At a number of conferences, I have had the privilege and joy of sitting in the front row to hear my friend John Piper speak. And a few times I have been assigned to speak after him. It’s never my preference to speak after John. Preaching after John is always a humbling experience.

As you know, I cannot preach like John Piper. But what I have discovered over time is that great preachers like John, Charles Spurgeon, and Jonathan Edwards do model practices all preachers can emulate and benefit from.

At the Together for the Gospel conference, I had the privilege to participate with Mark, Al, and Lig in interviewing John. During the panel discussion, John provided us with a glimpse into how he prepares his sermons, and how he prepares his heart as he prepares his sermons.

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C.J. Mahaney: Most of these guys are already in the process of preparing a sermon for this Sunday. If they were to meet with you for lunch, how would you counsel them about both the preparation process and the preaching event?

John Piper: The most important thing I want to say in answer to that question is this: There isn’t any technique to preaching. It is not a technique. It is not a profession that you go to a homiletics class to learn how to do.

God is doing sermon preparation when your throat is blazing with yellow pustules and you have a fever and you feel like quitting. He is doing sermon preparation there. Don’t begrudge the seminary of suffering. Don’t begrudge the marriage difficulties. Don’t begrudge the parental stuff that is so hard. He is making you a preacher. He is making you a pastor.

So the main preparation work is walking with him through it all, and going deep with him, and being there and not running away from it into endless food or television. That would be a—very practical thing to do would be to get rid of your television so that you have some time, family time and reading time and reflection time, and basically keep your mind free from pornography.

We were talking about this pornography thing over lunch the other day, and we who are 60 years old were reflecting on how difficult it was to get pornography when we were teenagers. The implication of that is that in my brain I have two pornographic images from my teen years. I found a Playboy in a Laundromat, and they were passing a really weird book around in the locker room one day. I remember both images like I saw them yesterday. Most of you have a thousand images in your brain. That really makes sermon preparation hard, but not impossible. He died to purify our conscience, although you make your job a lot harder if you keep going to that cesspool.

…Keep your minds from being contaminated, because the preparation moment is a heart/mind thing in which every three minutes you are crying out to the Lord as you are reading your text in Greek or Hebrew or English. You are reading it and you are saying, “God, please. I have got to have a word. I have got to have a word for my people. Let me see what is really here.” That is a prayer for the mind part. My points must be here in the text. I can’t make this up. My people have to see it. I have to see it. I don’t want to pull rank on these folks by quoting Greek—and they say, “I don’t see that,” and I say, “Well, believe me it is there.” I don’t want to do that. I want them to see what is really there, so I need to see what is really there. So I am pleading with the Lord, “Show me what is there.”

And then I am pleading just as strong, “Help me to feel what is there. If it is a horrible thing, help me to feel horrible. If it is a beautiful thing, help me to feel thrilled over its beauty. Bring this dead heart into some kind of conformity—moral, affectual conformity to what is really there.”

Those are my two kinds of prayers, light and heat. If you try to work it up without the Holy Spirit giving it, people will know. They will know. Your people will know sooner or later. “I don’t think that was a real affection. That was planned.”

So there are a thousand details I could say about the preparation moment as far as poking at the text, but the preaching moment is the same. You plead with the Lord.

I do APTAT, before I stand up.

A—I admit, O Lord, that I can do nothing of any lasting value.

P—I pray for self forgetfulness, for fullness of the Holy Spirit, for love, for humility, for passion, for zeal, for prophetic utterance that may come to my mind while I am preaching so that I can say things that I hadn’t prepared that might penetrate where nothing else would.

T—I trust a particular promise from the Lord that I have found in my devotions early in the morning. So today I read Deborah’s song in Judges 5 as well as Psalm 84 between 6:30 and 7:00 this morning, and pointed out a verse to Mark as we were sitting there. “Oh my soul, ride on in strength.” That was my word this morning.

The Lord gave a word from his Word this morning: “Ride on in strength.” So I take that. That’s my T: trust. So as I am walking up, I am saying, “This is your work. It has come. Don’t leave me here. You have got to do something here. I am counting on you.”

And he is saying, “I got this under control.” He is God.

A—Then you act. You have got to do it. It is your hands that are moving. It is your voice that is moving. You have got to do this. Walking by the Spirit, putting to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit, being led by the Spirit, bearing the fruits of the Spirit is a mystery. “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10, ESV). That is the mystery. So sermon preparation is: You put out when you are preparing and when you are preaching. You put out, but if you have prayed and done APTAT and God is merciful, you won’t be putting out. He will be putting out.

T—Thank God. And when you have acted and you go sit down, you thank him. He is going to do, and is doing what he is going to do, and he regularly does more than you think he does.

