Don’t Underestimate Ministry Philosophy

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Michael Lawrence
Are assumptions behind any method I use. I’m using them because I think they are going to work, or I think they are faithful, or I think they’re biblical. There are a number of different assumptions that might be brought to bear. It’s all got massive assumptions built into it, and we end up smuggling in things that maybe we didn’t mean to but they come in with that methodology.

Matt Smethurst
Welcome friends to this episode of the everyday pastor, a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt Smethurst I serve as a pastor in Richmond, Virginia, and I’m joined by my trusty cohost

Ligon Duncan
Lig Duncan from Reformed Theological Seminary.

Matt Smethurst
And today we’re going to be talking about this topic of philosophy of ministry. So one of the most disorienting things that we often encounter in the course of ministry with other pastors or churches is is seeing people who agree on doctrine, as far as we can tell, but have very different forms of ministry or practice. And the question can arise, well, how is that? How? How can two people who agree on doctrine be so different when it comes to how that doctrine gets expressed, and the answer is philosophy of ministry. The late Tim Keller likened the it kind of, if doctrine is hardware and practices software, philosophy of ministry, or what he called a theological vision for ministry, is kind of that middleware that that connects the two, and that’s really where actually a lot of the differences in in ministry, forms and postures toward culture and ways of doing church show up as in that that middle connecting category. And we want to devote a whole episode to this, because it’s a topic that is often invisible to us. We all have a philosophy of ministry, even though we haven’t always given careful attention to it. And so to help us think well about this topic, LIG and I have invited a mutual friend of ours who has extensive experience in pastoral ministry, and I would like the record to show League was once a Presbyterian, but then became a Baptist. Rub it in. Matt, rub it in. Perhaps, perhaps we could say that the topic today is sanctification. That’s what we’re talking about. Michael Lawrence, thanks for being with us. Michael studied at Duke and Gordon Conwell in Cambridge before becoming a long time associate pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, where I first met him way back in 2008 and for the last 14 years, he’s been serving as the lead pastor of Henson Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon. He’s also a council member for the gospel coalition. Michael, thanks so much for being with us.

Michael Lawrence
Thanks for having me glad to be here,

Matt Smethurst
Michael, we just, we want you to help our audience, primarily. Pastors. Think about what I was saying earlier, how theology is not just something that is confined to academic books or even confined just to the pages of Scripture, but is something that inevitably works itself out in the everyday life of a local church, especially what they do on Sundays. So our doctrine can communicate one thing, but our ministry practices can end up communicating something very different. How does that happen? How is it that there can be such a disconnect between our doctrine and our practice?

Michael Lawrence
That’s a great question, because I think all of us go into ministry wanting and assuming that theology is going to drive it, our convictions are going to drive it, but inevitably, ministry is often about solving certain problems, working towards certain ends that we’d like to see maybe we want to see people convert it. We want to see people grow as Christians. And all of a sudden we start thinking the way Americans especially think best, and that’s as pragmatists. We just we see a problem that needs to be solved, and all of a sudden we’re not thinking about theological first principles anymore. We’re thinking about what works, what’s going to get me to the end that I’d like to see. You know, so I might be totally convinced that conversion is the work of God, that he has to actually do a supernatural work to convert somebody. But as I want to see people respond to my gospel message, maybe I begin to think, oh, yeah, but what’s what’s going to really help them make that response? How can I reduce barriers, or kind of, I don’t know, grease, grease the skids a little bit to make it. It easier as as if there’s anything we could do at the end of the day to make it easier for a dead heart to become a living heart at the end of the day, God’s got to do that. But that’s what happens. I think we we stop thinking theologically, not on purpose, but mainly because we want to see something happen. And so we become pragmatists,

Matt Smethurst
yeah, when we think about different philosophies of ministry, what are the ones you have in mind? I mean, what would be the major options out there that a pastor or a church might have might be practicing or might have bought into without even consciously realizing it. Can you just give us kind of a thumbnail sketch of the landscape as you see it, and then, of course, we’ll end with what you think is the most faithful and effective one. But what? What are, what are the major philosophies of ministry you see out there?

