01- The Gospel According to You
I. The Gospel According to You
WE HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT IN A SINGLE GENERATION we have moved from the horse-and-buggy days to a streamlined life. And the church has not escaped this movement of change. We have been swept along on this tide of innovation until some of us on the far side of middle life hardly recognize the church in which we began our ministry. Stately Gothic structures have replaced the little white meetinghouse. The old frock coat has been discarded f or the flowing robe, and the center pulpit for a chancel. Above all, a chancel! Some ministers just cannot preach at all until they have rebuilt the old church to include a chancel. Nonliturgical churches too must have their processionals, entroits, and recessionals. We have translations of the Bible in everyday speech, streamlined sermons, unified services combining study and worship. We have our church secretaries and mimeograph machines in a church office. We have directors of religious education. We have theological education comparable to specialized university courses. We ministers do more things, attend more meetings, raise more money, and plan more things than the ministers of yesterday ever dreamed of doing. I wonder what John Wesley or Phillips Brooks would think about what we call the march of progress in the church.
Well, I imagine they would probably think it just that a mark of advance. A thing need not be wrong because it is new. Wesley and Brooks would doubtless be quick to use some of the new methods and materials of our day. I know that I have no desire to be limited by.the restricting forms and tools of the ministry of my boyhood.
It is worth noting these changes, not for the purpose either of approval or of criticism, but that we may face squarely the fact of how little difference they make in the fundamental qualities of our ministry. The trappings of life change from age to age, but not life itself.
Still the fundamental need of the ministry is a man. No change we make in the material structure of the church, in method, or in program, can alter the fact that the gospel remains a living force only by contact of life with life. The most adequate church equipment with the most enicient organization is cold and lifeless unless it centers in some personality. Someone has said that there is only one problem in the world, only one problem in the church. It is the problem of finding the right man. Being a minister of the gospel involves many things. It is more an involved task today than ever before. A man must be most everything to be a good minister. He must possess some of the qualities of a businessman, a banker, and a general of an army. He must preach and organize and direct. He still needs, however, more than all to be a pastor. Nothing that happens in the changing structure of the church’s life, or ever may happen, will alter that need. Our life may be streamlined, but it is still life. And it still takes life to minister to life. A minister must be both a preacher and a pastor. I am conscious of many limitations in my own ministry. But any lack of appreciation for the place and power of the pulpit is not one of them. Time, thought, and prayer must be given to the sermon. “Blood, sweat, and tears” must go into the preparation. To preach is an infinite privilege. The man who slights this task is slighting his Lord. The people want good preaching.
They are infinitely patient with the kind of preaching we give them. They deserve better than they get. But they want and deserve a pastor as well as a preacher. There is no good reason why they should not have both in the same man.
Now the pastoral ministry is a personal ministry. And when we think together about a pastoral ministry, there is only one place to begin, and that is with ourselves. That is where we not only begin, but where we must continue, and where we will end with ourselves. We are prone to think that our ministry is determined by the type of church we serve, the co-operation of our official boards, the responsiveness of our congregation, the kind of community of wMcli we are a part. We can muster any number of reasons for our success or failure, especially for our failure. But the main reason is always in ourselves. When we fail, some personal qualities have always been a factor in that failure. When we succeed, personal qualities in us will have been invariably a greater factor than any method or technique employed. It is of little importance for us to think at all about a pastoral ministry unless we consider ourselves problem number one. It is well to discount ourselves in any success, for others have always shared it. The true pastor will always recognize that in every failure he has had some definite share. To paraphrase a Negro spiritual, “It’s not my church, and not my officers, and not my community, it’s me, it’s me, it ’s me, Lord. ’ ’ We can never leave ourselves out of the reckoning.
There is a gospel according to you and to me.
Few of us would agree on what makes a good minister of the Lord Jesus Christ. We would probably get an entirely different set of answers from the folks in the pews, and some surprising ones.