I don’t think after 28 years of preaching that I can correlate with any degree of confidence my sense of effectiveness in the moment and the true effectiveness of the moment. I don’t know any keys to know how to correlate those two. This keeps me from being too excited or too depressed.

The Lord will be sure to put me in my place if I do the one and lift me up if I do the other, because he said, “I am working out there in ways you can’t make happen at all. You thought that was a good thing to say? That wasn’t it. You missed it. That wasn’t what did it. This thing over here that you didn’t even know I gave you did it, and you will find out in heaven that that happened.”

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Listen to the T4G panel discussion here.

 

 

The new book Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World, edited by C.J. and coauthored by Craig Cabaniss, Bob Kauflin, Dave Harvey, and Jeff Purswell, was released last month from Crossway. In his foreword, John Piper suggests one way pastors could use the book:

A word to pastors: this book is a gift to you. It will help you help others—by the modeling that’s done here and by the exegetical reflection and by the biblical and cultural insights. I can see whole churches reading this together as the pastor fleshes out the biblical foundations from the pulpit. What a powerful season that would be in the life of the church. (p. 12)

Worldliness was written with pastors and church leaders in mind. If you want to use the book as Dr. Piper proposes, or in some other church or small-group setting, check out the thoughtful discussion questions in the back (see pages 180–187). These questions are designed not only for personal application, but also to help pastors or small-group leaders guide focused and fruitful discussions about the truths in the book.

In addition to purchasing the book (or if you’re not ready to purchase it yet), you can download extended excerpts from the book for free. Download the foreword by Dr. Piper and the opening chapter by C.J. (“Is This Verse in Your Bible?”) as a PDF here. And recently we posted a series of excerpts on modesty, from chapter five (titled “God, My Heart, and Clothes”). Read this entire chapter online here.

C.J.’s message from the 2002 New Attitude Conference, “Do Not Love the World” (1 John 2:15) is another tool for resisting the sin in our fallen world—and in our own hearts. (This conference message eventually grew into the first chapter of Worldliness.) You can watch, listen to, or download the message at C.J.’s sermon archive.

Since we’re talking about Os Guinness, I pulled my stack of well-worn copies of his books off my shelves. And one of the most dog-eared, check-mark-littered, and highlighted copies is the book Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance (Baker, 2003).

The book is a piercing critique of the church’s uncritical pursuit of relevance for the sake of relevance. His argument: “Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously; never have Christians been more irrelevant” (p. 12). Guinness explains it like this:

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant. (p. 11)

This is because, as Guinness writes, faithfulness to eternal truth is the means to genuine cultural relevance. In every generation, our goal is centered on the proclamation and advance of the gospel of Jesus Christ through the local church. Only because of the gospel’s continued relevance is it rightfully called the “good news.”

The gospel is good news. In fact it is “the best news ever” because it addresses our human condition appropriately, pertinently, and effectively as nothing else has, does, or can—and in generation after generation, culture after culture, and life after life. Little wonder that the Christian faith is the world’s first truly universal religion and in many parts of the world the fastest growing faith, and that the Christian church is the most diverse society on planet earth, with followers on all continents, in all climates, and under all the conditions of life and development. Of course, Christians can make the gospel irrelevant by shrinking and distorting it in one way or another. But in itself the good news of Jesus is utterly relevant or it is not the good news it claims to be. (p. 13)

Escaping the Cultural Captivity

The strength of Guinness’s book is not only the insightful criticism, but the constructive vision he presents to the reader. Chapter six, “Escaping Cultural Captivity” (pp. 95–112), was especially helpful. Guinness writes,

Without God, our human knowledge is puny and perverse, limited on the one hand by finitude and distorted on the other by sin. That said, and that said humbly, three things can help us cultivate the independent spirit and thinking that are characteristic of God’s untimely people. In ascending order, they are developing an awareness of the unfashionable, cultivating an appreciation for the historical, and paying constant attention to the eternal. Each is crucial for effective resistance thinking. (p. 96)

Guinness then develops each of these points:

1. Awareness of the Unfashionable: Because the cross runs across the grain of human thinking, the faithful choice is often not the culturally popular choice. Guinness introduces the countercultural actions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany. While the Führer demanded complete allegiance, Bonhoeffer was stressing the cost of discipleship and allegiance to Christ alone. In all generations, the church needs to cultivate an awareness of the unfashionable to avoid being captured by the popular or “relevant.”   

2. Appreciation for the Historical: Americans, Guinness writes, seem to know everything about what’s happened over the past 24 hours, but little about the past 600 or 60 years. “Essential for untimeliness is appreciation for the historical, for no human perspective gives us a better counterperspective on our own day” (p. 100).