Michael Lawrence
Yeah, so I think it’s easiest to do this chronologically. So we can start with the one that, that I grew up with, maybe that LIG grew up with, which is just the traditional service, particularly, maybe that was dominant in the I grew up in the southeast. So this would have been a Sunday morning gathering that was characterized by a sermon, for sure, but there would be special music, maybe a choir. There’d be a kids sermon. The church itself would would have been characterized by a lot of programs for largely families, I think really centering around families. There were some, some real strengths about this particular ministry. It often did have preaching right at the center. It was very focused on age graded ministries that that whether it’s kids or youth or young married or older married couples, and it kind of segregated the church into all of those different sections, I think it it found its inspiration honestly in some of the revival meetings from a generation before that kind of became stationary in the life of the church as as culture changed, and particularly as the as the boomers took over, we moved into what we might call the seeker sensitive model. So now the idea is, let’s get rid of anything that feels churchy and traditional. Let’s make our language very contemporary. Let’s make the music contemporary. Let’s make the church feel like something other than a church. Maybe it feels like a corporate campus or a mall. Let’s get theater seating in there so that people like feel super comfortable. We don’t really want them to feel like they came to church. Let’s change the let’s change the platform so it no longer looks like a a traditional platform where there’s a pulpit, maybe some, some some chairs. If there were elder sat, maybe we’ll make platform look more like a set, like, like, I don’t know, the tonight show or something. Now, some, some really good things about that, right? We don’t want to put up unnecessary barriers. And so there was a real desire with that particular philosophy of ministry to remove unnecessary barriers on the on the other hand, it really put the culture in charge of what we’re going to talk about and how we’re going to Talk about it. The focus became on the person showing up almost more as a consumer than somebody who had come to meet God. As culture continues to change, then philosophy, there’s another kind of revolution in terms of philosophy of ministry. We get to what we now might call the missional church. There’s a real movement away from the consumer orientation of the seeker sensitive philosophy of ministry, and instead, now there’s gonna be a real focus on matters of social justice, community engagement. Boy church might not even meet every week. You might you might meet most weeks, just as a small group on mission in your neighborhood or community, and only gather once a month, maybe for a corporate gathering abortion. There’s some wonderful things about that particular philosophy of ministry. It had a real emphasis on engagement, on mission and evangelism, but it also ran the danger of losing the gospel for justice issues. Again, the reality is, there was a real appeal to justice issues. The. Because the world loved justice issues. So that was, that was kind of an easy way to push forward. But maybe we run the risk of losing the Gospel itself in that process, as Justice overtakes the good news of Jesus Christ. So you’ve got that’s real quick, very broad sketch of three different models of ministry.

