Preaching and Biblical, Systematic, Historical, and Pastoral Theology (Part 3b)

Don Carson discusses how theological study, across its various disciplines, should be intimately connected to pastoral concerns. He emphasizes the importance of integrating theological reflection with a focus on its applicability to people and real-life situations, rather than treating it as a purely academic discipline. This sermon explores how pastoral theology can shape preaching, calling for compassion, understanding people’s needs, and a Christ-centric approach.

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You may wrestle strongly with exactly what is meant by imputation, but at the end of the day you ought to be able to preach it. The problem, of course, is that for many reasons, both good and bad, our theology becomes detached from pastoral concerns. So we sometimes use adjectives such as theoretical theology, academic theology, polemical theology, or technical theology over against pastoral theology. We create these antitheses. Now none of those adjectives are intrinsically bad.

You might use technical theology to talk about theology that is encumbered with footnotes, is working out of the Greek and Hebrew text, is advanced, and is interacting with the best minds on the subject, but the question is, “Does it have to be non-pastoral because of it, or can it written in a way that is reverent and edifying for people, at least at that level who can read at that level, still to find it pastoral? Why do you have to put technical over against pastoral?” You can do this with all of these categories.

It is sometimes easier to do academic work divorced from thinking through pastoral questions. All you need is a good mind and a bit of training, but I’m not sure that’s ever quite godly because, although you need a good mind and a bit of training to think at a high level about some of these things (that’s true; you need the languages and all that), it is not ever supposed to be thought of as a discipline like studying Shakespeare, King Tut and cuneiform sources, or microbiology, where it’s just a world in itself and it’s creating its own ideas.

You’re talking about the living God and his relationship with his own image bearers. You’re talking about heaven and hell, and who Christ is. There’s a sense in which any sort of divorce along those lines is intrinsically idolatrous. Intrinsically.

I’m sure some of you have experienced this, and if you ever teach at a college or seminary, you’ve certainly experienced it. A student comes in bright-eyed and bushy tailed. They’ve been reading their Bibles, and they’re really excited about reading their Bibles. They’re keen to evangelize. They’re sharing the gospel all the time. They’re really excited that now they’re going to study the Bible, thinking it’s going to be really, really fun.

About three months later, they can’t figure out which end is up. L˙ō, l˙eis, l˙ei, l˙omen, l˙ete, l˙ousin. They’re learning paradigms and how to outline stuff. They’ll creep into your office one day feeling a bit guilty and shamefaced. “I’m not enjoying the Bible anymore. What’s happened?” Have some of you gone through that, either from the doing-it-yourself end or from the end of having to provide counsel for some of these people?

I always think that it is a mistake to tell such people simply, “Well, you still have to do the academic critical work; just make sure you have time for your private devotions where you can be as mystical as you want.” I think that’s a mistake. Now we wouldn’t put it quite as crassly as that, but I think that’s a mistake. The aim always should be, in your so-called devotional times, that you’re still using your brain to think critically.

In your critical work, where you’re working in the Greek text and doing careful exegesis, you should still be offering this up to God in devotion. Part of the problem is this sort of person is already working under a bifurcated notion in which you sort of have a tingly-in-the-spine, excited, emotional view of Christianity over here and an academic, theoretical, cold-as-ice view of Christianity over there.

Surely if we’re to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, you want to put all these things together. You really don’t want to take them apart; you want to put them together. So that’s the kind of pastoral theology I’m finally interested in. That is to say, it’s not something that you add on top.

In other words, for our purposes, what I mean by pastoral theology is a perspective in all theological reflection … all of it, at any level … that focuses constantly on the applicability of the Word of God to people. That’s all I mean. Now granted that understanding of pastoral theology.… How shall pastoral theology properly shape our preaching?

1. Cultivate compassion.

In other words, it’s not just a question of cultivating ideas, understanding what ideas are true and false, and being faithful, it’s also a question of cultivating compassion for people. How often do we read of Jesus, that he saw them as sheep without a shepherd and had compassion on them?

