Striving for Warm Complementarianism in a Cold, Mostly Egalitarian World
Oh that we might better live and love God’s good design.
Our church recently posted a job opening for another associate pastor. I’ve thought a lot about the church hiring process, even writing a whole book about the topic. And in my experience, most job descriptions sound vanilla. They’re boilerplate. Sure, churches will write a bunch of details about what they want from their new youth pastor, lead pastor, or what have you—but in the end, most job descriptions for a men’s ministry pastor look an awful lot like all the other job descriptions for a men’s ministry pastor. Churches say they want applicants to have theological education and previous church experience. They also want, cliched as they are, self-starters and people skills.
Churches looking for pastors—not unlike the pastors looking for churches—typically have few opportunities to distinguish themselves from the rest. This is why in our job description we have one particular bullet point that, we hope, makes us stand out.
In the job requirements section we mention that a candidate should have “a shared theological and philosophical DNA with the pastor-elders,” and then we add, “including warm complementarianism, a humble embrace of Reformed soteriology, and a gospel-centeredness in all of ministry.” That threefold set of phrases is not vanilla. Depending on the candidate, “complementarianism” and “Reformed soteriology” will not taste vanilla but either as repulsive as a shot of vinegar or as delightful as a slice of red velvet cake.
But we’re also hoping a candidate who reads those words will pause for a bit. We hope that stringing together these particular theological concepts with those particular modifiers—warm complementarianism, humble Reformed soteriology—will cause intrigue to arise in the candidate’s mind. We want a candidate to think, “I like the sound of that, but I wonder if they mean what I would mean by those terms.”
In fact, we not only want them to wonder about the phrases but to actually ask us what we mean. And so far, some have.
I don’t want to take time in this post to explain what we mean by “humble Reformed soteriology” or “gospel-centeredness.” For those, I’ll flag J.A. Medder’s book Humble Calvinism and Jared C. Wilson’s book Gospel-Driven Church as helpful resources. I do want to explain what we mean—and what we do not mean—by the phrase warm complementarianism.
Warm complementarianism strives to actually be complementarian. Most pastors looking at our job description will be familiar with this term, but I’ll begin with a brief definition for those newer to the discussion. Broadly speaking, two theological positions exist on men’s and women’s roles in the home and church. They go by the names of “complementarianism” and “egalitarianism.” Both views affirm that God created men and women in his own image and, consequently, that both men and women have equal dignity, value, and worth. Here we all agree.
“God created men and women in his own image and, consequently, that both men and women have equal dignity, value, and worth.”
And yet, there are differences. Egalitarians believe that there should be no distinctions in roles in the home and the church that are based on the innate qualities of gender but rather that all roles should be decided on the basis of competency. In other words, if you can do a task well, regardless of your gender, then you should do it.
Complementarians don’t believe the Bible teaches this. They believe that while there is tremendous overlap between what it means to be a man and a woman, they also believe that manhood, in distinction from womanhood, means something—something beautiful. And complementarians believe that womanhood, in distinction from manhood, means something—something beautiful. In short, men and women are both fearfully and wonderfully made, but they are not interchangeable.
What, then, are the distinctions? Space does not allow me to explore this in detail, but I’ll mention one area. Our church believes God desires godly men to take the role of spiritual leadership in the home and the church, and that the office of pastor-elder is open only to qualified men.
This view is, of course, controversial. So let me mention a few of the places we see this taught in the Bible. Support for male eldership is seen in the following:
the responsibilities given by God to Adam before and after the fall (Gen. 2–3; Rom. 5:12ff);
the pattern of Old Testament and New Testament spiritual leadership being placed mainly among men (e.g., Jesus had many women who ministered with him, and he was no stranger to poking socially taboo topics when necessary, such as the religious leader’s man-made rules about the sabbath, but Jesus chose men to be his twelve apostles);
the parallels between male leadership in the church and the headship of men in the home as taught in places like Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, and Titus 2;
no explicit mention of female pastor-elders in the New Testament; and, finally,
specific passages like 1 Timothy 2:8–3:7 and Titus 1:5–9 which require male pastor-elders.
Now, back to where I started. By saying we strive to be complementarian, we want to actually be complementarian. But what we mean by this is something quite different from the stereotype of simply keeping women from doing certain roles.
Warm complementarianism encourages women to passionately pursue ministry. The perception of many churches that hold complementarian views is that they don’t encourage women to pursue ministry, even that they stifle women from significant leadership roles.
I concede that the perception is the perception because it can often be true. Indeed, in our own church I’m sure that at times, no matter how hard I might try not to do so, my leadership in this area has left certain women feeling deflated. For all those times in the past and all those that will come in the future, please know that I’m sorry. Our hope—indeed my hope—is to see women passionately use the varied ministry gifts God has given them. Over and over again in the Bible we read of women serving in wonderful, significant, and courageous ways. There are well-known examples like Mary and Esther, but also lesser-known ones like the little girl who cared for Naaman (2 Kings 5).
To explain this better, I’ll use an anti-analogy analogy. Most student ministry leaders have been asked some version of the question “how far is too far” when it comes to the physical relationship that the student has with his girlfriend or the girlfriend has with her boyfriend. The proper response to this question is that God desires sexual purity, and thus the goal shouldn’t be to get as close as you can to “the line.” The line of sexual sin is a line you want to stay pretty far away from.
This is not the way God wants us to view “the line,” if you will, for what is biblically appropriate for women and men in various ministry roles. There are some ministry roles that God has given only to qualified males, such as being a pastor-elder, but this doesn’t mean churches should take the approach of staying away from that line as far as possible. Actually, I’d suggest we should want to get as close as we can. In every ministry role that God intends for women and men to do, we should have men and women doing ministry. In the case of “the line” of sexual intimacy between unmarried people, getting too close to the line becomes sin, while in the case of men’s and women’s roles, backing away from the line is sin.
I should probably give a few concrete examples where women lead in our church. We have women teach on Sunday mornings in some classes. Our staff worship pastor is a man, but we typically share the leading of individual Sunday mornings with different leaders, and sometimes a woman leads us in song, and almost every week on the stage, women play instruments, sing, and read Scripture. I know complementarians debate whether women should be deacons; we believe they should, and we have several.
I’ll mention one more example. At our church we wrote a prospectus for a two-year “pastoral residency program.” It’s a program for men who are currently in seminary or have completed seminary and want more church experience before they launch into a full-time vocation. But we also wrote a “mentored ministry program” for any ministry-minded person, whether male or female, who wants to prepare for local church ministry. We haven’t made these programs open to the public yet, but as we’re beta testing the mentored ministry program, we currently have one man and one woman receiving pastoral care from me, the lead pastor of our church. I think our church currently has more women than men enrolled in seminary courses. And in the coming years, I hope and pray God uses our small church to raise up dozens of women who love the local church and have the ability to teach God’s word faithfully.
“In every ministry role that God intends for women and men to do, we should have men and women doing ministry.”
So where is the line? We understand Scripture to teach that in church settings where the sacraments would be practiced (i.e., Sunday morning worship services), teaching is preaching and should be done by elder-qualified men. However, in church settings where the sacraments would not be practiced (i.e., Bible studies and youth group), teaching is not necessarily preaching and can be done by both qualified men and women. I get to this conclusion seeing the verses near the end of 1 Timothy 2 intricately connected to 1 Timothy 3.
Much of this focus on a line, however, can shift undue focus to Sunday mornings. There are, of course, six more days of the week. Pastors often get teased about working only one hour a week, but we know best that the ministry of a church consists in far more. Which is to say that so much of what women (and non-elder men, for that matter) contribute to a church can’t necessarily be seen while sitting in a pew during a service and watching the stage, as though it were the only place of ministry. As Paul writes to the church in Corinth, “Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman” (1 Cor. 11:11). Though we often forget this truth, we need each other and are interdependent, as the very name complementarity implies.
Almost monthly I get comments from newcomers about the beauty of the interior design of our building, which is largely overseen by one gifted woman. And I get regular requests to host weddings, funerals, baby showers, and other events here because it’s such a welcoming place. We have a few women at our church studying counseling, and these women meet informally with those young and old and with those in our church and those outside. And this is not to mention the host of friendship and discipleship relationships among our women that cultivate faith, hope, and love. Also, we have a meals ministry for those with a health challenge or after the arrival of a baby. It’s a ministry much appreciated by those who receive it, and a ministry led almost exclusively by women.
I could go on and on, but this post is long already, so I’ll close by speaking about our posture as leaders toward this doctrine.
Warm complementarianism humbly and openly embraces God’s design as good. There are plenty of ways for a man to be a lousy complementarian. He can be angry about it, wearing the doctrine like a chip on his shoulder, always ready to take offense and pick a fight. He can also be boastful, a prideful windbag who fails to see God’s calling first as a responsibility, not a privilege. I wish these were only straw man caricatures. But they really exist.
“There are plenty of ways for a man to be a lousy complementarian.”
A man could also be indifferent or cold to complementarianism. In this scenario, he might believe complementarianism comes from the Bible but fail to see how the doctrine is actually for our good. So he hides his complementarianism under the proverbial bushel. He keeps the doctrine out of his sermons, and the church keeps it off its website. We may believe this, they think, but it’s better that we not tell anyone.
Warm complementarianism, instead, embraces God’s truth humbly and openly. Warm complementarianism believes that if God is actually good and he gives good gifts, then whatever the Bible actually teaches—to allude to Jesus’s words in Matthew—is him giving bread to his children and not stones.
This is why we write about complementarianism in our membership material. We want our perspective members to know where we stand and why we stand there. We want to model the apostle Paul’s approach when he wrote to the church in Corinth, saying, “We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Cor. 4:2). To quote from our denomination’s statement of faith, the Bible “is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises” (Evangelical Free Church of America Statement of Faith, Article 2, “The Bible”).
And this is why, to come full circle, we not only write about our complementarian convictions in our membership booklet, but we put it in our job description.
Now, may God our Father, help our belief of these doctrines to be more than mere aspirational belief, more than words on paper. And may he help us be the kind of warm complementarians who adorn the doctrine in such a way that people taste red velvet, not vinegar.
* Photo by Amanda Congiuv on Unsplash
Our Church Is Hiring Another Pastor
If you know someone interested, please pass along the details.
Over the last few years, change has marked our church experience, even my pastoring. Pastors and other staff members have transitioned. Church members have moved away and left for good reasons, while others left for, shall we say, less than good reasons. All this change is normal for churches. Maybe only the rate of change over the last three or four years has been abnormal.
And yet for all the change, the people and pastors here have also tried not to change the critical elements that make a church a church. I think, by God’s grace, we’ve gone back deeper into the basics. Back to God and his Word. Back to the primacy of the gospel and deeds of mercy and mission. In fact, for as hard as it’s been, the Lord has used the struggles to refine us. He’s grown our church numerically but also, maybe more importantly, in our depth of faithfulness. Soli deo gloria.
Part of the change at our church comes as we prepare to send out one of our pastors and dozens of people to plant a church a few miles away in the center of our city. We’ve never done this before—at least I’ve never done this before—and we’re learning as we go. But it feels right. The church won’t be planted officially until January 2024, yet we’re now starting the search for another associate pastor, a pastor who can help lead and preach, a pastor with ministry experience.
Below is the job description. We’ve posted it on job boards and with seminaries, but I thought I’d share it here too. Maybe you know someone who’d like to work with us. You can also see the PDF here and here’s a link to our website: Community Evangelical Free Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
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Associate Pastor
OVERVIEW
The associate pastor will serve with the other members of the church staff and our pastor-elders to further our church’s vision. He will serve as a generalist, able to help in areas that need more attention in any given season but have a particular emphasis on leading and training and preaching. He will operate under the direct supervision of the senior pastor and under the overall governance of the Pastor-Elder Board.
COMPENSATION
Benefits: 7 paid holidays, 15 paid vacation days, 5 paid personal days, 1 day off during the week in addition to Saturday, which is considered a day off (Sundays are considered a workday); pay every 2 weeks on a Wednesday
Salary: Please ask for salary range during interviews.
JOB REQUIREMENTS
Committed Christian who will participate and engage in our church and who agrees with the EFCA Statement of Faith.
Humility and willingness to work with teams. Deep love and compassion for people, Christian and non-Christian alike.
Skilled expositor of God’s Word; ability to teach and preach to all ages of the church.
Excellent people skills with the ability to engage diverse types of people.
Aptitude for training, recruiting, and developing leaders and pastors for ministry.
5–10 years of ministry experience in a local church (completed MDiv degree strongly preferred).
A shared theological and philosophical DNA with the pastor-elders, including warm complementarianism, a humble embrace of Reformed soteriology, and a gospel-centeredness in all of ministry.
JOB RESPONSIBILITIES AND DUTIES
The other associate pastor roles at Community have specific areas of oversight, such as connections, worship, or discipleship and visitation. This role, however, will be something of a generalist role but have a particular emphasis in leading the church and mentoring others. As an associate pastor, he will help with church administration, preaching and teaching, administering baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and officiating weddings and funerals. He will preach a minimum of eight sermons a year.
CHURCH BIO & HOW TO APPLY?
Our church mission statement is “to see the weak, wounded, and wayward enjoy the living Jesus.” We belong to the Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) and have around 200 members, 300 people in attendance in the sanctuary each Sunday, and 200 people in small groups throughout the week. Our lead pastor has served here for almost ten years. This position became open because we are planting a church and sending a current associate pastor to lead that church. Please see our website for more information, CommunityFreeChurch.org. Send your resume and cover letter to jobs@communityfreechurch.org. Within two weeks, we’ll follow up about potential next steps. We hope to fill the role in the spring of 2023.
Reading List 2022
A list of every book I read last year.
My first post of each new year always contains the list of books I read the previous year (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021). I post the list for personal accountability, not to showboat. Knowing I have to confess my list helps me stay on track.