Ligon Duncan
Matt, I’d add I agree with what Michael just said. I also just by way of confession, I do think that the pragmatism that he talked about runs really deep, even in circles that want to think about ministry theologically. And let me pick on my own tradition. These are evangelical reformed, many of them Presbyterian guys who very much care about theology, very much are committed to the inerrancy of Scripture, very much committed to a high view of God and a high view of grace in ministry. But at the same time, you’ll hear things like, well, we need to be fixed in our theology, but flexible in our methodology. Now that can be a good statement or not, depending on what you mean by it, but very often, I found that a lot of my contemporaries use that as an excuse to think that methodology is neutral and is not necessarily something that flows out of theology. So it’s become one of my missions in life to explain to people that how you do ministry is theological, and it will convey a theology to your congregation. And so polity conveys a theology to your congregation, whether you like it or not it does, and philosophy of ministry conveys a theology to your congregation, and that’s why Tim cared so much about a theological vision for ministry. He did not want a pragmatic philosophy of ministry. He wanted a philosophy of ministry that flowed out of the convictions about the gospel and the convictions about theology that the minister and the leaders the elders of the church had, and so I think just because of that, I mean, I cannot tell you how many of my friends, yeah, that’s polity, that’s not theology, or that’s methodology, that’s not theology, as if those two things could be hermetically sealed and have nothing to do with one another. And I think that that can be a back door way for people to think pragmatically who really aren’t pragmatists. They’re not they are convictionally not pragmatists. And yet, there’ll be these certain areas of ministry where they’ll be functional pragmatists, because they don’t realize that your philosophy of ministry actually flows out of your theology, and will express some kind of conviction about about theology. So I think, I think the sort of, the three kinds of ministry, Michael’s right, I saw that I grew up in the traditional model. By the time I got to seminary, the seeker model was the big thing. And I think a lot of people don’t know that the PCA, my denomination, had more people in the Willow Creek Association than any other denomination except maybe the Methodists. There was a lot of Willow Creek influence in the PCA in the 1970s and 80s and then. And then, of course, like Michael, I’ve seen a missional model come in reacting to the attractional sort of approaches that had dominated for a long period of time and but I think, you know, Michael is right, Americans have been entrepreneurial in the way that we’ve approached ministry. And if you, if you’re not very deliberate about making sure that your philosophy of ministry is anchored in your theology, you can become a by default pragmatist. And I just want to confess that in my neck of the woods, Matt and I’m sure that I’ve, I’m sure that I’ve made those mistakes myself in in ministry, but I’ve certainly seen that in my circle. So I’m, I want us to make sure I’m not just sort of throwing rocks at people out there. I I realize this can impact all of

Matt Smethurst
us. Yeah, well, it’s like all pastors know when we when we’re, for example, counseling people. It’s, it’s one thing to have a professed theology, a confessional theology, but it’s you see, someone’s true belief about God, for example, when suffering shows up, when hardship happens. And what I hear you saying, LIG is, is essentially whatever you may profess on paper. Show me your you know, show me your methodology. And I’ll show you your functional theology. You go, Michael, what were you going to say?

Michael Lawrence
Well, just say, I think that. I think legs, right? That method, whatever method we use, is revealing, as you said, right there functional theology. There are assumptions behind any method I use. I’m using them because I think they are going to work, or I think they are faithful, or I think they’re biblical. There are number of different assumptions that might be brought to bear. Or

Matt Smethurst
it’s how we’ve always done it,

Michael Lawrence
or maybe it’s just always how we’ve done it exactly, but but licks observation that we often think that methodology is neutral is exactly right, and yet, boy, if, if the sociologists like Peter Berger and Taylor have taught us anything, methodology is not neutral at all. Yep, it’s all got massive assumptions built into it, and we end up smuggling in things that maybe we didn’t mean to but they come in with that methodology.

Ligon Duncan
And one of the Evangelicals that thought a lot about this, Matt was Jim Boyce, and I think we may have even quoted his famous little phrase, what you win them by you win them to and I think, I think that just reminds me that you got to think hard about how you’re doing ministry.

Michael Lawrence
Right? I don’t know who said this first, but I know when I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I would hear people talk about reform. People really reformed, like all five points, a hardcore reform, but they would talk about wanting to reverse engineer revival, as if we could figure, once you figure out how revival happens, then we can reduce it. We could reverse engineer it, we could reduce it to a set of steps that if we just then follow those steps, will produce the outcome we want. That’s kind of what I’m talking about. It’s not that these guys didn’t believe that the spirit had to work. It’s that they assumed that there was a methodology that could be applied, that would work no matter what. Michael,

Matt Smethurst
so you’ve kind of charted some of the landscape for us in terms of options that would be for different reasons, sub biblical. What is the alternative? What? What is the kind of philosophy of ministry that you think is is faithful to Scripture and that you’re seeking to practice in your own ministry? Yeah,