Now he could have said instead, “Clearly the theological prejudices of the Pharisees have corrupted these people so they really do not understand the truth as they ought. I need to write a dissertation to refute them.” Well, in some ways he does refute them, doesn’t he? But he has compassion on them.

When I was still a young man, I was busy that particular summer trying to plant a church in the Ottawa Valley. The guy who was over me was a pastor of a nearby church. He was older and more established, but he was also single as it happened. As a result, we had more time in the evenings than some pastors have.

Once in every three or four weeks, we might drive up into the outskirts of the Laurentian Mountains to a lake called Pink Lake about 45 minutes from Hull (about an hour and a half from where we were). We’d drive up there after supper and go swimming. In the day, you’d find people there on holidays or whatever, but at night there was hardly anybody ever there, just nothing.

There was a raft that was anchored about a quarter of a mile out, and you could lazily swim out to the raft and back. It was really quite a refreshing way to end up the day after visiting endless homes door-to-door and doing all the things you’re trying to do to get a small church going right at the very beginning.

On this particular occasion, we got there and stretched. There was not a soul in sight. It had been a warm day, but this lake was just as smooth as glass. There was no wind, fresh air. It was going to be really terrific. Before we stripped down to our swimming suits, suddenly about six or seven vehicles stormed into the place with high school kids with their boom boxes and barbeques.

They were having a high school graduation thing. They turned those things up to about 140 decibels, completely regardless of anybody else that might be there (especially me). They were taking over the place. It was going to be noisy, loud, and raucous and, quite frankly, right on the edge of immorality. There was booze there that shouldn’t have been. These were high school kids that shouldn’t.… It was going to be dangerous before this thing was out.

We sort of stood there agape at all of this, and I turned to him to express my indignation, my righteous indignation, about all of this, and he had tears streaming down his face. He said, “High school kids. What a mission field.” We had both seen exactly the same thing, but one of us responded with compassion.

2. Cultivate an understanding of people and their needs in biblical categories.

You can talk about a lot of things that are part of felt needs today. Loneliness (not least in our big cities), questions of self-identity, hate and bitterness, pleasure and where you find it, narcissism, what you do with retirement. Lots of felt needs.

If you understand these needs purely in sociological or self-identified forms, then the way you respond to them will be in the same sociological categories. They have to be transmuted in your own thinking into the biblical equivalents or into what’s behind them. What’s behind loneliness? It’s often lack of being tied to a family, an actual family or the family of the people of God.

More broadly, it’s not knowing that you’re genuinely loved by God himself or seeing that Christ himself promises “in this life, brothers and sisters … a hundredfold, and in the life to come eternal life.” It’s being disconnected from God, his people, and so on. Do you see what I mean? You can analyze it in biblical-theological categories.

Pleasure. The Bible dares speak of “the pleasure of sin for a season.” Contrast that with the joy of the Lord. How do you work that out? Self-identity is so often bound up with images that we’ve absorbed from the advertising world, whether you have implants, your hair is dyed, trying to look younger than you are, or expressing yourself as being free from this or that. On the other hand, at what point is that idolatry?

Our self-identity really ought to be, first and foremost, children of God. Forgiven. Under the lordship of Christ. Living in the light of eternity. Cultivate an understanding of people and their needs in biblical categories, because that is how you will be better enabled to use the truth of the Word of God to meet their real needs rather than ultimately domesticating the Scripture to merely horizontal, sociological analyses.

3. Cultivate a knowledge of the diversity of people in your congregation.

I’ve already said something about that in passing in one of the other discussions, about young pastors with a 6 month-old baby always having the same sort of illustration about the pure milk of the Word. I’ve said enough about that.

I will say this though in passing. If your church profile, for example, is dear ol’ ducks with an average age of 63 and you’ve got no families, young people, or non-Christians at all, there is a sense in which you need to minister to the people that you’ve got, that’s true, but you also need to minister to the people who are not there yet but whom you want.

