My calling as pastor is to lift God’s people before the Lord, to bring his Word to his people, and to equip them for their calling. Unbelievers, in a sense, are incidental to that primary purpose.
—John MacArthur Jr.
I receive many letters from pastors who feel intimidated by today’s church trends. They see the exploding seeker church, but the bottom line is, they’re not in the same league as its pastor. They can’t pull off the techniques. And they can’t afford to do it. The creativity isn’t there, the money isn’t there, and the crowd isn’t there.
One pastor who read my book Our Sufficiency in Christ called me in tears. He said, “I was beginning to wonder if what I have always believed about ministry was wrong. This helped me realize that what I’ve always been committed to is what I need to stay committed to. I just needed to hear that what I’m doing is okay.”
Pastors hear the therapists on the radio and they read the books of renowned Christian counselors who say, “Pastors often do more harm than non-Christian counselors,” and they get intimidated. So these pastors think, I can’t counsel anybody. Somebody’s going to kill himself; I’ll get sued and be in court for ten years. I better not say anything. They hear about the mystical experiences of the charismatics, and they’ve never seen a sign or wonder in their life. They wonder why they’re in ministry if they can’t make the lame walk or see a mystical vision.
All across our nation pastors who are godly and welltrained are wondering if they are competent for the task of ministry. What is our sufficiency for ministry? How can we carry on successful outreach in our contemporary culture? I believe the answer lies in a few key principles.
A church for saints
Many people come to church for less than ideal reasons: to be part of something exciting, big, and thriving; to be entertained or inspired; to get a spiritual lift to help them through the week; to give the kids some religious training; to see the preacher they’ve heard on the radio.
So thinking up a strategy to get an unbeliever to church isn’t difficult. All you do is find their hot buttons and press them. If they like dancing elephants, you get dancing elephants. If they want to be successful in their business, you hold a business-success seminar. If they’re worried about their kids, you hold parenting workshops.
I’m not guided by that. My calling as pastor is to lift God’s people before the Lord, to bring his Word to his people, and to equip them for their calling. Unbelievers, in a sense, are incidental to that primary purpose.
I would never think, How can I structure this service to accommodate unbelievers? or How can I make unbelievers want to attend? because that’s not our purpose—unless we are gearing a special meeting for evangelism. We do have an evangelism outreach on some Saturday and Sunday nights. But we would primarily ask our people to bring those they know.
The biblical pattern is that the church gathers to worship and be edified. It scatters to evangelize.
Although my preaching in a regular church service is focused on those who are already believers, the effect is often evangelism. One recent Sunday night in our baptism service, the last guy to come into the water announced during his testimony that he had been a homosexual for twenty years. He was HIV positive, and he knew he was going to die.
“I came to this church,” he said, “because somebody told me that this was the church that preached the truth for a desperate man. When I walked in, the first thing out of your mouth was Psalm 107, which you stood up and read during worship. God directed that at my heart; that whole psalm described me. Before that hour was over, I had heard enough of the gospel to commit my life to Jesus Christ.”
What primarily attracts newcomers to Grace Community Church is personal relationships. The strength of the church has always been people bringing people. In our first six years, the church doubled every two years, without our doing any advertising.
So I basically instruct people: “Honor Christ with your life, take every opportunity to present the gospel, be aggressive in scattering your seed. It isn’t the skill of the sower; it’s the state of the soil.”
It isn’t a marketing strategy; it’s letting others see the obvious benediction that Christ has become to your life, your marriage, your family, that makes the gospel attractive. Christians have something non-Christians want. I trust that by giving our church people a clear understanding of the gospel, they will be able, when doors open, to start where people are and lead them to the good news of forgiveness and salvation.
A transformation for believers
From the outset we have concentrated on life-changing truth. People had their lives changed and began bringing others, and that continues today. Our church continues to have a tremendous response from unbelievers. I give an invitation every service, and there’s not a service after which we don’t have people coming into the prayer room to respond to Christ. We baptize anywhere from five to twenty people on a Sunday night, every week, 90 percent of them led to Christ by somebody else in the church.
