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To Finish Well… A word to churches (pt. 2)

An isolated individual can finish well in ministry. Countless Old Testament prophets and New Testament missionaries served the Lord faithfully in spite of difficulties, divisions, and disappointments. And many pastors and ministers across our world are serving faithfully and will finish well in spite of a lack of resources, retirement accounts, denominational structures, or community support. But generally, leaders who finish well have help.

Ultimately, as I wrote two weeks ago about finishing well, pastors and ministers are responsible for following Jesus and leading themselves in a way that will help their ministries to last. If I finish well, it will be because Jesus is holding on to me and to my ministry, and because I follow him faithfully. In this regard, finishing well is the responsibility of those who are called to ministry. But this reality does not let churches and church leaders off the hook.

Too often, division in churches and ministries drives pastors away. Too often, churches and pastors have different visions which causes pastors to leave the church and maybe even ministry. But when pastors finish well, it is often because a church, ministry team, or accountability group served as a much-needed support system for the minister. If you are a pastor reading this, go back and read part one. If you are a church member or leader in your church reading this, then I would ask you to commit to the following practices that will encourage your pastor and ministers to finish well.

Pray for your leaders consistently. The most important thing a church member can do is to pray for his/her pastor and ministerial staff. Paul asked for prayer from the Ephesian church in 6:19. Paul’s request was not isolated. If a pastor or ministry is fulfilling God’s calling, it will be because God is blessing. If God is blessing, someone or many someones are praying. A few years back, I developed a prayer team for my sermon writing and preparation. I send a weekly email update with things for this team to pray about. And recently we added back a time of gathered prayer. I cannot tell you the encouragement and spiritual support I sense regularly from the prayers of those in our church. If you don’t know what to pray for your pastor or ministerial staff, ask them specifically. But above all, pray for them.

Follow your leaders willingly. There is an expectation that elders, pastors, and ministers should lead their congregations to fulfill the disciple-making mission of God in the world. At Wilkesboro Baptist, we’ve defined our mission this way: leading our neighbors and the nations to follow Jesus. We do so by worshiping, learning, serving, and replicating. When we are pursuing our mission, the church should be following pastoral leadership. It warms my heart and motivates my ministry when church members embrace our mission and lead others to follow Jesus. It strengthens pastors when church members follow their leadership. Paul commends just such a strategy for churches in his letter to the Thessalonians.

We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves.

1 Thessalonians 5:12-13

Question your leaders humbly. Pastors and ministers are not perfect. We are flawed and sinful. We are not always right. And while the church should follow pastoral leadership generally and especially with regard to our biblical mission and mandates, there are times when pastors should be questioned and/or challenged. Humility as Peter commended for the church in 1 Peter 5 demands that pastors and church members listen humbly to one another. Humble pastors should be able to handle and receive questions and even constructive criticism. Pastors and ministers also need accountability. Our pastoral staff provides a measure of accountability to one another as does my discipleship group and accountability partner. In churches with a plurality of elders, the elder body serves to keep one another accountable. In many baptist churches, deacons serve in a similar function. When this is a healthy dynamic, deacons support, encourage, and provide accountability pastors. Unfortunately in some cases, deacon boards operate outside their Biblical job descriptions and have run pastors off from their churches out of a sense of control. Whatever church governance structure is in place, humility and love should guide the interactions. Humble leaders can receive humble questions and critiques. But what if you’ve questioned humbly and your minister/pastor does not receive it well? Maybe, I’ll write on that in another post, but I would definitely advise going back to practice #1. Pray for your leaders. If it is a severe disagreement, then consider seeking counsel about what your next step should be.

Refuse to tolerate division in your church intentionally. In our next steps class at Wilkesboro Baptist, we discuss healthy habits of church members. One of those habits that we encourage is to protect the unity of the church consistently. Division in churches is much too common. Financial decisions, theological disagreements, resetting ministry programming, thoughtless comments, immoral or unethical behavior, and staff conflicts (among many other items) can create division in churches. Sometimes these divisions serve as necessary correctives for disciplinary purposes (see 1 Corinthians). But many times, divisions occur for minor or tertiary issues. In most cases, you can support your church and pastor by refusing to tolerate division. Don’t give your ear to gossips. Forgive minor offenses. Love others. If the division is because of an important issue (theology or morality) or is not going away, then seek out your church leaders to pursue reconciliation, unity, and love. Paul commended church unity throughout Ephesians 4, but especially in verses 31-32.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Ephesians 4:31-32

Encourage your leaders regularly. I have a large file of thank you notes and cards sent to me over the years. There are some special folks in my church who regularly send me a thank you note or stop by to commend something going on in the church. They’ll likely never know how much those comments and compliments have meant to me. Believe me, if you have a pastor that cares about you and the mission of God, then the past 18 months have been trying and difficult. Look for ways to encourage your church leaders. Our church recently went above and beyond to encourage our ministry staff. It has meant a great deal. Leaders that regularly feel encouraged by their churches are less prone to discouragement and walking away from the ministry.