Let me explain what I mean by that. If you preach only to 63-year-olds (retirement problems, old age, and rheumatism), then if some young family happens to come in, hears you only preaching to 63-year-olds, and there’s absolutely nothing there for anybody else who’s under 62, you’re not going to keep them.

Part of what you ought to be doing, even if there’s no one or scarcely no one there, is preaching to the people in your community that you want to be there, even if they’re not there yet. Then when they trip in (by an invitation from you or from somebody else), they’re caught, or at least are more likely to be caught, by the relevance of the Word of this ministry to them where they are. That’s partly then a function of cultivating a knowledge of the diversity of people in your own congregation and community.

4. Cultivate a prepared mind and heart for the turning points in people’s lives.

Some sociologist wrote in a book 20 years ago (I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it rings true) that, on average in the Western world, families go through a crisis every five years. Now that might be too sweeping; I’m sure there are lots of exceptions.

There’s somebody who’s being born or dying, the first day of school, a rebellious teenager, somebody got pregnant, somebody got sacked at work, the economy has gone down, the mortgage is going up, somebody’s becoming a drunk and beating up his wife, you’re going to have to move to another city, or whatever. On average, families go through a crisis once every five years.

Obviously you can’t look at a family and say, “Well, you’ve had four years of clear shot, just watch out for this next year.” It’s an average thing; I understand that. Nevertheless, if you cultivate a prepared mind and heart for the turning points in people’s lives, then you are already ready, thinking about, and have in your files increasing biblical, theological, and pastoral material to give to people when they’re coming up to a marriage, when there’s a birth of a baby, when they’re diagnosed with cancer, and so on.

I used to prepare biblical material and biblical texts that I’d keep on file for these sorts of turning point in people’s lives so that when something came up, it’s one that I had dealt with it six times before, and I’d gradually increased stuff in the file. I’d write them a note or something with respect to all this material. Maybe I’d throw in a little booklet that I already had written up or that I’d found was particularly useful. I didn’t have to start from ground zero again. It becomes part of developing, of cultivating, a pastoral mind.

5. Cultivate a rapid, automatic, reflexive turn to Jesus, turn to God, turn to the cross, turn to the resurrection, turn to the Spirit.

What I mean by that is that some of us have been so bashed around by those who teach us counseling psychology, by books or whatever, that as soon as somebody has some sort of problem, we’re immediately thinking in all of the standard categories. Was this one abused by his father? I wonder if they’re getting enough sleep?

Now all of those things are necessary. That’s part of mature diagnosis and understanding what’s going on. I’m not denying any of that for a moment, but there’s a danger that we become exactly like secular counselors, except we have a little prayer at the end, instead of having an automatic, reflexive, very swift pointing of people to Jesus, to the gospel, to God, to the cross, to the resurrection. Just automatic. That’s the first thing.

Now within that framework, it might need to work out in terms of the church helping to provide food for a dislocated family or whatever. I’m not denying any of those things, but unless it is part of our reflexive reaction to turn people to Jesus, then I’m not certain that we are discharging Christian ministry. Christian pastoral ministry, even in death. So instead of endless navel-gazing and horizontal reflection, cultivate a rapid, automatic, reflexive turn to Jesus.

6. Cultivate connections between, on the one hand, lofty thoughts of God and profound understanding of doctrine and, on the other hand, people.

When you’re thinking through some massive area of doctrine that’s part of your preparing for a sermon, a catechism class on Westminster Confession of Faith because you’re Presbyterian and you go through these things people have to believe, or some point of the Thirty-nine Articles, and you’re thinking through how you’re going to get that across, cultivate meditation and reflection on how this bites in the Christian life.

What does it do? What does it mean for how you live and believe? What’s the application in the individual life? Cultivate that all the time. You work at that all that time, so that when you’re preaching and talking about these doctrines, you’re automatically teasing it out in people’s lives. So you’re going through the attributes of God, let’s say from the Confession. For every one of the attributes of God, what’s the cash value in terms of our lives?

