As you may have seen, the July/August 9Marks eJournal focusing on the topic of marriage was sent out yesterday.

The eJournal began with my editor’s note in which I considered the link between an individual’s marriage and one’s evangelistic ministry. Here’s what I originally stated:

Can a man with a good but wrongly structured marriage have a faithful evangelistic ministry? This question was posed to me recently. The answer seemed obvious—"Look, it may not be ideal, but if a person is out there sharing the gospel…"

I then presented the question to a pastor whom I respect tremendously. I was amazed when he said that he was unsure whether such a man could. His rationale: "A rightly ordered and healthy marriage is that close to the heart of the gospel, and an unhealthy marriage teaches a wrong gospel."

In response, a couple of very loving and helpful brothers contacted us to say (essentially), “What are you talking about?! Of course someone with a wrongly structured marriage can have an effective evangelistic witness! God uses sinners, doesn’t he?”

To which my reply is, “Yes, of course, you’re right.” Thank you, brothers, for your corrections.

So let me try to state the matter a little more carefully, and then invite others into the conversation. If you click on the (revised!) editor’s note on the home page, you’ll see that this is how I should have stated that second paragraph from the get-go:

I then presented the question to a pastor whom I respect tremendously, and his reply caused me to see a link more clearly than I had before: a rightly ordered marriage presents a picture of the gospel, and, in that sense, a distorted marriage can present a distorted gospel. Yes, God can certainly use those of us with imperfect marriages to be effective evangelistic witnesses. Thank goodness! But the more biblically ordered a marriage is, the clearer will be the portrait of Christ and the church—that is, the gospel. The clearer the marriage biblically the better the display of the gospel.

Bottom line: I certainly don’t want to suggest that a wrongly structured or unhealthy marriage entirely nullifies a couple’s evangelistic witness. I do want to say that our marriages can present a different message than our gospel proclamation itself does (like sin does in our lives generally), and so we need to attend to them diligently. For more on this, see C. J. Mahaney’s even-handed article from this last eJournal.

Thoughts?

Elder Jamie made a list for Intern PJ at CHBC about things that he has observed that he thinks have made for the unusual relational depth which, by God's grace, seems to characterize our congregation.  I say "by God's grace" because we understand that there are no guaranteed recipes for our actions to produce certain results.  But I think Jamie's observations would be of interest to others, and perhaps of help as pastors pursue improving the "life together" aspect in their congregations.

I've often heard it said that people come to CHBC because they hear about the preaching, but they stay because of the community.  That's only partly true, I'm sure, but I think it IS partly true.  This series intends to go through the aspects of life together that Jamie mentioned to PJ, and expand on them very briefly.

#1 is the understanding that the LOCAL church in the New Testament met together in one LOCATION.  It is very hard to begin to develop community when you are divided into multiple services, sometimes even on multiple days. While more theologically and even biblically-driven arguments could be made, practically community arises from being together.  While churches with multiple services can certainly be marked by a strong life together, there is no doubt that the depth of community life is enhanced by regular weekly meeting together for public worship--hearing the word, singing praises, sharing, giving, observing the ordinances, prayer, etc.  Formally and informally, meeting together helps promote togetherness!  Forgive me for stating the obvious, but meeting together helps to deepen relationships in a congregation.

For more such advanced thinking on the local church, stay tuned!

There are lots of people out there playing with Wordle, a program that creates "word clouds" out of large sections of text, giving prominence to the words that are used more often.  Endless fun to be had with this. (HTJT)

Here's the entire ESV Bible.

The Psalms.

The ESV New Testament.

The Psalms in Hebrew.

Several different books of the NT.

The wordles of the different NT books are really interesting, because they manage to nail pretty well what the main point of most of those books is.

So what would you guess stands out in every single one of the gospels?  "Jesus said."

Romans?  "God Christ law righteousness through faith."  Really.  No kidding.  Righteousness through faith!

1 Corinthians?  "God Christ body brothers." (It's mostly about the church.)

Hebrews?  "God made covenant through blood high priest."  No, seriously.  It's that good!

Anything to be learned here?  Eh, probably not much.  Just, well, that this crazy little computer program is alot closer to preaching an expositional sermon than......nah, never mind.

Sean Michael Lucas reviews Mark Dever and Paul Alexander's The Deliberate Church here.