Michael Lawrence
so what I want to encourage pastors to do is to pursue a word driven philosophy of ministry. What’s a word driven philosophy of ministry? Well, it’s a philosophy of ministry that flows out the conviction. And here I’m going to I’m going to steal something from David Helm, who likes to say that God does His work through His Word in a world gone awry. Now maybe David stole that from somebody else, but I like the way it sounds. God does His work through His Word in a world gone awry. A word driven ministry is a ministry that understands a philosophy, ministry that understands that God has always worked primarily through His Word, by His Spirit. That’s how he created this world. In the first place he spoke and things happened, the world came into being. It’s how he called Abram out of idolatry and ur and made him the beginning of his of his promised work. It’s how he forms Israel into a nation. He speaks 10 words to them and forms them into a nation at Mount Sinai. And then, of course, we could go to the to the wonderful picture that Ezekiel gives us in the valley of dry bones. Ezekiel, 37 He the Lord, is wanting to communicate to Ezekiel, hope that that he is going to work to restore Israel and and he gives them this vision in which he tells them to preach to dry bones. And it’s just not the way we would tell the story if we were making it up, if we were making it up the story, God would first take those dry bones and put flesh and ears on them and then tell him to preach. But instead, God says, preach to what can’t hear. Preach to what has no life. And through the preaching, life is going to happen. And then, of course, ultimately, that’s exactly what we see in Jesus Christ. So I want to encourage guys to pursue a philosophy of ministry that does something that seems really impractical and maybe like oddly old fashioned in our very visual world. God these days, and that is to put the word of God a front and center in your ministry. Look for every opportunity you have to preach and teach God’s word. Multiply those opportunities and step back and see what happens like

Matt Smethurst
how would you describe and you were senior minister at first press Jackson for almost 20 years. How would you describe the philosophy of ministry there? And was that something you deliberately talked about, or did it just kind of organically?

Ligon Duncan
That’s a great question, Matt, and I’m ashamed to say that when I started, I’m not sure I could have formulated for you, you know, a an articulate, biblically and theologically grounded philosophy. And I say that, especially, I’m ashamed of that because I was a friend of Mark dever before I became the pastor of the church. And if there’s anybody who thinks about philosophy of ministry or theology of ministry, it’s Mark dever and and I can, I can distinctly remember sitting around a shonis dinner table with a bunch of campus ministers. A bunch of young campus ministers were in town to do staff training in the summer, and we went out to grab lunch at the show nice buffet. And one of them turned to me and he said, So Lincoln, What’s your philosophy of ministry? And you know, my life sort of flashed before my eyes, you know, what? What is my philosophy of ministry? What am I going to tell this young guy, you know? And I started, I started sort of listing off what I was doing. I really wasn’t giving him a philosophy of ministry. I was just kind of telling him what my priorities were. And and I would have said what Michael said, I would wanted to have been word driven, and so the very first thing I would have said is, hey, I’m here to preach the word and to love the people and to pray for them and to disciple the elders so that they’re able to have their role In discipleship in the congregation and promote family religion in the life of the congregation, so that families are worshiping God and growing in grace together, not not just when we’re in meetings in the church. I would have, I would have had priorities, personal priorities, for ministry, but I had not thought a lot about how the word worked. And let me say these young campus ministers were ahead of me. They said, Well, look, our our philosophy of ministry is sort of the word should be working amongst our campus groups in two ways, justification and sanctification, and their their little informal motto for their campus ministry was reaching students for Christ and equipping students to serve. And so that’s you can see this sort of justification, sanctification. And so they said, Well, do you have that kind of a grid for ministry? And again, I I’d not, I’d not thought about that. I mean, obviously I wanted to, I wanted to preach justification, and I wanted to see people come to faith in Christ, and I wanted to encourage the congregation in their sanctification. I cared about both of those things, but I hadn’t thought about how that worked out in life, and that, that little embarrassing encounter, made me go back and start reading. And one of the, one of the, one of my favorite books on ministry is Charles bridges. I know, I know Michael and mark, and probably you love to read Charles bridges. Well, bridges is a guy that helped me think about this.

