Category: Church Leadership

Hope for the Next Year

This year why not be someone who knows hope, shows hope and shares hope?

Hope is powerful. Without hope people wither and die.

One of the most frequent pictures that Scripture uses to describe the dynamic of hope we have in Jesus is light and darkness.

“God”, St John says, “is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”1 He is light. That picture of light is brilliantly simple and yet rich and deep.

It is in the nature of light that it goes out and includes others. Light radiates from a source and moves towards the other, enfolding and embracing it. It does not diminish that which it touches but rather allows it to be seen fully as it is, to become fully itself. It warms and energises.

For this reason light is associated in the Bible with life and with love. To say that God is light is the flip-side of saying he is love: one who looks to the other, and brings them life, enabling them to be more fully themselves and more glorious than they could have been without him.

But we can go further. For God to be light also implies that he is truth and freedom. Light illuminates – that is its essence. It makes known the truth about that which it touches.That in turn brings freedom for to choose freely we must first know the truth. And so we return to love. For what is love but the other, known and freely chosen?

God is light. He is beauty and truth and freedom and above all love.
Pause for a moment. This is an extraordinary claim. At the centre of existence is not the cold indifference of a mechanical universe blindly progressing from darkness to darkness. It is a person whose very being is light.

Moreover, this light is not merely the source of existence but its end. In the beautiful picture of the destiny of all who love Jesus, John describes a city that “has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.”2

But if the centre of existence is light, why does the world experience such darkness?

The possibility of darkness is the necessary implication of the ability to choose the light of freedom and love. God is perfect freedom and perfect love. To be able to choose both freedom and love is to accept the possibility of choosing darkness. Yet just as light, love, freedom and life go together so do darkness, sin, slavery and death. The world exercises the freedom of light to choose darkness and so finds that freedom removed. It rejects God who is freely chosen love and life and finds itself enslaved to sin and death. Such is the condition of humanity. It is fundamentally one without hope for the only hope of the slave is to be freed and yet freedom is the one good the slave cannot himself will or perhaps even imagine.

To be in darkness is to be without hope. To offer light is first to demonstrate that there is another way to live – to understand that darkness is not the final condition of all humanity. That offer awakens the possibility of hope because it demonstrates that we need not live in the darkness of sin and death but can imagine ourselves becoming men and women of light and love.

This is how St John begins his account of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection: “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind… The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.”3 As Christ comes into the world he brings with him hope that the darkness of sin, slavery and death will be destroyed in his light.

“Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”4 This is the gospel. That within each of us lies a darkness of pain, shame, guilt, frustration and, ultimately, despair. And that in its place Jesus has come to fill us with light and, ultimately, with life.

The challenge each of us face is whether we will receive that hope, to allow the light to remove our darkness and replace our death with his life. To do so is both sudden and slow. It comes like a flood when we open the shutters of our lives to him, when we are baptised and commit ourselves to following him. And yet there are still attic rooms shrouded in gloom which each of us need continually to open to the light – areas of bitterness or long-held grudges, of cherished abuses of our sexuality or prejudice against our brothers and sisters.

To live in the light is a continual choice to reject darkness and embrace Christ.

So where does this leave us as Christ’s Church? With the words we read earlier.

Christ came as light into a world of darkness, the ultimate bearer of hope. And now he sends us in the same way.

When Christ instructs us to be light, therefore, he is setting out our destiny – not merely to show up the failures of the world around us but rather to offer hope that the world need not live in darkness any longer; that slavery can be replaced by freedom, sin by love, despair by joy, the devil by God himself. To put this shortly, the light is Christ; when we become light we demonstrate the desirability of knowing Christ, generating the hope that there might be a different way; when we offer light we are offering the chance for that hope of a better future to be realised.

The light that we bring is not, fundamentally, our own. It is not, in the final analysis, the hope of a society run well, of people who are kind, of men and women treated as equals, of a community of races, nationalities and ethnicities. All of these things are evidence of the presence of light. But the light they demonstrate is not their own; it is a reflection of Jesus. 