Guinness continues,

Mere lip service to the importance of history will not do. We each have to build in a steady diet of the riches of the past into our reading and thinking. Only the wisdom of the past can free us from the bondage of our fixation with the present and the future. C. S. Lewis counseled, “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” (p. 104)

On the next page, he quotes Lewis again: “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of history blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books” (p. 105).

3. Attention to the Eternal: “Essential for untimeliness is attention to the eternal, for only the eternal is eternally relevant” (p. 105). The way to remain relevant is to stay on the path of eternal truth. Guinness asks us to consider, if we are seeking to be relevant, why? To what end are we seeking relevance? “Nothing is finally relevant except in relation to the true and the eternal….Only the repeated touch of the timeless will keep us truly timely” (pp. 106, 112).

Yet again, it’s worth quoting him directly:

How then do we lift ourselves above the level of the finite and the mundane to gain an eternal perspective on what is true and relevant? The biblical answer is blunt in its candor. By ourselves we can’t. We can’t break out of Plato’s cave of the human, with all its smoke and flickering shadows on the wall. We can’t raise ourselves above the level of the timebound and the earthbound by such feeble bootstraps as reason. But where we are limited by our own unaided efforts, we have help. We have been rescued.…God has broken into our silence. He has spoken and has come down himself. And in his written and living Word we are given truth from outside our situation, truth that throws light on our little lives and our little world. (p. 107)

Conclusion

I highly recommend Prophetic Untimeliness, especially for pastors. We would do well to heed Guinness’s call to faithfulness: “It is time to challenge the idol of relevance, to work out what it means to be faithful as well as relevant, and so to become truly relevant without ever ending up as trendy, trivial, and unfaithful” (p. 15).

From the beginning, cultural influences have threatened to weaken the church. The Apostle Paul exhorted the Roman Christians to resist the temptation to be “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2 ESV). And then he continued to remind his readers of the importance of thinking and discernment. Biblical nonconformity requires that we become aware of the forces in our culture that threaten to press in, confine, and reshape the church.

The story of [theological] liberalism is the story of adapting, accommodating, and then surrendering to the spirit of the age.

When I came to Christ, evangelicals had a high view of worldliness. Often the things that were considered worldly were rather trivial, so called “no-nos.” But now in some circles we don’t even have any view of worldliness. And you can see that with the rise of the church growth movement in the extremes, the seeker sensitive movement in the extremes, the desire to be relevant, etc. Evangelicalism has its own version of the liberal tendency. And many people are taking on modern ideas, modern practices, without a thought, and it is absolute folly…

Capitalism has trounced all its enemies: socialism and communism and the rest. But it is now at its greatest danger, both as a theory and as something practical in terms of, say, daily consumerism. And we as followers of Jesus must give a theoretical critique of capitalism and a very practical critique of capitalism in terms of shopping malls, etc. And if we don’t, it is going to undermine itself and our culture.

Guinness on Pluralization

Pluralism is just a social fact. There is a diversity, a great many people, a lot of differences, faiths, social backgrounds, languages, cultures, and so on. That is pluralism.…The early church, [although it] was born in a pluralistic climate,…was absolutely faithful to the exclusiveness of Christ. And they would die for it.

Pluralism is different from what the social scientists call pluralization, which affects us psychologically and spiritually.

So for instance, in a simple, traditional, culture, the idea that you had your faith that was for all of life was relatively easy. Like one man, one woman, till death do us part. But I often say, if I had my grandfather’s silk handkerchief and I lost it, I would look for it. It is precious. It is old. It is valuable. It is connected to the family. It would be stupid to look for a Kleenex. A Kleenex is made disposable, thousands of them.

Now in the same way, in a modern world, our relationships have been pluralized. And that is one of the deepest reasons undermining marriage. Every day you are meeting other people. Every woman could see another man she might do better with, and every man another woman he might do better with. And so our relationships have been pluralized, and that is very, very dangerous.

Peter Berger describes modern faith as “conversion prone”—we should always be changing, there is always something else. You could pass down the supermarket of faiths and today I am this, and tomorrow I am that.

One megachurch pastor said to me, “I look into my congregation’s eyes, and I am haunted by the fact that they are always only two weeks away from leaving me to join a bigger church, a better church.”

You can see church-membership shopping, surfing, channeling, and so on. “I don’t like your music. I like the music down there. I like the worship there. They are liturgical, or they are not liturgical,” or whatever.

You can see that a whole generation is pluralized. So pluralism is simply a fact. Pluralization is potentially very dangerous.

Guinness on Secularization

Secularism is a philosophy, the idea that there are no gods, no supernatural: atheism, naturalism, and science. That is secularism: a philosophy.