The total this year comes to 63 books. You can see from glancing at the graphs below how the tonnage relates to other years. I’ll just give you the punch line, though, so you don’t have to spend time figuring it out. This year I read fewer books—significantly fewer—than any year since 2015. I know, I know, for many readers, finishing more than sixty books in one year would feel epic. And when compared to the general population, it is epic. I’ll explain.
Around seven or eight years ago I started taking reading (and writing) seriously and set the goal of reading over one hundred books a year. I don’t typically make it, but I often get much closer than I did this year.
There’s not necessarily one reason why my total finished so low. But I could sum up the reasons in the phrase “intentional sacrifice”; I chose to do other things. I have a large family, and as my older children tend to stay up later at night, so do my wife and I, which means I get up less early. I helped coach sports at my children’s school, which means I can’t pad my reading total by hammering audiobooks while I work out. Right there I lost more than a dozen books. Also, life at our church was super full. We had several staff transitions and geared up to plant a church. All good stuff, right? But it meant I rarely read books at work.
The same sentiment about sacrifice applies to my writing. Not only have I not read fewer books in seven years, but I’ve also probably never written less. I used to write forty blog posts and a dozen guest posts each year, while also tinkering, if not finishing, a book project. This year I wrote a mere half dozen blog posts, a half dozen guest posts, and didn’t do much more than tinker with a book.
I love my part-time job as the managing editor for Gospel-Centered Discipleship. I get to edit and oversee the publication of over 150 articles a year, coach staff writers and editors, and work on our book projects. It’s wonderful to get paid to do something I would do as a hobby. But this work garbles up precious free time that I have in the mornings for writing.
But for all the sadness of sacrificing words read and words written, I know I’m making the right decision. Books to read and books to write will still be there, Lord willing, when children are not.
One final comment. In last year’s recap, I noted that I wanted to read the Bible using my English Standard Version Study Bible and that I also wanted to read all the introductions to each book as I went through the Bible. By God’s grace, I did. That added 66 extra days of reading or over two months’ worth of mornings. This meant I had to read an extra chapter or two each day to finish in a year. The sacrifice was a good one. Even as a pastor, I must keep reminding myself of whether Hosea wrote to the northern kingdom of Israel or the southern kingdom of Judah and why that context matters.
If you have a favorite book from the previous year, please let me know in the comments. I’m always looking for great books to read, fiction or non-fiction.
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Books Read, 2013–2022
Pages Read, 2013–2022
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In order of completion, this year I read . . .
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (160 pages)
Confessions of a Pastor: Adventures in Dropping the Pose and Getting Real with God by Craig Groeschel (224 pages)
Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson (272 pages)
The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life by Marion Roach Smith (128 pages)
Love Me Anyway: How God’s Perfect Love Fills Our Deepest Longing by Jared C. Wilson (256 pages)
Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers (479 pages)
The Bible: Romans to Revelation, Part 6 of 6 by God (300 pages)
The Givenness of Things: Essays by Marilynne Robinson (304 pages)
Storycraft, Second Edition: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) by Jack Hart (286 pages)
The Subversive Copy Editor, Second Edition: Advice from Chicago by Carol Fisher Saller (200 pages)
The God of the Garden: Thoughts on Creation, Culture, and the Kingdom by Andrew Peterson (224 pages)
Economical Writing, Third Edition: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (76 pages)
A Separate Peace by John Knowles (204 pages)
The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr (256 pages)
The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home by Russell Moore (320 pages)
A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 by Phillip Keller (176 pages)
Wordcraft: The Complete Guide to Clear, Powerful Writing by Jack Hart (282 pages)
But the Blood: A Novel Based on the True Story of America’s Bloodiest County Seat Battle by Stephen R. Morefield (209 pages)
The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World by Brett McCracken (192 pages)
The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective by Russell Moore (320 pages)
The Bible: Genesis to Deuteronomy, Part 1 of 6 by God (300 pages)
Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams (226 pages)
Surprised by Jesus: Subversive Grace in the Four Gospels by Dane Ortlund (144 pages)
The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis (176 pages)
The Best Punctuation Book, Period: A Comprehensive Guide for Every Writer, Editor, Student, and Businessperson by June Casagrande (256 pages)
The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism by Carl F. H. Henry, Foreword by Russell Moore (112 pages)
The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz (368 pages)
Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches by Russell Moore (256 pages)
Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (448 pages)
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins (400 pages)
Always Longing: Discovering the Joy of Heaven by Stephen R. Morefield (162 pages)
The Bible: Joshua to Esther, Part 2 of 6 by God (300 pages)
The Liars’ Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr (352 pages)
Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ by Russell Moore (208 pages)
Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning in an Upside-Down World by Russell L. Meek (80 pages)
The Unwavering Pastor: Leading the Church with Grace in Divisive Times by Jonathan K. Dodson (160 pages)
Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel by Russell Moore (240 pages)
The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear without Losing Your Soul by Russell Moore (304 pages)
The Lincoln Highway: A Novel by Amore Towles (592 pages)
The Bible: Psalms to Song of Solomon, Part 3 of 6 by God (300 pages)
A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society by Eugene Peterson (216 pages)
Boundaries Updated and Expanded Edition: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud and John Townsend (352 pages)
Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr (224 pages)
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (531 pages)
Boundaries for Leaders: Results, Relationships, and Being Ridiculously in Charge by Henry Cloud (272 pages)
The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr (256 pages)
Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God by Tim Challies (224 pages)
The Possibility of Prayer: Finding Stillness with God in a Restless World by John Starke (200 pages)
1984 by George Orwell (328 pages)
But the Blood: A Novel Based on the True Story of America’s Bloodiest County Seat Battle (Audiobook) by Stephen R. Morefield (209 pages)
The Secret Place of Thunder: Trading Our Need to Be Noticed for a Hidden Life with Christ by John Starke (192 pages)
God, Technology, and the Christian Life by Tony Reinke (320 pages)
The Bible: Isaiah to Malachi, Part 4 of 6 by God (300 pages)
Primed to Plant: Overlooked Requirements of Church Planting by Dwight Bernier (168 pages)
Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work by Eugene Peterson (251 pages)
Everything Sad Is Untrue: (A True Story) by Daniel Nayeri (368 pages)
Leading Change by John P. Kotter (208 pages)
American Gods: A Novel by Neil Gaiman (560 pages)
Memory Wall: Stories by Anthony Doerr (256 pages)
About Grace: A Novel by Anthony Doerr (432 pages)
Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz (224 pages)
The Bible: Matthew to Acts, Part 5 of 6 by God (300 pages)
Well Done, Good and Faithful Dad: A Review of SEASONS OF SORROW by Tim Challies
A comforting, honest book for those in their own seasons of sorrow.
Many people remember November 3, 2020 as election day of a contentious United States presidential race. I remember the day, of course, but for two other reasons.
November 3, 2020 was the launch day of the book I coauthored with my friend John Beeson about blogging for God’s glory. Months and months before the book launched, we picked November 3 to release the book. And when we picked the date—as you might expect—we neglected to notice it coincided with the Trump-Biden showdown. Unfortunate timing, to say the least. We could have planned better.
The other event, however, we could have never seen coming.
My favorite blogger is Tim Challies. He’s so faithful in his theology, so consistent in his output, and so generous in promoting the work of others. When John and I thought about which author might write the foreword to our book about blogging, we, of course, asked Tim first. Thankfully, we didn’t have to ask anyone else.
But the day we launched our book was also the day Tim’s only son died.
Tim wrote on his blog the following day, “Yesterday the Lord called my son to himself—my dear son, my sweet son, my kind son, my godly son, my only son.” His son Nick had been playing a game with friends and his fiancée on his college campus when he suddenly collapsed and could not be revived. When Tim posted about the tragedy, he added, “And we ask that you remember us in your prayers as we mourn our loss together.”
I wrote my own prayer to God and posted it online, as did many others. I prayed to our Heavenly Father asking, among other requests, that “when a man who loves words—and spends his life using them for your glory and the good of your people—has nothing to say, whisper to his heart that you are still God and you love him and his wife.”
It’s been two years since that season. Joe Biden is still President, our book is still on Amazon, and Tim’s son is still gone.
But these years have not gone by without effort from Tim to capture the story of his loss and the ways God has remained faithful. Those reflections, many of which have never been shared in public before, became his latest book Seasons of Sorrow. The book chronicles his reflections over the first year of grief. When I finished reading the book, I emailed Tim to tell him that, for so many reasons, this book is the best writing I’ve ever read from him. Here are two main reasons I love the book.
Seasons of Sorrow puts the pain of loss on the page. I’m a sucker for stories about fathers and sons. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and Harry Chapin’s song “The Cat’s in the Cradle” make me melancholy like few other stories and songs can.
In Seasons of Sorrow, we see the picture of a father who loves his son. He loves the way I want to love my sons. He always made a point to wake before his family to pray for them so they would know that, before they woke, their father was praying for them. Tim would make his son coffee before his son went to work. Even now, he writes about occasionally bringing a cup to the gravesite.
All this love makes all the loss so hard and leads to excruciating moments of introspection. In one reflection, Tim asks a question that anyone of us might ask were we in his place, namely, whether the tragedy came from God as punishment for some sin in his life. “Could it be,” he asks, “that Nick’s death is God’s discipline toward me? Could it be that Nick was some kind of idol in my life, and to loose my grip on him, God took him away? Could this all be my fault?” Then he adds, “I’m haunted by these thoughts and questions” (33). As any good and godly father might be. In another passage, Tim wrestles with the emotions involved with emptying his son’s bedroom to prepare it for future use as a guest bedroom. “What right do we have,” he asks, “to barge in and sort through his possessions? Who are we to decide what will be kept and what will be discarded, what will be treasured and what will be thrown away? Yet it must be done” (102). Some nine months after Nick’s death, Tim wrote, “I miss my son today. That goes without saying, I suppose, since I miss him every day. But on this day, the pain is particularly sharp, the ache especially deep” (170). Here, Tim normalizes for readers what I’ve heard others say: there will be good days and bad days.
In all these ways, Tim does not shrink back from putting his pain on the page, telling readers his many frustrations with what William Cooper called God’s “frowning providences.” But that is not all he does.
Seasons of Sorrow points us to both the comfort of God’s promises and the comfort of God’s people. In a reflection he titled “My Manifesto,” Tim affirms his resolve to follow God and trust him despite the pain of loss. “By faith I will accept Nick’s death as God’s will, and by faith accept that God’s will is always good. . . . I will be forever thankful that God gave me a son and never resentful that he called him home. My joy in having him will be greater than my grief in having lost him” (36). Many such things he says. In the concluding paragraph of the chapter, Tim poetically strings together scriptural promise after promise after promise, affirming his belief in them with the concluding words, “This is my manifesto” (37).
In a chapter titled “I Fear God and I’m Afraid of God,” readers will notice overlap with themes from the book of Job. Tim writes of fearing God “in a new way” and of how “some kind of innocence has been shattered.” And still, he affirms his desire to continue praying, “Thy will be done,” while also noting, “even as I pray, I cringe just a little” (45). As Job came to learn, there is an unexpected comfort that comes to us when we remember that the God who is who he is, is who he is—he’s not a small, tribal deity, but sovereign and good, awesome and kind. There’s an unexpected comfort in having our innocence shattered and our foundation rebuilt.
In these ways and others, Seasons of Sorrow pastors and comforts those who grieve by sharing the ways God sent people to pastor and comfort him. In one section, Tim mentions to a friend he’s concerned his own eagerness to see his son one day in heaven has overshadowed the hope of seeing Jesus in heaven. To this, Tim’s friend tells him he does not sound like a pagan. “You sound like a grieving father” he says (122). That’s good pastoring.
Near the end of the book Tim notes the sadness that Nick “was the last male in the Challies line” and that now even the Challies “surname will in the course of time disappear” (183). But to this, Tim also encourages readers by sharing the truth he encourages himself with, writing that “Nick doesn’t need to be remembered by other people, because he will never be forgotten by God” (185). Amen and amen.
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In the opening pages, Tim writes, “Writing is how I reflect, how I meditate, how I chart life’s every journey. And so when the sorrow was still new in my heart, when the tears were still fresh in my eyes, when I barely knew up from down and here from there, I began to write” (xiv). He goes on to say that he had to write because writing teaches him what he actually believes and what he should seek to believe. “I had to know,” he says, “whether to rage or to worship, whether to run to bow down, whether to give up or to go on.” Painful as the prose was for him, I am thankful he went on, bowed down, and worshiped.
For all these reasons, the subtitle could not fit more perfectly: the pain of loss and the comfort of God. It seems to me that not only has Tim been a good and faithful dad (the hope he writes about in the final chapter), but Tim has been a good and faithful author. In the coming years I expect I’ll buy more copies to give to those in our church going through their own seasons of sorrow.
* Photo by Jonah Pettrich on Unsplash
Oh to Be an Unwavering Pastor: A Review of Jonathan K. Dodson’s Latest Book
A new book about pastoring that helped me stay afloat.
The last few years have felt, at least to most people, anything but stable. And if we feel the instability generally across society, we certainly also feel the turmoil inside churches and among pastors. Into this context, pastor and author Jonathan K. Dodson published The Unwavering Pastor: Leading the Church with Grace in Divisive Times (The Good Book Company, 2022).
But what Dodson means by “an unwavering pastor” might not be what you expect. He does not mean a pastor chiseled from a block of granite, strong and indomitable against the storm, a pastor with Nehemiah-like fortitude to execute his vision amid detractors. Dodson has a different kind of unwavering pastor in mind, the kind of unwavering pastor that Paul became. In his final letter to Timothy, he tells his young protégé, “I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me” (2 Tim. 1:12).