Our work is to bring people to Christ; it is not merely to demonstrate a better way of living but to introduce them to the One who is himself life.This is how John’s words are fulfilled: “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”5 It continues to shine through us.

What does this mean for us as we move into the year ahead?

First, it means we need to know hope. In other words, to resolve to come increasingly to the light of God and allow that light increasingly to fill our lives. In practice, that might mean any of:

  • Getting baptised – going all in for Jesus. If you haven’t got baptised, that’s a bit like having those Christmas lights people put up that shine a picture onto the house. The light is there, some might get in through a window at some point, but basically the house is closed to the light. It is outside shining in where it can. If you haven’t put your trust in Jesus and got baptised yet, do.
  • Committing to prayer and reading Scripture, or fasting each week. Plan to build up your spiritual life in a named, accountable, achievable way.
  • Looking for acts of kindness first to other Christians and then to those outside. You could set yourself the goal of one selfless act of love for someone every week. Then increase it.

Second, we need to show hope. Jesus said:

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others…”6

We can do this as a group, opening our building to community services, looking for ways we can raise money to help good causes, seeking ways to improve our environment and care for creation. You will have better ideas than I do. Let’s share them. We want to be a light shining in this village, bringing hope to those whose experience of life is dark.

Third, share hope. That quote from Jesus doesn’t finish with Christians doing good. It says we are to do good in order that people might come to worship the God who made them.

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”7

A large part of the point of the good deeds is ultimately to bring people to worship. The light we shine is not our own; it is Christ’s. We let our light shine so that they can discover his light. Ultimately he is what people need.

Sharing faith can feel hard or intimidating. But it doesn’t need to be. It could be as simple as:

  • Inviting a friend to come with you to a Life Group or Sunday service.
  • Resolving to pray for someone to know Jesus and then doing it every week.
  • Offering to pray with a friend or neighbour who is in distress.
  • Inviting someone to Alpha.

It feels scary but it shouldn’t. Jesus is good. Church is good. Light and life are good. And everyone deserves to know them.

  1. 1 John 1:5. ↩︎
  2. Rev. 21:23-27 ↩︎
  3. John 1:4, 9 ↩︎
  4. John 8:12 ↩︎
  5. John 1:5. ↩︎
  6. Matthew 5:14-16 ↩︎
  7. Matthew 5:14-16 ↩︎

Do We Still Need Pastors and Priests?

Faith, and the pastors and priests who embody it, not only remain relevant, in our current age they are essential.

Do we still need pastors and priests? Or has our society progressed made such people and posts irrelevant or actively harmful. It’s a question I think about a lot both as a pastor/priest myself and as I watch many of my colleagues struggling with a crisis of calling or identity, scrabbling for relevance to other disciplines or professionals.

To this question, Joseph Ratzinger gives a rallying cry: faith, and the pastors and priests who embody it, not only remain relevant, in our current age they are essential.

The shadows are becoming longer, the loneliness— more profound, and the question of those who remain— more difficult: What sort of a future do they face? Does it still make sense to become a priest in a world in which only technological and social progress matters now? Does faith have a future? Is it worthwhile to stake one’s whole life on this card? Is priesthood not an outdated relic from the past that no one needs anymore, whereas all our efforts should be applied to eradicating poverty and furthering progress?

But is all that really the case? Or is mankind, by running the machine of progress faster and faster, not at the same time rushing into suicidal insanity? The famous French aviator Antoine de Saint- Exupéry once wrote in a letter to a general: “There is only one problem in the world. How can we restore to man a spiritual significance, a spiritual discontent; let something descend upon them like the dew of a Gregorian chant. Don’t you see, we cannot live any longer on refrigerators, politics, balance sheets, and crossword puzzles. We just cannot.” And in his book The Little Prince, he says: How uncomprehending the world of adults, of clever people is. By now we understand only machines, geography, and politics. But the really important things, the light, the clouds, heaven and its stars, we no longer understand. And the great Russian author Solzhenitsyn records the cry of distress of a Communist who landed in Stalin’s prisons: We could use cathedrals in Russia again and men whose pure life makes these cathedrals alive and turns them into a space for the soul. Indeed, man does not live by refrigerators and balance sheets alone. The more he tries to do that, the more desperate he becomes, the emptier his life is. We need even today, and today more than ever, people who do not sell luxury items and do not make political propaganda but, rather, ask about the soul of a man and help him not to lose his soul in the tumult of everyday routine. The scarcer priests become in the world of business and politics, the more we need them.