Secularization is a process, and it should be distinguished [from secularism]. It is the idea that as the world gets more modern, it gets less religious. Now the theory of secularization was actually grossly overstated for the first 200 years, and it has collapsed. It used to be thought [that] the world inevitably gets less religious as it gets more modern. So Europe was the model and the United States was the exception for the moment, but the whole world would eventually go the way of Europe. That’s now being seen to have the bias of a secular philosophy behind it. It is wrong. Empirically it is wrong. Philosophically it is biased.

So the secularization theory is under heavy assault today. But there is some effect of secularization. For instance, in our modern world, most of us, even as Christians, have a tendency to be atheists unawares in the sense [that, like] the modern world, [we put] all the premium on the five senses—what you can touch, taste, see, calculate, measure, weigh, and so on. So [in] many churches the whole understanding is this side of the feeling.

You know, I have rarely been in churches in the United States where sometimes in the sermon or worship the ceiling was punctured and you knew you were in the presence of the transcendent. I have rarely experienced that over here, because it is all this side of the ceiling.

And you look at, say, much of the church growth movement: They know everything about parking lot theory, the color that your tie has to be, and all sorts of things to grow the perfect church. The church could operationally go on for 50 years if the Holy Spirit withdrew altogether, because it is all this side of the ceiling, it’s all worldly operational procedures.

We have actually been much more secularized than we realize. That is why brothers and sisters from Africa or Asia, they know the power of Spirit…for healing or other areas, which many of us in the West simply don’t know. We have words like prayer or the supernatural, but a direct living experience of them we often don’t have.…

Now, with the rise of the Iranian revolution in ’79 and then all sorts of things right down to September the 11th, Peter Berger said famously, “The world is as furiously religious as ever.”…I personally think that when secularization seemed to be sweeping everything, atheists weren’t very strident. They didn’t need to push religion. It was on the way out. But suddenly they realized [that] the world is “furiously religious,” and they see Islamic extremism and look at Christian fundamentalism as dangerous. Now you see the new atheists—Dawkins, Harris, and so on—are strident because they are actually panicking.

Guinness on Privatization

Privatization is the way in our modern world we lose the integration of faith. So go back to a traditional world, small town, village: Where someone lived, worked, and went to church was integrated. You could probably walk around them in half an hour, certainly go around on a horse in an hour. But as the modern world explodes, where people live and often where they go to church is relatively close still (although in L.A. it might be an hour away, traveling 50 miles to go to church). But then where they work is quite different altogether.

So it is called privatization, the way religion and faith in general [get] restricted to the private sphere—the home, the church, the weeknight, the weekend. But the world of work, politics, business, science, technology is another world, with a different way of doing it.

So, as one person says, people have different hats and they have different souls. A non-Christian said the churches in California he studied were privately engaging, publicly irrelevant. That’s another way of saying privatization…

Now up until the ’60s, most evangelicals, a great majority, [were] privatized. Then came the ’60s and evangelicals slept through it. ’73 was the wake-up year—Watergate, Roe v. Wade, OPEC, the oil crisis. Evangelicals started to realize the culture was slipping away.

The tendency then was to make the opposite mistake, to politicize faith, to swing from a privatized faith that lacked integration, the lordship of Christ in every area of life...They swung to a politicized faith, thinking politics was the be-all and end-all, and that lacked independence. No longer was faith primary. Christians became core chaplain to whatever party they supported, more recently the Republicans.

Guinness on Sociology

I was studying at Oxford, and Peter Berger became my mentor. And I realized that most apologetics, most Christian thinking, used the history of ideas, going from thinkers and their thoughts to the impact on the street, church, or whatever. Whereas the “sociology of knowledge,” as it is called, looks to the street, the social setting of people’s lives, and describes how that shapes even their thinking.

And you can see [that] the modern church is affected by crazy ideas. But it is much more affected by the way we live in our modern lifestyles and so on. So I tried to write The Gravedigger File to take ideas that were relatively well known in sociology, but show their relevance to Christians who didn’t understand sociology.

So terms like privatization which are bandied around by a lot of people now—the way, in our modern world, faith easily becomes privately engaging, publicly irrelevant. I tried to explain those and show Christians how they are shaped by faith.

Now when I wrote that, there was almost no one in evangelical circles looking at sociology. Today I am embarrassed and, more than that, disturbed, to say many people pick up sociology but uncritically. They take the latest insights they read from whoever it is and take it as gospel. Sociology is a very useful tool, but a very dangerous master…

Look at the seeker sensitive movement. It looks at the world to try and catch up with it, be relevant to it. Whereas actually, if you look at the world critically, there are things that are good and there are things that are very, very dangerous and to avoid at all costs. Sociology should make us much more discriminating.

[Mark Dever mentions David Wells’s series of books—No Place for Truth (1993), God in the Wasteland (1994), Losing Our Virtue (1998), and The Courage to Be Protestant (2008)—and asks if these books have been successful in uniting theology and sociology.]