Matt Smethurst
And just for, just for listeners to know the title of of one of bridges is best works is the Christian ministry, yes, definitely still

Ligon Duncan
in print. You can get it, you know, you can get it right now. You can get in, I think, in paperback. So I started reading stuff like that, Matt, just because I wanted to make sure that I was being deliberate about what I was doing. And it didn’t make me jettison anything that I was doing. It just placed it in a context. If you asked me today, I would say I was just, I was just trying to do the ordinary means of grace. I was trying to lead with the ministry of the word and prayer and what my confessional Baptist friends would say the ordinances, what my confessional Presbyterian and Anglican friends would call the sacraments, word prayer and Sacraments at the very core of how God does this work in people, and to make sure I’m doing everything I can to foster that ministry, knowing that the Spirit uses the word in order to accomplish his work in the people of God. But I wouldn’t have been able to say it as a young minister, you know, I had to go think about how to say that for a long time. Matt, yeah,

Matt Smethurst
well, I’m happy you used that phrase ordinary means of grace. So, Michael, sometimes that’s a term that gets thrown out. What does that mean? And why is that so relevant to this particular conversation? Because, you know, I can imagine someone listening to this and. And nodding along and saying, Well, of course, I’m a pastor. Of course, I like the Bible. Of course, you know, I want my ministry to be informed by God’s word. But I also could hear them, them saying, but what about passages like First Corinthians nine, where Paul says, Hey, I’m basically willing to do anything short of sinning in order to reach as many people as possible. So how Michael, does the urgency that we ought to have in reaching the lost? How does that comport with a ministry that is built on the ordinary means of grace, trusting the word to do the work. How do we think through those things?

Michael Lawrence
Well, I certainly want us to feel that urgency. I think that’s exactly right. We also want to recognize that God has told us how he ordinarily works in this world. He ordinarily works through His word. He ordinarily responds to his people’s prayers. He ordinarily works through the gathered local church as it celebrates the ordinances or sacraments. I kind of don’t care which, what you call them, but baptism and the Lord’s suppers, they hold forth visibly for us the truth of the gospel in in saying that we’re putting forward a word driven philosophy of ministry, we’re not saying that God doesn’t work through means. We’re simply saying, Actually, he’s told us the means that he normally uses, and that is when we get his word out into the minds and the hearts of people. And there are a lot of different ways that can happen. I mean, it starts like the starting line for word ministry in my church is the Sunday morning pulpit. But then that ordinary work of the word then kind of reverberates and echoes and bounces around all week long through my church in small group, Bible studies and one on one Bible readings as people are getting together over the word and praying for one another and praying through the Word together, the Lord does his work. I love that because, of course, I don’t get any credit for it. You know, it’s not my words that are doing the work. It’s it’s his word that’s doing the work, and I think that’s why the Lord uses it. He doesn’t want to share His glory with somebody like me, nor should he. He’s going to receive the glory as people grow and are transformed and changed because of His Word in their life.

Ligon Duncan
And that’s not in any way Matt pitted against a personal ministry, right? I mean, we know very often it is in the context of personal ministry that a window is opened up for the word to do its work. So I had an elder take me aside as a young minister, and he said, ligand, walk to a wedding, run to a funeral. And what he meant by that was, Ligon, you’re going to have tremendous opportunities to get into the lives of people when their when their hearts are broken over the lost of loved ones, don’t miss that opportunity. That was such good advice to me, and I can tell you that I I saw how when people knew that I cared about them in their deepest need, it opened them up to receive the Word of God. And it became so Michael’s not setting the ministry of the word over that kind of work. That kind of work opens up the heart for the ministry of the word to do its work. And I saw that happen over and over when, when I was involved in people, in people’s lives, in the most significant things, and very often the most tragic things in their lives. It enabled them to receive the Word of God from me and and the spirit used that in in their lives. And I do think it’s important for younger ministers committed to a word driven ministry to do that in the very relational way that Jesus did. I mean, Jesus was all up in the business of his disciples, right? He knew he he, he knew their lives, he knew their foibles, their strengths, their weaknesses, and he lived life with them. And I, you know, I that that doesn’t in any way diminish the importance of a word driven ministry. It opens the door for it.