Joseph Ratzinger, Teaching and Learning the Love of God, p.207-8

How Can We Lead Prayer Better?

What are the problems involved in evangelical and charismatic approaches to public prayer? And how can it be done better?

In my (charismatic free) wing of the Church our services don’t feature much written or traditional prayers or liturgies. We prefer to change the exact words we speak to reflect the type of community we are waking in or what we think the Holy Spirit wants us to do at any particular moment.

There are big advantages to this approach. 

It allows us to be flexible, fresh and to respond to the needs and characteristics of the people in Church. It also allows us to be alert to what the Holy Spirit might want to do at the time we are ministering. Finally it allows us to model for the people we are pastoring that they can pray in any language and in a way that is real for their personality and background.

With that said, emphasising contemporaneous prayer also has drawbacks. 

Andrew Wilson has written about the need,  in the midst of spontaneity,  to maintain the essential elements of Christian worship (like praying, reading Scripture, taking communion etc). Otherwise our worship becomes progressively less and less full of the riches of worship the spirit has given to his Church in Scripture and Tradition. We want to be “Eucharismatic” in our worship.

My concern here is a slightly different one. When the charismatic or evangelical worship leader, venue pastor or preacher leads the Church in spontaneous or unplanned prayer, he (or she) is writing liturgy and language that needs to sum up, express and model the concerns of the Church, the needs of the world and the right way to address God. All at the same time as teaching the people how to do that for themselves. 

This is a much harder task to do well than one might imagine. It involves formulating Scripturally sound, theologically rich, pastorally sensitive and reverent words, expressing them contemporaneously and clearly, and then fitting them into the rhythm and setting of an informal worship service. 

If we are not careful the spontaneous prayer we bring becomes all the things we want to avoid as people of the Spirit and Scripture. 

I think there are three particular areas we need to be careful about (drawn from my own failings leading prayer and worship over many years):

  1. Not including much, if any prayer, in public services.
    Here we end up having extended singing followed by a sermon (and maybe communion). There might be a short prayer between songs or at the end. But, if we’re honest, it’s not a particular feature of the service, certainly compared to, for example, sung worship or a talk. 
  2. Having my own personal prayer time in front of the congregation rather than leading them in prayer.
    Here I end up praying in a slight mumble with my eyes closed and talking quickly and informally, as if I am having an internal monologue. The problem is I am not leading the congregation at this point; instead, they are just watching me pray.
  3. Praying prayers that, instead of expressing the immediate, urgent, prophetic intercession of the Spirit praying through me, become predictable, banal, cliched, and dominated by non-words that litter speech such as “just…”, “yeah…” and so on.
    The ‘just’, and ‘yeah’ prayers are actually the least problematic form of this. It gets much worse when public prayer becomes dominated by the concerns or vocabulary of the leader’s own politics or concerns, narrate their own thoughts about life, politics, social issues or Jesus (often with the phrase ‘God, you know that… followed by explaining it to him anyway). At times they can become offensively bad. The most egregious one I’ve heard used the phrase ‘blaze, Spirit, blaze’ from Shine Jesus Shine (an excellent song people are wrongly snobbish about) to segue into intercession about a major fire in which people had lost their lives. It was, to say the least, not optimal.

What can we do to remedy these difficulties if they begin to arise in our context or ministry?
One approach would be to begin using formal, written liturgies. That approach might be one we should consider (I’ll leave that to Andrew to argue for). I think, however, that there is another approach that would allow us to keep the good that we find in spontaneous prayer while also remedying its difficulties.