Even when we hold a special concert, we don’t advertise; we just let our people know that this is a special time for them to bring unbelieving friends.
It’s easy to get sidetracked from our purpose, which is spiritual transformation. One diversion is an excessive focus on felt needs.
A man came up to me one night after a recent sermon and said, “I’m not a Christian. My marriage is falling apart. My business is going bad. Can you help me?”
I could have offered some thoughts on marriage enrichment or business principles, but that wasn’t the real issue. Instead I replied, “It sounds like you need an invisible means of support.”
“Yeah, that’s it!” he said. “That’s exactly what I need.” So I started from there, explaining how Christ could come personally into his life and circumstances.
Unbelievers come in different shapes and sizes, with all different kinds of felt needs. The most compelling—even more than “How do I fix my marriage?”—is sin. By sticking on a Band-Aid, we may fail to address the need for a transformation of life.
We do need some point of contact with a non-Christian, however. I’m not saying we never address felt needs. We just don’t want that to become a diversion.
A second diversion is entertaining people in church. Of course to bring about spiritual transformation we need to be adept at keeping people’s interest. When we explain the Bible, we need to focus on the things that people find significant. We need to illustrate well. But the difference between maintaining interest and merely entertaining is the purpose: Is it for the sake of being interesting? Or for the sake of truth and spiritual transformation?
It gets back to the preacher’s motivation. I’m not concerned with whether listeners think I’m novel, witty, or entertaining. I’m concerned that they get the truth.
I’m not really a student of communication technique, but I have learned how to keep people’s attention. What rivets people is anticipation, the expectation that I’m about to say something they want to know. As long as they think I’m about to say something funny or helpful or informative, I will have their attention, and as soon as they decide I don’t have anything worthwhile, they’re gone. So I don’t try to hold listeners by entertaining them in some superficial way, but by giving them the sense that I’m going to say something worthwhile.
A worship for God
The galloping pragmatism I see in the church mitigates the confrontive character of the gospel. When the church becomes enamored with influence and image as the key to evangelization, it is no longer depending on Christ. The philosophy in some churches is, If they really like us, they’ll like Jesus. I’m not sure there’s any correlation whatsoever.
Therefore, I have trouble with the idea of a “user-friendly church.” We don’t want to be personally or institutionally offensive, but we cannot buffer the offense of the Cross.
At Grace Community Church we do everything possible to let visitors know we’re thrilled they’re there. We put high priority on treating visitors with real love and care. We have a host ministry that moves throughout the campus identifying people that look new and integrating them into the flow. In the service I take special care to welcome first-time guests. We give them a booklet that explains things in which our church is involved. In the worship service I think most are impressed with the music, which is exceptional. If they are offended, it is always the message that does it. They don’t get offended until I get up to preach!
I’ve often encouraged pastors, “Don’t let your church look like anything but the most well-cared-for property in town. If the bank looks better than your church, you’re in trouble. The bank is saying, ‘We care more about you than the church.'”
We have a beautiful, well-manicured facility. In fact, I remember one couple visited, came to Christ, and later said, “We thought if you took care of flowers, you probably cared about people.”
I read a study that ranked the things that determined where people would go to church: Looks of the facility was number one. Parking, two. Nursery, three. Friendliness, four. Pastor, five. So yes, I think our parking, our shuttle service, and our nursery care are crucial.
So there’s nothing wrong with being creative, doing things that make outsiders take a look at your church, things that attract needy unbelievers, as long as it doesn’t mitigate the message that God is central. God has given us a beautiful world, and we ought to do everything we can, as Adam did, to dress the garden. In addition we want to keep as nice as possible the things that represent him.
All of this is based on our understanding of human nature: people gravitate toward things that are nice, things that are lovely. I have no problem with anything that doesn’t compromise the message or depreciate worship. What happens when churches are so concerned about unbelievers’ reactions, though, is they depreciate worship. They put God-centeredness somewhere down the line.
There’s a big difference between appealing to human nature’s attraction to beauty versus human nature’s attraction to entertainment. We are here to demonstrate the beauty and the graciousness of God. We’re not here to entertain people. When you move to entertainment, you’ve taken a major jump.