Absolutely. I tease my good friend David because early on he was what I would call a “straight theologian.” I told him, “David, you can’t make sense of theology without looking at the modern world.” Now some people say today there is too much sociology. And before his last book…I said, “Come on, we need a bit more theology, not just sociology.” But he is a good example of someone who is doing this well.

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Listen to the entire interview, “Life and Ministry with Os Guinness."

Today we feature more wisdom from Mark Dever in my 2007 interview with him. This time Mark shares details about his personal preparation and delivery of sermons.

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C.J. Mahaney: Let’s move into the topic of preaching. The first of the “nine marks” is expositional preaching. Talk to us very specifically about your process of preparing a sermon.

Mark Dever: I assume that my mind is in too many ways a stagnant swamp that needs the fresh water of God’s Word constantly being poured in to understand him better, to understand myself better, to understand life better. So I want to give myself to preaching on a certain passage of Scripture. I usually don’t preach because I am looking to talk about a particular problem. This year we are going through Luke’s Gospel, and so I want to work specifically on the passage I am going to be preaching Sunday. I want to read it over and over and note things.

Gordon Fee taught me New Testament exegesis at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and—although I didn’t agree with his feminism or his kenotic Christology—I did love his story about the graduate student in ichthyology. There is a student studying fish at a doctoral level, and a world-class expert tells him to write down everything he sees about the fish and then he leaves. And the guy is kind of disappointed, because he was studying under this great expert. He thought, “Why am I doing this?”

He wrote down a few things. The expert returns about 30 minutes later and says, “This is all you’ve got?”

And the graduate student says, “Yes.” 

He says, “I want you to do this for the next hour.”

And the student says, “An hour? You’re kidding!”

So for an hour the student does it and he starts noting down more things, and seeing more things, and writing them down.

The expert returns an hour later and he says, “All right. This is a pretty good start. Why don’t you do this the rest of the afternoon?”

And the graduate student is thinking, What are you thinking? You are the great expert, I came to learn from you and this is just a fish floating here.

So the student spends the rest of the afternoon doing the same thing. But by the end of the afternoon he realizes he has learned more about fish just by sitting and staring at the fish.

All of that to say: Rather than reading all the commentaries, I spend my first day in sermon preparation just reading and rereading the text and praying about it and noting things I see (any structures or questions that are answered). I find this to be the most fruitful way for me to have my soul freshly engaged by God about his Word.

And I also think of it in the context of where I’ll be preaching it—to this congregation. So I assume my exegesis should be very similar to what other people have done, but I will be looking at it with certain questions in mind from my own life, from the lives of those people in the congregation, and from the congregation as a whole. 

So the most fundamental part of the sermon preparation for me is this reading and rereading of the text.

CJM: Do you do recommend pastors consult commentaries?

MD: Yes, particularly when there are things I’m not sure what to do with—but only after I have completed all this work on the text myself. Otherwise I will just become an echo chamber for somebody’s commentary rather than talking with the commentary, as it were. When I have a text, I will put a question mark by a certain thing that I have a question about in my Word doc. I will write out my question and then I make myself answer it. Then I will type in “Answer” and insert the best answer I could think of at the time (even if it is not a very good one).

Then once I have this in mind, I try to answer all the questions I have about the text. Only then do I feel it’s safe for me to look at a commentary. Hopefully a lot of the things commentators will have thought of are some of the questions I have considered as I have been reading and rereading the text and praying over it. So I am able to have a conversation with the people who have written the commentaries, rather than just let them sort of type on my brain.

CJM: All right. Average number of hours each week devoted to sermon prep?

MD: Thirty to 35.

CJM: How long do you speak on Sundays?

MD: One hour. 

CJM: You work from a manuscript? 

MD: I do, though I don’t generally recommend other people do that. 

CJM: Why?

MD: Manuscripts can just be deadly boring. I don’t want to say there are few people who can use a manuscript well, but it is definitely a minority.

CJM: And you don’t remain restricted by your manuscript, though. That would be the difference.

MD: For whatever reason, I can glance down and pick up several sentences and then talk. So I don’t think it appears that I am reading.

CJM: Not at all, no.

Matt Schmucker: And you often get accused of saying that your best stuff after a sermon is the stuff that wasn’t in the manuscript anyway. We call it off-roading. 

MD: What everybody thanks me for as they walk out at the door usually had nothing to do with my manuscript. 

CJM: You are unique in your preparation process in that you love to have people around you. True?

MD: Well, honestly, there are some parts of preparation when I do prefer to be alone, especially when I am trying to think things through. But I like having people around for me to be able to bounce things off of. Particularly when I go over my application grid and fill it out, I do that with another member of the church.

