tregallion

Grapes come from mature vines

January 19th, 2024

We use the language of ‘planting’ churches because it’s more organic than, say ‘founding’ churches or ‘building’ churches. And ‘planting’ also helps us remember that it’s only Christ who builds his church; it’s only Christ who founded his church, and he himself is the cornerstone, but ‘I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.’ (1 Corinthians 3:6 ESV)

But if we’re going to evoke that imagery of planting, let’s also remember that it takes a long, long time, for a sprout to become a sapling to become a mature tree that actually bears fruit.

I want to see our church grow. I want there to be more people in our church next year than there are this Sunday. But if our church is going to grow — and not just by gobbling up and assimilating erstwhile believers from other congregations — that means we have to make disciples. We have to be fruitful as a branch of the vine, organically and integrally connected to Christ the true vine. And that means we have to become mature in Christ.

You don’t pick apples from saplings, and nobody plants a vine one year and gathers grapes the next. And as believers, as a church, we have no right to expect God to jolly well jump up and start growing our church the second we decide that’s what we want.

Jesus said,

‘Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.’
John 15:4-6 ESV

A branch on a vine needs to grow, thicken, deepen, before it can produce fruit. It has to be pruned for several years before the branch will bear a good crop of grapes. When a branch first shoots off of the vine, it’s thin and green and soft and it won’t bear a thing. But a branch that is mature, with a deep and strong connection to the vine, that branch bears fruit. And it bears it repeatedly, season by season, year after year after year, and in ever increasing abundance, because it is mature.

So the beginning of growth, the beginning of fruit — by which I mean making converts, baptising them, and discipling them — is becoming mature. It’s abiding in Christ, drawing deeply on Christ, by committing deeply to the means of grace: the preaching of the word, prayer, the sacraments, fellowship, meditating on the word of God. These are the gifts given to us for our abiding in Christ. It’s these means of grace that mature us as a branch, so that we might bear fruit.

It seems crooked — ‘Are you saying that instead of reaching out with the gospel, we should be coming to church and going to Bible study? Isn’t that backwards, inward-looking, institutional thinking?’

I’m saying that if you want grapes, you have to plant a vine, prune it, and wait. And if you want to be a church that is bearing the fruit of making and discipling new believers, you have to be abiding in Christ.

If we want to make disciples — if we want to see our churches grow — if we want to participate in the mission to which Christ has called us — then we need to dedicate ourselves first and foremost to being people who deeply abide in Christ. Apart from him we can do nothing, and as he says, you want to see someone who bears much fruit? Look for someone who abides in Christ, and Christ in him.

When is the best time to plant a vine? 20 years ago. When is the second best time? Today.

So if we want to see fruit, the first thing we do is not necessarily to immediately start a 7-week evangelistic course. If we want to see fruit, the first thing we do is to abide in Christ — put our roots down deep into him, as a fellowship, and as individuals. Prayer. The Word. Service. Worship. The sacraments. That’s how we go deep. That’s how we abide in Christ. That’s how we bear fruit.

It’s not fast. There’s no flatpack solution to this, no algorithmic wizardry, no shortcuts. But if we want true growth, true fruit in the life of our church and in our town, we need to be thinking, not of next year, not of five years from now. We need to be thinking, who will we be, what will our church be in thirty years, and start to prepare for that. We need to be beginning the slow, deep, organic practices of abiding in Christ. If we want our children’s children to drink good, aged wine, we need to plant a vine right now. And if we want our children’s children to worship in churches that are deep and strong and bearing fruit, we need to get about the business of abiding in Christ right now.
Refocusing ministry

January 9th, 2024
On my recent sabbatical I spent a bit of time thinking about the proper focus of pastoral ministry as a ministry of Word, prayer, and shepherding. The two foundational texts for understanding the pastoral ministry (of a pastor/elder/overseer) are both in the Acts of the Apostles:

But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.
Acts 6:4 ESV

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for [lit. to shepherd] the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.
Acts 20:28 ESV

Word, prayer, and attentive shepherding. This is the essence of the pastoral calling.

Word

Ministry of the word means my own study, as well as sharing it with others. So it’s part of my job, not extraneous to it, for me to spend a lot of time in my study, actually reading and studying biblically, theologically, historically. It’s part of my job to delve deep into the things of God, writing, thinking, and learning. This develops and informs every other aspect of the outward ministry of the word.

Not only this, not only intellectually, but spiritually, too. It is my job to read God’s word devotionally, worshipfully, meditatively. I cannot minister the word to others, unless I have been ministered to by God’s word. The first task of the ministry of the word is not teaching, preaching, and catechising; the first task is receiving, hearing, meditating, and submitting to God’s word. It is to open the Scriptures, not in the first place to teach them, but to ‘hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.’¹

But of course, ministry of the word does mean giving out to others. It means preaching on the Lord’s Day, with all the due preparation and study that attends it — but it doesn’t only mean preaching on the Lord’s Day. The ministry of the word means leading Bible studies, it means one-to-one discipleship, it means catechesis, it means teaching classes on theology and doctrine, it means training the church in the tools they need to responsibly interpret the Bible, it means reading Scripture in the homes of the congregation as part of pastoral visits, it means giving biblical counsel to those who come to me with problems, struggles, questions, confusions, it means evangelism and gospel outreach. And it means whatever other way or practice by which I communicate the word of God to others.