I object to the user-friendly church idea because even though its proponents may assume the spiritual foundation of ministry, the presentation tends to make people think that the methods are essential. I would rather see a book or seminar say, “Preach the gospel, and by the way, don’t forget to provide ample parking.” Much of the time it’s a matter of emphasis.
The bottom line: Our sufficiency isn’t in our techniques, skills, or experiences. Our sufficiency is in Christ.
Coming to Terms with Technique
If we really desire the deepest healing for others, we must eventually help move them beyond felt needs and prod them with the goad of the Word into a life of obedient love.
—Donald McCullough
By what power do we minister? Pastors have always needed to answer this question, but never more than now. At one time the pastoral office carried a heavier weight of authority; the pastor was often the best-educated, most respected leader in the community. Not so today.
We have degrees in theology, a subject no longer considered “the queen of sciences” but evoking the same bemusement as Sanskrit. We are generalists in an age of specialization. We work with words in a video culture. We lead institutions in an anti-institutional era. We can’t help wondering what good we do as we refer parishioners to doctors and psychologists and lawyers for concrete help.
What is the basis of our authority? Where do we find the necessary power? I have three assumptions.
First, the theological answer is that we minister through the power of the Holy Spirit. But we are not limp puppets; we must do something, and our choices of what we do places the issue of power on a very practical level.
Second, I assume for most of us the difficulty is not a simple choice between success or faithfulness. We all struggle with mixed motives, to be sure. But most of us, down deep, want to be faithful stewards of the gospel.
Finally, I assume we want to build congregations where Christ is glorified through caring fellowship and evangelistic outreach; we want to draw men and women into the family of faith.
The question remains: Where do we find power for this work? As a pastor in modern America, I’m as tempted as anyone to seek it at the altar of technique.
The temptation of technique
Americans have always loved technique. Our most famous homegrown philosophy is pragmatism, the belief that the value of all ideas is determined by their practical consequences. In other words, truth works. William James (1842-1910) and John Dewey (1859-1952) gave erudite expression to this notion, and their writings found receptive soil in a nation built by “Yankee ingenuity” and a “can-do” spirit.
Our national dedication to practicality has had beneficial consequences. We have split the atom, walked on the moon, and developed more efficient shaving creams. Every day we enjoy the comforts of technique’s benedictions. By now we don’t doubt its power; where there’s a will there must be a way. Faced with a problem? Get the experts working on it and before long they will find the solution. If something such as AIDS persists, it can only be because we haven’t spent enough money on it. If the national debt keeps growing, it must be because of incompetent, corrupt politicians; we simply need someone with enough courage to descend on the problem with something akin to the Nike swish and “Just Do It.”
It’s never easy to transcend the gravity of culture. The church, made up of nothing but ordinary people, always reflects the values of Canaan about as much as the law of Israel.
In the church world, technique means an idolatrous faith in practical means to achieve efficient ends. Technique’s bible is the how-to manual of successful methods. Technique’s creed is the conviction that research will lead to improved means, which will lead to successful ends.
This false god, with extravagant promises of efficiency, too often seduces us into sacrificing the integrity of our ordination to the ministry of the Word.
We have had special difficulty staying away from the Baals of pragmatism. We’re not much interested in theology unless it works. “Leave the abstractions to professors; just tell us how to get on with the business of being Christian. The simpler the better.”
So lining shelves of Christian bookstores are improvement manuals (on everything from spirituality to sexuality) and books that show how to get out of any problem in no more than twelve steps.
Given the inclinations of culture and congregation, pastors are easily lured into the shrine of technique. The church, wheat and weeds growing together, saint and sinner in every individual, is a messy affair that seems impossible to lead much of anywhere, let alone toward growth. So I would like to think there must be some method, some new means of operation, that will help me manage the three-ring circus into the greatest show on earth.
