How Culturally Up-to-Date Must My Pastor Be?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | Ryan, a listener to the podcast who is also a pastor,
00:00:08.440 | writes in with a very good question.
00:00:10.840 | Pastor John, how much of the news should I read?
00:00:14.080 | I'm a pastor and a very average reader in terms of speed.
00:00:17.840 | I want to stay up on the news to be a good citizen
00:00:20.180 | and an informed leader.
00:00:22.340 | I want to help my congregation think biblically
00:00:24.160 | about major cultural trends and issues when relevant,
00:00:27.960 | but I could spend hours every morning reading
00:00:30.240 | different online newspapers and opinion pieces,
00:00:32.560 | perhaps to the neglect of my Bible and solid theology books.
00:00:37.560 | So my question is not whether to read the news,
00:00:39.840 | but how much of it to read.
00:00:42.040 | Is there any practical advice you can give from your years
00:00:44.400 | as both a Christian and as a pastor that would help discern
00:00:47.480 | how much is too much and how little is too little?
00:00:50.940 | I do have one main piece of advice from my experience,
00:00:57.080 | and it might be partly owing to my own limits
00:00:59.320 | and reading slowly and things like that,
00:01:02.560 | but more important for your people, our people,
00:01:07.560 | and their ability to be Christ-exalting husbands and wives
00:01:12.200 | and community participants and civic contributors
00:01:16.240 | and vocationally effective,
00:01:18.360 | more important for all those things
00:01:22.160 | than a pastor's being widely read and culturally up to date
00:01:27.160 | on lots of fronts is the way he deals in preaching
00:01:32.920 | and leading and living with a few key social issues,
00:01:39.240 | like three or four or five over his ministry, say.
00:01:44.120 | And the principle I have in mind here is the same one
00:01:46.900 | that drives me in understanding the aims of education
00:01:50.940 | in school, and the principle is to impart to your people
00:01:55.560 | by the way you preach and teach and the way you think,
00:01:59.360 | biblically and culturally,
00:02:01.040 | you impart to them a way of thinking,
00:02:04.180 | a way of dealing with issues, a way of reading their Bible,
00:02:07.720 | a way of applying their Bible on various issues
00:02:11.160 | so that you don't bear the burden of thinking
00:02:14.520 | you have to be the expert on all the issues.
00:02:16.700 | You have to model for them how they become the expert
00:02:19.880 | on the issues that are facing them most immediately.
00:02:23.520 | So we go deep on a few issues,
00:02:27.960 | and we're aware, of course, of more.
00:02:30.160 | Then we preach and teach on the few
00:02:32.440 | that seem urgent and major,
00:02:35.280 | and we'd be sure that, we try to be sure
00:02:39.680 | that the sermons are not mainly political.
00:02:42.640 | When I say deal with the issues,
00:02:43.660 | I don't mean mainly be a politician,
00:02:46.340 | but mainly aiming to show how to think and pray
00:02:51.140 | and act from the roots of things,
00:02:54.180 | and how they're rooted in human nature
00:02:55.860 | and how they're rooted in God's purposes for the world
00:02:59.540 | and rooted in Scripture.
00:03:01.240 | And then we show them those roots in Scripture
00:03:04.780 | and roots in human nature,
00:03:07.380 | and we pray that certain kinds of outcomes of behavior
00:03:13.980 | will result in a kind of righteous life in the culture.
00:03:18.460 | We show them how it all relates to God
00:03:21.100 | and His ways in history and in the world
00:03:25.020 | and in this city, in this situation in particular.
00:03:28.640 | You don't need to be a world expert
00:03:32.700 | to address the biblical and ethical matters
00:03:36.100 | relating to the key issues.
00:03:39.220 | You need to go deep with your Bible
00:03:42.040 | and with human nature.
00:03:44.440 | That's your bread and butter as a pastor,
00:03:46.860 | the Bible and human nature.
00:03:49.940 | That's your expertise, and that's what your people want
00:03:53.700 | and they need from you.
00:03:56.020 | Another implication of this approach would be
00:03:59.240 | that we should make clear to our people,
00:04:01.960 | we think they, not we, are to become the experts
00:04:06.960 | in the fields where they endeavor.
00:04:09.880 | I think there's a lot of misunderstanding here in the church
00:04:12.900 | that if a big ethical issue comes up in their vocation,
00:04:17.360 | the pastor should have the answer.
00:04:19.280 | (laughs)
00:04:20.380 | How in the world?
00:04:22.020 | If they're lawyers or doctors or carpenters
00:04:25.540 | or computer programmers or salesmen,
00:04:28.580 | they bear the main responsibility
00:04:30.860 | to think through how Christianity bears
00:04:33.400 | on the nitty gritty of their vocation.
00:04:36.300 | That's not the pastor's job.
