Church & Ministry

The Church in Technicolor

As I write these words the History Channel is promoting a documentary on World War Two. The series consists mainly of original film shot during that great conflict. Instead of the grainy black and white of 1940’s newsreels, however, the picture has been digitally enhanced and colorized.

It was with great fear and trepidation that I boxed up all my books in December, as my wife and I prepared to move roughly forty five minutes to the south of our then current location. While I will not bore you with all the details, we had found out that we would have to move suddenly, and then we lost more precious time struggling to find a suitable apartment just a few weeks before Christmas. What added to my consternation was the fact that now I was charged with shepherding a small church in our original town, and I was concerned about trying to do sermon preparation without my books. Fortunately, I had received a copy of Logos 4’s Leaders Library program for Christmas, and I expected it to be a godsend and blessing. Although it is a very powerful program, and there is a lot of potential with the program’s abilities, I have to confess that I am disappointed in it.

I have had an on again-off again relationship with Gordon MacDonald. As a young associate pastor in the mid-eighties I read his best seller, Ordering Your Private World (which is still in print). A couple of years later I read his book, Renewing Your Spiritual Passion. Although it was twenty-five years ago, I vaguely remember spiritually profiting somewhat from those books, although if I were to re-read them now, I might have a different opinion. However, the fact that he has admitted that he was involved in an extra-marital affair while writing those books kind of soured me on him. I did not read his Rebuilding Your Broken World or anything else by him. (That may be more of a reflection upon my former Phariseeism than his restoration.)

Gordon MacDonald has been a pastor and author for more than forty years. He has also been the president of a couple of well-known parachurch organizations, and is currently an editor at large for the magazine Leadership. He and his wife of almost fifty years live in New Hampshire.

This book first caught my eye a couple of years ago when it came out in hardback. I skimmed it a couple times at the bookstore, but didn’t want to pay the hardback price. However, when I eventually saw it in paperback, I plopped down my money. I am glad I did.

The subtitle of this book is “What to Do When the Church You Love Tries to Enter the 21^st Century.” It is a fictional tale told in the first person. MacDonald writes as a pastor of an imaginary New England congregation of a few hundred people. The church has had a proud history and is part of an unnamed denomination. The sixty-ish “Pastor MacDonald” has been at the church for several years and has overseen the last of a series of changes designed to attract younger people. Not everyone is on board with these changes—especially the aging “boomer” generation. Plus, there are more changes on the horizon. A proposed $150,000 initiative to upgrade the sanctuary’s technology did not get the expected congregational approval. This has brought the change issues to a head. Also being debated is a proposed name change for the church.

The following is reprinted with permission from Paraklesis, a publication of Baptist Bible Seminary. The article first appeared in the Summer ‘09 issue.

Why learn Hebrew and Greek?

I want to address just one facet of the question in this essay. The primary purpose of Baptist Bible Seminary is to train pastors. We have made a deliberate choice to focus on only one narrow slice of graduate-level biblical-theological education. I am thinking first and foremost of the pastor when I think of the place of the biblical languages in the curriculum. In its biblical portrait, the central focus in pastoral ministry is the public proclamation of the Word of God. There are certainly other aspects of pastoral ministry, but it can be no less than preaching if it is to be a biblical pastoral ministry.

How does preaching relate to the biblical languages?

I have some serious concerns about the state of the pulpit these days. My concern could be stated fairly well by adapting the wording of 1 Sam. 3:1 and suggesting that biblical preaching is rare in our day, and a word from God is infrequently heard from our pulpits. Some of today’s best known preachers echo the same sentiment. John Stott, for example, says that “true Christian preaching…is extremely rare in today’s Church.”¹

As those who stand in the pulpit and open the Word of God to a local congregation, pastors have the same charge as that with which Paul charged Timothy: “Preach the Word” (2 Tim 4:2). That is an awesome responsibility. The apostle Peter reminds us that “if anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God” (1 Pet 4:11).