Thabiti, when you say, "Consider one man at a time," you mean that in regard to actually interviewing him, having him visit the church, preaching, and all that, right?  I assume you don't mean that a group of elders can't have a stack of resumes or a list of names (referred by sister churches or whatever) and do some prioritizing based on the church's life, culture, and context.

Of course I agree with you on that point-----You don't want to run something that looks like an NCAA tournament:  "Congratulations, brother!  You made it into the final four!  Now we're going to have you all up to interview next week, reduce it down to the final two, and then let those two duke it out in the pulpit! Are you ready to ruuuuuumbllllllle?"

Another point:  It seems to me that many churches mess up by creating a very detailed job description for their pastor, and then they go looking for the guy that fits best into the hole they've carved.  That can very easily, though, turn the whole thing into what it sounds like Mike's describing----a very corporate-like headhunting process.  Seems to me it would be better to go looking for a man to be the pastor and once you've found him, work with him to create a job description that emphasizes his strengths and compensates for his weaknesses.  Of course you have to have some kind of expectations up front; I'm not denying that.  It's just a matter of perspective: Is it the man or the job-description that's primary?

Pastor search help potentially here, by the way.

Thanks for your thoughts, Mike. We'll be thinking about you on Colonial Rebellion Day.

I've appreciated this discussion. I think the way a church searches for a pastor says a lot about its goals, priorities, and self-perception. I was a member for 10 years of a church of 4000 people and in that time we went through 3 pastoral searches, each one looking for someone who could "fix" what was wrong with the church.

I think if more churches approached their pastoral search from your perspective, Jonathan, we'd be a lot better off. Too many churches are like the NBA teams that hire Larry Brown. He's a proven winner, but you know he won't stay around very long. Churches want a guy with a proven track record of growing churches, even if they know he's going to move on to another church in a little while.

Churches should look to the long term. Give a shot to the up and coming young guy. Hire the Sam Mitchells of the world.

Having just come out the other end of going through the pastoral search process (My induction service is next weekend - the day after Independence Day!) and having actually begun that process with a few other churches before eventually finding where we trust that the Lord will have me serve, let me make a couple of observations.
1) I was very resistant to thinking of the pastoral search process as a job interview. I think that some of the churches I've talked to liked this, and some didn't. So, I desired to see a great deal more openness than perhaps your average employer might give about the state of the business. In some churches I found that, in others I found an over possessiveness of the congregation that led to a level of confidentiality about the church where I felt that they were finding our plenty about me, but I was finding out very little about them. I guess I felt like it was rather like going on a blind date, and expecting a proposal of marriage the next day!
2) I found it quite important to try to take some kind of lead in what the pastoral search process might be like. If the search committee or church leaders had such set ideas about how they wanted the process to run, that they were unable to accommodate suggestions I made as to how the process might be made a little more useful to both parties, I saw that as an indication that they might not want me to take a lead in helping them to think through other things if they were to recogniSe (and yes, now that I'm back in blighty, I'm going to be using those English spellings) me as their pastor.
Another thing I also did was to suggest some of the questions that they should be asking me... Paul Alexander has a good list here.
One of the things that attracted me to Twynholm Baptist Church was the way in which the elders here responded to my slightly (I hope not very) pushy suggestions was that they seemed to think of this as a positive thing that I was able to take some kind of lead. It is now a real privilege to serve alongside them now.
So, if you are a church looking for a pastor, and have are considering someone whom you think the Lord might have for you, I'd really encourage you to give them opportunities to say how they would like to proceed on the search.

Thabiti,
Great points, brother. My sense is that a lot of churches use the "want ad" route. But my fear is that this only affirms the professionalization of the pastorate, in the same way that "personals" in the newspaper only affirm the consumerization of love and marriage. Are either of these routes necessarily "wrong"? No. Can you find a good pastor or a good spouse this way? Sure. But are these the wisest fields to go hunting on? I don't think so.

Now, insofar as a church looks to its pastor to be something of a service provider, you can understand why it would use the want ads. But if you're looking for a man to be more like a father-figure, a shepherd, a teacher, a disciple-maker, you're not just looking for someone to "do a job" (though that's part of it), you're looking for him to enter into the covenant relationship (whether implicit or explicit) of your local church's life--and to lead in that covenant relationship!