Dodson points out that Paul does not waver in his final imprisonment and as he nears his execution, not necessarily because of “what he believed but who he believed in. He knew the God he trusted” (13–14, emphasis original). Dodson continues, “An unwavering pastor’s confidence doesn’t come from his command of theology, his experience in counseling, or his faithful spiritual disciplines.” Instead, he writes, our confidence “is derived from God’s unwavering commitment to his own gospel, to preserve, protect, and promote the grace of God in Christ through the Spirit for sinners. . . . If you believe this, then you too can become an unwavering pastor” (14). Oh to be more of this kind of a pastor, an unwavering unmovable pastor “always abounding in the work of the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58).
During the summer of 2020, however, I experienced a struggle we could classify as something more than a mere waver but something less than a complete breakdown. I think many people and pastors did, but mine had less to do with Covid itself and more to do with all that had happened in our church in the previous years. I’ve written about that elsewhere, so I’ll leave aside those details. But I will say that I can relate to the way Dodson describes the experience of wanting to quit even though you know God hasn’t called you away. He just felt, as I had felt, that “pain was pushing [him] out the door” (129). Indeed, Paul can relate to this, and so can most pastors who’ve done the job for more than a decade. To paraphrase the author of Ecclesiastes, nothing is new under the sun or inside a church.
The Unwavering Pastor has a short introduction and eight chapters that explore what this understanding of unwavering might mean for different areas of ministry. For example, what might it look like for an unwavering pastor to love those outside the church in an age of cynicism about Jesus and the church (Chapter 2: “Questioning Christianity”), and what might it look like for an unwavering pastor to preach God’s Word not only to others but his own heart (Chapter 6: “Preach the Word”). I read the book slowly over two weeks, reading a section or two each morning during my devotions.
Besides the biblical engagement and personal stories, Dodson sprinkles throughout the book lessons he’s learned along the way. After sharing that he’s been ambushed in too many meetings, he advises, “If a critical person asks for a meeting, don’t be afraid to ask them what they want to meet about” (76). Besides mitigating anxiety, knowing the nature of the meeting can guide your prayers in the meantime and help you know if you should bring someone along with you.
I agree with the comments Dane Ortlund, author of Gentle and Lowly, makes in the foreword: “We don’t need to be told what bizarre and perplexing times we live in. We know that. We need to be given guidance for how to negotiate these times as pastors” (9). Dr. Ortlund goes on to say the greatest threat to pastors and churches right now is not pastors formally resigning from their posts. Rather, he says, “the greatest challenge is more subtle. It is to continue collecting a paycheck from the church while shifting our hearts into neutral. It is to carry forward the ministry at the level of activity while quitting ministry in terms of our hearts and longings” (10). Or to put it the way a friend of mine puts it: the danger is to quit without actually quitting. He’s not wrong.
I work part-time for Gospel-Centered Discipleship, a Christian website and publishing company. The company takes its namesake from another book by Dodson, a book recently re-released by Crossway as an updated ten-year anniversary edition. So, you could say, I should promote his book since, after all, Jonathan K. Dodson is my boss’s boss.
But I’m confident I would like The Unwavering Pastor even if I had no context for Dodson or Gospel-Centered Discipleship. In fact, being closer to the organization might have given me a better window to appreciate the struggles he writes about.
I remember during the recent low point in Dodson’s ministry, the one he talks about so candidly throughout the book, and how I texted my boss at GCD a screenshot from Dodson’s Instagram feed and asked if he was going to be okay. From my perspective, it seemed like two things were true at once: Dodson was struggling under the weight of pastoral ministry, and simultaneously his church and elders had rallied to support him as best as they could. To use the word he uses in the book, even as Dodson’s heart had become uncoupled from his church, his church’s heart toward him grew more coupled. Having this context made reading The Unwavering Pastor more visceral. In an age where so many people will do whatever they need to do to sell books, it helped to know Jonathan hadn’t feigned pastoral fatigue just so that his book would come across as “more authentic.” When he says he was tired and hurt by the church, he really was tired and hurt.
I’ve liked all of Dodson’s other books too. I was blessed by Here in Spirit as he describes his openness to the dramatic work of the Spirit and yet also the biblical grounding. And I love the transparency and moral courage of Our Good Crisis, a book that explores the meaning of the beatitudes for our present day. As an aside, I typically find the genre of “book trailers” underwhelming, but the trailer for Our Good Crisis has one of the best book trailers I’ve ever watched (here), second only perhaps to my perennial favorite of Zack Eswine’s The Imperfect Pastor (here).
I’d recommend The Unwavering Pastor to any church leader, whether the waters around him feel calm, whether a storm sits on the horizon, or whether his boat already threatens to capsize. I’d also recommend this book for teams of elders to discuss. The book would even bless the Christian in the pew who wants to gain a better appreciation for the weight and joy of Christian ministry in our divisive times and how the Chief Shepherd who safeguards his church amid the storm neither slumbers nor sleeps.
* Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash
What Does “Vanity of Vanities” Mean? A Review of a New Book on Ecclesiastes
For as odd as some statements in the book of Ecclesiastes may seem at first, they are truths we need in our day.
The author of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes makes some pretty wild statements. He asks rhetorically, “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” implying wisdom benefits nothing.
In another place, he says, “Man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.” Later in the book, he writes, “Be not overly righteous . . . . Be not overly wicked” (Eccles. 2:15; 3:19; 7:17–18). Wait—what?
When we consider the biblical story and the good news of God redeeming all of creation through the person of Jesus, perhaps the wildest statement of all could be the opening statement of the book: “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Eccles. 1:2).
How could anything be vanity—or meaningless—if God is redeeming all things?
I don’t actually believe these statements from the book, when rightly understood in their context, are as wild as they seem at first blush. As there is a season for everything, so there is a context for everything—especially when interpreting passages from the Bible.
But what context helps us make sense of Ecclesiastes? How should a Christian benefit from a book that can seem so full of cynicism in one place (6:1–6) and hedonism in another (2:10)?
Back in April of this year, Russell Meek, a friend of mine, released a book to help Christians understand Ecclesiastes. Dr. Meek teaches Old Testament and specializes in Ecclesiastes. His new book is called Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning in an Upside-Down World.
The big questions about the meaning of life and the many other questions addressed by Ecclesiastes have never been theoretical for Meek. He writes in the preface of his struggles with substance abuse and later in the book about his troubled childhood and lousy relationship with his father. “I started using drugs when I was around twelve years old, just after grandmother died,” he writes on the opening page, adding, “and that way of facing life stayed with me for a long, long time.”
Later in life, while getting a master’s degree, a mentor helped Meek see Ecclesiastes in a new light. “I started to study Ecclesiastes because I thought I had found in it a kindred spirit who, like me, had thrown up his hands and given up on faith and life and, who had accepted the meaninglessness of these on planet Earth.” Instead, Meek found in the book a “path through life that doesn’t involve the bottom of a pill bottle.”
Meek’s book is a short book, less than one hundred pages. In the first chapter, Meek explores the overlap of words used in Ecclesiastes with other books in the Bible, especially the overlap with the book of Genesis. In the second chapter, Meek argues that the author of Ecclesiastes wants readers to understand the Hebrew word for vanity (hebel) in the context of the Genesis story of Cain and Abel. The word hebel, by the way, being the same word for the name Abel (Hebel in Hebrew). In the third and final chapter, he explores the ending of Ecclesiastes and the emphasis on fearing God and enjoying his gifts.
To be fair, I think Meek’s book is a peculiar, even odd, mashup of a powerful, personal memoir and a technical commentary. He writes about losing his father, the sins of racism, and substance abuse; he also writes about Hebrew words most of us don’t know and essays in theological journals we’ve never read. I told Russ I felt this way when I read an early copy of the book a year and a half ago. However, I don’t really mind the genre blend. In fact, I like it. I was helped by both aspects of the book—his personal testimony and the technical commentary—to better understand what God has for his people in the book of Ecclesiastes. In some ways, Meek’s book has parity with the mashup of Ecclesiastes itself: personal reflections interspersed with philosophical reflections.
Our church is considering preaching through Ecclesiastes next year during Lent. Rereading Meek’s book this summer certainly got me more excited (not less) to preach Ecclesiastes to our people and apply God’s wisdom to our lives. Ecclesiastes exalts the words “given by one Shepherd,” meaning the words given by God, and warns readers to “beware of anything beyond these” (12:12–13). While we should prioritize God’s Word above all other words, I believe Russ’s book about Ecclesiastes will increase your desire to do just that, to “fear God and keep his commandments, for,” as Ecclesiastes concludes, “this is the whole duty of man” (12:13).
* Photo by Daoudi Aissa on Unsplash
Why the Promise that Jesus Will Build His Church Does Not Mean He Will Necessarily Build My Church
Jesus made a wonderful, encouraging promise. But what does his promise mean for individual churches?
I suspect that in our personal Bible readings through Exodus, with all the fireworks that come in the first half of the book, we often miss the beauty of the ending of Exodus. After all that God’s people went through, after all that was stacked against them—the sin of the Egyptian enslavers and the sin in the hearts of Israelites—God was faithful to his promise to lead his people out and to cause them to worship him (cf. Ex. 3:12 and 40:34–38). It’s a beautiful, encouraging ending to a truly epic book.
Our church recently finished preaching through the book of Exodus. In my final sermon, I connected this ending in Exodus with a passage more familiar to us, the promise that Jesus makes in Matthew 16:18 to build his church. “On this rock,” he tells Peter, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
I take the “upon this rock” statement not to be Peter in and of himself but rather the rock of Peter’s confession. Just before Jesus made the promise, he asked the disciples, “But who do you say that I am?” and Simon Peter responded, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (16:15–16). Peter’s rock-solid confession is the rock upon which Jesus builds his church. As one popular worship song puts it, “This gospel truth of old, shall not kneel shall not faint.”
After the sermon, a member of our church asked what this promise might have to do with individual churches, particularly here in the West. Many churches have become so progressive that they might not be Christian churches anymore, and other churches have become so political that they might be more political than spiritual, more partisan than Christian.
Does it not seem in so many ways, we wonder, that the church of Christ is not being built but torn down?
I love this question because it aims to take seriously the promise of Jesus, which is how Christians should take the promises of Jesus. But I don’t think we should understand the promise that Jesus will build his church to mean that any individual church will increasingly thrive or even survive indefinitely. The same goes for churches in any particular region, such as churches in North America or the West more generally. Instead, I take the promise to mean that, upon the rock of the confession of Jesus as the Christ, Jesus will always be building his church somewhere.
I’ll give one scriptural reason for this view and a few reasons from church history.
Reasons from the Bible
In Revelation 2–3 we have letters from Jesus to individual churches in different regions. Each letter has encouragement and challenges. Some of the letters even have threats, or maybe we would call them warnings. For example, to the church in Ephesus, we read, “Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent” (Rev. 2:5). To the church in Pergamum, we read, “Therefore repent. If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth” (2:16). Famously, to the church in Laodicea, we read, “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth” (3:15–16).
It’s verses like these that help me understand what Jesus means and does not mean by building his church. The promise that Jesus will build his church cannot mean that every individual church will remain prosperous; otherwise, the verses that warn of punishment for unrepentant disobedience wouldn’t have teeth.
Reasons from Church History
Second, I think we’re helped by church history, even the church history within the book of Acts. While the church of Christ grows throughout the book, we do not necessarily see the continual, unbroken growth of the churches in Jerusalem. True, “the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47). When persecution comes, however, many Christians and church leaders scatter (Acts 8:1). But even in the scattering because of persecution, although it hurt the church in Jerusalem, scattering seems to be part of the very way Jesus was building his whole church.
When we leave the book of Acts to look at the rest of church history, we’re left with many questions about sometimes growing and sometimes shrinking and, inevitably, disappearing churches. Why, for example, has the church in France been cold, even hardened, to the gospel for hundreds of years, especially after a season of gospel fruitfulness? And why has the church in the global south been exploding in growth after being unreached for so long?
I’m speaking in generalities and acknowledge plenty of exceptions: there are good churches in France and bad ones in the global south. But this does seem to be how God is building the church in this day.
Again, why? What does all this mean for the church in America? What are we to make of the recent news regarding the Southern Baptist Convention? On Sunday this last week, during the sermon, I briefly mentioned the terrible news about the SBC and the abuse scandals and how sad they make me. How will Christ build his church on such shaky ground?
I don’t know any more about this question than anyone else. Yet, many people seem to think that the American church will keep getting better and better, but I don’t see any reason, at least not a scriptural one, why this would have to be true.
How Should We Then Live?
Behind the question about Jesus building his church, I suspect any thoughtful Christian would have much to be discouraged about. I, too, am confused and sad about aspects of the church in America.
Just last week I was talking to a pastor with deeply evangelical and orthodox convictions who belongs, for now anyway, to a very liberal denomination. I asked him how many pastors are like him, that is, how many pastors in his denomination believe the Bible and the historic tenets of Christianity, such as Jesus rising bodily from the dead. I won’t give this pastor’s answer. But it was a very low percentage. This is why, I think, a few years ago we saw a dozen or so churches in this denomination close in the city of Harrisburg. I’m sure some of these church buildings had a few genuine Christians who attended them each week, but I would say that it is hard enough to keep a church healthy when you actually preach the gospel. It would be even harder, indeed impossible, to build a church without the gospel. You can’t build upon a rock when the rock ain’t there.
Even as there are many things to be thankful for in the Western church, there are so, so many things to lament. And that’s probably all we can do. Lament and pray. And stay faithful in whatever church context God has called us, confessing our sin and confessing Jesus as the Christ . . . loving an imperfect local church, loving her members and her pastors . . . and loving our neighbors . . . and raising our kids . . . and planting our gardens . . . and exercising and enjoying our hobbies . . . and, of course, praying and lamenting some more. That’s about all we can do.
But that’s not nothing. It’s the sort of faithful living that God uses to build his church.
* Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash
Every Believer’s Biography Is Every Believer’s Biography
My foreword to a new 30-day devotional by Will Dobbie published by Christian Focus.
A few years ago I started to get to know Will Dobbie. At the time, he pastored a church plant in a suburb of London. He has since moved with his family to the US to work with another church plant.