Now that my theological degrees hang in their frames, volumes by John Calvin and Karl Barth tend to gather dust while I study the latest books on church sociology and cultural change. And the conferences I attend are less likely to be about “Approaches to Biblical Interpretation” than about “How to Grow Your Congregation Beyond the 2,000-Member Barrier.” I’m tempted to be more interested in the medium than the message, more interested in strategies for marketing than the Savior I’ve met.
The tyranny of technique
Technique does bestow its blessings. It works, at least within a particular field. No doubt one reason our congregation grew from five hundred to two thousand in a dozen years is that we tried to think strategically about such things as meeting felt needs and advertising in more creative ways.
The use of good techniques, however, differs from reliance upon technique. Herein is the problem. Technique seems to have a life of its own, drawing us more and more under its influence. Unwilling to remain a servant, it becomes a tyrant.
Jacques Ellul pointed out that means will always overtake ends. A church building, for example, can facilitate corporate worship, but so much congregational time and money may get committed to its maintenance that it becomes an end in itself. In the same way, improved methods, though legitimate as means, tend to become ends. Invite technique into the sanctuary and before long it takes its place on the altar.
A world of difference exists between saying that truth works and saying that what works is true, if by truth we include what ought to be. This distinction gets lost as technique grows in influence. What works, we think, must be right. Our goal, for example, should properly be evangelization and discipleship. But too often growth itself becomes the end, and whatever creates growth becomes authoritative.
Thus, preaching that never confronts the listeners’ self-centered lifestyle might enhance growth. But just because it works doesn’t make it right. Yet if we rely on technique to supply power for our ministry, we will naturally follow where it leads.
Getting more people into our sanctuaries may be of some value, but numerical growth itself cannot be the goal. Growth simply for growth’s sake is cancerous. The only growth that finally matters is growth in Christian faith and the fruits of obedience.
Are the people to whom we minister deepening their trust in the grace of Christ? And are they demonstrating this by loving God with all their heart and soul and mind, and by loving their neighbors as themselves?
I praise God for full pews in the congregation I serve, making necessary three services. But in itself, this doesn’t mean much. The growth that counts shows itself when Matilda says, “God really loves me, and I want to be his woman, his holy woman.”
Or when Bill, eager to share the gospel with others, commits himself to raising enough money to start ten new churches in San Diego in the next ten years.
Or when Marilyn finally forgives someone who has wounded her deeply.
Or when Aubrey convinces farmers in the San Joaquin Valley to donate surplus crops to the poor and has about 80,000 pounds of food transported each week into the inner cities of Los Angeles and San Diego.
For growth such as this to occur, we need something far more powerful than technique; for this we need nothing less than the Word of God.
Whenever I’m tempted to find power for ministry in technique, I try to remember three basic theological convictions.
The power of the Word
First, the Word of God has all the power necessary to accomplish the will of God. In fact, it is the only power able to do this.
God creates and re-creates through the Word. In the beginning, God spoke to nothing, and it became something (“God said, ‘Let there be light'” in Genesis 1:3). In response to human rebellion, God speaks forth the re-creation of all things through the enfleshed Word (“the Word became flesh and lived among us” in John 1:14). And the Word’s work of creation and re-creation continues through the apostolic witness of Scripture and its proclamation.
Technique may create more empirically verifiable results in the short run, but the Word alone has power enough to cause growth that will endure for eternity. Power for ministry, therefore, comes from preaching and teaching the Word, from building congregations that are Word-saturated and Wordshaped.
Why then are we ever tempted by technique?
Because the Word takes the way of humility, often the form of weakness. Who would have guessed all things came into being through the baby lying in a manger? Who would have guessed the world was saved through the broken figure on a cross? Who would guess that lives are transformed into holiness through words written in Scripture? “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27). We have no choice, therefore, but to find our confidence and authority and power in the Word.
My most recent inner conflict between the temptation of technique and the integrity of my calling as an ordained minister of the Word came during a recent political campaign. Technique told me to keep quiet, at least in the pulpit, about the election. Conventional church-growth wisdom cautions against controversy in sermons. No matter what I said, someone would be unhappy. Liberals would dislike the biblical pessimism about human rulers; conservatives would dislike the biblical call to care for the poor.