This is the ministry of the word, and I want to rededicate myself to the fulness of it.

Prayer

Pastoral ministry is a ministry of prayer. ‘We will devote ourselves to prayer…’ said the apostles.

Typically, I’ve imagined this as my responsibility to pray for the congregation, and all their spiritual and material needs. This is certainly true! ‘Far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by ceasing to pray for you,’ said the prophet Samuel, even after his responsibilities as judge were handed over to the new king (1 Samuel 12:23 ESV).

But, as before, the first task of the prayerful pastor is to pray; simply to pray. That is, to draw near to God, simply for the sake of fellowship and communion with the Lord. This vision of ministry must admit and allow for the fact that a pastor is set apart for prayer, as an end in itself; to admit and allow for the truth that prayer is not a means to the end of ministry; that in a sense it is the ministry.

It is in prayer, in close fellowship and communion with Christ, that an under-shepherd’s soul takes on the hue and shape of the Good Shepherd. It’s in prayer that the heart is formed, so that the love of Christ for his sheep shapes the love of the pastor for the flock entrusted to him. It’s in prayer that the pastor ultimately recognises that he himself cannot do one thing, not one single thing, to save the souls of his congregation, to bless them, to build them up, to make them mature in Christ. If prayer is anything, it is the admission of limits, and the admission of contingency. To pray is to say, ‘It is the Lord who made us, and not we ourselves.’ To pray is to say, ‘I cannot, but Thou canst.’

From this personal prayer will flow all the prayers for and with the congregation. Surely the pastor will pray for the nearness of God to his people, the spiritual blessings of communion with God in their own prayers and worship? Yes, of course: but how can a pastor pray for such things with the purpose and urgency that they deserve, if he remains cold and distant from God himself? How can I have a longing that Christ be formed in my congregation, if it’s not worth my time to pray that Christ be formed in me?

In John Updike’s novel ‘Rabbit, Run’, there is a fantastic encounter between the modern, therapeutically-minded Episcopal minister who walks with the main character through the events of the book, and a Lutheran pastor. Throughout the story, Rabbit Angstrom’s minister meets with him regularly, follows him from place to place, and — it has to be said — vicariously enjoys through Rabbit the thrill of self-destruction which he himself cannot indulge. But then he meets this Lutheran pastor, this stony-faced, Teutonic Elijah who corners him and thunders at him,

Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug holes up and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job… I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer… In running back and forth you run away from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful… When on Sunday morning, then, when you go out before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. This is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do and say, anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us.
John Updike, Rabbit, Run (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), 146.

Attentive shepherding

Visiting the congregation is, depending on your disposition — and the state of the church — either the cushiest part of the pastoral calling, or the most gruelling. Some pastors thrive on the time spent in homes and over coffee; some leave exhausted and scuttle back to their studies. And for those who understand the value and the blessing of pastoral visits, it strikes a jarring discord in your heart when someone says flippantly, ‘Ah yeah, you just drink tea with old ladies all day, in between working one day a week.’ Forgive them; they know not what they say.

But the purpose of visitation — regular, systematic visitation — is, as I hinted above, to create ongoing occasions for the direct and individual- or family-specific ministry of the word, outside of the church programme of worship services and Bible studies. We need not limit the dignity and efficacy of the ministry of the word as a means of grace only to the specific function of preaching. I’ve seen people take huge, long-delayed steps towards maturity in just a few focused, one-to-one conversations around God’s word, in the context of pastoral visitation. And I’ve wondered how they have sat under the preaching of the word for long years, and not made the leap in understanding that it took barely two hours to make, on the sofa before me.

But notice the words of Paul in Acts 20:28 again:

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock…

If pastoral visitation is to be practiced biblically, it must include the attentiveness to the flock as a body, and to each of the sheep placed under your oversight by the Holy Spirit (and to yourself, but that’s for another post). That is, the ministry of the word in the home of the congregant or member must be applied only once you have paid sufficient attention to their stated and unstated spiritual condition. Or, as Harold Senkbeil puts it, the pastoral call in visitation is first of all attentive diagnosis, and only then is it intentional treatment.²

This diagnosis and treatment language sounds a lot like what our grumpy Lutheran friend from Rabbit, Run detests: meddling in people’s lives with psychology and that. But it’s quite different — the failure of the psychologised, therapeutic model of ministry is not that it seeks to diagnose and treat. It is that it uses the wrong toolkit, the wrong diagnostic manual, and the wrong pharmacopoeia. Senkbeil refers to ministry as ‘baptismal therapy’ — calling the mind and soul of the suffering Christian back, time and time again, in specific and targeted ways, to the great and glorious gift they received at their baptism³, namely Christ, clothed in his gospel, and with him, all his benefits.⁴ The diagnosis Senkbeil speaks of is always spiritual, not psychological; the treatment we pastors are qualified, able, and called to offer is always Christ himself, clothed in his gospel, brought to bear on the heart and soul through our ministry of the word.