Will is a guy who can do a lot of different things: lead an army into battle, pastor a church, and play classical piano music. He can also write. That’s actually part of what connected us in the first place—his writing and a common friendship with another pastor.
A few days ago, Christian Focus published Will’s first book, From Everlasting to Everlasting: Every Believer’s Biography. The book is a 30-day devotional exploring God’s plan of salvation for every believer. I thought Will had a winning book idea when he first told me about the concept a few years ago. And he did.
Will was kind to ask me to write the foreword for the book. I’m sharing it below. We’d love for you to buy his book on Amazon.
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We lost my younger brother at the beach—just a toddler and learning to walk, he snuck away in a sea of people. Although I was his older brother, I was still too young to be either culpable for losing him or much help in finding him. Our family had just moved to England, where we would spend the next three years, and my mother wanted to take her sons on an outing to make memories adventuring in a new country. A couple of hours later, we found him holding the hand of an elderly woman as she walked up and down the beach looking for what she rightly assumed would be a frantic mother. That day my mother certainly made memories.
A similar incident happened to my family one summer at a water park, except this time I was the parent with the lost child—a father old enough to be more than culpable, yet still struggling to be any help in finding my daughter. She was only lost a dozen minutes or so, but it felt much longer. We found her near the lazy river.
I suspect most parents have a similar version of the same story, whether the child wandered off at a beach or amusement park, a sporting event or concert. Thankfully, almost all lost-child stories have happy endings that, in hindsight, parents can laugh about with their grown-up children.
As I read the Bible, I learn that not only does God save His people from their sins, but He also intends for Christians to understand their salvation: to understand that they were lost but now are found. Our practiced belief in God’s eternal plan to save us, to make us more like Him, and to one day make every wrong right, provides so much of a Christian’s peace and joy in a world full of angst. This is not to say that when we are confused about aspects of our salvation we are necessarily any less saved, but it is to say that when we lack understanding of the riches of God’s redemption, we will lack joy and, probably also, obedience.
This is why I was excited when Will first told me about his idea for a book that would trace the story of a believer’s redemption from beginning to end. Now that Will has finished the book, I’m only more excited. The Christian world needs devotional material with both warm-hearted prose and theologically rich truth, not simply one or the other. Will’s book From Everlasting to Everlasting has both.
As a pastor of a local church, I have another reason to long for others to read this book. In our day so many issues conspire to divide local churches that Christians need constant reminders of the one story that binds us irrevocably together. Just as a group of parents could share a meal together and bond as they tell each other stories of the common experience of losing and finding a child—the panic, the relief, the thanksgiving—so also I believe a church will bond together when we understand that every believer’s biography is indeed every believer’s biography.
In other words, I can, and should, preach to my church about the need for Christians to pursue the unity we already have in Christ, but my pleas for unity will accomplish little if, deep down, those in my church believe that which makes us different carries more weight than that which makes us the same. Biblically speaking, the opposite is true of Christians: the deep story of our sin and salvation, of Christ’s cross and consummation, carries more weight than our lesser identities in gender, ethnicity, or any social status. “How can I relate to her?” I might be tempted to think. “We have nothing in common.” Except that when we have Christ in common, we have everything in common. As Paul writes in Galatians, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27–28). From Everlasting to Everlasting reminds us that Christians share common, gospel bedrock, a unity deeper and sturdier than mere affinities.
Your tour guide on this panorama of God’s salvation knows all this too. And he’s found a way to share it with you in thirty daily excursions through the vistas of our redemption. Some of the concepts Will writes about may be new to you, while you may have heard others many times before. Regardless, my prayer for you is that God would use these words to pour fresh peace and joy into your life—that you would know in your inmost being, as Paul writes in Ephesians, “what is the breadth and length and height and depth . . . [of] the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:18–19). I pray that this knowledge that we once were lost but now are found would bind us together, that we would unite over the common experience of the panic and the relief and the thanksgiving that comes when God washes our sins as white as snow.
Benjamin Vrbicek
Community Evangelical Free Church
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
* Photo by Xavier Mouton Photographie on Unsplash
Finding Jesus at the Nub End of Jared C. Wilson’s Fraying Rope
I’m not gonna lie; I love this theme in Wilson’s writing.
The guys at the church often tease me about being a fanboy of Jared C. Wilson’s writing. Last year they even took a picture from Wilson’s Instagram page and photoshopped my head into the picture as though I were just hangin’ with my bud. You might even say my relationship with Jared is as his relationship is to actor Mark Ruffalo. I just let the office guys tease me. They know I’m right.
I could mention a few reasons why I appreciate Wilson’s writing. I’ve done that in other blog posts—hence my reputation. This afternoon, I’ll just share one reason. Wilson seems to understand what it means for faith to wear thin and to know what it means to need Jesus, not theoretically but experientially. To say it another way, Wilson knows a Christian’s salvation rests in the strength of Jesus, not in the strength of one’s faith in Jesus. Knowing this difference matters a lot, especially as you suffer. And knowing the difference matters as you commend Jesus to others.
Wilson writes in his book The Gospel According to Satan, “When you get to the end of your rope, there is Jesus” (84). In his writing he doubles back over and over again to this theme of finding hope in God when all around our soul gives way. His words remind me of Paul’s comments about finding hope in God when Paul wondered if he would even live or perhaps if he even wanted to live. “For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia,” Paul writes. “For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death.” This is the nub end of Paul’s rope, and he attributes trials of such severity to God’s desire that his children find their strength in him, not in their own ability. “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:8–9).
“Until God is your only hope,” Wilson writes in another book, “God will not be your only hope. Utter brokenness is key to gospel wakefulness, because we will not be all-satisfied in Christ until Christ is all we have” (Gospel Wakefulness, 127). This quote comes from a transparent section where Wilson describes a terrible season in life and marriage. I’ll say more about that season in a moment. Wilson continues, “I was groaning in prayer in our guest room, flat on my face, wetting the carpet with tears the moment the Spirit whispered the gospel into my ear. That moment changed everything for me.”
Referencing this same, depression-filled season in another book, he writes, “It’s my conviction that God will not become your only hope until he becomes your only hope” (The Prodigal Church, 212). Wilson writes something similar in his earlier book Gospel Deeps, my personal favorite in the Wilson corpus: “I realized that God would become my only hope when he had become my only hope” (Gospel Deeps, 116). Then, with the proverbial twinkle in his eye, Wilson adds, “Let the reader understand.”
I do understand. And the longer I walk with Christ and serve in pastoral ministry, I’m coming to understand better. This is the Christian life—knowing the goodness and grace and sovereignty of God and coming to know it deeper. I’m reminded of the line in the last chapter of Lewis’s The Last Battle, when the faun named Tumnus says to Lucy, “The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.”
“Christ will not become our only hope until Christ has become our only hope!”
Wilson repeats this theme in his latest book, Love Me Anyway: How God’s Perfect Love Fills Our Deepest Longing (Baker Books, 2021). After writing two books about gospel-centered ministry mainly for pastors and church leaders, Wilson returns to writing for a broader Christian audience. While maintaining his faithfulness to biblical, gospel truth, he also writes with an artful, maybe even playful, prose that so many seem to have appreciated in his book The Imperfect Disciple. Love Me Anyway explores the key phrases in the great chapter on love by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, as well as our cultural fascination with love songs.
“It is at the end of your rope that we find Christ is more than enough.” Good writing only infrequently uses exclamation points, reserving them for only those sentences truly deserving. Wilson’s next sentence has one. “And I have come to believe that for a great many of us—if not all of us—Christ will not become our only hope until Christ has become our only hope!” (Love Me Anyway, 129). Later in the book Wilson adds, “I had come to the end of my rope and found there the sufficiency of Christ” (164).
But more than using similar phraseology as in his other books to repeat the theme of finding the strength of Jesus when faith wears thin, in Love Me Anyway Wilson gives his most extended recounting of the season in life which precipitated his wakefulness to the glory of the grace of Jesus Christ. The season brought him to a place of wakefulness not merely to gospel propositions about Jesus but a gospel encounter with Jesus.
Many years ago, as he lived for a long and lonely season in the spare bedroom of his house because his marriage was so poor that his wife didn’t want him in their bedroom, God showed up and began to warm cold hearts. You’ll have to get the book to read it. The details of the story are similar to what he wrote near the end of The Prodigal God, but in Love Me Anyway the story comes with more transparency. Wilson expected the marriage would dissolve, though he prayed it wouldn’t. And with his face wetting the carpet many nights he prayed God could change him.
God did. Because God can. And does. Our God loves to make his power perfect in our weakness and be there for his children when our hands slip from the nub end of our rope.
* Photo by Rui Silvestre on Unsplash
Reflections on Shepherds and Sheep: An Unexpected Cost
A recent article for Christianity Today about the reasons people leave churches.
You often hear a writer tell you how many hours it took him to write his big article or how many years it took her to write her big book. I’ve written a few times about how much I love Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See, and it seems like in every interview I’ve heard with Doerr, he’s always asked about the ten years it took to write the novel. And I get it. Authors want readers to know how much effort we expended in writing the piece, how much heartache we endured and how much saltwater dripped on the keyboard. Sometimes readers like to know too.
Author Annie Dillard, however, questions whether authors should share the cost. “How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag?” she asks rhetorically. “Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer?” (Dillard, The Writing Life, 7). She’s probably right. We all take the price tag off birthday presents before we give them lest what might have otherwise been an expensive, generous gift be seen as cheap. And yet still, from time to time, I feel the impulse to leave the tag, not so much as a humble brag—“Look how long this took”—but as catharsis.
Recently I wrote something that I won’t tell you what it cost, at least in terms of hours or months, thus sparing myself the impertinence, to use Dillard’s word. I will say, though, that I didn’t anticipate the emotional cost required to look certain realities in the eyes. Even I was caught off guard by the process, and more than a few times, I had the wind knocked out of me. Yesterday, Christianity Today posted the article. It’s about people leaving church and how pastors can respond. I’ll just share the opening few paragraphs with you, although I’d love for you to read the whole thing, “Two Hundred People Left Our Small Church.”
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About 200 people have left our small church. The number probably sits closer to 350 when counting their children. But they didn’t leave the way you might expect—no church split or splinter. They left slowly, with neither fanfare nor fireworks. Some, if not most, left without a goodbye. And they left not over seven weeks or seven months, but over the course of seven years.
I got to thinking about this when I came back from my summer sabbatical, because I was pleased to see that not only did our church still exist, but there were also a few dozen new people.
The new attendees shake my hand and introduce themselves. They smile at me as I preach. They participate in our membership class and ask about small groups and opportunities to serve. One couple invited my wife and me out for a date. Still, I struggle to open my heart to them the way a pastor should, fully and without reservation. And I wonder why.
Then it hit me. In seven years, our church—in terms of net attendance—has grown from around 150 to 350. But in the same amount of time, our church has lost as many as have stayed. The losses never occur rapidly, as though a levee burst, but more as a steady trickle or slow leak.
A few of our members died. One went to jail. One wrote me an eight-page letter of grievances I was instructed to share with the elders; another wrote a chapter-length blog post suggesting we’re not even a church. Some parishioners didn’t let the door hit them on the way out because they kicked it off the hinges and left us to pick up the shattered pieces.
These departures are by far the exceptions. Many of those who left told me neither why they left nor even that they had left. I often find out via back channels like social media and other impersonal means. And I don’t believe our church has an exceptionally large back door—I suspect we’re typical.
How does a pastor keep his heart from growing cynical when, over 350 weeks of pastoring the same church, I have lost an average of one person each week? And why are these congregants leaving our church anyway? What role might I play, even unintentionally, in sending sheep to what they perceive to be greener pastures?
I don’t know. But I recently spent a lot of time and effort to find out.
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You can read the rest at Christianity Today.
* Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash
12 Books You Should Read and 12 Sentences Why
My attempt to help jumpstart your year of reading.
A not-so-complementing trope associated with bloggers and self-proclaimed influencers goes like this: “A lot of people have been asking me about ‘such and such.’”
The question typically serves as the prelude to a humblebrag. A lot of people have been asking whether I consider myself more of a pastor or a male model. This sort of baloney makes readers wonder whether a single person has ever asked said influencer such a question.
There is one question, however, I want to bring up that I’ve been legitimately asked. I wouldn’t say a lot of people have asked, though. In fact, only one person has asked the question. It’s the same person who asked me the exact same question last year, a question that I believe came to me on at a “blog comment” from my fellow-Pennsylvania-pastor-friend Josh. Until now, I pretty much ignored Josh’s question, which I can explain why after I tell you what the question is. (But first: Sorry for doing that, Josh!)
In the first blog post of each year, I share the list of books I read the previous year, always including in the post a few quirky tidbits about my year of reading. Because the list is typically so long, and because, to paraphrase Twitter, “a book read doesn’t equal an endorsement,” it’s hard for those who skim my annual blog post to have any helpful takeaway other than Benjamin is probably as quirky and eclectic of a reader as the lists seem to indicate. And that’s not much of a takeaway.
This is why, I think, Josh has asked me each of the last two years to create a much reduced list of books that only includes the books I suggest people read and perhaps why I make each suggestion.
I didn’t ignore the question because I thought it was a dumb question. I just never answered because of the work involved.
But this week I’m going to give it a try. Below are the twelve books that I would encourage readers to read, a list pared down from the list of all the books I’ve read over the last four or five years, a list that includes several hundred books.
Before sharing the list, I’ll mention that I didn’t include the Bible on the list below. But I will say that the Bible is the only book I read every year and certainly the only book I try to open nearly every day. I think I’m on my twentieth time through the book cover to cover. Therefore, for me to not put the Bible on the list is not at all meant to be a disrespect to the Bible but rather a way to respect the Bible by saying it is beyond belonging to a list of “book suggestions.”