Resolving these issues requires us to think a bit more about what is happening when we pray publicly, particularly if we do so spontaneously.

Filling Our Stores: The Christian Tradition of Prayer

When we speak publicly, whether in prayer, preaching or some other way, we are essentially bringing words, ideas and idioms out of our minds and memories. No speech is, in that sense, truly spontaneous. We are a bit like jazz musicians Who seem to be producing spontaneous, improvised music but are doing so using scales, techniques and phrases they have internalised over time practising. Or footballers,  who produce moments and movements of inspiration in the immediate context of a match but draw on hours of drills and practised skilIs. 

If we want to lead prayer well,  therefore, we need to practise. 

That means filling our minds and memories with great prayer, Scripture and discipline so that we have something to draw from when we pray in public. In some ways, this is more important for those of us in traditions that don’t use a formal liturgy in our public services than it is for those who do. It is precisely because we want to be able to lead the congregation in spontaneous prayer in response to the Spirit’s leading in the moment of worship that we particularly need to fill our minds and mouths with the language, cadence and concerns of great prayers. We might repeat these exact prayers as we lead people to pray. More likely, though, is that we will begin to pray with a greater fluency and depth when we create our own prayers. We will also find the content of our prayers becomes more timeless and aligned with the eternal and historic concerns of the Church and the saints she contains and less dominated by the phrases and personal preoccupations we unconsciously find ourselves repeating.

Similarly, disciplining ourselves to include in our daily devotional life a set time in the Psalms or the Divine Office imprints on our minds and hearts the central importance of prayer as a discipline for both public and private worship. We will find, then, that the impulse to overlook intentional times of public prayer on the basis that there is no time in the service or that it interrupts the “flow” or mood of sung worship is easier to overcome. 

Moreover, the discipline of reading (out loud) the prayers of the historic Church and of Israel is an antidote to the habit of mumbling to oneself when leading in prayer. These are prayers written and published with the intent of being read publicly. They have that feel about them.  As we begin to make them a part of the unconscious reservoir from which we draw our public prayers, we will begin to find that we construct and project our prayers with a similar tone.

What Does This Mean in Practice?

So what does this mean for those Who regularly lead prayer in charismatic or evangelical  services? 

There are, I think, three specific things that will transform the way we pray, and particularly how we pray in public.

  1. When praying, remember we are leading the congregation and not just praying on our own in front of them.
    That means:
    1. Begin your prayer with clarity. Don’t just let the prayer ’emerge’ from under your breath.
    2. Go at a pace where the congregation can follow what you are saying and agree with it. God can understand you at your fastest speed but we can’t.
    3. Think about what you want to say and then say it. Don’t feel the need to keep on speaking when you don’t have anything to say at that moment.
  2. Plan to pray as part of your service leading.
    If you are not able to say when you are going to lead the congregation in prayer during a service, there is a problem. Choose a time in the service and allocate who is leading prayer and what you want for it. A good test is to think how you would treat the preparation of sung worship in terms of planning etc and then make sure prayer in the service is at least as good and focussed as that.
  3. Twice a day, as part of your daily devotional times, include praying the Psalms and/ or a traditional Daily Office.
    There are lots of modern versions of a liturgy of the hours or something similar. However, to be honest, I think you are better off with one of the older ones from a historic denomination. For me, the best you can do is get the free “Daily Office” app. It is a Catholic app, devoted to systematically praying through the Psalms and uses many of the ancient prayers of the Church. If you don’t want to use a prayer book then read three Psalms (give or take, depending on the Psalm length)twice a day as part of morning and evening prayer.

Throughout this article I have focused on the pragmatic reasons for immersing yourself in the Church’s historic prayers. There is, however, another even more powerful reason to do so. These prayers have been collected, edited, arranged and prayed over millennia. Praying them each day as part of a disciplined prayer life won’t just make you better at praying; it will bring you joy. Ultimately every worship leader themselves needs to draw close to Christ. Disciplined prayer with the church will help you to do that.