CJM: Describe that process. Because before you preach a sermon on Sunday, you meet with a member of the church on Saturday to do what? 

MD: They will have been reading over the text of Scripture. We will sit and talk about the Scripture. So they will ask me any questions they have. And that helps me sometimes, because they will have questions—as someone who hasn’t done all this study will have. Sometimes I’m thinking, “Well, you don’t need to explain about the Samaritans. Everybody knows.” They’ll say, “Well, no, actually I don’t know. Who are the Samaritans?”

These things are very helpful as a reality check for the preacher, I think. 

But then we labor in giving our time to application where I have various categories set up, which can change from series to series. But generally for each point of my sermon I try to ask,

• What is this saying to the individual Christian? This is the category I think most evangelical preachers preach from—and only this one. But there are others.
• How does this point to Christ?
• What is this saying that is unique in salvation history that I need to articulate?
• What is this saying to the non-Christian?
• Are there any public implications?
• What is it saying to Capitol Hill Baptist Church? How should we as a church, as a congregation, be challenged, encouraged, or shaped by what we are hearing? 
  

These categories provide me a structured meditation on the text. And it is really helpful for me to have someone else to talk through these categories with.

September 11, 2001 was, for me, memorable. It marked the first morning of a very special trip with my wife to the quaint town of Chatham on Cape Cod. Carolyn and I had just finished breakfast at the Wayside Inn and were eager to begin this relaxing and romantic day together. And the day could not have been more inviting.

But while preparing to pay for breakfast, I noticed a gathering of people in the adjoining bar area, studying a television screen. Curious, I took a place among them and learned what they already knew: Two jet airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers, both the apparent attacks of terrorists.

We made our way back to our hotel room stunned and perplexed by the images we had briefly viewed. Just yesterday we had flown into Logan International Airport in Boston, now the airport of origin for the two flights that slammed into the towers.

I had no category for what had taken place. Like the rest of the world, we stared in disbelief at the television, immediately aware that our trip would not end as planned. I called home to talk with the pastors to begin altering the message for the Sunday meeting and assembling the church that evening for the purpose of prayer. It was important to return home to serve the church with a message providing biblical perspective to the events. I was one of countless pastors whose plans were altered that week by the crisis.

Years ago I came across an article with the title “When the News Intrudes: What Do You Say from the Pulpit about National Crises and Tragedies?”. Though I would give the article a mixed review, I like the title and the idea behind it. Pastors have a unique responsibility and opportunity during a national or local crisis. How are pastors to effectively serve and lead those they care for “when the news intrudes”?

Hopefully nothing like 9/11 will ever happen again. But events that capture the attention of the world and broadly affect the world will happen again. So how should a pastor serve and lead the church during these times?

I’m no expert on this topic, but the following is what I learned in leading Covenant Life Church through experiences like 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Beltway sniper attacks....

[Download the full article, titled “9/11, Crisis, and the Pastor,” as a PDF document here.]
 

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C.J.’s message from the 2008 Together for the Gospel conference, “Sustaining the Pastor’s Soul,” has been added to the sermon archive. To read, listen to, watch, or download the message, click here.

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Sustaining the Pastor’s Soul
C.J. Mahaney                
Philippians 1:3–8        
April 17, 2008
Together for the Gospel Conference; Louisville, KY

 

The role of the church in influencing and shaping contemporary American culture is a topic generating much interest, discussion, and disagreement. Gauging from the many books on the subject, there is a lot that can be said, but I especially appreciate what my friend Mark Dever has said.  

Today I want to draw off another excerpt from my 2007 interview with Mark. Mark lives, works, and pastors a church four blocks from the U.S. Capitol and three blocks from the U.S. Supreme Court. Mark is geographically—and in his thinking—on one of the front lines where the church and contemporary culture meet.

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C.J. Mahaney: Elaborate more on the priorities of 9Marks.

Mark Dever: Well, what we want to see are communities of people that reflect the character of God, and by doing so are distinct from the world around them. As I travel around I see so many evangelical churches trying to “break the code” of how to look as much like the culture as possible and yet keep the gospel, assuming this will maximize the evangelistic impulse.

I’m not sure that’s true.

I think there is a lot of peril in this. And it seems to be that even from the very earliest chapters of Acts, what strikes people are not thoughts of, “Hey, they speak Hebrew too,” but rather, “Hey, look at how they love one another in a way that is different from the way we are loving or being loved.”

So I think that God’s character, as it is reproduced in a community of people, must be one of the most powerful witnesses to the truth of the gospel, both for evangelism and the edification of those already converted. So I would like to see evangelical churches— while not becoming unsophisticated in how they interact with culture—keep cultural interaction in perspective, and realize that the life-blood of your church continuing is not your contextualization (your similarity to the culture), but how you are blessedly distinct from the culture. The church is full of people who are born again.