I’m sure I’m missing a few books worthy of reading. If you think so, let me know in the comments below what those books are and why, in your opinion, they are must-reads.
* * *
12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You by Tony Reinke
This book is a few years old, so it’s probably “15 ways” now.
The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home by Russell Moore
Our hearts and homes are far more broken than we might expect, and yet the grace of God is also far more lavish than we might expect.
Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament by Mark Vroegop
We don’t know how to lament well, and that is neither to our credit nor joy.
Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers by Dane C. Ortlund
While Pharaoh says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you more burdens,” Jesus says, “I will give you rest . . . . for I am gentle and lowly in heart.”
Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace by Jared C. Wilson
Look, I’m contractually obligated to pick at least one Jared Wilson book because I love his books so much—so I’m picking this one because it’s new-ish and it also includes a helpful story-like-fable that wraps all the gospely-warmth and wisdom into a compelling and instructive whole. (As an aside, my favorite Wilson books are still Gospel Deeps and The Pastor’s Justification, although his newest book, Love Me Anyway, is great too.)
The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus by Zack Eswine
It’s the only ministry book I re-read every other year or so, which I do because I’m prone to wander, prone to leave the kind of pastoral ministry that God loves, and this book calls me back again and again.
Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death by Russ Ramsey
What an honest story of pain and loss and grappling with God and coming out the other side in hope and joy.
The Art of Rest by Adam Mabry
We ain’t very good at rest, and this book explains why that’s a problem and what we must do about it.
The Song of Solomon: An Invitation to Intimacy by Douglas Sean O’Donnell
So, this is a preaching commentary, but as I’ve studied and taught Song of Solomon several times, I found this whole book so wonderfully done that it should belong on this list because of its great combo of exegetical insights and devotional warmth.
The Ten Commandments of Progressive Christianity by Michael J. Kruger
We need to see progressive Christianity for what it is, or more accurately, for what it is not—and this very short book will help you do so.
When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse by Chuck DeGroat
The book opens with an extended quote from Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk who lived during the middle of the twentieth century who said that a Christian consumed with himself “is capable of destroying religion and making the name of God odious to men,” to which I say, “Indeed, Merton, indeed.”
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Read this fictional story from WWII for the reminder that books are more than a succession of words placed one after the other on pages placed one after another; instead, books are spectacles to see reality that cannot be seen were it not so beautifully described.
Honorable Mentions:
Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making by Andrew Peterson
The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose by Helen Sword
Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi
On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser
A Few More (Sort of) Honorable Mentions:
Shepherd & Sheep: Essays on Loving & Leading in a Local Church by Benjamin Vrbicek
Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World by Benjamin Vrbicek
Don’t Just Send a Resume: How to Find the Right Job in a Local Church by Benjamin Vrbicek
Once for all Delivered: A Reformed, Amillennial Ordination Paper for the Evangelical Free Church of America by Benjamin Vrbicek
Struggle Against Porn: 29 Diagnostic Tests for Your Head and Heart by Benjamin Vrbicek
Can you blame me for trying?!
* Photo by Radu Marcusu on Unsplash
Reading List 2021
A list of every book I read last year.
My first post of each new year always contains the list of books I read the previous year (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020). I post the list for personal accountability, not to showboat. Knowing I have to confess my list helps me stay on track.
The total this year comes to 93 books. You can see from glancing at the graphs below how the tonnage relates to other years. I’d love to include a massive, annotated write-up about my discoveries, but this year I think I’ll let my “no comment” be the comment. It just takes too much time to write a post like that.
If I were to comment, I’d tell you I read every Fredrik Backman book and his darker books tended to be too dark for me but I simultaneously seemed to like them better than the lighter ones.
And I’d tell you that I read about four or five books in 2021 from author-friends that will be published by traditional publishers in 2022. It’s always fun to root for friends. I even wrote the forward for a book coming out in May with Christian Focus.
I’d also tell you that in these annual posts I often flag that I attempt to read the Bible cover to cover each year. I made it again this year and did it in The Message version. I know, I know—gasp. The reasons for this shift were several, but riding the cultural fad wasn’t one of them. I missed it by like fifteen years. The Message version of the Old Testament historical books and prophets sang melodies I’d never noticed before—in a good way—but places like the Psalms and other poetry had too many pop cliches, in my opinion. This year I’m going back to my ESV Study Bible, with the goal of reading the “book introductions” as I go along.
Okay, okay, I have to stop with all the comments. Just call me on the phone if you want to talk about them.
Here’s one update that might interest you and has little to do with reading lists. Now that I finished writing and submitting several articles this fall and winter to other websites, I’m returning to a book project I began last summer on my sabbatical. I’m calling the book Author as Abram: Writing to the Land He Will Show Us (A Memoirish Essay to Encourage Christian Authors). I probably have 40 pages of the 160 or so written.
Speaking of articles and books and sabbaticals, may I make a request? If you didn’t pick up a copy of my book that I compiled during my sabbatical called Shepherd and Sheep: Essays on Loving and Leading in a Local Church, I’d love for you to do so. The book has some of my best writing collected in one place. The feedback on the book has been—how shall I say this?—small but meaningful.
And if you had a favorite book from your recent reading lists, please let me know in the comments. I’m always on the hunt.
* * *
Books Read, 2013–2021
Pages Read, 2013–2021
* * *
In order of completion, this year I read . . .
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (384 pages)
Sabbaticals: “How-To” Take a Break from Ministry before Ministry Breaks You by Rusty McKie (122 pages)
Echo Island by Jared C. Wilson (272 pages)
Catching Fire (The Hunger Games) by Suzanne Collins (391 pages)
Five Masculine Instincts: A Guide to Becoming a Better Man by Chase Replogle (208 pages)
Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World by Benjamin Vrbicek and John Beeson (181 pages)
Mocking Jay (The Hunger Games) by Suzanne Collins (391 pages)
A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O’Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth by Michael Mears Bruner (260 pages)
The Unbelievable Gospel: Say Something Worth Believing by Jonathan K. Dodson (240 pages)
Win the Day: 7 Daily Habits to Help You Stress Less & Accomplish More by Mark Batterson (256 pages)
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: A Hunger Games Novel by Suzanne Collins (528 pages)
Here in Spirit: Knowing the Spirit Who Creates, Sustains, and Transforms Everything by Jonathan K. Dodson (160 pages)
The Bible: Romans to Revelation, Part 6 of 6 by God (300 pages)
Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning in an Upside-Down World by Russell L. Meek (80 pages)
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance (272 pages)
What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book by Peter Ginna (320 pages)
To Be Continued: The Unstoppable Mission of Jesus by Tony Merida, Christy Britton, and Amy Tyson (261 pages)
The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher (272 pages)
Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher (256 pages)
The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis (176 pages)
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman (432 pages)
Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure by J.R. Briggs (208 pages)
Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes by Jonathan K. Dodson (192 pages)
The Bible: Genesis to Deuteronomy, Part 1 of 6 by God (300 pages)
Before You Lose Your Faith: Deconstructing Doubt in the Church by Ivan Mesa (139 pages)
Over The River: The Story of Joshua (Kaleidoscope Kids’ Bibles) by Chris Ammen (115 pages)
Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson (247 pages)
The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims by Rebecca McLaughlin (125 pages)
Before the Lord, Before the Church: “How-To” Plan a Child Dedication by Jared Kennedy (108 pages)
How to Reach the West Again: Six Essential Elements of a Missionary Encounter by Timothy Keller (60 pages)
Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches by Russell Moore (256 pages)
The Mission of the Body of Christ (Retelling the Story Series) by Russ Ramsey (256 pages)
Hiroshima by John Hersey (160 pages)
Home: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson (336 pages)
Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life by Douglas Wilson (124 pages)
With Those Who Weep: A Theology of Tears by S.A. Morrison (122 pages)
Lilia: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson (272 pages)
Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction by Jack Hart (280 pages)
Copyediting and Proofreading for Dummies by Suzanne Gilad (384 pages)
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (531 pages)
The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear without Losing Your Soul by Russell Moore (304 pages)
Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr (224 pages)
Shepherd and Sheep: Essays on Loving and Leading in a Local Church by Benjamin Vrbicek (160 pages)
The Bible: Joshua to Esther, Part 2 of 6 by God (300 pages)
Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality by Rachel Joy Welcher (216 pages)
Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words by Richard Hughes Gibson, James Edward Beitler III (248 pages)
Green Lights by Matthew McConaughey (304 pages)
Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson (352 pages)
Seven Questions about Heaven by Stephen R. Morefield (144 pages)
Gospel-Centered Discipleship by Jonathan K. Dodson (176 pages)
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcom Gladwell (256 pages)
Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul by Hannah Anderson (208 pages)
All That’s Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment by Hannah Anderson (224 pages)
The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose by Helen Sword (88 pages)
Men and Women in the Church by Kevin DeYoung (176 pages)
Jack: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson (320 pages)
#Blessed: Intentional Gratitude in a World that Celebrates Self Everything by Laura Pyne (152 pages)
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson (397 pages)
The Bible: Psalms to Song of Solomon, Part 3 of 6 by God (300 pages)
Wordcraft: The Complete Guide to Clear, Powerful Writing by Jack Hart (282 pages)
Becoming by Michelle Obama (448 pages)
From Everlasting to Everlasting: Every Believer’s Biography by Will Dobbie (208 pages)
Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian by Bret Lott (192 pages)
Pastors and Their Critics: A Guide to Coping with Criticism in the Ministry by Joel R. Beeke (192 pages)
A Promised Land by Barack Obama (768 pages)
Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life by Bret Lott (224 pages)
Woke-Free Church: For the Deliverance of the Body of Christ from Social Justice Captivity by Jeff Kliewer (165 pages)
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (384 pages)
The Art of War: Complete Text of Sun Tzu’s Classics, Military Strategy History, Ancient Chinese Military Strategist by Sun Tzu (137 pages)
When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays by Marilynne Robinson (224 pages)
The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe (120 pages) [I only read the long, historical background and not the anthology part]
Anxious People: A Novel by Fredrik Backman (352 pages)
Us Against You: A Novel (Beartown Series) by Fredrik Backman (448 pages)
Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing by Andy Crouch (192 pages)
The Bible: Isaiah to Malachi, Part 4 of 6 by God (300 pages)
Deacons by Ben Bechtel (150 pages)
Britt-Marie Was Here: A Novel by Fredrik Backman (336 pages)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot Mysteries) by Agatha Christie (304 pages)
Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential by Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman (160 pages)
The Art of Pastoring: Ministry Without All the Answers by David Hansen (224 pages)
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel by Fredrik Backman (384 pages)
The Deal of a Lifetime: A Novella by Fredrik Backman (96 pages)
Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel by Anthony Doerr (640 pages)
Things My Son Needs to Know about the World by Fredrik Backman (208 pages)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (304 pages)
When Prayer Is a Struggle by Kevin Halloran (160 pages)
And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer: A Novella by Fredrik Backman (96 pages)
Lament for a Father: The Journey to Understanding and Forgiveness by Marvin Olasky (112 pages)
The Weary World Rejoices: Daily Devotions for Advent by Megan Hill (127 pages)
Ten Words to Live By: Delighting in and Doing What God Commands by Jen Wilkin (176 pages)
The Ten Commandments: What They Mean, Why They Matter, and Why We Should Obey Them by Kevin DeYoung (208 pages)
Art and the Bible by Francis A. Schaeffer (95 pages)
The Bible: Matthew to Acts, Part 5 of 6 by God (300 pages)
Jesus, Be Big: A Prayer for the New Year
I’m doubling down on this prayer in the new year. And every year.
I recently finished reading my friend Kevin Halloran’s new book When Prayer Is a Struggle. He told me about the idea for the book a few years ago over dinner, and I thought, Man, that’s a good idea for a book because when is prayer not a struggle, even for a pastor?
In one of the early chapters, Kevin shares ideas for ordering our prayers, ways to give our prayers a scaffolding, so to speak, on which to hang fresh petitions. I had forgotten about the A-C-T-S method of prayer, where each letter stands for a different theme (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication). But I used the method recently to structure a pastoral prayer at church.
To set up the theme of the pastoral prayer, I read from one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors: Jared C. Wilson’s book Gospel Deeps: Reveling in the Excellencies of Christ. In the opening paragraph Wilson writes,
My driving conviction in this book is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is big. Like, really big. Ginormous, if you will. And deep. Deep and rich. And beautiful. Multifaceted. Expansive. Powerful. Overwhelming. Mysterious. But vivid, too, and clear. Illuminating. Transforming. And did I mention big? (Gospel Deeps, 17)
Wilson goes on to explain that the church culture that he grew up in would often extend invitations to receive Jesus, whether after preaching or a potluck. These continual invitations unintentionally communicated that the gospel is for unbelievers who might want to begin their Christian life, not for Christians actually living the Christian life. Wilson’s contention in the book is that part of the “bigness of the gospel”—the ginormousness of the gospel, if you will—is the way God intends for us to apply the gospel throughout our Christian life. “Obviously the gospel is the ABCs of salvation,” Wilson writes. “But it is also the A to Z” (2).
If you follow Wilson on social media, you know he often posts before a speaking engagement his prayer, “Jesus, be big.” I think what he means by this prayer is the desire that in our hearts and affections and lives, Jesus would have all the gravity that he really does have.
This is the prayer I want to pray next year for me and my house. And every year.
Adoration
Dear Heavenly Father, we acknowledge that your Son, Jesus Christ, is far bigger than we imagine him to be.
I think of verses such as those in Hebrews 1:1–3 where it says that you have spoken to us finally and definitively through your Son, whom you appointed as the heir of all things, and through whom you also created the world. And how Jesus is the radiance of your glory and the exact imprint of your nature and how Jesus upholds the universe by the word of his power.