Further Reading and Resources

If you want to explore these ideas further or get into praying with the Church, here are some resources to get you started.

Books about this type of prayer for evangelicals:

Prayer Books or Apps

How Can We Do Sung-Worship Well?

We love sung worship. But how can we do it well, love others, and honour our core values?

Introduction

In my (Charismatic Protestant) branch of the Church we love sung worship. Sung worship is very important to us as it has been throughout the history of the Church. 

This is not just a question of taste or preference. It expresses something profound about who we are and how we encounter God on a deep level. St Augustine wrote that “singing is for one who loves” while an ancient proverb reads that “he who sings, prays twice”.1 In the New Testament we find Christ and his disciples singing as they head for the Mount of Olives on the night of his betrayal,  St Paul commanding the church in Ephesus to “[speak] to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Finally, John’s vision of heaven echoes with the sound of the song of the redeemed and angelic bests falling before the glorified and exalted Lamb of God.

Sung worship is powerful. It draws us close to God in our minds and our hearts. It can lift the brokenhearted and put strength in the legs of the weary. To lead sung worship is a wonderful and fearsome thing. The words we sing, particularly when we are young, are the words we carry with us and which in times of exaltation and desolation we will reach for to find comfort, hope and to direct our paths. To some extent, therefore, to lead sung worship is to stand as liturgist, preacher, counsellor and guide for the whole congregation.

The songs we sing reflect and shape who we are, who we will become and what we will become. This means we need to take sung worship seriously. Doing it well is a priority for us.  

At my church are blessed to be led in the sung parts of our services by some gifted and godly leaders and singers. We want to empower and trust you to lead in accordance with the gifts God has given each of you. These guidelines are given in order to enable us to benefit from you and you to grow as you minister to us.

Values Behind Sung-Worship

At HBC we find it helpful to think about what we do and believe in terms of core values. We want to be people who are Bible saturated, Spirit dependent, loving of others, and courageous in mission. Each of these has relevance to sung worship.

Bible Saturated

Sung worship needs to be saturated with truth both about God and about us. This flows from two ideas we find in Scripture and the Christian Tradition.

Responding to Truth

First, sung worship flows from Truth because it is a response to what we have seen of God. For example, in Revelation 14:1-3 John describes the scene in heaven as he sees “the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion” followed in response by overwhelming music “like that of harpists playing their harps. And they sang a new song before the throne.” 

Sung worship, in this sense, is not the warm up to get us in the right place to begin to worship. It is also not something that we come to “cold”, so to speak. As both worship leaders and a congregation we sing in response to the reality of who God is being revealed to us. This is why our services begin with prayer for God to draw worship from us followed by a reading from Scripture or a testimony. We sing in response to God. It also means that as worship and service leaders we need to be immersed in worship and Scripture throughout the week so that we have seen Christ and can respond to him in faith as we lead others.

Communicating Truth

Second, sung worship is Bible saturated because when we sing we are teaching. In Colossians 3:16, Paul writes:

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.

Singing is teaching. Even more than a sermon, the sung worship in our services shapes how people think about God and themselves. At its most basic level this means that the songs we sing must be biblically orthodox.

In addition to each song’s content being true in itself, the balance of song themes and contents overall must be helpful, forming the congregation in a particular way. For example, we should ensure that over the course of a typical month we are singing hymns and songs  that reflect on who God is in himself, on what he has done for us (chiefly in Jesus) and on our response to, and experience of,  him.

Ensuring this happens is a partnership between the sung worship leader and the Elders and other leaders in the church. We need to be meeting regularly to reflect, pray and oversee what we are doing and ensure it is biblically sound and balanced.

Spirit Dependent

In addition to being Bible saturated, sung worship should also be Spirit dependent. Again, this has multiple dimensions.

Prepared in Prayer

Being Spirit dependent means, first and foremost, being immersed in prayer. This begins in the week prior to the service as everyone involved in leading seeks Christ for both the inspiration and the ability to worship. As the Psalmist prays:

Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will declare your praise.