We know, at least, that there is no mold for shaping ministers. They cannot be turned out on some assembly line. The whole task of the ministry is too specialized and individual for that. And the minister has no blueprint to follow. Even his Bible is least of all a set of rules. Jesus told his disciples what they were to preach, but scarcely a word as to how they were to do it. How much easier it would be for both church and minister if we had a model of a perfect minister and could say, “This is it.”
That, however, is also the glory of the ministry.
Because there is no exact design for the minister, our own talent of ability and personality cannot be ruled out. There are frequent illustrations of two men utterly different proving to be effective ministers in the same place and under the same conditions. Everyone knows of some church which, having lost its pastor, is certain that it can never find another who could fit its situation so well, only to find that another man different in age, appearance, personality, method, and as unlike the former pastor as anyone could be, succeeds in that task with the approval and the enthusiasm of all. We say that this shows how God can use any man. Yes, and it shows how God must truly have the man, not just a brain or a technique.
President Woodrow Wilson, a son of the manse, and himself a Presbyterian elder, in an address on “The; Minister and the Community,” said, You do not have to be anything in particular to be a lawyer. I have been a lawyer and I know. You do not have to be anything in particular, except a kind-hearted man, perhaps, to be a physician. You do not have to be anything, nor undergo any stirring spiritual change, in order to be a merchant. The only profession which consists in being something is the ministry of our Lord and Saviour and it does not consist in anything else.
There is then truly a gospel according to you. In tine training of the Twelve Jesus laid down no rule of thumb for them. He offered no course in pastoral efficiency. He said something, however, that, had we heard it from his own lips, we might have asked that he repeat it to be sure we had heard aright. And this is it: “As my Father hath sent me [into the world], even so send I you! ’ ’ You! What had the Father done in sending him into the world? “The “Word became flesh.” He was the truth of God embodied in a living person. In that land of the prophets he was the greatest preacher of them all. Men had never heard his like. “Never man spake like this man.” Yet, did the throngs crowd him just to hear him preach? He was even more a different person than they had ever known. In his person he drew men to him as the flower draws the bee. The fishermen left their nets to follow him not because he proclaimed a new theology. They never did quite grasp his full truth until after the Eesurrection. They left all, and followed him, almost blindly, because of the attraction of his person, the light in his eye, the smile on his face, the winsomeness of his conversation, the gentleness of his manner; because in him they saw light and glory, and something that made their fishing a drab and little thing.
How do you visualize Jesus when you think of him yonder in Galilee? When in imagination you join the crowds to press close to him, what sort of picture has formed in your mind? Is he delivering a sermon, or do you see him at a wedding feast, feeding a multitude, healing the sick, with the little children gathered about him, in a boat with his disciples, going about doing good? Pearls of wisdom drop from his lips, it is true. But they tell us less of himself than his stopping by the way to touch a blind man’s eyes, or his finger writing in the sand as he drops his own eyes before the burning shame in the eyes of a sinful woman, or his walking along the streets of Jerusalem with Zacchaeus to be the guest in the home of this man who was scorned as a sinner. Jesus did not say, “He that hath heard me,” but, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. ’ ’ God put his truth into the life of Jesus. And Jesus sent out his men to be something, not only to say something.
There are definite ways of doing the work of a minister. God does his work in an ordered fashion.
There was nothing haphazard about the ministry of Jesus. There are correct methods to be employed, the right tools to use, wise plans to follow; but the most important, and determining, will be the man who uses them.
There is a gospel according to you.
“As the Father hath sent me [into the world], even so send I you.”
It is almost frightening to find ourselves at all in the succession of those sent forth by the Master to minister to men. Perhaps we say, “It is too high for<me; I cannot attain unto it.” Yet that is just where we need to begin. We must elevate our ideal, and our every thought of our task, until we find ourselves crying out in despair, “Who is sufficient for these things? It cannot possibly be I. “ If our pastoral ministry is something we are/too sure about, then it is not for us, and we will never make anything out of it.