The Priority of the Pastor is to Prayerfully Protect and Promote Sound Doctrine in both Proclamation and Practice in the Church and before the World.
That is the summary of pastoral ministry that I believe best encompasses all I have studied and meditated on in Jesus’ life in the Gospels and all the passages in the New Testament that speak directly to the pastoral ministry. Each post in this series will focus on one aspect of the thesis. There are nine aspects in total: Priority, Prayerfully, Protect, Promote, Sound Doctrine, Proclamation, Practice, the Church, and the World. This post will expound on the first aspect of that thesis: Priority.
The Priority of the Pastor
Every position in society requires prioritization in order to be effective or fruitful. Priorities are those activities that bear the most importance in fulfilling a role in society. The dish washer at a restaurant must prioritize washing dishes as opposed to say, baking cookies, since his role is to wash dishes. If he does not wash dishes, the restaurant will have some angry, and maybe sick, customers, thus resulting in a loss of business, and before you know it, the dishwasher has also lost his job. This includes the role of a pastor. What I am aiming at here is the biblical mandate on a pastor to prioritize his ministry on those tasks which must be front and center for faithful and fruitful ministry.
Priorities assume a common mission, a common goal. There were many activities Jesus could have involved himself in. He could, like Peter, have gone fishing. Yet he had a mission from his father to accomplish. This is why he could say to his parents at the mere age of twelve, “Why were you searching for me? Didn’t you know that it was necessary for me to be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). Jesus was focused on the mission for which he was sent, and that mission determined his priorities. In Luke’s Gospel we read of Jesus’ ministry as primarily a teaching-preaching ministry (4:15-16, 31, 43-44). Jesus, after a time of isolated prayer, refused the Capernaum residents insistence that he stay in their town. “It is necessary for me to proclaim the good news about the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because I was sent for this purpose” (Luke 4:43). That is, Jesus did not stay in Capernaum because his mission required going to other towns. Matthew’s Gospel summarizes Jesus’ ministry as a two-fold ministry: teaching/preaching and healing (Matthew 4:23-25, 9:35). Jesus’ mission of accomplishing eternal redemption for his people through crucifixion and resurrection required him to prioritize his activities to preaching and healing, with prayerful dependence on his Father in the power of the Spirit.
The pastor has a mission, which means he has to prioritize his ministry to accomplish that mission. So it is necessary to speak of the mission of a pastor if these priorities are going to make sense. I cannot persuade you that these are priorities if I do not place the priorities within the framework of the pastor’s mission. The mission of the pastor is to labor night and day for Christ to be formed in the people God has entrusted to him by the power of the Spirit in accordance with the Scriptures until Christ returns. This is how the Apostle Paul described his ministry to the Colossians, “We proclaim [Christ], warning and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. I labor for this, striving with his strength that works powerfully in me” (1:28-29). And for the Ephesians he prayed, “that [the Father] may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Ephesians 4:16-17). When the Galatians began to turn away from Christ to another gospel, Paul expressed deep anguish, “My children, I am again suffering labor pains for you until Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:19). The mission and purpose for all church leadership was summed up this way, “And [Christ] himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers… until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness.… But speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into him who is the head — Christ” (Ephesians 4:11-15).
This was not just his desire for the Church, it was Paul’s desire for himself. “My goal is to know [Christ] and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death, assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead. Not that I have already reached the goal or am already perfect, but I make every effort to take hold of it because I also have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:10-12). What Paul is saying here is that Christlikeness in the saints is the end for which Christ died. The apostle Peter resonates the same sentiment when he writes, “His divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. By these he has given us very great and precious promises, so that through them you may share in the divine nature, escaping the corruption that is in the world because of evil desire” (2 Peter 1:3-4).
And this is not mere moralism. To share in Christ’s likeness also means to share in the Son’s fellowship with the Father. Jesus, the Christian’s great high priest, who lives to intercede for us, said these words in his longest prayer recorded in Scripture, “I have given them the glory you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one. I am in them and you are in me, so that they may be made completely one, that the world may know you have sent me and have loved them as you have loved me…. I made your name known to them and will continue to make it known, so that the love you have loved me with may be in them and I may be in them” (John 17:21-26). Sharing in the fullness of Christ means sharing in the fullness of that glorious Triune fellowship of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Oh Lord Jesus may it be!
So we see that the mission of a pastor is to see Christ formed in both himself and in the lives of the saints to which he is entrusted, with view to please God, resulting in the joyful maturity of God’s people. That is the mission. The means to accomplish that mission is the prayerful protection and promotion of sound doctrine in both preaching and practice in the church and before the world. In the next post we will look at the second aspect of my thesis: prayer.
(all Scripture quoted from the CSB)
Sound Teaching, Sound Living 