But prayer does not cease when we begin to lead. Rather, prayer becomes for the worshipper a disposition of our hearts, orienting ourselves towards Christ, listening all the time even as we sing for what the Spirit might be saying to us and through us.

Prepared to Pray

Being Spirit dependent means being willing to pray at the front of church if it seems appropriate and right. The sung worship leader is also, at that moment, the chief liturgist in the church, shaping how we, as a people, respond to what we were heard either in prayer or, if appropriate, through the prophetic gifts. 

Obviously, this looks different at different points in the service and depends on whether there are, for example, young children present or a preacher has gone over his allocated time. What is important is the posture of prayer and a willingness and confidence to respond to it if it seems right.

Flexibility

Finally, while the Sunday worship service has a high degree of order to it both to enable us to worship well and to make it accessible for guests, especially if they were young children, part of being Spirit dependent in leading sung worship is flexibility. 

Depending on what the Spirit is doing, you might want to swap out a song for one you think is more appropriate at that moment. Generally that is fine；we would encourage and support you in that. Equally the overall service leader (if they are a different person) might want to drop or add a song or silence to enable a different form of response. Again, this is fine;  we want to listen to what the Spirit is saying and doing.

Courageous in Mission and Loving of Others

What, then, of our final two values? To be courageous in mission as a sung worship leader means to be willing to be vulnerable by being on display at the front of church. To stand in front of a room of one hundred or more people and sing is already an act of courage, not least because it requires you publicly to declare your faith in a way that is not required of an ordinary church member.

More than this, however, there is courage in leading sung worship for a church that comprises a wide range of people of different ages and backgrounds. Doing so well requires the leader to deny their own desires and preferences in order to minister effectively to the congregation.

In turn this leads us to our final value, being loving of others. For the sung worship leader this consists of two principles. 

First, they should practise so that they know the songs they are singing and are able to lead as well and as unobtrusively as they are able. To serve well is itself an act of love. 

Second, however, the sung worship leader shows love for others by denying their own preferences in relation to presentation, set length or song choice in order effectively to minister to the needs of the congregation. In this way they choose to focus their selection around how first to love and honour God and then second to serve the needs of the other. This is essentially an ascetic practice and as such is not pleasant. Yet in the midst of the discomfort, and even occasional irritation, that accompanies all forms of self-denial for the sake of another, there is the opportunity to become closer to Christ both for the leader (who embodies his self-giving love) and for the congregation (who sees the love of Christ reflected in the leader’s love for them).

  1. Augustine, Sermon 336. ↩︎

What Is the Future of the Church?

We don’t need a church that celebrates the cult of action in political ‘prayers’. It is quite superfluous…the future of the church, this time as always, will be shaped anew by the saints. By people who are aware of more than mere phrases, people who are modern but have deep roots and live in the fullness of the faith.

We don’t need a church that celebrates the cult of action in political ‘prayers’. It is quite superfluous. Therefore it will collapse of its own accord. From today’s crisis this time too a church of tomorrow will rise, which will have lost much. It will become small, and to a large extent it will have to start again from the beginning. It will no longer be able to fill many of its buildings that were built in times of prosperity. Because of the number of its adherents it will lose many of its privileges in society. Unlike in the past, it will present itself much more strongly as an optional community, which can only be joined through a decision to do so. It will surely find new forms of office and ordain reliable Christians as priests, who also have other jobs. But, as before, full-time priests will be essential too.

The future of the church will not come from those who just follow recipes. It will not come from those who just want to choose the easy way. Those who avoid the passion of the faith and call anything demanding false and obsolete, tyrannical and legalistic. To put it positively: the future of the church, this time as always, will be shaped anew by the saints. By people who are aware of more than mere phrases, people who are modern but have deep roots and live in the fullness of the faith.

But despite all these changes which we can imagine, the church will again decisively find its essential being in what has always been its heart: faith in the triune God and in Jesus Christ. It will be an inward church, which does not bang on about its political mandate and flirts as little with the left as with the right. It will rediscover its own core in faith and prayer and experience the sacraments again as divine service, not a problem of liturgical design. The church will find it hard-going. For the process of crystallization and clarification will cost it much labour. It will become poor, a church of the little people.

