Pragmatic Churches and Pastoral Ministry Students, Introduction

/ William F. Leonhart III / Leave a comment

This post begins a series taken from the senior thesis I wrote in my undergraduate studies. For more, check out this page.

The evangelical church in the West has lost its mind. Even in regard to the things that are most crucial for the life of the church, they have ceased to consider the joint testimonies of Scripture and church history. Certainly, Western churches have not ceased to think altogether. Many have, however, begun to think merely in terms of what works. In a results-oriented culture, obedience is valued far less than utility. A command or precept of Scripture is far more likely to be obeyed by Western evangelicals if it immediately and consistently yields a desired result. The act of mining the Scriptures or church history for precepts that are not immediately apparent is seen as unnecessarily laborious and strange. In church life, to question why a thing is or is not done or how it might be done differently often draws immediate suspicion, if not accusation, discouraging any investigation into alternative, more biblical (and / or historical) approaches. Such investigation is all but nonexistent regarding the question of churches’ responsibilities in the lives of pastoral ministry students. Through examination of church history and philosophy, the articles to come show how churches have generally become pragmatic in how they relate to pastoral ministry students and offer, by exegesis of appropriate Bible passages, principles to guide churches to a more biblical approach.

NASB vs. ESV

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You may also be interested in my more recent post: “NASB vs. ESV vs. HCSB.”

A friend asked me why I like the NASB over the ESV. Here are a list of comparisons I have made between the two translations. Some are fact based, and some are preference based:

NASB (New American Standard Bible)

Lockman Foundation

Formal Equivalent

12th Grade + Reading Level

Original 1977 version kept Thees and Thous in passages where God is directly addressed.

Pew Bibles run $5 each.

Cons

Factory binding is notoriously cheap.

Packaging is not as marketable as ESV or HCSB.

Word choice and grammar may be difficult for some to adapt to.

Pros

Font is unmatched.

Personal pronouns for God capitalized.

Words added to complete the meaning that do not appear in original text are italicized.

OT citations in the NT are rendered in small caps for easier reference.

Cross references in their reference Bible are amazing (even better than the ESV Study Bible).

Multiple options for font sizes.

Preferred Bible for personal study of most educated pastors and seminary professors.

 

ESV (English Standard Version)

Crossway

Formal Equivalent

9th Grade Reading Level

Pew Bibles run $5 each.

Cons

Font is typically too small.

Personal pronouns for God not capitalized.

Fewer helps for determining what is translation and what is interpretation.

OT grammar is choppy, with lots of run-on sentences (NASB adds breaks so-as not to overextend the reader).

OT does not lend itself well to group reading.

Pros

Factory binding unmatched.

Packaging lends itself very well to marketing.

Preferred preaching text of many popular pastors.

Accessible for Christians of various generations.

Study Bible notes are unmatched.

Catch Up! The Tortoise Approach…

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Catch Up! The Tortoise Approach to a Bible-in-Eleven-Months Plan

            So, you wanted to read the Bible in a year, January is nearly over, and you never got started. Now you’ve pretty much decided to put that goal on the shelf until next year. It was good in theory and all, but American life has once again succeeded in distracting you. Oh, well. “There’s always next year. I’ll just do an intensive study of Job or something while I wait for that big ball to drop.”

What if I was to tell you, though, that catching up in a “Bible-in-a-Year” program isn’t as difficult as you think? What if being a month behind didn’t mean that you have to read 20 chapters a day just to get caught up? It’s really not as daunting a task as you think, and there’s still hope for you who still want to get into this thing.

My wife and I are doing the McCheyne Bible-in-a-Year study. It is a very family friendly study in that it incorporates personal Bible study with household Bible study. Each individual is expected, in this type of study, to read approximately two chapters a day from two separate parts of the Bible. Then, the household comes together at night (family, young married couple, college roommates, etc.) and corporately reads, in general, two more chapters together from two other parts of the Bible. Built into this system is a definite sense of accountability and washing with the word. There are others that can be just as beneficial. This is not one size fits all. Be sure and do your research.

“But,” you interject, “it’s almost February. I have no hope of catching up, now.” Not so fast. In the process of reading through the Bible together, my wife and I have gotten behind many times, and we could have killed ourselves trying to get caught up (figuratively speaking of course). We chose not to, however. Here’s what we suggest for those of you who still would like to get into a “Bible-in-a-Year” program and don’t want to tear your hair out doing so:

Step One: Find the study that’s right for you. There are many different approaches out there. Find the one that’s just right for you and your household.

Step Two: Make sure that you are not in it alone, unless you are simply a self-driven person and you are not part of a family unit.

