during a break at a major conference and wept. He couldn’t have cared less who was looking at him or what they heard him say. He was just that desperate. He had the appearance of a completely beaten, totally broken man, but he was a God-gifted, divinely appointed pastor. No, he wasn’t in a proud war with his leaders, he hadn’t committed adultery, and he was not addicted to pornography or substances. He was an angry, discouraged, embittered, and now desperate man. Through his tears he said, “Paul, I just don’t know how to go home. No one knows me there. No one knows what is going on in my family. No one knows what is in my heart. No one knows that I force myself to crank out sermons every week. No one knows that I hate most of the meetings that I lead. No one knows that my wife and I bicker and fight our way through week after week. No one knows that my children are beginning to hate the gospel because of me. No one knows that I numb myself with hours of television. I have no one to talk to, not one close relationship in the entire church. My family lives in isolation, but I don’t think anyone notices. My wife has some friends, but she’s very careful about what she says. If I just stopped a meeting and began to confess what is really going on with me, I don’t think my leaders could deal with it. Paul, if I come clean, if I let people in, I’m done. I don’t know how to go home and face this stuff.”
Does Darrel’s situation sound extreme to you? It doesn’t to me, because I’ve heard his cry again and again. No, it hasn’t always reached this level of desperation, but there are way too many pastors out there who have lost their joy, who are cranking it out. There are way too many bitter and angry people in ministry who are carrying around a self-protective list of previously experienced wrongs. There are way too many pastors living in isolation who are in trouble, and they don’t know it. There are way too many congregations and leadership boards that have a distorted, unrealistic, idealized image of their pastor. There are way too many ministry families that are unprotected because they are not being properly pastored. There are way too many pastors in survival mode. There are way too many pastors’ wives who fantasize about what it would be like to be out of the ministry. There are way too many children who bear the daily brunt of the ministry father’s bitterness and anger. There simply is way too much functional anonymity in the pulpits of our churches.
The third of our passages specifically defines the nature of the essential private ministry of the Word that is the calling of the body of Christ. In this way Colossians 3:15–17 is very helpful:
And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Paul envisions a well-prepared body of Christ with the Word of God dwelling in their hearts, now ready to do what God has designed the body of Christ to do. And what is that? Again, Paul is very specific: teach and admonish. Now, let’s be honest. In most contexts, what Paul is describing would be quite radical, maybe even unsettling. He is actually proposing that every believer is designed to have a teaching function in the life of every believer. It really is an “all-of-God’s-people-all-of-the-time” paradigm. This means that it’s unhealthy for any church and its pastor if, in that church, the pastor is the only teacher. It is assumed here that every teacher, no matter where God has placed him or her in the body, needs to be taught, and all the people being taught need also to teach.
Now, notice again the two descriptive words that Paul uses: teach and admonish. To put the most basic definitions on these terms is to say that teaching enables you to see life God’s way. It is embedding the story of life in the larger story of redemption. Admonishing is helping you to see yourself God’s way. It is standing you before the perfect mirror of God’s Word so that you are confronted with the reality of who you really are. There is not a day when every member of the body of Christ does not need to be taught, helped to identify those remaining artifacts of an ungospelized worldview. There is also not a day when we don’t need to be admonished, confronted with the fact that we still look into the world’s carnival mirrors and carry around distorted opinions of who we are.
Pastor, you too need to be surrounded by well-trained teachers and faithful, loving admonishers. And you are in danger if anonymity allows you to be the only regular teacher you hear and to live void of a protective circle of grace-motivated admonishers.
THE CYCLE OF DANGER
1) UNHELPFUL ASSUMPTIONS
In many cases the cycle of isolation and danger begins when the church that calls the pastor makes incorrect and unhelpful assumptions about the person they have called. Sadly, in many cases the person being called has not lived in protective and productive redemptive community for years. Having separated from the nurture of his home church, where his gifts were recognized, he goes off to a place where the faith has been academized and compartmentalized, being taught by professors who do not presume to function as the pastors of their students. In many cases, because he is working as well as engaging in the rigors of theological education, he has little remaining time to have but a cursory relationship to a local church. This probably also means he’s been a bit of a distracted husband and absentee dad. Meanwhile his own relationship to Scripture has been more about completing assignments than a devotional nurturing of his soul.
But the church that has called him tends to assume that because his gifts and some level of maturity have been recognized and because he is now a biblical scholar, trained for the pastorate, he is spiritually healthy and able to live without the normal protections and encouragements that they would want for any other believer. So a culture of untoward assumptions and functional pastoral isolation is often set up from the moment of the first interview.
2) UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS
It should be obvious that the unhelpful assumptions made as the pastor is coming to lead the church would be fruit in a whole set of unrealistic expectations. The biggest is that many churches simply don’t expect their pastor to struggle with sin. But he is not sin-free! Since he is still being sanctified, sin still remains and is being progressively eradicated. They don’t expect him to get discouraged in the middle of the war for the gospel. They don’t expect him to be tempted toward bitterness or envy. They expect him to be a model husband and father. They don’t expect him to be lazy or to settle for mediocrity. They don’t expect that in moments of self-protection he will be tempted to be antisocial and controlling. They expect that he will be able to joyfully carry an unrealistic job description that would overwhelm anyone this side of Jesus’s return. They expect that he will be content with significantly less pay than most people with his level of education. They expect that his wife is so fully committed to ministry herself that his coming to the church is actually a two-for-one deal. They don’t expect that there will be moments when he is tempted to doubt the goodness of God. They don’t expect that in a meeting or in the pulpit, fear of man will keep him from doing or saying the things that God calls him to do and say. They don’t expect to hire a flawed man who is still desperately in need of the very grace that he is called to offer and exegete for others.