The process will be long and difficult. But after the test of this letting go, great power will stream from a church that has been taken to heart and become simplified. For the people of a wholly planned world will become unutterably lonely. When God has disappeared from them, they will feel all their terrible destitution. And then they will discover the little community of believers as something completely new. As a hope that takes root in them, as an answer, which they have always secretly been seeking – as a home which gives them life and hope beyond death.

Joseph Ratzinger, Glaube und Zukunft (Munich, 1970) (quoted in Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life (Volume 2), p.70)

How Churches Can Get Better Pastoral Care, a Deeper Spiritual Life, and be More Missional?

How can we make our churches deeper in pastoral care, the sacraments and Scripture while also being more effective in evangelism and social outreach? The answer from the New Testament is to appoint and empower Deacons.

How can we make our churches deeper in pastoral care, the sacraments and Scripture while also being more effective in evangelism and social outreach? The answer from the New Testament is to appoint and empower Deacons.

Church leadership has classically been made up of teams that comprise a range of gifting but which represent two different orders, and which have different focuses. The one that draws the most attention and controversy is that of Elder or Priest, a role that focuses on mediating Christ’s presence to his people through teaching, pastoral care, and the sacraments.

Equally important, though, are non-Elder leaders, traditionally called Deacons. Acts 6 and 13 illustrate why. In Acts 6, the text in which the office of Deacon as a non-Elder leader is first explained, we find Deacons leading in two areas. First, they lead in social action – demonstrating the love of Christ in action by ensuring the people are fed. Second, they lead in evangelism, pioneering an early evangelistic and apologetics programme that leads ultimately to the martyrdom of one of their number, Stephen.

Later, in Acts 13 we find other non-Elder leaders developing the mission strategy of the Antiochian church alongside Paul and Barnabus.

As Joseph Ratzinger put it:

[B]ecause one cannot learn to do by speaking but only by doing, the diaconate originated precisely and in a special way as a ministry of “showing how to do”. When the apostles called the seven men from whose efforts the Church’s diaconal ministry developed, they did so in order to entrust to them the ministry of charity in the Church, so as to be free again as apostles for the ministry of the word. Since then charitable work, showing how to believe and to love, has always remained a defining feature of the diaconal ministry…A Church that neglected this demonstration of charity, of social and human concern, and the actualization of Jesus Christ’s goodness in practical matters would neglect an essential part of her mission…

Here a second aspect of diaconal ministry becomes visible: showing-how-to-do remains mute unless it is interpreted in an explanatory proclamation, in the message that commands the deeds in the first place.1

In all of this the Deacons enable the pastoral and sacramental ministry of the Elders precisely because they (the Deacons) lead the mission of the Church in both its evangelistic and practical forms so that the Elders don’t get distracted from their actual calling. In other words, Deacons are appointed to lead in mission because that is not what Elders should be focused on Acts 6:3-4. That doesn’t mean the Elders are irrelevant to mission. Texts such as Acts 13 and Philippians 1: 1 show blended teams of Elders and non-Elders working together. But it does mean that as Elders they aren’t responsible for directing on implementing the church’s social and evangelistic mission and  when they try to be so they will inevitably end up being compromised in the execution of their actual calling.

I’m really blessed in this regard. My church’s leadership includes some wonderful and effective leaders executing non-sacramental ministries that keep the church on mission while enabling me to focus on representing and ministering Christ to those for whom I am responsible. Nevertheless, at a time when many in church life desire greater depth and care from Elders, the mission demands of a post-Christendom world seem overwhelming, and many evangelical pastors burn out, maybe Elders should not be occupied with being vision-casting, organisation-building, missional leaders. And ask the church to appoint and empower some Deacons instead!

  1. Benedict XVI, Teaching and Learning the Love of God: Being a Priest Today, p.152, 154. ↩︎