00:04:39.060 | I think sometimes there's a blame shifting here
00:04:41.940 | that's a cloak for laziness.
00:04:43.700 | Pastors should give help for sure.
00:04:48.100 | Rich biblical insights week in and week out
00:04:51.860 | from the scriptures,
00:04:53.660 | but there are hundreds of issues in every line of work,
00:04:57.900 | every vocation that the pastor does not
00:05:01.220 | and cannot know about.
00:05:03.620 | He's not the expert in that vocation, that business,
00:05:08.260 | that trade.
00:05:09.780 | The people in those vocations bear that responsibility.
00:05:14.620 | That's what it means to be a Christian where you are.
00:05:17.880 | That's what makes those jobs a place of influence for Christ.
00:05:22.880 | Christians thinking and reading and studying
00:05:25.820 | and praying and talking about what it means
00:05:28.620 | to be a Christian in this job.
00:05:30.940 | There are hundreds of them,
00:05:32.700 | and it's naive to think that a pastor
00:05:35.940 | can be an expert in any of them.
00:05:39.380 | So I'm a little disenchanted these days
00:05:41.980 | about the way some of this is talked about.
00:05:44.900 | So we empower and we encourage our people
00:05:49.380 | to become the experts on how faith and work fit together,
00:05:54.000 | how the issues they're dealing with in life fit together,
00:05:57.060 | all the while the pastor is pointing and encouraging
00:06:00.380 | and pointing them to the scriptures
00:06:02.440 | and feeding their souls.
00:06:05.020 | And not just jobs,
00:06:08.380 | I was thinking vocation when I said all that,
00:06:10.420 | but issues as well.
00:06:12.780 | Out there in our congregation,
00:06:14.720 | people should be studying healthcare and immigration issues
00:06:19.720 | and racial profiling and police reform
00:06:23.620 | and the roots of poverty in their neighborhood and so on.
00:06:26.820 | I mean, there are just dozens of social, ethical,
00:06:31.620 | moral, justice issues in the world
00:06:35.380 | that our people ought to be engaged with
00:06:39.120 | and that vastly outstrip the ability of the pastor
00:06:43.120 | to be up to date on all of them.
00:06:45.740 | So my point is,
00:06:47.880 | whatever else a pastor reads,
00:06:51.860 | whatever else you read for focus
00:06:55.460 | and for learning and for awareness,
00:06:57.860 | focus on a few key issues
00:07:01.740 | and bring God's word to bear on those.
00:07:04.940 | Model in preaching and teaching and leading and living
00:07:09.860 | how a Christian thinks about those issues
00:07:13.500 | and tell them, tell the people you hope
00:07:16.960 | they can take that method,
00:07:19.100 | what they see you doing with these texts and that issue
00:07:23.180 | and apply them in other issues
00:07:26.060 | where they may run into ethical conundrums
00:07:29.340 | that the pastor hasn't thought about
00:07:32.000 | and that they haven't thought about.
00:07:35.260 | And let part, I want to say to this pastor,
00:07:38.420 | let part of your modeling be courage,
00:07:41.420 | courage to address hard issues.
00:07:44.100 | And let part of it be wisdom
00:07:46.240 | in how to relate to those who disagree with you.
00:07:49.460 | Model for your people that
00:07:51.540 | as well as the right position on an issue,
00:07:54.020 | but how to deal with people who don't take that position.
00:07:57.340 | And whatever you do,
00:07:59.060 | don't try to sound like you know more than you know.
00:08:03.100 | And don't try to drop clever phrases
00:08:06.420 | that make you look like you're culturally informed.
00:08:08.900 | That's just fluff and it's ego.
00:08:11.780 | It will entertain the superficial,
00:08:13.860 | but it will disappoint the spiritually insightful.
00:08:18.020 | So admit to them your limits
00:08:20.720 | and take them as deep into God's word as you can
00:08:25.320 | on a few key issues.
00:08:27.880 | - Boy, that is gonna help liberate a lot of pastors.
00:08:30.720 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:08:32.440 | Well, it's time for us to break for the weekend.
00:08:34.980 | And we talked about weekends on Monday, by the way,
00:08:38.080 | and now you have time to catch up
00:08:39.580 | on the episodes you missed this week.
00:08:41.760 | And for everything you need to know about this podcast,
00:08:44.040 | to send John Piper a question, to download our apps,
00:08:47.040 | anything, go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohnPiper.
00:08:51.680 | And on Monday, we return to address a question
00:08:54.040 | from a listener who battles doubts and cynicism
00:08:57.080 | that prevent her from living in the victory of Christ.
00:09:00.140 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:09:01.120 | We'll see you on Monday.
00:09:02.320 | (upbeat music)
00:09:04.900 | (upbeat music)
00:09:07.480 | [BLANK_AUDIO]