An Ordinary Pastor?

^{Editor’s Note: Dr. Jeff Straub’s articles occasionally appear in lieu of Dr. Bauder’s regular column.}

I don’t suppose any of us aspire to be ordinary. We would like to excel at something … a hobby, sports, trivia, literature, and particularly, our vocation. We want people to think well of us. We want to be highly esteemed, to be regarded among our peers as men of high character and high gifts. We struggle with the desire for recognition and praise. It’s a part of our sin nature, to be sure, but struggle we do. No one really wants to be just ordinary!

For this reason, D. A. Carson’s recent biography on the life of his father, Tom Carson, is so helpful. A pastor friend recommended Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor (Crossway, 2008) to me several weeks ago, and since Tom Carson pastored in Quebec, Canada, and knew T. T. Shields, I was initially interested in the book for its historical insights. While the book has a number of interesting details regarding Shields, one of Canada’s most colorful Baptist preachers, it is far more than a valuable historical treatise. I ordered the book and began reading it shortly after it had arrived. So engaging was its story that I was finished in no time. It is the kind of a book one could read in one sitting, if one had a bit of time. I finished it in two sittings.

The essential point of the book on Don Carson’s part is to chronicle the life of his father, a faithful servant of God. Tom Carson was a Baptist pastor who labored in Quebec during the early days of the evangelical Baptist efforts to plant churches there. It was a difficult ministry in a difficult culture. Quebec is French Catholic, and Tom was an English-speaking Protestant. Some of his colleagues were jailed for their efforts. Their works struggled for years and were resisted by the Catholic establishment and clergy. Nevertheless, in time a foothold was gained, and gospel churches were planted in the province.

As interesting as the story of the evangelization of Quebec is, it is the story of the man who gives this book its significance. Tom was a man who labored in relative obscurity most of his life. He was not a great leader among men in the popular sense of the term. He wasn’t invited to speak around the country, the continent, or the world like his more well-known son. He was just an ordinary pastor who likely would have remained in obscurity had not his son offered us a glimpse into his father’s life. In doing so, Don Carson has written a book that should remind those who read it of Paul’s important charge regarding faithfulness—it is required of stewards that they be faithful or trustworthy (1 Cor. 4:2). The steward needs to carry out God’s charge without regard to personal gain or professional aggrandizement. Tom did, and therein is his legacy.

Don tells the story in simplicity, neither embellishing the facts nor concealing the truth. His father was an ordinary pastor who faced the kinds of challenges we all face in the ministry—a sense of inadequacy, discouragement, and failure. Through all of this, however, we read snippets of Tom’s journal that reveal the man as he was before God—earnest, diligent, and faithful. He struggled with not seeing more progress in the work, but he never quit on the ministry and never quit on God. As his circumstances in life changed, he was forced to leave the paid ministry. But he never left his calling. He labored faithfully as a second man to help another pastor build the work in Quebec. He preached and taught until his wife’s illness curtailed his activity, and after her death he continued to minister in a difficult place. The price of the book is well met by simply reading Don Carson’s words on discouragement that appear at the end of chapter six. He lists nine principles he gleaned from the life of his father that would be well worth all of our consideration when we, too, face discouragement.

Something also should be said of Tom’s encounter with T. T. Shields. Tom had been a student at Toronto Baptist Seminary in its early days. He was one of Shields’ boys and knew him well. Shields was a man of strong conviction and a powerful personality. He seldom brooked dissent in his church or in his ecclesiastical associations. Later in life, Tom ended up on the wrong side of T. T. Shields in an ecclesiastical matter and bore the brunt of the older man’s censure. It cost him personally, but he persevered. He seems to have never become bitter. His son, growing up in the pastor’s home in the aftermath of the controversy, had to wait until he was in college in a Baptist history class to learn something of the affair. Why? His father had resolved to avoid speaking of the matter or to allow it to become a problem. When Don approached his father for the details, Tom was reticent to speak of it for the sake of his pledge. He suffered in silence rather than let the turmoil affect his family or his ministry.

Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor is no ordinary book. Doubtless, it will receive a wider readership because of its author. Don Carson is well-known in conservative Evangelicalism, and that alone will give the book a vast audience. But I hope the book will be read for its story. In reading about Tom Carson, we could be reading about ourselves. Most of us will be ordinary pastors. But as Don has demonstrated, there is no shame in that. Few of us will ever attain unto the greatest. God calls us, nevertheless, to a life of faithfulness. In the end, that is really all that matters. “Most people go through life afraid that people will not think enough of them; Paul went through life afraid that people would think too much of him (2 Cor. 12:5-6) [131].” My only regret after reading the book is that I never had the privilege, when I labored in Canada, to have met Tom Carson. Thanks to his son, Don, I feel as though I have. My life is richer for the experience. You should meet him, too.

Sonnet xcix

Fulke Greville (1554-1628)

Downe in the depth of mine iniquity,
That ugly center of infernall spirits,
Where each sinne feels her owne deformity,
In these peculiar torments she inherits,
Depriv’d of human graces, and divine,
Even there appeares this saving God of mine.

And in this fatal mirror of transgression
Shows man as fruit of his degeneration
The error’s ugly infinite impression,
Which bears the faithless down to desperation;
Depriv’d of human graces and divine
Even there appeares this saving God of mine.

In power and truth, Almighty and eternal
Which on the sin reflects strange desolation
With glory scourging all the Sprites infernal,
And uncreated hell with unprivation;
Depriv’d of human graces, not divine,
Even there appeares this saving God of mine.

For on this spiritual Cross condemned lying,
To pains infernal by eternal doom,
I see my Saviour for the same sins dying,
And from that hell I feared, to free me, come;
Depriv’d of human graces, not divine,
Thus hath his death rais’d up this soul of mine.

Dr. Jeff Straub is associate professor of historial and systematic theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN), as well as serving as adjunct professor at Calvary Baptist Seminary in Moscow, the Ukraine, and Romania, at Piedmont Baptist College, at LIFTS Institute (Kitchener, Ontario) and most recently at Central African Baptist College in Zambia. He has been a senior pastor and church planter in Canada and was a missionary among the Ojibway Indians in Wanipigow, Manitoba. He has had several articles published in the Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal, as well as in FrontLine Magazine. Dr. Straub is married to Rebecca, and they have three children. He enjoys books, golf, hunting, and fishing.