Now you don’t want to mean that God’s attributes serve no other purpose than to give us something or other in our lives. You don’t want to do that. That becomes human-centeredness again, and yet all of the attributes of God do say something to us in our lives. Take his self-existence. What should that say to us? By contrast with us, our existence is dependent. We need to acknowledge it as part of who we are. We’re not self-existent. Moreover, it also is part of the fact that God doesn’t need us. Dependent beings have needs. God has no needs. None.

Isn’t that a point that Paul makes in Athens, for example, in Acts 17? “It’s not as if he needs us but gives us everything, life, breath, and everything else.” God doesn’t need us, so you can’t barter with him. If he has no needs, you can’t barter with him. “You give me this, God, and I’ll give you that.” You can’t barter with a God who has no needs. It’s going to be of grace; that all flows out of God’s self-existence. Do you see? You can do this with attribute after attribute of God.

7. Cultivate the ability to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.

Now in a small church, this one isn’t difficult. At least it’s rarely difficult. In a big church, it’s exceedingly difficult because in any given weekend, you’re likely to have two weddings and a funeral, or the reverse, where you’re supposed to be rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep. Do you know what I mean?

Many is the time in one day when you’re talking to a woman who’s just been diagnosed with breast cancer, somebody who’s just been converted in college, and somebody else who’s just announced their wedding engagement. The emotional pull and tug in all of that can really take its toll, but learning to be able to handle all of that (weeping with those who weep; rejoicing with those who rejoice) because you’re others-centered is just a huge part of pastoral shrewdness in ministry.

8. Cultivate the prudential wisdom that refuses to give too much time to bottomless-pit parishioners.

This one I will have to put some exceptions to. Now I don’t want to take away the importance of the kinds of things Peter Adam was talking about yesterday. I do not mean that you don’t love them. I don’t mean that you give them no time.

I knew a minister in England who was superb at the door when people came out to talk. He would talk to a Regius professor in something-or-other in the university with respect and courtesy and give him his full attention. Then the next fellow might have been one of the street dossers, smelling of alcohol, with a mental IQ of about 63 but who always came to the church, and giving him exactly the same respect, attention, and courtesy.

To my mind, that’s very Christ-like. That’s good. But almost every church (not quite every church) has a certain percentage of what I call bottomless-pit parishioners who will bleed you emotionally, bleed you in time, and bleed you in energy so that you don’t have time or energy left for teaching the Word of God, for preparing the Word of God, for studying, or for training the people that you are called as part of your job to do.

You can’t allow that to happen. You can’t do it, because you’re not loving enough if you do. You’re claiming to love them, but there are all kinds of other people that can get some help and training if you reserve some time for study, thought, prayer, and interaction with those who’ve become helpers.

Now sometimes there are things you can do depending on the makeup of the church. It’s not easy when 90 percent of the church is sociologically from the bottom rungs, but where you have a mix in the church there may be some people in the church who have what I call the gift of hand-holding.

In other words, I don’t want too many people who think that I exist primarily just to hold their hands. They want to talk endlessly. They want to come and.… They’re retired, or they don’t have a job to do. You give them something to do, and they’ll walk away. They just want to bleed your time, and they have problems all the time. You give to them, and the problem is not going away. You can’t just dismiss them, but they’re bottomless-pit parishioners.

The church has to have the structures to help them in some measure, but they cannot bleed you dry so that you cannot be a teacher of the Word of God which you’re primarily called to be. So if you can find some people in the church with the gift of hand-holding who just are very good at listening and praying with people.… It may not be a profound, life-transforming counseling ministry. It’s just the gift of hand-holding.

A few people like that in a church are a God-send. You can match them up just a wee bit. Then it frees up those who have more gifts in the area of teaching and so on to do their share in the hand-holding side but not allowing the bottomless-pit parishioners to evacuate your time so that in the name of compassion, you are showing no compassion to the church as a whole. You have to say that surrounded with enough caveats and footnotes, but it still has to be said.