On the other hand, our nation was focused on the election, and silence would imply a docetic gospel that has nothing to do with daily life. So with some fear I chose Psalm 146 as my text: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals in whom there is no help.… God executes justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry … lifts up those who are bowed down … watches over strangers.”
The following week I received a letter from a member telling me that she and her husband had brought their neighbor to church that Sunday.
“We appreciate your ministry,” she wrote, “but you should know that he left in anger and will not be back.”
I felt horrible. I immediately castigated myself for insensitive stupidity. But when my emotions settled down, I reminded myself that I was not ordained to be popular or to grow a large church; I was ordained to witness to the Word in all its fullness, and I must trust it still has power for creation and redemption.
The number of people drawn inside church walls doesn’t mean much. What really matters is how many are exposed to the Word. One congregation may draw a Sunday crowd of 5,000 to inspirational talks as a way to get 500 into a midweek Bible study (an honorable strategy). Another church may draw five hundred to Sunday services with high-protein doses of the Word.
Both churches, I submit, are effectively the same size. If concern for numerical growth has a place in ministry, it is here, in the passion to reach as many as possible with the lifechanging power of the Word.
The incarnation of the Word
My ministry is also shaped by the conviction that the Word not only became flesh but becomes flesh. The Word did not remain a disembodied idea, but took the form of a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, who lived in a specific time and place. The Word dressed itself in the clothing of culture.
It still does. Not only were the apostolic witnesses to this Word children of their time, with concrete ways of thinking and speaking and writing, so are contemporary proclaimers and hearers.
Ordination to the ministry of the Word, therefore, calls for the work of translation. Faithful communication of God’s Word cannot remain abstract but must always be incarnational, always connect with actual people and their hopes and fears, their ecstasies and anxieties.
Here the insights of church growth and cultural analysis and church sociology can be helpful. After placing confidence in the power of the Word, after exegeting the biblical text to hear the Word—then comes the creative task of speaking the Word in a manner that will most likely be heard by our contemporaries. If the first two conditions are met, then it’s time to be seeker sensitive and aware of felt needs.
I make no apologies for striving to be winsome and even entertaining in my proclamation of the gospel. I prepare sermons, for example, constantly reminding myself that we live in a video age; the people who hear me will respond more readily to the visual than the audio. So I sweat and fret, and I often think the most difficult part of preaching is finding images that picture the truth and thus clothe the Word in a contemporary fashion.
But we are called to translate, not transform, the Word. We may not modify its message or adjust it to the culture for the sake of technique. The Word alone, and not our clever presentation of it, has power for ministry.
A recent cover story in The Atlantic was titled, “Dan Quayle Was Right,” and presented results of research studying the consequences of the breakdown of the American family. The statistics revealed that many children suffer painful, longterm consequences when parents divorce.
Shortly after reading this article, I came across 1 Kings 16:34: “Hiel of Bethel built Jericho; he laid its foundation at the cost of Abiram his firstborn, and set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub.”
The flint of culture and the steel of the Word came together, and the sparks ignited a sermon. Child sacrifice suddenly seemed a not-so-ancient practice. We have modern ways of laying the foundation of success and happiness at the expense of our children. And how this contrasts with the New Testament image of Jesus drawing little children to himself to bless them!
The message of God’s Word was clear to me, and I knew I had to remain faithful to it. But how could I craft this into a sermon that would be heard by a congregation filled with busy people, not to mention many who had at one time taken their children through the pain of divorce?
I needed to speak the truth in a way that forthrightly challenged parents who were neglecting children because of careers, or who were contemplating a marital split, naively assuming “the kids will adjust.”
Yet how could I do this without alienating those already feeling guilty, those coming to church seeking help? I feared adding to the burdens of single parents by making them feel condemned by the church.
I began by asking Susie’s advice. A single parent, she works with our ministry, “Single Parents and Co.”
“Tell me,” I asked, “how this might be heard by a single mom struggling against tough odds? How can I say this in a way that will actually be encouraging?”