So our distinctives are what we want to hold out, and trust that God will make them attractive and will commend the gospel to other people.

So sometimes I feel like I am being called to tar the ark before the flood. Our world is increasingly secular. And churches that are trying to be as much like the world as possible, I fear, are very leaky arks. And churches that are trying to be like the world are often unselfconsciously nothing more than part of their culture. I fear they are just going to sink and become spiritually worthless spiritual tombs.

So I think the rise of secularism will itself cut down on nominal Christianity. It will actually encourage the clarity of what truly is the gospel and the effects that it has, because the cache, the worth, the value of nominal Christianity will just continue to decline in the culture broadly, so that you won’t want to be known as an evangelical Christian because that means you hate various groups of people or you believe these weird things. (As opposed to in the 50s it meant you were a respectable, upstanding citizen.) So as the general cultural perception turns on evangelical Christianity, I think we are just seeing all the more clearly our need to have a positive vision for the church as distinct from the culture.

CJM: And so what would you say to a pastor who is attracted to models of the church that aren’t distinct from the culture and aren’t distinctly proclaiming the gospel?

MD: Well, when you are not distinctly proclaiming the gospel, then you are not talking about a healthy church in any way whatsoever.

I want to be careful here. Not every church is going to be exactly alike. For example, there are churches that deliberately dress differently, or have a different kind of music, or different order of their services. But as long as they are preaching the gospel, preaching the Word, the things they are saying are true, they are reading Scripture, they are praising—as long as they are doing the things we are commanded to in Scripture, I am prepared to believe there are a number of different ways, and that in different settings one can be better than another.

But I would be very careful if these things are what a church begins majoring on. If the adverbs overtake the verbs, the adjectives overtake the nouns, the how you do it becomes more important than what you are doing, well then I think you have surely lost your way.

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For more on this topic, consult Mark’s T4G’08 message (“Improving the Gospel: Exercises in Unbiblical Theology”), The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World by David Wells (Eerdmans, 2008) and Christ and Culture Revisited by D.A. Carson (Eerdmans, 2008).

 

If you step out the doors of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, walk across the parking lot, and hike up a long hallway of stairs, you’ll arrive in the office of my good friend Mark Dever. There his massive study claims the entire second story of his home, the walls hidden by bookshelves.

But Mark’s study is more unusual than you think.

Entering Mark’s office, you immediately become aware of people. Mark is rarely alone in his study, and it appears he likes it that way. His sermon preparation is unlike anything I’ve seen as he enjoys interacting with the flurry of staff and interns buzzing around his desk. And on more than one occasion, Mark has prepared entire sermons in the church parking lot—not to avoid people, but to better tap into the stream of staff, interns, and church members cutting between the church and his study! But when the parking lot is not ideal for sermon prep, Mark moves back into the study, where the stream of staff and interns continues. Mark’s (quite unusual) study arrangement makes a loud statement about his care for people, his desire to train others, and his love of friendship.

The second thing you notice about his study is the books. Books are everywhere, floor to ceiling. Though his study is large and his walls are hidden by bookshelves, I would guess Mark’s collection of books exceeded the shelf space in the mid-1990s. When the shelf space was exhausted, the books kept coming, the horizontal arrangement stopped, and vertical piles of books began to accumulate. Though there must be some organization to the maze of books, I cannot tell you what system it follows (probably only Mark knows).

Third, you will notice his love of music. There is always some form of music playing in his study, which is not unusual for a study. But his eclectic musical interests are bizarre and distracting. You could hear classical music followed by a Maranatha! worship chorus from the early ’70s, then a singing nun (no joke!), Keith Green, opera, and jazz. Often when I’m in his study I ask him to turn the music down or to change it to something, well, less annoying and distracting.

On June 6, 2007, I joined the staff and interns at 9Marks in Mark’s study. We sat among the books and silenced the music, and I turned the microphone on Mark to hear about his life and ministry. We were scheduled to talk for one hour but extended it to another hour (and could have gone a third without any problem). The full interview recording can be downloaded from the 9Marks website here and here.

Although I had explored many of the topics in the interview with Mark before, the Q&A uncovered a stream of information I had never heard before. I commend the entire interview, but I especially wanted to highlight a few excerpts here for pastors.

The god of Options

This first excerpt reminds me of the many pastors I have met who are distracted from serving joyfully in the present by thinking continuously about future options. These pastors are often unaware of how their consideration of the future affects their souls each day.

In answering a question about his future at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Mark’s response included the phrase “the god of options,” which I found wise, and have since used (when appropriate) to care for other pastors. I think as pastors read the rest of his response, this phrase will remind them that, regardless of God’s will for your future, and without eliminating the real possibility of future transition, you can be certain that God’s will for you this day (and in the foreseeable future) is to serve him with gladness right where you are.