Matt Smethurst
That’s good, and it’s worth noting that we don’t even have to leave Paul’s correspondence to the Corinthians to see that the word was driving at all, even his desire to be flexible and adaptable and urgent in getting the gospel to as many as he. So First Corinthians, chapter one, you know, he insists on a gospel ministry being centered on something the world finds completely foolish, the message of the cross. And he resolves to know nothing except Christ and Him crucified. And then you think of the beginning of Second Corinthians, four. Two, he says, but we have not, but we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the Open statement of the truth, we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. So, as it’s been said, Paul understood that our job is to deliver the mail. And as we all know, tampering with mail is a federal offense. God is not in the market for editors. The Bible is not a rough draft. And Paul, that weighed heavily on Paul, and it ought to weigh heavily on us. And so Michael, I want to pitch another question to you, but I think the word driven that you’re using, and word driven is really the key, because any Bible believing pastor is going to be a word appreciative minister, a word favorable minister, but, but you’re saying we’re a word driven ministry is one in which God is setting the agenda on Sundays, and as it reverberates throughout the church. So I heard you say something once, Michael about Sunday worship, and you were talking about these kinds of things, and you said, the Sunday gathering is not primarily for unbelievers. Rather, that’s right, it’s primarily for and I was expecting you to say believers, but you said and it’s not for believers either. So who is the primary audience on Sunday, and why is that significant?

Michael Lawrence
Well, yeah, well, the primary audience on Sunday is God. We have gathered to offer him are our service, right? Our spiritual acts of worship. God is the audience for the gathering on Sunday, not the unbeliever. Though I want unbelievers there, because I want them to not only hear God’s word, I want them to see God’s people worshiping and be confronted with that. And of course not, it doesn’t. God is not served if his people do not gather to declare His praises and rehearse the marvelous deeds that he’s done. But I think it’s important that we remember who the audience is. That’s, that’s certainly, I mean, I’m in the business of communicating, so I want people to understand what I’m saying. I don’t want to use language that is unintelligible to my contemporary audience, but my only goal on Sunday morning is not to make myself understood to them, right? So I’m going to be asking some other questions, and I think word driven ministry pushes this like I’m going to be asking questions about reverence and awe before the Lord. I’m going to be asking questions about what honors him and glorifies Him, not just what makes the people present feel better about themselves or feel like they got what they needed, as if they showed up as religious consumers.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah, you’re going to be asking not just questions they are asking, but questions they ought to be asking exactly, and helping create those categories as as an act of of love leg. How does this topic of a philosophy of ministry relate to Monday to Saturday? So, you know, we understand on Sundays that, okay, the word is central. We trust that it’s not going to be our cool ideas or ingenuity that’s going to effect life change. It’s going to be God’s word. Michael made a passing reference, though, to people in his church getting together throughout the week to read the Bible and encourage So, how does this get translated into the daily lives of of our church members? Well,