(Caveat lector: Pastors certainly should be aware enough to identify the presence of genuinely psychological matters, and willing to refer their congregants to the appropriate care for those things).

None of this is possible without careful, attentive time spent with the congregation. And, more broadly, it’s also true to say that the ministry of the word in the function of Lord’s Day preaching will also prove more effective, if the one preaching is actually aware and sensitive to the real, current state of the church, both individually and as a body.

These are my thoughts — a manifesto for refocused, biblical pastoral ministry. Word, prayer, attentive shepherding.
1. Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, Scottish Book of Common Prayer, 1929. ↩︎
2. Harold Senkbeil, The Care of Souls, (Lexham Press, 2019), 67ff. Chapter Three and Four of this book lay out Senkbeil’s vision of attentive diagnosis and intentional treatment. ↩︎
3. Senkbeil, Care of Souls, 100-102. ↩︎
4. Sinclair B Ferguson, The Whole Christ, (Wheaton: Crossway, 2016), 46-47, 52. ↩︎
On the sufficiency of Scripture

June 19th, 2023

The church traditions that took shape during the Reformation all make clear statements on the authority of Scripture, and whether we’re self-consciously confessional or not, there are some themes that we major on in the ways that we describe our churches.
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The Lord’s Prayer (Westminster Expanded Version)

June 17th, 2023

A few months ago I consolidated all the answers from the last 10 questions of the Heidelberg Catechism, which put together form a beautiful devotional exposition of the Lord’s Prayer.

Today I’ve done the same with the last 7 questions of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. It’s, well, shorter than the Heidelberg version — crisp brevity is the Westminster’s mode d’emploi — but no less helpful in guiding and refreshing us in praying that familiar form of words given to us by the Lord Jesus.
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The Creator/creature divide as a proof of Jesus’ divinity

June 16th, 2023

Following on from yesterday’s post about Jehovah’s Witnesses and their denial that Christ is God:

If you were to force me to make the case for the true divinity of Jesus from a single verse of the Bible, I would go to John 1:3.
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A frustrating encounter

June 15th, 2023

Yesterday I had a long conversation with some Jehovah’s Witnesses who were standing in our town square. It was really frustrating. So frustrating that this morning when I was trying to focus on reading the Bible and praying, I was still stewing on it to the point of distraction.

It was frustrating for a couple of reasons, one of which was simply that I don’t like hearing someone claim to know Jesus and at the same time deny that Jesus is truly God. Another frustration was that I couldn’t quite make the point I wanted to make as clearly as I wanted to make it, so that was my failure.

But less viscerally, it was a frustrating conversation because the JWs’ approach to reading the Bible is impossibly literalistic.
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Who knows what part you’re playing?

June 14th, 2023

And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.” —
John 1:19-23 ESV

John the Baptist faithfully executed his office as a prophet of God, the voice crying in the wilderness. He was obedient to God’s call and commission through his whole life as a Nazirite and until his brutal death for his uncompromising willingness to speak the truth, even to Herod Antipas. He prepared the way of the Lord, making his paths straight. He baptised the Lord Jesus, and saw the Holy Spirit descend from a heaven torn asunder at the voice of the Father. And John rejoiced to see Christ increase, even as he himself decreased.

But despite all the great and glorious things that John the Baptist saw and did, he still didn’t fully understand the part he played in it all. See the words of Jesus concerning John:
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The Legitimacy and Use of Confessions

June 13th, 2023

Sam Waldron’s commentary on the 1689 Baptist Confession opens with an excellent essay by Dr Robert Paul Martin called ‘The Legitimacy and Use of Confessions.’

I can’t speak for other contexts, though I would expect it’s about the same, but in Baptist church culture in Scotland there’s a real aversion to creeds and confessions.
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The Lord’s Prayer (Heidelberg Version)

November 28th, 2022

The Heidelberg Catechism takes the reader through a beautiful tour of biblical doctrine in a crisp, clear, and devotional manner, and over the last couple of weeks I’ve especially appreciated its exposition of the Lord’s Prayer.

The question/answer format slightly disguises the fact that the last 10 questions of the Catechism are an expository expansion of the Lord’s Prayer itself, so I’ve taken the words of each answer and set them together. This is a lovely way to pray the Lord’s Prayer, that helps me (and hopefully you) to savour and digest the meaning of each line in this most familiar of prayers.
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Baptist Larger Catechism

September 5th, 2022

A few years ago I discovered the 17th century Particular Baptists, Reformed theology, and especially the 2nd London Baptist Confession. There’s such a wealth of Particular Baptist theological work out there, and a bit of a revival of interest in Baptist confessionalism as a whole. And for those who want to embrace the Baptist confessional tradition, we have our 2LCF and Keach’s Catechism (although the relationship between Keach and the catechism is a bit contested) as Baptist adaptations and revisions of the Westminster Confession and the Westminster Shorter Catechism — but there’s a conspicuous lack of Baptist Larger Catechism.
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Word

Prayer

Attentive shepherding