3) RETICENCE TO SPEAK WITH CANDOR
In most situations the local-church pastoral culture (the nature and character of the relationship of a pastor to his leaders and congregation) is set in the early days of his ministry in that particular church. If the leaders that called him have sought to know the man behind the gifts, experience, and skills, and if they have alerted him to the fact that he is entering an intentionally intrusive, Christ-centered, grace-driven redemptive community, then what follows will be requirements that he participate in and be a recipient of the ministry of the body of Christ and the promise of those who seek to build relationship with him as instruments of seeing in his life. If the calling process has failed to go after the heart of the potential pastor, and if in the early days it hasn’t been clear that the church fully intends to pastor their pastor—not just to hold him accountable but to minister the gospel of Jesus Christ to his soul—then he will probably conduct most of his ministry in the context of personal isolation coupled with a large network of terminally casual relationships. Both the body and the leaders will be reticent to speak to him with biblical candor tempered with love, and he will be reticent to make confession to people who aren’t used to having that kind of relationship with their pastor. There will probably be more talking about him than talking to him, and he will probably do more hiding than confessing. It simply is far from what God designed this community of grace, called “the church,” to be and to do.
4) ABSENCE OF TIMELY INTERVENTION
The “exhort one another daily” command of Hebrews 3:13 tells us that because of remaining sin, our capacity for self-deception is so great that we need regular, even daily intervention. We all need this ministry of intervention, where someone interrupts our private conversation and helps us to see ourselves with greater biblical accuracy, until sin is no more. But when a local church makes wrong assumptions about their pastor, does not invite him into a culture of loving candor, and allows him to live in functional separation from the body of Christ, he will not be the recipient of the kind of Christ-centered, heart-rescuing intervention that every pastor needs.
5) LOSS OF RESPECT IN THE FACE OF PERSONAL REVELATIONS
What then happens is that the pastor will tend to live in a continual state of spiritual hiding with a growing separation between his private and public life and will make confession to his fellow leaders and perhaps to the wider body only when struggles have progressed to a point where they cannot be hidden any more. No, it’s not as if he is participating in a huge spiritual cover-up; it is simply that this is the way a culture of assumptions, silence, and separation operates. When he finally makes confession, he comes crashing down from the unrealistic and unbiblical pedestal that he has been standing on. The community surrounding him is shocked and dismayed and suffers a huge loss of respect for him and is therefore unable to minister the grace of the gospel to him in the way that he has done and so desperately needs himself.
6) DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS OF RESTORATION
In the face of this shock and loss of respect, the local church is tempted to just want to move beyond the ministry of this man and replace him with someone they can once again respect and follow. So the church gets rid of its problem and moves beyond its leadership crisis, but the pastor and his family are the casualty. The heart issues of the man have not been dealt with biblically, he has no greater personal spiritual insight, he has not received the transforming grace of the gospel, the leaders he leaves behind are tempted to be a little more cynical, the weaknesses in their leadership culture are unaddressed, and he is tempted to take on the bitterness of a victim. Is this too dark of a picture? I wish I could say it is, but I have personally witnessed this sad progression.
7) LACK OF DISCERNABLE PASTORAL REPENTANCE AND GROWTH
We should care about, pray for, and do all we can to work toward the constant, progressive spiritual growth of our pastors. We should not assume that it is taking place. We should want them in a thoroughly gospelized community that takes this seriously and invites them into loving, honest relationships where this kind of growth thrives. It is a very sad thing when a pastor moves from place of ministry to place of ministry and does not grow as the result of the things that a God of grace has exposed. Know this: if your eyes ever see or your ears ever hear the sin, weakness, or failure of your pastor, it should never be viewed as a hassle or an interruption; it is always grace. God loves that man and will expose his needs to you so that you can be part of his instrumentality of change and growth.
8) CARRYING PROBLEMS TO THE NEXT SITE OF MINISTRY
In the way that divorce often aborts the growth of a husband or a wife, the dissolving of a pastor’s relationship to his church and the move to a new place of ministry often obstructs or inhibits his growth. There is often so much misunderstanding, back-and-forth accusation, and hurt that accompany this separation that it is very hard for the pastor to look at himself with the kind of objectivity and accuracy that is necessary for sightedness, conviction, and repentance. In fact, it is often worse than this. Often the pastor leaves convinced that his problem is not that he struggled with areas of sin but that he was naive enough to confess, and he silently determines he’ll never put himself in this situation and do that again. I got push-back at an event, when I was doing this material, by a longtime pastor who was convinced that the only way for a pastor to survive is to live in silence and separation.
9) DISHONOR TO CHRIST’S NAME
This whole sad process denies the transforming power of the gospel, devalues the gifts Christ gives to his church, weakens the preaching of the gospel, diminishes the ministry of the church, and ultimately dishonors the name of Christ.
Should we not work to build local-church cultures that encourage, require, and help pastors to be living examples of the heart- and life-transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Shouldn’t we assume that the presence and power of remaining sin lives inside of every pastor? Should we not conclude, then, that it is dangerous for the pastor to live outside of the essential ministry of the body of Christ, which is there to guard, protect, confront, encourage, grow, and, if needed, restore him? Should we all not step back and ask heart-searching questions? If you are a pastor, do you live above or outside of the body of Christ? Do you seek out the insight-giving eyes and wisdom of others? Are there those who know you—I mean, really know you—at the level of the heart? Pastor, do you have a hunger to be pastored? If you are not a pastor, does your church do everything it can do to help your pastor benefit from the ministry of the body of Christ? Is he living in a gospel-centered culture of candor and love? Are you pastoring your pastor?