9. Cultivate a healthy independence from your congregation.

This is another one that has to be said with caveats and footnotes, but it still has to be said. I know that you have to say a lot of other things as well. You’re part of the congregation. You love the congregation. You’re not above the congregation. You have a certain function in the congregation. All that’s true.

By all means, find people from whom you can solicit suggestions and criticisms. I’m not denying any of that. On the other hand, sooner or later in ministry (maybe sooner and later) a crisis will erupt where if you have certain favorite friends in the congregation and they’re on one side of an issue and you’re on the other side or if you have developed the kind of thing whereby you are thought to be in somebody’s pocket, it is far, far more difficult than if you have learned to fear God and nobody else.

When you first move in to many parishes (it’s not always the case) always beware of those who most want to be your friends right away. They are almost always manipulative. I shouldn’t say things so generally, but there’s some truth to it. I know there are wonderful exceptions, but just be careful.

Preserve a certain kind of independence so that you treat everybody with respect, listen to everybody, try to be friends to everybody, and be even-handed, but to develop the kind of intimate friendships with just some, that at some level you need, can just set you up for some devastating problems in the church. So it’s for their good that you must develop a reputation of fearing God and not fearing anybody else.

Now that does not mean being aloof. There are different personalities, of course. Someone like Mark Dever, to whom I’ve already referred, is one of the most gregarious souls I have ever met. He’s just unbelievably gregarious. His study is two rooms with the wall knocked out between, with book-lined shelves all around. His desk is at one end, and then he’s got a whopping big desk down the middle where he invites students and others to come in and sit while he’s preparing his sermon.

They will ask him some question about assurance, and he’ll say, “Over there. There’s a book over there. When you’re finished reading that chapter, summarize it for me.” Meanwhile, he’s writing a bit more. “Hey, did you see what this commentator says about this?” He’s talking back.… He’s just one of these gregarious people. I can’t study like that. I have to have some peace and quiet!

So I’m acknowledging that there are different personalities, and we’re not all in the same mold and all that. I’m not suggesting aloofness or anything like that. All I’m suggesting is you still have to have a certain kind of healthy independence so that your first and foremost, your deepest, and your ultimate allegiance and dependence is with God. Fear God, and fear nobody else.

10. Cultivate your own maturation.

At the end of 1 Timothy 4, Paul says to Timothy, “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Let all see your progress.” Both in doctrine and in life, if people are seeing your progress, then after five years people who are at all reflective ought to look at you and say, “You know, he was a pretty good preacher five years ago, but he’s just getting stronger and better now.” At the same time, they ought to be able to say, “He loved us then, but his love for us is still growing.” “Watch your life and doctrine. Let all see your progress.”

Those are my reflections on preaching and pastoral theology. All of these are designed to enrich your preaching of the Word of God, and they’re all predicated on the initial definition of pastoral theology that I gave you at the beginning. If you think of pastoral theology as an entirely separate discipline, the way it is treated in many of our Bible colleges, some of what I’ve just said now won’t make sense, but if you accept the definition I gave you, almost all the rest of it follows.

Male: Just following on from your point nine, how have you experienced, or how have you put into play, both the idea of sharing these very lives and making time to study the Word of God? I’m kind of an extrovert, so I love to do that. How do I be careful not to kind of get into someone’s pocket?

Don Carson: Or jeopardize your family. In the name of so much giving your life, you’re not having time to nurture your own soul or prepare your studies. It is so easy to take one of the ideals that the apostle spells out and then in the name of that ideal so distort the balance of things that you are forgetting other things that the apostle also spells out.

By definition, pastors, elders, bishops in the New Testament are all the same person; however, different titles have overtones. In the New Testament one of the necessary conditions or qualifications is “able to teach,” which presupposes study (finding things to say) and the ability to communicate it. That means that you give yourself to reading. It means reflection, meditation, time alone with God, and thought.

