Jul
08
2010
Uncommon pastoral wisdom
“Loving God, loving each other, loving the world — these three priorities can keep us innovative and challenged and occupied in happy, healthy, positive, aggressive ways.
They can bring us past the reactionisms into which young Christians, young pastors, young churches and young movements are likely to fall. I was talking to a pastor recently who described to me his pilgrimage out of a narrow, suspicious background, through squabbles within his denomination over modes of baptism or where money was to be given, through painful fights over doctrinal issues, organizational issues . . . . He’d been through years of ‘Christian civil wars.’ We agreed together that growth demands these things must be eventually settled in our minds, but that we can’t begin really to minister as church leaders or as churches until we’ve gotten past being reactionary.”
Raymond C. Ortlund, Let the Church be the Church (Waco, 1983), page 26. Italics added.