Provide for your leaders faithfully. I hesitated to add this, but believe it is important. Godly church leaders (pastors and ministers) don’t serve for the money (see 1 Peter 5:2). Pastors aren’t paid to minister, they are paid so they can minister. While it seems like most ministers serve only a couple of days a week, ministers do much more than what is visible on the weekends. Our ministerial staff regularly contact the leaders and participants in their ministries, check on and pray with church members, recruit and train leaders, prepare lessons, sermons, and church communications, work extra hours, address technological issues outside of office time, actively pursue the mission of leading others to follow Jesus (and I could keep going). My point is that for ministers and pastors to be able to serve the church and the community and the world with the gospel, providing income is appropriate (see Paul’s arguments in 1 Corinthians 9:9 and 1 Timothy 5:18). We are blessed at Wilkesboro Baptist to have a church who does this. But I’ve been around some churches where this was not the case, and it is discouraging when a church fails to provide for their pastor. Just a couple of years ago, a friend of mine left a church he had battled with and battled for because they couldn’t/wouldn’t pay him sufficiently to support his family. Sure, we could argue that God will take care of him. And God has. But the mindset of a church should not be “Let God take care of him, we’re not going to.” That mindset is what drives pastors out of ministry, what keeps them in ministry.

These aren’t foolproof practices. For leaders to finish well, they must be seek God and walk with integrity. But leaders who finish well also have help. If you are a church member at Wilkesboro Baptist, I want to thank you for practicing these things. You are a tremendous encouragement to me! If you are a church member somewhere else, I hope this post motivates you to encourage your pastors and church leaders.

Photo by Jack Sharp on Unsplash

Word of the Week: Manuscripts (Inspiration Revisited)

In last week’s post on the doctrine of Inspiration, we focused on the biblical claim that the Scriptures have been inspired by God. In this week’s post, we will go a little deeper into this important topic by highlighting the quality of the manuscripts that we have for the biblical texts.

I’m confident that the Bible we have (66 books with about 40 authors over 1500 years of writing) is God’s inspired Word. But just because I’m confident doesn’t mean everyone else is confident. Textual criticism is that discipline that investigates the content and reliability of ancient texts. It is a discipline used for other manuscripts, but primarily associated with the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. If it is right to hold a high view of the inspiration of Scripture (that God is the author), then it should follow that the manuscripts we have for comparison purposes would not disagree with one another and create uncertainty in the meaning of the text. Can we have confidence in the manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments?

Here are some basic facts about the manuscripts we do have. You can find out more on this subject from Jonathan Morrow’s book, Questioning the Bible: 11 Major Challenges to the Bible’s Authority.

  • There are 5,756 New Testament manuscripts that can be compared and contrasted for quality and consistency purposes. Other ancient writings for a comparable time and place are as follows: Greek historian Herodotus, 109 manuscripts; Greek historian Thucydides, 95 manuscripts; Greek philosopher Plato, 219 manuscripts; Roman historian Livy, 150 manuscripts; Roman historian Tacitus, 31 manuscripts; Roman historian Seutonius, 300 manuscripts; Greek classic Homer’s Iliad, 2300 manuscripts. The sheer number of New Testament manuscripts affords confidence that the documents we are reading today are consistent with the original manuscripts.
  • The NT manuscripts are significantly earlier than other ancient literature, within 35 years in at least one case and all of the NT within 200 years of the events.
  • While there are variations between the manuscripts, they do not distort the consistency or meaning of the New Testament. Bart Ehrman, professor and author of Misquoting Jesus, claims 400,000 variants within the New Testament manuscripts. Ehrman uses this number to undercut the confidence in the New Testament documents. Essentially, he reasons if there are so many variants, how can we be confident in the accuracy of the text? However, Ehrman fails to look into the types of variations carefully. According to Jonathan Morrow, “A variant is any place among the existing NT manuscripts where there is not uniformity of wording” (p. 98). A variant then could be a misspelled word in 1 manuscript different from 2,000 manuscripts. This would count as 2,000 variants. Morrow notes, “the reason we have so many variants is because we have so many manuscripts to work with” (p. 98).
  • Note the types of variation within the New Testament manuscripts:
    1) Spelling=70-80% of all the variants.
    2) Minor differences such as word order or the use of the definite article with a proper name.
    3) Meaningful, but not viable differences such as, “gospel of God” vs. “gospel of Christ.”
    4) Meaningful and viable differences such as “let us have peace with God” vs. “we have peace with God” (less than 1% are meaningful and viable). 
  • The Old Testament manuscripts and the and the Dead Sea Scrolls affirm that the copyists of the OT were careful, and that the OT that we do have is consistent with the earliest manuscripts. According to Douglas Stuart, it is a safe estimate that 99% of original words in NT and 95% of original words in OT are recoverable (quoted by Jonathan Morrow in Questioning the Bible). In essence, we can be confident that we have the Word of God.
  • These basic facts can be found in Questioning the Bible, by Jonathan Morrow pages 96-105.

The Old and New Testaments have been questioned and critiqued for millennia. Particularly, the New Testament has faced textual and source criticism aimed at discounting its claims of the supernatural and the deity of Jesus. This critique should not surprise us. We live in a post-enlightenment age where we question and doubt anything that cannot be tested scientifically.

These facts about the New Testament manuscripts do not force one to believe the stories they relate. But here is what they do. The sheer number of manuscripts dating back so nearly to the occasions of writing provide confidence that the New Testament we are reading today was the same New Testament originally written.

If we can have confidence in the consistency and accuracy of the Old and New Testaments, then we cannot claim that over time the authors changed stories to build their case for the deity of Jesus or other theological concepts. What they wrote is what we have. You may or may not believe what they wrote. After all, that underscores the importance of faith that permeates Christianity.

But if we are honest with the data we have, we must accept that the biblical documents relate to us an accurate account of the original manuscripts. This becomes foundational to the doctrine of revelation regarding the inerrancy, sufficiency, and authority of Scripture.