Ligon Duncan
if, if the minister views himself as facilitating a word mediated encounter between the living God and His people and and he believes that that word is used by the Spirit to do its work in God’s people. Then that has a 24/7 365, ramification. And it it can show in lots of different ways, but let me just say one way that it shows up in the in the ministry of that of that pastor. I remember visiting an elder of mine who was dying of cancer, and he had not been conscious for about eight hours. And in fact, his wife was a little reluctant to let me go back into the he was in his house. They had the hospice there at the house, and the she was a little resident. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted me to see him in the kind of suffering that he was experiencing, but she finally let me go back, and he had not, he had not responded to anybody for about a day, and I went back and I spoke, and he immediately opened his eyes. And I think it’s not just because I was a friend Matt, it’s I think he heard the voice that he was used to hearing from the pulpit speak to him, and I had the last conversation with him in his life. And I just think pastors need to recognize your faithful ministry of the word on the Lord’s Day is going to resonate even down to that level throughout the life of your congregation. And I got to, I got to speak to my friend one last time this side of glory. And I’ll, I’ll be able to embrace him again one day. But thank God he had heard me read the Word and preach the Word and pray for him in public, and he responded to that. And I think that pastors should be encouraged that sometimes, when they don’t get to see things that dramatic, the word is still doing its work. Pastors have to have a long view sometimes, because, boy, you can sow and so and so and so. And feel like this is getting nowhere in the life of the congregation. It is. If you are sowing the Word of God, the Spirit will use the word now. He’ll use it when he wants to, where he wants to, on whom he wants to, in the way that he wants to. You know, we always need to remember, we don’t get to decide how the Lord is going to use our faithfulness. Our job is to sow. But I think every minister should understand whether they whether it’s people so excited about learning the Word of God, they want to get together on Tuesdays at lunch and do a Bible study, or they want to get together on Thursday nights and pray together, or they want to go out and share the gospel in the neighborhood, the word is going to do its work in a lot of ways, and ministers just need to be encouraged to that end.

Matt Smethurst
And again, I think that a lot of missteps are well intentioned, because I think few ministers are waking up in the morning saying, How can I be a pragmatist today? How can I sideline the Word of God in order to reach people? But it’s a hard thing to pour your heart into a sermons week in and week out, and preach to people who look pretty much the exact same way they did seven days before. And you can just start to wonder, is this really accomplishing anything? Is it moving the needle? But I’m helped just to think about the fact that, you know, I’ve forgotten 99.9% of meals I’ve eaten in my life, but they’ve kept me alive, amen. And in a similar way, the Lord uses faithful, forgettable sermons to beautify and build up his bride in ways they’re not even aware of, and we won’t be there until glory.

Michael Lawrence
I’ll give you another example of that. When I got here 14 years ago, the elders of my church were so faithful to pray. They prayed, particularly for all the folks that were in the hospital. That’s how they prayed for the church. They pretty much prayed for the hospital list. And we started a practice that I had learned actually from Mark of reading the passage that we were going to be preached on, that was going to be preached on that coming Sunday, and we would praise God for something we saw in that passage. So this is bringing two different means of grace together, the reading of God’s Word and prayer. We would praise God for something we saw in that passage, and then we would pray for one page in our church directory. And you didn’t have to be sick to get prayed for. You didn’t have to be in the hospital. We pray for we’re gonna pray for everybody over 14 years later. 14 years later, it’s not just the elders. They’re doing this. Many people throughout the congregation are doing this. They are praying God’s word for one another, and I’ve got to listen in and over 14 years, I’ve got to hear that kind of how the quality of their prayers have changed the quality of my people’s prayers has moved from the merely physical, which is important, but it’s not everything, to praying God’s promises and God’s truths, praying for sanctification and growth and grace for one another, simply by the practice of The means of grace. Now I didn’t see that overnight, but 14 years later, it’s really evident when you listen to my people pray.

Matt Smethurst
That’s encouraging, and that’s probably a good note to end on, because what a compelling vision for how just faithfully teaching God’s word and promoting. A philosophy of ministry that flows out of it is going to change the very way that our people relate to the God of the universe and to one another. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the everyday pastor from the gospel coalition, Michael, thanks for joining LIG and me for this conversation. Please pass it along to a friend so that you can help them to find fresh joy in the work of ministry. Please subscribe if you’re able on YouTube or a podcast platform so that we can continue to encourage pastors. Thank you.