I think of what is said in Colossians 1:15–20, that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. And how by Jesus all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—and that all things were created through Jesus and for Jesus. We also read that Jesus is before all things and in him all things hold together. We read of how Jesus is the head of the body, the whole church and every local church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, and in this way, he is preeminent, that is, of first importance. We read of how in Jesus all your fullness was pleased to dwell, and through Jesus you are pleased to reconcile to Jesus all things by the peace that comes through his blood.
And I think of verses like John 1:16 that says from the fullness of Jesus, we receive grace upon grace.
Confession
Father, please forgive us for worshiping a Jesus that is smaller than he really is. We confess that too often other people and worries and fears and dreams occupy in our hearts the place that should only belong to our affections for your Son.
Thanksgiving
Thank you, Father, that you delight to not only hear our prayers but to answer them in ways bigger and better than we could ever imagine.
Supplication
So we ask that as one year closes and a new one begins, you would renew our affection for Jesus and rivet our attention on him. We come to you as those made in your image, but through our sin, we have become weak, wounded, and wayward. Though we do not deserve it, because of your grace and mercy, we ask that you cause us to enjoy the living Jesus in all of life—in this life and the life to come.
We pray all these things in the name of Jesus, which is a way to say that we pray these prayers, not in our authority, but his authority, and we pray these prayers, not according to our will, but his will.
Amen.
* Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash
Long as the Curse Is Found
Do not grow weary because every good deed sowed in obedience to Christ—even the ones sowed with tears—will one day reap a harvest if you do not give up. Continue, in the words of the prophet Hosea, to press on to know the Lord.
Last Christmas my youngest daughter made me a calendar that I hung on my office wall all year long. The other day I noticed that I had reached the final page. That happens. Years come to an end. And so do eras when daughters hand draw calendars for their dads, I thought. It made me sad.
For me, the ending of one year always leads to as many reflections as, if not more reflections than, the beginning of a new one. And the succession of moments that continuously poured like water through my hands as I tried in vain to catch them always seems to lead me toward lament rather than hope. Maybe I’m too morose.
My recent annual performance review encouraged me to have more confidence that not as many good works slip by undone as it often seems to me in the moment. A rain barrel, as it were, positioned by God’s grace, sits under my hands and captures more sacred moments than I realize. As a new year will be here in just a week, maybe I should be more excited about the prospect of catching new moments, a huge cupful of them. After all, a new year with new mercies awaits. How can that not be exciting?
Still, I feel far from being one of those confident souls who seems to have a verse or “a word from the Lord” to identify the upcoming year, some word or another that sparks hope, optimism, and promise. On the first of January I got nothing. Every year.
For the last two years, however, I’ve found a verse from the Lord in retrospect, by accident really—if you believe in accidents.
“A solid chunk of windshield time with the Lord can be cheaper than therapy.”
Sometimes I nibble my way through a Bible memory pack while I commute to church. In both fortunate and unfortunate ways, though, my commute only lasts a few minutes. It’s nice to get back and forth quickly from work, but a solid chunk of windshield time with the Lord can be cheaper than therapy. And because I live less than a mile from our church building, rarely do I make much progress in my Bible memory beyond a few verses, even in those seasons I try to be consistent.
Through all the drama during 2020, I found myself stuck on the memory card with a few verses from Psalm 56. I would mumble the passage to myself as I stopped at the stoplight by the bike shop, took a left at the baseball card shop, drove over the hill and down again to a quick four-way stop before I coasted into my typical parking spot at the back of the church parking lot. “When I am afraid,” I’d say over and over and over again, “I put my trust in you” (56:3). A few more of the verses from Psalm 56 are also printed on the card, but these lines about fear and trust seemed to do the most to calm my anxious heart.
When I got to church, I’d put the car in park, place the memory pack on the floorboard, and go into work, doing what I could do and leaving God to do the rest. When I was afraid, I tried to trust in God.
It worked—not in the short, “screenshot version” of time but in the long, “video reel” version of time. Slowly and steadily the Psalm went in, prayers went up, and perseverance rained down.
Should I call this a verse or a word from the Lord? Well, of course it is a verse from the Lord. But is it a “verse from the Lord” in the common parlance of Christianese? Maybe it was.
That was last year. This year if I had to pick a place my heart has found the most refuge, I’d tell you it’s in the end of Paul’s letter to the church of Galatia: “Let us not grow weary of doing good,” God inspired Paul to write, “for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9). This verse came to my mind the other night before our prayer time at our small group Bible study. I thought mentioning the verse might encourage another member of the group, so I read it to him. But I left that night wondering if the Lord might have a word for me as well, even as I pondered the ways Christians have abused “words from the Lord.”
“Paul gives the admonition to not grow weary, I believe, because the temptation is real.”
Paul gives the admonition to not grow weary, I believe, because the temptation is real. The effort required to do the right deed at the right moment for the right reason will sap your resolve dry. And doing good to my family of eight . . . and church of four hundred with a staff of five . . . and coaching my children’s sports teams . . . and holding a seat on the school board . . . and leading strong in all things and apologizing quickly for my many mistakes . . . and making time to run a few miles and do a few push-ups . . . and maintaining the side-hustle of editing articles and writing words is what I mean when I speak of the moments like water that pour and pour and pour while in vain I try to catch them.
But, again, the rain barrel of God’s grace catches more than we might expect.
In December, as I sing “Joy to the World,” I find comfort in the lines in the third stanza about how Christ “comes to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found.” The promise is one of saturation. One day, there will be no square inch of creation not covered with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the earth.
As this year ends, however, I feel like I could tweak just one word from the classic Isaac Watts hymn and catch yet more biblical truth to encourage my heart: Christ comes to make his blessings flow, long as the curse is found. This promise would speak to God’s preservation and our perseverance. God will finish every good work he begins, which means we must not become weary in doing good.
So, dear reader, do not grow weary in your chemotherapy. Do not grow weary in loving a local church that doesn’t seem to love you back. Do not grow weary in praying prayers yet without an answer. Do not grow weary in loving your teenagers. Do not grow weary of coming to church by yourself as a middle-aged single. Do not become weary in keeping supreme in your heart the heaven-born gospel of peace when so many others would encourage you to replace gospel-peace with snark and suspicion.
Do not grow weary because every good deed sowed in obedience to Christ—even the ones sowed with tears—will one day reap a harvest if you do not give up. Continue, in the words of the prophet Hosea, to press on to know the Lord. As you buy new calendars and hang them on office walls, know that there is no date in the next year, or any year, where God is not both sovereign and good. As long as the curse is found, he comes to make his blessings flow. Let us not grow weary in doing good.
Maybe you feel my word from the Lord is a word for more than just me. Don’t worry; it won’t bother me to share. King David and the apostle Paul shared theirs with me.
* Photo by Artin Bakhan on Unsplash
When You Feel Like a Missionary Carrying a Grand Piano: The Importance of Sabbaticals
Intentional sabbath rest helps alleviate weight of ministry. That’s certainly how I experienced the gift of Sabbatical this summer.
When people would ask how I was doing, sometimes I’d tell them “fine” or “okay.” On some days I might have even said “great.”
On other days, however, I’d tell people I felt like a tiny pickup truck—maybe an old Chevy S-10 or a Ford Ranger—that had a grand piano plopped down in the truck bed. I didn’t tell everyone this was how I felt, and it certainly wasn’t the first thing I’d mention. But for my close friends and the fellow pastors in my life, who get the real and deeper answers when they ask for them, I told them how tired I was. To be candid, they probably already knew. They could see the fatigue on my face and feel the bumps in my pastoring, the way I’d snap a little too quick when I was criticized or my subtle feelings of indifference about certain church problems. To stay on the same truck metaphor, my shocks and struts were blown. Even little bumps on a smooth road shook the chassis something fierce, as though our church barreled down a dirt road full of potholes.
The reasons for the weariness were obvious. A few years ago, our church lost one of our pastors, which led to a change—an expansion really—in my role. During the months after the other pastor left, forty new people showed up, who wanted to join small groups that didn’t exist yet, with leaders we didn’t have. Meanwhile, I officiated five weddings in two months. Then, I completed my ordination process in our denomination, which required writing a huge paper and undergoing a four-hour oral defense of my theology. Then, three days later, I had a massive shoulder surgery that left me in a sling for a few months, sleeping in a recliner for longer, and undergoing painful, but helpful, physical therapy for longer still.
Meanwhile, we formed a search team to look for a new pastor, which meant we were not only short-staffed but that we had to devote part of each week to reading resumes and doing interviews. The Sunday after our church finally hired a wonderful new pastor, our wave of euphoria crashed when we closed our church for in-person gatherings for thirteen straight weeks because a pandemic was spreading across the world. In other words, I was tired before Covid came in the night to slash our tires.
“I told them ministry hadn’t broken me beyond repair, but I needed help.”
So, I did what I should’ve done sooner with a check engine light on. I asked for help. After one late night elder meeting, I asked all the staff pastors to leave and poured out my heart to our volunteer pastors. I told them ministry hadn’t broken me beyond repair, but I needed help. I told them I was sorry for doing a lousy job of keeping them informed about how I was really doing, sorry for telling them I was “fine” and “okay” when I was neither. And I told them what was really going on in my heart, all the pain and weariness and how my workload affected my health and family. I also told them I needed their help to heal. Either I wasn’t called to be a pastor or I was doing it wrong; there just didn’t seem to be another choice. And yet, I knew I was too close to the problems to tell which it was.
I will be forever grateful for the way our volunteer pastors listened to me that night and prayed for me. The Lord heard our prayers and answered them in ways, as Paul says in Ephesians, beyond what we could have asked or imagined. And so began a year of recovery that climaxed with a three-month sabbatical away from local church ministry.
In the book The Art of Rest, author Adam Mabry writes as a fellow pilgrim-pastor journeying toward true rest, which is challenging to do in a society that’s created an idol of busyness. “In the West,” Mabry writes, “we’ve managed to take something that has in every culture until recently been a vice and, through the magic of repeating a bad idea long enough, have turned it into a virtue!” (29). Throughout the book, Mabry tells readers that he aims to “sell Sabbath rest.” He wants readers to know the how of Sabbath, the why of Sabbath, and the look-how-wonderful-this-is of Sabbath.
I want the same for you, Mr. or Ms. Tired Missionary. I want to sell you on the look-how-wonderful-ness of an extended Sabbath. If you feel like someone placed a piano in the bed of your pickup, and every bump in ministry feels like a sinkhole rather than a pothole, then use whatever spiritual and emotional health you do have and ask for help. As time and money allow, craft a plan for an extended sabbatical or furlough.
And if you are not a missionary but sit on a committee that grants sabbaticals, I urge you to do everything you can to make one happen for those who serve with you. We all know that we should take our vehicles to a mechanic as soon as possible after the check engine light comes on. It doesn’t honor God to drive a vehicle into the ground.
When I got back to church after my sabbatical, as we all might’ve expected, it still feels like our church is barreling down the road too fast, and as the lead pastor, like the grand piano is still inside my truck bed. But this fall, the newly installed shocks and struts that came from several months of rest have made a huge difference. Little bumps now feel like little bumps.
And while I wasn’t even working on it—in fact, while I was resting and not working at all—by the grace of God, the engine in my pickup truck may have even grown a little bit too.
* This post first appeared on the ABWE blog and is shared with permission.
** Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash
11 Memoirs I Love but Can’t Necessarily Endorse
I’ve become a sucker for a good, true story.
Lately my favorite genre of books, the genre I can’t seem to get enough of, is memoir. A memoir differs from a classic autobiography in aim and scope. The author of a memoir has more narrative focus than simply telling the details of one’s life, the details that begin where it all began and move toward where it’s at now.
In the introduction to the ten-year anniversary edition to Mary Karr’s best-selling memoir The Liar’s Club, she describes the way memoirs have taken up the mantle that used to belong to novels in telling the experience of people that don’t often have their story told. She believes readers find the “single, intensely personal voice” of memoirs compelling. I know that’s one of the reasons I love a good memoir. She also adds that people are drawn to memoirs because they deal with dysfunctional people and families in ways we often find reassuring. And note how Karr defines a dysfunctional family: “a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” Then she adds, “In other words, the boat I can feel so lonely in actually holds us all.”
Below I’ve put a few of the memoirs I have most enjoyed. I listed them alphabetically by the author’s last name. I hope they give you some reading ideas to consider this fall.
As you look at the list, please be aware that just because I put a book on the list, it does not mean I love every aspect of the book, or even most of the book, especially when it comes to foul language and non-Christian worldviews. Sometimes family life gets described with a form that matches dysfunction.
But, alas, I confess, I did love reading them anyway, even as I find them strategic reading. Here’s why: so much of my role as a pastor pushes me to spend more and more of my time, indeed nearly all of my time, with mature Christians. And so, one way I try to keep from becoming utterly insular is by reading broadly. I’ll stand by that practice even when I can’t stand by some of the specific content in these books. These authors represent the sort of cross-section that exists in our world and might, on a random Sunday that’s not random at all, be the sort of people who visit our church. I want to speak intelligently to them about the only hope I know: Jesus.
Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi
One-sentence summary: A strikingly vulnerable story told by a man who seemed cocky but—big surprise—had a lot of inner demons.
I couldn’t imagine being this open about my struggles. And I believe the Christian message of the gospel, which tells me that I’m loved even when I was a sinner far from God, and therefore have nothing to hide. Still, to be this open would scare me. I love how Agassi tells us how and why he came to hate the sport that made him famous. Image, as you already know, isn’t everything, despite the camera advertising that used him to say otherwise. I only wish I understood the scoring system in tennis better, so I could have understood those parts of the book better. But if you can’t tell the difference between serving love and straight sets, don’t let that stop you from reading it.
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Brycen
One-sentence summary: two guys who are not fit enough to do something really tough, try anyway—and have a lot of goofy struggles along the way.
Oh man, I laughed and laughed and laughed through this book. This summer I went on a long, four-day hike in the Adirondacks with my oldest daughter and some friends. In preparation for the hike, one of the guys going on the trip told me about this book. I’m glad he did. And I wish, as Brycen writes, I too had “eyes of chipped granite.”
Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr
One-sentence summary: a literary writer is given a year to write and think and ponder, and what results is the weaving of a story about the ancient city of Rome with the themes of life and death and the struggle to make meaningful art, all while his own life is both ordinary and hard.
My favorite novelist wrote this book, so he had me at hello. Also, if you’ve read All the Light We Cannot See, you’ll appreciate the backstory to some of the struggles that went into writing that novel, as a discussion of that book pops up here and there in this memoir. Some readers might find this memoir too self-indulgent, but I’m not one of them.
Life & Letters: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian by Bret Lott
One-sentence summary: a collection of essays that have the overtones of memoir, especially the last half of the book, which links together the death of a father and the love of his son.
I recently read this book and another nonfiction book by Bret Lott about writing (Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life). I’m not sure why I waited so long to read these two books. I love the plain and conversational tone of the writing that slowly unfolds to reveal just how thoughtful and un-plain the writing is. Lott is a Christian who doesn’t always write to Christian audiences, which makes him a good man to learn from. This book gets a full endorsement.
Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
One-sentence summary: a Hollywood A-list celebrity, who only sort of fits into Hollywood’s culture, writes about his Texas upbringing and his expansive acting career, all while punctuating the memoir with new-agey-pop-self-help gobbledygook—and doing so with a lot of goofy gusto, I might add. All right, all right, all right.
When I texted a friend about this book, he told me that he had heard it was a “hoot.” Boy, is it ever. I’m a fan of The McConaissance, at least in so much as it produced a movie like Interstellar—but for the record, this is for sure not a book I endorse. My favorite part came when he described his self-appointed physical training to act the role of a dragon slayer.
12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
One-sentence summary: terrible, unspeakable evils happened to an educated African American slave.
It was so hard to read this book. We read it in our church book club a few years ago. In the movie adaptation, I remember a good many scenes where the cameras stayed focused for an almost too-intense amount of time, as if to say, “Don’t look away. Keep staring at this evil.” I wouldn’t say the author does this as much, but aspects of the book are sort of like that too. And, in my opinion, we are better for staring despite our desire to look away.
A Promised Land by Barak Obama
One-sentence summary: the most powerful man in the world tells the story of his presidency and how, “despite all the pomp and power,” the presidency is just an ordinary job.
I found this book absolutely fascinating. During the early years of his presidency, so many iconic moments in modern history took place—the economic recovery after 2008, the BP oil spill, and the killing of Osama bin Laden, just to name a few. But if I’m honest, I had my head down and pointed at my feet during his presidency, working hard to raise a family, earn a graduate degree, and love a church, and, therefore, I missed so much of what happened more broadly in US politics during his eight years in office. To give you a “for instance” to illustrate my point, I remember on an early Tuesday morning in November standing in the dark for hours waiting to vote in President Obama’s first presidential election while I tried to study a book about Hebrew grammar because I had a graduate-level Hebrew exam that week. And not only did this book narrate a period of US history I know little about, it often does so from a political perspective I don’t typically share, which is so helpful for having one’s own views sharpened as opposed to having one’s own views merely pampered. This book is only volume 1 of 2, so I’m excited to read the next volume, which will follow his second term in office.
Becoming by Michelle Obama
One-sentence summary: the wife of the most powerful man in the world tells the story of what it’s like to embrace that identity while also seeking to pursue her own—oh, and at the same time, raise two lovely daughters before a watching world.
Michelle Obama’s book came before her husband’s, so I read it first, but as I later read his book, I found myself thinking over and over again that her book makes a wonderful complement to her husband’s book, offering a more domestic look at their very public careers. The book covers her whole life, from her birth and childhood in Chicago, through her years at Princeton and Harvard Law school, and then back to Chicago again, and then to DC and back to Chicago. I only had a small complaint. I didn’t love how, at times, her words seemed to have a slight agenda toward propaganda; although I can’t fault her too much for that because in the moments the book comes across this way, her words are often in the service of praising her husband. How can that be so wrong?
Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death by Russ Ramsey
One-sentence summary: a Christian pastor gets a random infection from a trip to the dentist, and in a very short time, he has to have massive heart surgery, which upends all of life and takes a few years to recover from the trauma.
When I read this book, I went out and bought five more copies to give away to those who are suffering at our church. I heard back from several of those people how much the book put into honest language their pain while pointing them to the hope of the gospel. This book gets a full endorsement.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
One-sentence summary: a poor kid from a poverty-stricken part of the country rises out of that mess (and it is a mess) and becomes an Ivy League lawyer while also navigating truckloads of family dysfunction.
An interesting part of this story, which I only noticed during my second reading, is the way different “versions of Christianity” show up in the background. By a version of Christianity, I mainly mean a folksy version and a more fundamental, Pentecostal version. And it seemed to me, especially on the second reading, that Vance actually wrestled with a true version of Christianity mingled with all the rest. The recent movie will give you a sense of his story but not this part.
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
One-sentence summary: a woman grew up in a pseudo-Mormon cult but found a way to get away and become educated.
Perhaps my favorite part of this book is the way the author leaves out editorializing and instead focuses on the strict narrative; she trusts her powerful writing and her powerful story and the thoughtfulness of her readers to pick up what she’s throwing down.
What about you? What are some of your favorite memoirs? Let me know in the comments.
* Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
Shepherd & Sheep: The Preface from My New Collection of Essays
A book with my best essays about life in a local church.
I recently returned to church after a summer sabbatical. My family and I used the time to rest and play. I also used the time to work on several writing projects. It was a surprise for my church, but I gathered up my best writing about the local church and collected it in one place, a book called Shepherd and Sheep: Essays on Loving and Leading in a Local Church.
If you like, you can grab the book on Amazon. We gave away 150 copies last Sunday at church. Below is the preface to the book and the table of contents.
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Preface
Of all the apps on my phone, my favorite is Strava. It’s the fitness tracker app I’ve used to log all my workouts for the last ten years. Every trip to the gym, every mile run on a road or a trail, and every mile ridden on a street or a stationary bike are all stored in my fitness history. With all that information, Strava creates what they call a “heatmap.” Overlaid on a map of the world, Strava uses a system of colored lines with various thicknesses to show the areas an athlete has traveled most. The heatmap resembles a diagram of arteries and veins. My heatmap shows thick lines up the back of Blue Mountain Parkway in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a climb I’ve ridden well over one hundred times. It’s a 1.59-mile climb to the top, with an average gradient of 8.4%, making it a Category 3 climb, although that probably only means something to cyclists. My quickest time was six years ago, which required just under eleven minutes of enjoyable suffering. I rarely check the leaderboard, but of the nearly two thousand attempts to summit the climb, that attempt is ranked forty-fifth. Not too bad.
A certain satisfaction comes not only from looking at individual excursions but also from seeing the aggregate of all the runs and all the rides in one place. Analyzing my heatmap, I notice the routines, those places and pathways I return to again and again. Some people might rather call these routines “ruts.” But the difference of word choice between routines and ruts is more than the difference between “you say to-may-toe, and I say to-mah-toe.” Ruts signify unthinking drudgery, a continuous grind from which we cannot pop loose. Routines signify, I like to think, the places my heart, and thus my feet, gravitate toward without much thinking. Routines signify the places we love to travel, even when we know doing so might involve eleven minutes of suffering. Or to say it in biblical language, where our routines are, there our treasure is also.
This summer my church graciously offered me a sabbatical after seven years together. The sabbatical plan had been in place for a long time, but with all the unrest in the world and in local churches, it seemed like following through with the sabbatical this summer might be unwise. Sometime in early winter, however, the Lord began to give our church a fresh supply of stability. So, when the time came, my church sent me away, and I left. I left to rest and read and write and exercise and date my wife and play with my children for fifteen weeks.
In the early weeks of my sabbatical, I happened to look over some of the essays I’d written while at our church. There are over three hundred on my blog and another seventy-five published elsewhere. Like analyzing my Strava heatmap, I began to notice routines, those themes I tend to return to again and again. I hadn’t realized how often I alluded to The Chronicles of Narnia or how influential Zack Eswine’s book The Imperfect Pastor has been to me. (Well, maybe I did know that one already.) As I looked over all the words, the largest cluster seemed to revolve around life in a local church, the relationship between pastors and parishioners, shepherds and sheep. That makes sense, of course; pastoring is, after all, my day job.
But pastoring a local church is far more than a job to me. The local church signifies the place my heart loves to be, even though I know being here will often involve more than eleven minutes of suffering. So, as a gift to our church and for the joy of collecting the best of the essays in one place, I put together this book, my writing heatmap, if you will. Perhaps a half dozen of these articles were first published on my website, but most of them appeared elsewhere, places such as Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, 9Marks, For The Church, Gospel-Centered Discipleship, and Desiring God. If you’re interested, you can see the note at the end of the book for the details of where each entry was published.
I subtitled this collection Essays on Loving and Leading in a Local Church because I like to think the two go together: loving and leading, if not in my actual shepherding, at least as an aspiration. But I gave it the title Shepherd & Sheep as a way to remember that every shepherd is first and foremost a sheep in the fold of the Good Shepherd. As the apostle Peter shares, each local shepherd is an under shepherd of the chief Shepherd (1 Pet. 5:4). And praise God that the chief Shepherd loves the sheep he leads and leads the sheep he loves. Loving and leading go together with him.
May the congregational lives of local churches, the routines of local shepherds and sheep—our heatmaps—be to the praise of the glory of the Chief Shepherd’s grace.
Benjamin Vrbicek
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Summer 2021
Table of Contents
Preface ix
1 Bending the Covid Bow of Bronze 1
2 The Day That Darrin Died 10
3 “Pastor, Why Aren’t You Preaching about What’s Happening?” 13
4 Redeeming Pastoral Ambition 22
5 Spring Loaded Camming Devices and The Expository Sermon 27
6 When My Church Was Washed with Butter 32
7 Ministry Morning, Noon, and Night 37
8 Was I Betraying My Church by Interviewing Elsewhere? 44
9 The Greatest Enemy of the Church 48
10 Pastor, Strive to Learn Their Names 52
11 Pastors Need Healthy Boundaries 56
12 Do Not Despise a Gentle Nudge 60
13 Don’t Let Sexual Shame Move You from Christ’s Mission 66
14 The Truth Is Always Positive 71
15 Light for Those Who Sit in Darkness 76
16 Two Ways Every Christian Can Be Pastoral 80
17 On Pastoral Prayer 84
18 The Wrath of God Should Come to Our Minds More Often 91
19 When Ministry Success Becomes an Idol 97
20 How Much Does a Pastor Work? 102
21 Congregations of Bruised Reeds 110
22 Come to Me All Who Have Covid Weariness 114
23 Sometimes God Just Closes Doors 119
24 Dear Twitter, I’m Leaving You for My Wife 123
25 My Heart Is Full 128
Publication Note 133
About the Author 137
Why You Should Consider Studying and Preaching the Book of Judges
An excerpt from an introduction I wrote to the book of Judges
I fell in love with the book of Judges years and years ago. During college even, when I was a camp counselor at a Christian sports camp for a summer, I would read as a bedtime story about Ehud shoving his sword into the belly of a fat king until the king’s poop spilled out. The kids loved it. So did I.
One of the first few summers in my current church, my co-pastor and I preached through Judges. It was—as my father often says with a kindly smirk—memorable. I’ve written blog posts about the book and preached it at retreats. I’ve preached it on Christmas Eve. Seriously. It worked well, too. In fact, tomorrow I’m preaching two messages from the book of Judges to a local Christian school. (Yes, it’s the older students, but I think the book can be preached to younger students too, especially when using a children’s Bible like this one.) I guess I’m like Sam-I-Am and could preach Judges in a boat and to a goat, in the rain and on a train, and in a tree—it’s so good, you see.
Yesterday the website For The Church published the longest collection of words I’ve ever had published, nearly five and a half thousand of them, which is basically the size of a large chapter in a book. The words are a “preaching guide” to the book of Judges. But you don’t have to be a preacher to make use of the guide. You can just be a regular Christian who wants to know God and the gospel better.
My preaching guide in Judges is part of their series to offer guides through books in the Bible. Their preaching guides have a sort of template to them, and the last section always suggests reasons you should preach through the book (or, as I said, study through the book). Below you’ll see my answer for why you should study and preach through the book of Judges. I hope you enjoy the excerpt.
If you’d like to read the rest of the preaching guide, you can do so here. (The list of all the preaching guides is here.)
And if you know a pastor or Sunday school teacher who might benefit from my guide on Judges, please pass it on to them as well. Everything is free.
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Why should you preach through Judges?
Those who live in the Rocky Mountains or on the Hawaiian shores can behold beautiful scenery as easily as they can walk to their back porch. For most of us, however, tracking down mountain vistas or ocean sunrises takes a lot of work. From a preaching standpoint, the vistas seen from Ephesians 2 or Romans 8 tend to be more accessible and thus more often traveled by preachers and beheld by congregations. Yet for those willing to break a sweat and endure some soreness, the vistas that open in the book of Judges are just as fearfully and wonderfully made—you just might have to wade through a swamp or hack through a jungle before you can see them. In short, you should preach Judges because the book offers modern readers scenery that we didn’t know we needed until someone has shown us. These “views” include but are not limited to those I have listed below. Knowing these breathtaking views exist and hiking with your people to see them is reason enough to start the journey through Judges. And as you go, you will discover other sights both terrifying and awesome, sights you didn’t know you needed until God showed you that you did.