How do we tell a single brother or sister to find a spouse? Well, there are certain basic boxes that need to be checked. And then there is a host of less quantifiable, more subjective, time-testing-required issues of trust, character, and even personality that need to be considered. So it is with finding a pastor, which is why the advice you offered, Thabiti, is excellent.

In short, there's a difference between looking for an employee and looking for a spouse. What's tricky about finding a pastor is, it combines elements of each. The first big step is to be mindful of that fact, and then structure a search process accordingly.

Greg & Mike,

I've always thought of the relationship of preaching and counseling in terms of one phrase: "Authority goes to those who preach the Word."   As you exposit the Scriptures, and as people grow to trust the Scriptures and your faithful handling of the Scriptures, they will seek you out.  Not the youth minister.  Not the associate pastor.  But the senior minister, the man who is charged with the task of proclaiming the Word weekly.   New ministers  won't get  much counseling because they are unknown commodities.  As trust in the minster and trust in his  proclamation of the Word grows, so does the  counseling.  And Greg is certainly right--faithful expositional preaching (not story-telling, moralism, or the like)---will pierce hearts, stirring up conviction of sin and eagerness for righteousness. 

Counseling has an interesting effect on preaching---it should aid the preacher in sermon application.  It helps you apply the truth because you have specific knowledge about the joys and struggles of the lives of members in one specific congregation.   

One thing that some of our pastors do during sermon preparation is to turn to a page of the directory and think about how a particular point in the sermon will apply to the different people in the directory.   This type of exercise helps you think about how truth changes the lives of specific people in your congregation!  (Obviously, you don't call specific people out by name in the middle of your sermon, but this does help you take broad application and turn it to more specific application at different points in your sermon....you need both specific and broad application when you preach!)

Jonathan, great question.  Just last night I sat with 3-4 other pastors and deacons discussing this very issue among others.  It was a spirited conversation, with some interesting differences emerging depending upon whether the men in question were from elder-led or elder-ruled congregations.

Why do we call these things "pastor searches" when it seems to me you don't have to do a lot of searching for pastors (they're everywhere, it seems) and few committees seem to really carefully search?  Want ads shouldn't be confused with searching.  They can have a certain graffiti on the bathroom wall quality.  And some of the things potential-pastors are subjected to aren't really searches as much as they are Gitmo-styled interrogations.

So we need something between want ads and witch trials.  Some quick thoughts not necessarily gathered from last night's conversation:

1.  The church's leaders, its elders, should lead the process for finding the new pastor, including examination of the man according to 1 Tim. 3, etc.  Personally, this rules out the traditional search committee.  I think you want the men most acquainted with the calling and work of pastors to examine the prospective candidate.  And perhaps the elders will have the demeanor that helps avoid the interrogation aspect that sometimes develops. 

2.  Running want ads seems a really bad idea to me.  Anyone who has had to hire someone in the work world using want ads knows how completely bogus the entire process can be.  Whatever the elders and congregation can do to avoid the "big prize bonanza" of the want ad lottery has got to be a good thing.  It seems this process holds a lot of potential for encouraging men to "audition" and "perform" and places the congregation in the position of pretending it knows more about a potential pastor based on his resume than it actually does.

3.  Instead of want ads, call like-minded churches and pastors you respect and ask for recommendations of faithful men they would be happy to see pastoring a church like your own.  It's more efficient and you increase the chance of learning something meaningful about potential pastors.

4.  Take the time to observe the men where they are currently serving, in their "natural environment," if you will.  Observe him preaching and serving at his current church.  And in this media-saturated age, a group of elders can listen to a man's entire preaching corpus before ever speaking with him.

5.  Consider one man at a time.

6.  The Lord's people need shepherds, but take your time to find one.  Don't be in a hurry to "get a pastor."  Consider the man's theological commitments, his practical commitments, his life and reputation, and so on.  That's not easily done in a couple of interviews.  It takes time.  If a congregation had no pastor and no prospects, it would do what it could to continue serving the Lord, preaching the word, administering the sacraments, etc.  It could not rush things, even if it wanted.  It's helpful to borrow some of that mentality when you do have options.  Pretend you didn't, slow down, and really ask the meaningful questions, the hard questions, and without becoming the Salem witch trial examine the man.  The next pastor will do much to press his own character (or lack thereof) on the congregation.  Don't skimp on testing his character.