At the same time, if you push that one too hard, then you could justify a hermitage existence. Then how do you give yourself to others as Paul also wants to do? An awful lot of this, it seems to me, is a question of balance that is partly a function of the kinds of people that you’re serving, partly a function of who you are, and partly a function of the particular needs of the church, your family and how old the children are, and how needy, giving, or strong your spouse is.

It’s a function of a lot of different things that have to be examined again and again, which is why I cannot give you an answer in terms of, “Spend 36.7 percent of your time on …” You can’t do that. It keeps changing, and part of it is a matter of being reflective and honest enough to keep adjusting these things as you go along.

I would also be inclined to say that whatever you find it easier to do, while the flip side is the harder thing for you to do (while recognizing that you might have particular gifts along that line that need to be honored), pour a little more time in the harder thing. So if you’re very gregarious and find it hard to study, make sure you breach out some time for study. If, on the other hand, you just love to study and it’s people you don’t like, then obviously you need to work a little harder on the other side.

Male: People often talk about the whole thing with children and protecting your family and so on. I heard one person say that we could turn that into a form of idolatry as ministers. I always ponder that.

Don: Yes, that’s true. Both are true. Many churches will start gauging the minister by the children and pose all kinds of unreasonable expectations on children. Then the parents need to defend their own children in front of the congregation and sometimes gently tell off those who are busy imposing false expectations. In particular you need to defend your spouse in this regard, often regarding their expectations about what “the minister’s wife” is supposed to do.

At the same time, I have seen some young men in particular who have heard all the warnings in this regard so much that they have so sheltered their family that there are all kinds of things they won’t do in the congregation because they’re having family time. “My mother’s dying of cancer.” “Sorry, tonight’s my family time.” You can’t do that sort of thing. Once again, it’s balance, poise, listening carefully to Scripture, trying to get the balance right, and confessing when you make mistakes. I don’t have formulaic answers to any of those sorts of things.

Male: In a sidebar to point eight with the bottomless-pit type of folks, Mark Driscoll in his book, Confession of a Reformission Rev, starts with wanting to be able to go in a particular direction, and there are these people that basically draw away from the missional idea of the church to the point where to some people, when they started to complain to him, he basically said, “I hope you’ll be very happy in your next church.”

At what point are we doing a disservice to these folks in terms of not loving them the way they want to be loved versus the overall mission, what you’re kind of pointing at, and saying you’ve got a larger commitment to the larger body. How do we deal with that when it’s not just people that are sucking you emotionally dry but also visionally?

Don: Mark Driscoll is on the council of the Coalition. I know him very well. I’ve preached at Mars Hill. He’s got all kinds of giftedness in all kinds of ways, but temperamentally he is an iconoclast. Temperamentally he’s likely to tear things down and call it faithfulness. He’s got a particular personality in a particular church in the most secular part of the country. The Pacific Northwest is the most secular part of the US. He’s seeing lots of people converted.

I want to be very careful about criticizing, but that doesn’t mean (and he knows this; I’m not talking behind his back) that I like everything that he’s doing. Partly it stems from his understanding of leadership. He analyzes leadership as prophets, priests, or kings. Prophets speak a lot, but they don’t have a good idea of leadership decisions (executive decision).

He sees the priests as sort of counselors (touchy-feely, helpful coming alongside), and people have gifts along those lines. But he sees himself as a king, and kings reign. I think this is a hugely flawed understanding of what pastoral ministry is. Pastoral ministry stuff is GP, general practitioner, and so it takes on many different kinds of things. You can’t afford to be a specialist.

Within this framework, you want to start asking.… Where is the component that you find in Jesus, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoking wick he will not snuff out”? Now there may come a time when some people in a congregation who are maybe not converted and who have.…

Occasionally you see a church where you’ve had a pastor that’s been there for three years, then the next guy for two years, and the next guy for three years, because there are one or two families in that church that are just out to control everything, and they will destroy whoever comes. Sooner or later it’s going to take a strong person to handle them and get rid of them. There should be church discipline; it’s hard to do, but it can be done. My brother had a case like that once.

