The Gospel Coalition

Today’s post is contributed by Darryl Dash, a pastor who blogs regularly at DashHouse.com.

When our doctor moved, we could have followed her. Instead, we stayed with the new doctor that took her place. A friend of mine said this about the new doctor: “He’s a doctor who reads his journals.” I like that. I want a doctor who goes home at night and continues to read and learn.

I can imagine that there are days that the doctor would rather watch a game than read another journal. Maybe he does some days. I can also imagine that there are competing journals for doctors with articles about “Ten Skills for Growing Your Practice” and “Team Dynamics.” But I’m glad that my doctor reads articles about chronic Achilles tendinopathy and Enteric fever. I want a doctor who reads his journals.

Pastors, like doctors, face the temptation not to study. There’s little short-term payoff for study. Nobody in my church is begging me to read Calvin’s Institutes or John Frame’s The Doctrine of the Word of God. In fact, they roll their eyes if I talk about these books too much. They have no idea how much they need me to read them.

Pastors can spend lots of time reading about the practical skills of ministry. In The Art of Pastoring, David Hansen talks about how-to books on how to preach, how to administrate, and so on. He writes:

“They didn’t help me… They assumed that I knew what my goal was. They assumed that I knew what I was and who I was.”

Books like this can be helpful in the short term, but they can also reduce ministry to a set of techniques and fads if we’re not careful.

We need more. We need pastors who read journals. I want pastors who know theology, who are reading Bavinck and Edwards and more. Here’s why:

• We need to understand God. I don’t know any pastor who knows God too well. The best thing that I can offer my people is a better understanding of who God is and what he is up to. I need journals and books that lead me to a better understanding of God a hundred times more than I need practical books on ministry.
• We need to understand ministry. We need a robust theology of the church, of pastoral ministry, and preaching. There’s more going on than meets the eye. We need a doctrine of anthropology if we’re going to understand people, and a doctrine of sin. We certainly need to understand salvation and all of its implications. We also need to know the same heresies that keep coming up so we won’t be “carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14). The more we understand what God’s revealed about ministry, the better we’ll be prepared as pastors.
• We need to understand how to apply all of this truth to real people in our contexts. I love the Puritan picture of pastors as soul physicians. When we understand God and ministry, as well as people’s hearts, we’ll be ready to provide real help to the people within our churches in our sermons, counseling, conversations, and leadership.

I’m not saying that we need pastors who are academics. John Piper writes of the danger of pastors who are too scholarly:

Many pastors, especially those who love the glorious vision of God’s being and beauty and plan of salvation, have a scholarly bent that threatens to over-intellectualize the Christian faith, which means that they turn it mainly into a system to be thought about rather than a way of life to be felt and lived. Of course, it is a system as well as a life. But the danger is that the whole thing can be made to feel academic rather than heart-wrenchingly real. (The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor, p.48)

We don’t need this kind of pastor. But we need pastors who read theological journals and books because they want to provide real and substantial help to their churches.

David Hansen once wrote that two hours of reading Barth, Forsyth, Edwards, or Bonhoeffer on Wednesday saved him hours of sermon preparation on Friday, and produced a deeper, more searching thesis. I imagine that my doctor finds that two hours spent reading journals helps him in much the same way.

We need doctors and pastors who read their journals. I pray for pastors who can provide substantial help for their people because they continue to feast on what God has revealed, and because they’re doing the hard work of translating theological truth in the service of the church.