The book of Judges shows us the purpose of divine rumble strips. Rumble strips are annoying. They shake your car and rattle your teeth. If you have young boys in the back of your car, someone might yell, “Who farted?” In other words, rumble strips get your attention. So do smelling salts. So do defibrillators. God often goes to great lengths to get our attention when we, his people, are tempted to sin. “When new gods were chosen, then war was in the gates” (5:8). For his glory and our good, thankfully the invasive love God displays in Judges, he still displays now. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The book of Judges shows us that sin is fundamentally illogical and only partially explainable. To read Judges slowly and carefully is to also become confused. He did what? But why? And she said what? But why? Often, you can deduce probable answers to many of these questions, and yet even when the questions are answered, you still might not know the deeper reason for why people do what they do. For example, consider some of the unanswerable questions from chapter 19. Why wouldn’t anyone take the travelers into their house? How could it be that an angry mob demanded violent, homosexual acts in an Israelite city? Why would a man offer his virgin daughter to the mob to be devoured? Why would the Levite allow his concubine to be handed over? What was a Levite doing with a concubine, anyway? And who could cut up a woman and send her out in twelve little pieces? When you stand back and let the totality of the depravity of this passage land on you, one recognizes almost immediately that we must settle for partial explanations. This is because, in the order of the universe, sin is only partially explainable. Why would Adam take and eat the fruit? Why would sin ever have looked pleasing to his eyes? Why would anyone crucify the son of God? Why would the drunk driver get behind the wheel? Why would I ever use that tone of voice with the wife of my youth? Because sin is only partially explainable and fundamentally illogical. We really do need a savior.
The book of Judges stokes our longings for permanence. Peace and prosperity ebb and flow like the ocean tide, and all our progress seems as permanent as castles in the sand. The cycles in the book of Judges show us this. And they show it to us again. And again. And again. We need a savior who sits on the throne he will never vacate, which is what we have in Christ.
Finally, the book of Judges shows us the greatest enemy of the church is not external but internal. The book of Judges both shouts and whispers this indictment. Consider, again, the last sentence in the book. “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (21:25; see also 17:6). Positioned intentionally at the end, this statement is the ancient equivalent of bold, italics, underline, and all caps—an example of the book shouting that our greatest enemy is internal. We hear another shout in Judges 2:10 where God lays the blame for all their trouble on the fact that “there arose another generation . . . who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel.” Again, the foe is internal, not external. The book also whispers this message. For example, consider the judge Tola (10:1–2). He, like another judge named Shamgar in Judges 3:31, was a deliverer only mentioned in a verse or two. But unlike Shamgar, who delivers from an external enemy (the Philistines), no enemy is listed that Tola fought. When Tola comes to save, he saves Israel from Israel. And that is why the book, as a whole, concludes with an appendix of sordid stories likely from an earlier time in the book, stories of a greedy priest, a Levite who dismembered his concubine, and a civil war that nearly annihilated one of the tribes. It is easy to point the finger at those outside the church. The greatest threat to the church, however, is not ISIS or Planned Parenthood. It is not Hollywood. It is not atheist professors who ruin the faith of our sweet college freshmen. The greatest enemies are not secular politicians and Supreme Court judges. If we want to know the worst enemy of the church—the one that, apart from the sustaining grace of God, could eternally destroy us—then we must look in the mirror. Doing so will not be easy; it will be uncomfortable. But a long look into our own souls and our indwelling sin might catch our melanoma while it’s early. And if it does, praise God we have the gospel for our healing.
* Photo by Jan Kronies on Unsplash
Writers’ Coaching Corner: A New Feature for GCD
A new, monthly resource to teach and encourage Christian writers.
“Books don’t change people, paragraphs do—sometimes sentences.”
This famous quote from author and long-time pastor John Piper highlights the transformative potential of prose. Piper added, “One sentence or paragraph may lodge itself so powerfully in our mind that its effect is enormous when all else is forgotten.”
But what makes one paragraph so transformative and so unforgettable? The answer is two-fold: the supernatural power of God and good writing. Writers can’t control the former, but we can practice the latter.
Back in January of this year, I took the part-time role of managing editor for the Gospel-Centered Discipleship (GCD) website. I’ve loved it. I get to oversee the publication of our articles and the team of staff writers and editors, help with our book publishing, and mentor fellow writers.
To that end of mentoring writers, I started a monthly feature where I look closely at one paragraph from a GCD article in the previous month to highlight some aspect of what makes for good writing. I talk about what makes the writing in the article work so well and how we, as fellow writers, can incorporate more of that writerly goodness into our craft.
If this interests you, I put a few of the videos below. You can get them all on our website, under the tab “Writers’ Coaching Corner.”
I’ve already made the video for next month, where I discuss one of my favorite writing ideas: climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction. It’s more helpful than it sounds. Trust me. I’ll post it on the GCD website on Monday, September 6, 2021.
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AUGUST 2021:
LIMIT THE USE OF BE-VERBS
This month I use Brianna Lambert’s article titled “God’s Word Isn’t Your Gas Station” to talk about the principle that good writing limits the use of be-verbs (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been).
I also mention Russ Ramsey’s memoir Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death and Helen Sword’s The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose.
JULY 2021:
TAILOR PROSE TO A PARTICULAR AUDIENCE
This month I use Jen Oshman’s article, a letter written to her daughter who recently graduated from high school. The article is titled, “From Mom and Dad to Our Grad.” This article illustrates the principle that good writing tailors prose to a particular audience.
I also mention Ivan Mesa’s Before You Lose Your Faith, Dane Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly, the Gospel-Centered Disciple Writers’ Cohort, and Roy Peter Clark’s How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times.
JUNE 2021:
LEVERAGE THE POWER OF ALLUSION
This month I use David McLemore’s recent article about guilt and grief over our sin, “In the Darkness, Jesus Is My Light,” to talk about the principle that good writing leverages the power of allusion.
I also mention Russel Moore’s recent newsletter “Atheists, Anger, & Alcohol” (Moore to the Point, May 17, 2021) and Douglas Wilson’s book Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life.
MAY 2021:
EXTRUDE LIFE THROUGH TRUTH
This month I use Lauren Bowerman’s recent article about her struggles with infertility, “How Infertility Revealed My Idolatry” to talk about the principle that good writing extrudes life through truth.
I also mention Timothy Keller’s article “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death” and John Piper’s book Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully: The Power of Poetic Effort in the Work of George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C. S. Lewis.
* Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
Did Jesus Have a Belly Button? A Silly Question with a Seriously Encouraging Answer
Someone asked me this question. Here’s my long answer.
The other day I received an email asking, what might feel like to some, a silly question. But the question came with sincerity. The question asked whether Jesus had a belly button.
I said yes. Here’s my longer answer.
Before I responded, I chuckled at the question because typically when people wonder whether someone from the Bible had a belly button, they usually wonder about Adam and Eve, since our first parents were not born by ordinary means; God created one from a pile of dust and the other from a rib. In one of my seminary classes, I remember a student asking the professor about Adam and Eve and whether they had belly buttons. The student asked C. John Collins, one of our Old Testament professors and an expert on the creation account in Genesis. I just wish I could remember the answer Dr. Collins gave. Knowing him he probably made a dismissive joke.
Coming back to the question at hand, I presume behind the question of whether Jesus had a belly button, lurks the suspicion that if Jesus experienced that intimate of a connection to his mother Mary, a relationship where they shared blood through her placenta and umbilical cord, then the blood of our Savior would have somehow been corrupted. This concern over the purity of Christ’s blood has led Catholic theologians to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is often assumed in popular culture to refer to the extraordinary, virgin birth of Christ. But the Immaculate Conception, in Catholic theology, refers to Mary’s birth, that she was born without the stain of original sin. In this way of thinking, if Mary had been born without original sin, then Jesus could have been in her womb with a belly button and an umbilical cord and could have shared her blood—and yet Christ would not have shared her original sin because she didn’t have original sin to share.
“While I affirm the impulse to see Christ as special as he really is, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary finds no basis in Scripture. ”
While I affirm the impulse to see Christ as special as he really is, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary finds no basis in Scripture. Perhaps there is a splinter of the Protestant church that, while rejecting the Immaculate Conception, has suggested that Christ did not have a belly button as a way to keep him from inheriting original sin through Mary. I have never heard any Protestants talk like this before, but there are many things I’ve never heard before. On the crowdsourcing website Quora, the question and answers about Jesus’s belly button seem to have more interest than I expected it would—although, to be fair, I hadn’t expected any interest.
As I start to answer this question, let’s acknowledge that when a baby lives in a mother’s womb, the line between blood and nutrients and cells becomes blurred. A child in a womb is dependent on the mother for all of these—the nutrients, the blood, and more. What a mother eats, in a way, her baby eats. Consider, for example, the tragic situation of fetal alcohol syndrome. So, yes, if Jesus was in his mother’s womb and had a belly button, then he would have shared Mary’s blood.
And certainly we should consider the blood of Christ special. The New Testament authors saw his blood this way. In the letter to the church in Rome, the apostle Paul writes of Jesus “whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood” (3:25). That phrase—as a propitiation by his blood—means that the sacrifice of Jesus absorbed God’s wrath against sin. This is the meaning of the rather obscure word propitiation. Later in the same letter Paul writes of Christians being “justified by his blood” (5:9). In both of these passages, as is often the case, speaking of the blood of Christ is a shorthand for speaking of his death. One dies when one loses one’s blood (cf. Lev. 17:11). Still, this shorthand way of speaking does not nullify the specialness of Christ’s blood.
The New Testament has many similar examples of talking about Christ’s blood the way Paul does in Romans and elsewhere (Eph. 2:13; 1 John 1:7; Rev. 1:5; 5:9). The apostle Peter even speaks of the “precious blood of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:19). A key passage from the author of Hebrews is worth quoting at length:
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself [Jesus] likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. (2:14–15)
The author of Hebrews picks up this theme again later in his letter, including an extended section in Hebrews 9:11–28 where he describes the importance of blood in Old Testament sacrifices and how these Old Testament sacrifices were really a pointer to the final, better sacrifice that would come through the blood of Christ.
“The emphasis in the Bible on the purity of the blood of Jesus is not so much on chemical purity but moral purity.”
But to say that the blood of Christ was pure could be misunderstood. It was pure, but in what sense? We misunderstand the purity of the blood of Christ when we understand it merely as chemical or biological purity, as though Christ’s blood must be his blood and his blood alone. The emphasis in the Bible on the purity of Jesus and his blood is not so much an emphasis on chemical purity but moral purity. Jesus was morally pure and without blemish, and therefore the true and greater spotless lamb who could take away the sins of the world. We see this, albeit in a different context, when Jesus touches lepers and remains clean.
While I waited for my kids to finish riding a roller coaster at an amusement park, I texted with my friend John Biegel about this question. (Yes, this really happened.) John is a super-smart theologian and pastor. John said—and I quote—“there’s nothing inherently sinful about a belly button, I think.” The “I think” made me laugh. But I agree. John also pointed out that the “be fruitful and multiply” command is a pre-fall mandate, which is repeated after Noah and his family get off the ark (Gen. 9:1), and “unless God changed the means of procreation post-fall, we should expect belly buttons to be a part of God’s very good design for humanity.”
Additionally, think how weird it would have been if, in the Father’s plan of redemption, the first witnesses to Jesus were supposed to recognize how special Jesus was by noticing that he did not have a belly button. Instead, it seems to me that the Father intends the witnesses to the Son to esteem his character, his majesty, his power, his love. They were not supposed to conclude that Jesus was the God-man, as theologians call him, after sneaking a peek behind his robe. As Jesus hung naked on the cross, people were not supposed to notice a missing a belly button. That’s just weird.
This is all a way to explain my answer that Jesus did have a belly button. The doctrine of Christ’s sinlessness requires that his blood was morally pure, a purity that emanates from his character and essence. As my friend John also texted me, “I don’t think the idea of human corruption is one that is considered in simply biological terms as if there were a sin gene that got passed through blood or tissue.”
If you’ve made it this far, I applaud you. From time to time, I write blog posts that I suspect no one will ever read but were helpful and edifying for me to write nonetheless. But maybe to a few of you this conversation about belly buttons still feels goofy, even bringing to mind the Veggie Tales silly song about belly buttons done as a Backstreet Boys parody (YouTube). It did for me.
However, encouragement flows to Christians willing to contemplate the full humanity of Jesus because faith should always seek understanding as far as faith can go. Christians should not retreat to “mystery” or “miracle” sooner than we must, even though the doctrine of the virgin birth and the nature of Christ, as with all theology, will inevitably lead us to both mystery and miracle.
And as we ponder the Christ anew, we see that in his incarnation the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God, really did become flesh: he was born, increased in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52), ate (Matt. 9:10–11), slept (Mark 4:38), got tired (John 4:6), felt sadness and wept (John 11:35), and experienced great pain and died (Mark 15:37). Which is to say Jesus really was like me. And like you. That is encouraging.
“Jesus really was like me. And like you. That is encouraging.”
We might rightly assume that this means when Jesus ate spicy Jewish food, sometimes he got indigestion and gas, even diarrhea. If the Coronavirus had swept through ancient Israel, as surely other viruses did, Christ was just as susceptible to sickness and, perhaps, being out of work without pay for an extended period of time. Now, in the sovereignty of God, Jesus couldn’t have died until, as we read about in John’s gospel, that his “hour had come” (John 7:30; 8:20; 13:1; 17:1). But still, Jesus was made like us in every way, as the author of Hebrews says (2:14). The Son of Man who saved the world from our sins had no place to lay his head (Matt. 8:20), and as he grew in favor and wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52), during puberty likely his voice cracked and his face had pimples. He was like me. And like you. He got lint in his belly button. That is encouraging.
Of course, he was also more than us. He was, as the Bible teaches, also fully God. So, not like us, which is encouraging too.
And it’s this dual nature—fully God and fully man—that allows him to be our Savior: in his humanity he identifies with us, and in his divinity he is a worthy sacrifice in a way no human could be.
Therefore, when we, with the eyes of faith, behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, we behold someone more special and more wonderful and more real than our imaginations could have ever created—a Savior who lives and loves with purity and power that is both heavenly and earthly at once.
* Painting: “The Lamentation” by Ludovico Carracci, ca. 1582