Her candid comments provided a fresh angle of vision. I knew I couldn’t transform the biblical truth; I knew the congregation needed a prophetic word of challenge about the importance of children. But I also knew I had to translate the Word in a way that would be heard, in a way that would allow the Word to penetrate defenses in order to do its business.
So as I wrote my sermon, I imagined not only parents sacrificing children, but also single parents struggling against the odds, sacrificing for the children. I ended the sermon by stressing that the primary family unit, from a biblical perspective, is the church, and that we want to surround both children and parents with the love of Christ.
The call of the Word
The Word of God meets people where they live, but it never leaves them there.
First it says, “Follow me,” and then eventually it says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Mark 8:34-35).
The Word travels the road toward Golgotha on its way to the empty tomb; it experiences the horrors of Good Friday before the joys of Easter. And those who follow the Word must take the same journey. We gain ourselves by losing ourselves; we enter life through the death of self.
Though our witness to the incarnational Word may begin with felt needs, showing compassion for hurts and speaking to longings, it must never end there. The Word aims for salvation, deliverance from sin, and thus works for the destruction of self-centeredness. A person may attend a church, finding help and inspiration for problems, but remain every bit as self-centered as ever, albeit religiously self-centered. Faithful communication of the gospel, for this reason, cannot neglect the call of the cross.
This will often create discomfort. A few years ago, in a sermon on Romans 5:15-21, I spoke of how Christ has fundamentally altered the human situation. While all had been marked by Adam’s disobedience, now all have been remarked by the grace of Christ’s obedience. This means, I went on to say, that along with Paul, “we can regard no one from a human point of view.” Christ has been crucified and raised even for those we don’t much like. To be concrete (to enflesh the word in the particulars of our culture), I gave a representative list of some people for whom Christ died: illegal migrants, the homeless, homosexuals. Nothing profound, certainly nothing prophetic in my view.
But the next day, I was chatting with someone at the church. He said, “Don, about yesterday’s sermon … I hated it.” Coming from a man for whom I have deep affection, this hurt.
“I hated it,” he repeated, in case I missed it the first time. “The part about homosexuals. I can’t stand them.” His voice was getting loud, very loud.
There was nothing but silence for a few seconds, and then he said in a soft voice, “But don’t stop preaching the Word, because I need it.”
A few weeks after that, following a worship service, I noticed him speaking with two members of the congregation, a father and his homosexual son who is fighting a battle with AIDS. Then I saw three heads bowed in prayer as the man put his arms around his brothers in Christ. The Word was doing its business, and the man was being changed.
Meeting felt needs is not enough because people do not always feel their deepest needs. Faithful ministry will both comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. A painful dislocation must take place before one can be relocated in the center of God’s gracious but demanding will.
My colleagues have been sensitive to human hurts and creative in ministering to them. They generated programs faster than rabbits make bunnies. We helped the sick, divorced, grieving, hungry, homeless, and addicted. We counseled confused adolescents, frustrated parents, and lonely seniors. We offered seminars in financial planning, disaster preparedness, and effective parenting. It’s all good, and it’s one reason we ran out of space.
But a few months ago, I asked them to ponder something: In being so focused on meeting the needs of people, are we inadvertently baptizing their self-centeredness in pseudospirituality? Have we created a congregation of religious consumers who come to us for help with problems, even as they visit doctors and psychologists and exercise therapists, but all the while maintain control of their lives on their quest toward personal fulfillment?
We discussed whether a therapeutic model of ministry might not encourage people to remain focused on themselves and therefore leave them with the worst of their problems. Jesus not only healed the sick, he called them to follow him in discipleship; he delivered them from one form of death to summon them to another.
If we really desire the deepest healing for others, we must eventually help move them beyond felt needs, beyond their self-preoccupation, beyond their comfort zone. We must prod them with the goad of the Word into a life of obedient love.
Where all this will lead, I don’t know. We’re still in process, still struggling. I know of no technique to help us. But I am confident we can minister with authority and effectiveness, for we have the Word—a Word with power, a Word that descends to every human need, and a Word that calls us to the only Life worth the dying.
Copyright © 1996 by Christianity Today/Leadership