If it’s just one of these things where it’s an intergenerational thing or an intercultural thing where you have poor people who don’t understand very much, don’t want the boat rocked, and they need to be brought along slowly, then surely it becomes part of a pastoral concern not to snuff out the smoking reed. I am more impressed by …

I knew a church (not in America; this one was in the UK) that had about 35 or 40 people on a Sunday morning, average age of about 55 or 60, deeply informed about their confessional stance, and so on. Culturally they were very, very conservative. The minister who came was a young guy. He was only 24 or 25. Over the next 11 years (before, in fact, he became a missionary to Nigeria) he actually built it to 300, of whom 75 were university students, with a very different flavor but without losing the original 30. Now that impresses me.

So again, there are exceptions. Occasionally some people have to be gently given it, but boy that should be the very last resort, to give somebody the boot. You’re trying to bring it together.

Male: I think in light of what you’ve just said, one of my concerns.… Maybe it’s just the Anglican Church I don’t know, but it’s the idea that some, it seems to me over the years, have sought some sort of position either in a large so-called successful church or in a hard situation. The story that you’ve told of somebody that can actually go into a poor place and not lose those people, that actually moves me.

In my own situation, over the years different models of church have been presented. One has been that of a sort-of associational model, whereby this particular service attracts university students or this particular service attracts tertiary, educated, middle-class people in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne or whatever. I was interested in your comments on that sort of thing in the light of New Testament diversity and …

Don: There was a mission theory that became very popular from about 30 years ago to about 15 or 20 years ago where the whole aim of effective evangelism and outreach was to target particular groups as culturally-unified groups. I’ll say something for that in a moment, but the result can be very, very different churches or different congregations where people don’t mix, and then you start hearing the overtones of Jesus warnings. “Love your enemies.” Even the tax collectors have their own friends.

You get enough people of the same sociological grouping together and of course they’re going to get on. There’s no sign of grace in that. You come to Ephesians where God has taken Jew and Gentile and constituted one new humanity out of it, overtones in James and elsewhere where there are rich and there are poor in the congregation, or how Paul handles the diversity, “I am of Paul. I am of Cephas. I am of Apollos.” He views that as a mark of terrible immaturity, not able to hear the mature things of the Word of God and so on in 1 Corinthians.

So there is just so much in the Bible that emphasizes the maturity of the congregation that is diverse, hangs together, and loves one another in any case. The small element of truth on the other side, it seems to me, is that in terms of reaching out, you sometimes are more effective by having a small unit that is going after certain kinds of people.

For example, I know a church in Sydney that develops small outreach units for Greeks in the area. It’s partly linguistically orientated, but there’s a certain cultural thing there too. They have three different forms of outreach for different Chinese groups, another one for Italians, and this sort of thing, but once people are converted in these small groups, their aim is to bring them into the whole church and get them better integrated so that they’re not just remaining endlessly in that small group that is culturally more uniform.

So I don’t mind if for pragmatic, evangelistic reasons, even as a sign of love that respects a certain kind of cultural diversity, you have some outreach in this area or that area that is more or less culturally uniform. If you have an evangelistic Bible study, for example, that is made up of some tertiary-educated people and some people who are illiterates, it really is very difficult to have a discussion.

It just is very, very difficult, and it may be better to break that up into two groups, but at the end of the day, as people are converted through those groups, I really want them to get into one church too as part of what is demonstrated by our oneness in Christ. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, but that’s what I like to see.

Male: Do you have any resources in place for us for numbers six and two? I was interested in those ideas, connecting the lofty God with people and understanding people in terms of biblical categories. Has anyone written on those things?

Don: People probably have written on them, but I don’t know it. In other words, my first area of bibliographical competence tends to be in domains to do with exegesis, theology, and all this kind of stuff. There may well be some pastoral things in this area that are really quite good. If so, I don’t know what they are. These are things that I’ve thought about as I’ve tried to meditate on the Word of God and experience pastoral work.