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C.J. Mahaney: Do you plan on staying at Capitol Hill Baptist Church?

Mark Dever: Lord willing.  

CJM: Lord willing what?  

MD: The rest of my life.  

CJM: As a member of the pulpit committee, Matt Schmucker remembers a particular statement you made in that regard. You said to Connie, “The next place we go, we’re buying...

MD: …cemetery plots.” Because we had been moving around and wherever we lived my heart got entangled with the people. I just hated moving and it was just horrendous for me. I had been studying the Puritans and realized that the basic model was to just stay someplace—like a marriage to a congregation. It is not exactly the same, it is not sin to leave it necessarily, but you don’t assume churches are a career ladder you are climbing. You are at one church for two years to work on some skills and when you run out of your bag of tricks you move to another church for three years, they hear all six of your sermons and then you move someplace else. No, I would like to know their children and their grandchildren. So I made clear when we were talking to the pulpit search committee that if I came I was intending, Lord willing, to stay. I had no further plans and actually planned to have no further plans.…

I remember, during a Wednesday night church potluck very early during my time here, I got my food and sat down. An older woman (probably in her mid-70s, late 70s at the time) who had been at the church for decades gets her meal and sits down right next to me. She looks at me and says, “I don’t like young preachers.”

CJM: And you are probably 33 years old?

MD: Thirty-two or 33. And I just looked at her. I said, “Really?” She said, “Yep. Of course I’ll make an exception in your case.”

CJM: Did you ask for an explanation why?  

MD: I just started eating my food and then I said, “I guess you expect to outlast him at the church, don’t you?” She said, “Yep. Always have.”  

And then I took some more food and then said, “Well, I think you may have met your match.”

CJM: Oh, outstanding.…Thank you for the compelling example you provide of a commitment to this church, and provoking other pastors to follow that similar attitude and approach. You introduced me to the description of Puritan pastors, that they were “looking for a place to settle.”

MD: A great example of that is when John Cotton, I think it was when John Cotton died, their church needed a pastor and began negotiating with the First Congregational Church up in Ipswich. Both churches entered a season of prayer for their pastor, John Norton, coming down to Boston. So it was not at all a kind of cloak-and-dagger secret committee goes and attends, tries to scout out the talent, and then steals them away. It’s two families, two congregations, praying about where would this brother be best used—which is a great way to approach it.

CJM: What are the unique joys of pastoring?  

MD: Well, for me, that would include that specific decision to stay here. It was a great opportunity to destroy the “god of options,” which I think young men and women who are successful in our culture tend to be addicted to.

I watch young people in this church when they are 25 and they don’t want to do anything that closes any options. At 27, 31, 33, the same thing. At some point life begins forcing itself on you and you have a wife and kids and some options just close. But I think the young folks in our culture who are doing OK by the world’s standards are enslaved to worshiping at the altar of this god of options.

So by saying I wasn’t interested in going anyplace else, I meant to send out a wide signal to say, “Please don’t tempt me by asking me about other options, because this is going to be slow, hard work and it’s worthy of a life.”

Ministry expectations can spread a pastor's energy thin as his duties expand in all directions. So how does a pastor serving alone prioritize his life and ministry to ensure that he is faithful to what is most important? During a Pastors College Q&A meeting this winter, a visiting pastor asked C.J. the following question.

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Question: With 18 to 20 hours of study a week, small-group training and leadership, parent-teen leadership, generational leadership, etc., for a guy like myself who is pastoring by himself, what do we do? Obviously we should preach on Sundays at the gathering, but where do we back off? And how do we gauge our family hours?

C.J. Mahaney: Your challenge will be the consistent temptation to compare yourself unfavorably to other pastors and other contexts. You hear about other churches and what they are accomplishing, and you can be tempted to think this is immediately transferable. Always look behind the immediate illustration to the history behind that church. That is too often what we don’t do. So realize that behind that other individual is a body of experience and a number of years. That church didn’t begin the way you now see it. And that is no small challenge for someone who is serving by himself in pastoral ministry, but it is your challenge, and it is one that I think you can walk wisely through.

Your priorities at present sound like they are in place.

(1) First is the priority of caring for your own soul before God, cultivating affection for the Savior, and growing in your appreciation for his death on the cross for your sins.

(2) The second priority is caring for, serving, and leading your wife and children.

(3) Then we arrive at preparation for the Sunday meeting. If I were to open your planner and study your calendar, I would want to see reflected in your schedule a sufficient number of hours to prepare for the Sunday meeting. This meeting must be your priority because, until you have a team around you, this is the most effective way you can serve the entire