Step Three: Make sure that even doing a “Bible-in-a-Year” program is right for you. Some people benefit more from doing a book at a time over the span of 5 years, as opposed to reading the entire Bible in one year. The most important issue is that you strive to be in the word daily. It is, after all, one of the few means of grace the Lord has left at our disposal.

Step Four: Don’t get in a hurry. Sprinting can lead to fatigue and burn out. Take your time. If you need to, just spend the first month doing the January study before attempting to add any extra reading. DON’T TRY TO CRAM A MONTH WORTH OR READING INTO A WEEK!!

Step Five: When you do begin the catch up process, do it a chapter at a time. Read an extra chapter a day, and within a few to six months you should be caught up.

Step Six: Couple it all with prayer and thanksgiving to the amazing God who, though He was completely transcendent, saw fit to stoop down and reveal Himself to us through what has been made (both seen and unseen), through His Son who became flesh that He may save us from the penalty of our sins, and through the divinely inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God: the Bible.

Give me some feedback. I’d love to know if this was of any benefit to any of you. God bless you.

In Christ,

William F. Leonhart III

Spurgeon on the “Novice” Pastoral Candidate

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“For a man to come shuffling into a College, pretending that he holds his mind open to any form of truth, and that he is eminently receptive, but has not settled in his mind such things as whether God has an election of grace, or whether he loves his people to the end, seems to me to be a perfect monstrosity. ‘Not a novice,’ says the apostle; yet a man who has not made up his mind on such points as these, is confessedly and egregiously ‘a novice,’ and ought to be relegated to the catechism-class until he has learned the first truths of the gospel.”

Spurgeon, Charles H. Lectures to My Students, Zondervan, Grand Rapids. 1954, 39.

Known as the Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a baptist minister in London, England from the mid to the late 19th Century. He was the pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle (a mega-church, even by today’s standards), the president of The Pastors’ College, a husband and father, and author of more works than any Christian minister before his time or since.

Ambrose to Constantius on Preaching

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“Therefore, let your sermons be flowing, let them be clear and lucid so that by suitable disputation you may pour sweetness into the ears of the people, and by the grace of your words may persuade the crowd to follow willingly where you lead. But if in the people, or in some persons, there is any stubbornness or any fault, let your sermons be such as to goad the listener, to sting the person with a guilty conscience. ‘The words of the wise are as goads’ (Ecclesiastes 12:11). Even the Lord Jesus goaded Saul when he was a persecutor. Consider how saltutary was the goad which made of a persecutor an apostle, saying: ‘It is hard for thee to kick against the goad’ (Acts 9:5).”

Ambrose, Saint Ambrose Letters: 1-91; trans. Sister Mary Melchior Beyenka, Fathers of the Church, Inc., New York. 1954, 78.

As his pastor and mentor, God used Ambrose in the life of Augustine plant the seeds that would eventually blossom into the life and work of the man that gave us such works as Confessions, City of God, and his letters to Pelagius. Though it is less recognized and certainly less acclaimed, Ambrose’s surviving body of work is more extensive than even that of his disciple, Augustine.

C.S. Lewis on the Casual Reading of Old Books

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“There are, I know, those who prefer not to go beyond the impression, however accidental, which an old work makes on a mind that brings it to a purely modern sensibility and modern conceptions; just as there are travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English tourists, enjoy all they see for its ‘quaintness’, and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards, mean to the natives. They have their reward. I have no quarrel with people who approach the past in that spirit. I hope they will pick none with me. But I was writing for the other sort.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Preface), Cambridge University Press, 1964, pp. ix-x

Why Publicly Contend for Christian Morality?

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In the subculture of evangelicalism I inhabit, the issue of publicly contending for Christian morality (i.e. abortion, the definition of marriage, “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” etc.) surfaces from time to time. There seems to be basically two camps: those for it and those against it. On the surface, I tend to agree with many of the arguments made by those who are against making a public defense of the moral claims of the Bible. They say it detracts from our focus on the gospel. They say that it can often stem from post-millennial idealism. They say that it makes us look silly to a world that already hates us for the gospel. On the surface, I can agree with all of these arguments. However, allow me to offer some arguments for the other side in response:

  1. The gospel does not make sense apart from conviction of sin, and there is no conviction of sin in a society where the church is by-and-large silent on moral issues in the public sector.
  2. To want a better society for one’s children, and to want to see people live according to the precepts of Scripture, does not automatically make that one a post-millennialist.
  3. The authors of Scripture spent more time defending the moral assertions of the Bible than they did defending the epistemological assertions of the Bible. Think about it.
  4. The law and the gospel are not diametrically opposed to one another, but rather God uses both to bring people to repentance and faith. The problem comes when one is shared without the other.
  5. Throughout church history, church leaders have contended for biblical morality in their cultural settings.
  6. Someone’s worldview will be the current that drives the culture. Why not Christianity’s?