Shepherding Notes 2

Ministering the Word into the Soil

One way of answering the question—What is the purpose of this ministry? (small groups, coffee-house discipleship, worship music, women’s)—is to spread a passion for the glory of Christ through worldview and gospel transformation. But that seems to me to be an unattractive way of saying it in our day. It is also incomplete in terms of the specific fruit we desire. So my task will be to persuade you that this transformation of the believer’s soul is the first thing that we are after, and then to challenge you to craft a statement of your own that will take the substance of this from the mind to the affections to the will of those to whom you minister. So the overall philosophy of ministry in any biblical church is rooted in God’s means of creating believers through the act of preaching; only the specifics of applying it in diverse ministries vary. What is applied remains the same. The way I will do this is two-fold: First, to argue from Scripture that the human soul that is under the discipline of the Holy Spirit does work in this “top-down” fashion; Second, to argue against the church pragmatism of our day that seeks to create what C. S. Lewis called “men without chests”—thinking and feeling, but with no direct connection between the two. This will be thick, so, enjoy!

We begin by examining the words of the apostle Paul:

Romans 12:2 – Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

This is a classic text in how a Christian ought to think, and how he or she ought to mature. Notice two things about the structure of the verse: First, conforming and transforming are pit against each other as opponents. Second, the discernment of the latter half of the verse is treated as a clause of, and is rooted in, the transformation in the first half of the verse. Thus, I will argue, there is an unseen spiritual phenomenon at work (transformation vs. conformation) and there is also a human phenomenon, albeit mostly unseen, at work (theoretical transformation/practical application). By saying that this transformation of our minds in order to practically discern is the human phenomenon, I am suggesting that this is our most immediate responsibility. However, this does not mean that the largely unseen spiritual phenomena are not ours to tackle: prayer, words of encouragement, and acts of service are all things that the Bible teaches us edify our brothers and sisters in ways that we may not quickly notice. We must be aware of both levels, but we are more consistently influential in the transmission of biblical truth.

To the first part, Paul teaches us the spiritual principle that our minds are not unlike a field that will return to the wild if rain, seed, and the soil are not all performing their function. Our souls are constantly being compared to a farmer’s soil in Scripture. As to this verse, conforming to the patterns of this age is not merely a danger; it is our default. This is true of the whole of the soul. If I am not actively seeking transformation of my own soul, then my whole soul is still being active, whether I know it or not. If I am starving my intellect from reflecting upon the things of God, then mindless curiosity will begin to carry my brain away into other endeavors. If I am repressing my affections that were made for satisfaction in God, then my longings will still be present and leaping up to some other flame. If I prefer indecision when the Bible commands my will, then I have neglected the fact that the decision to not make a decision is still a decision.

In other words, there are only these two ways: active pursuit of God or else conforming back to all that which opposes Him. How we come to the feast of worship in order to escape this conforming will become more obvious when we look at the second aspect of this verse. By having our minds renewed (worldview shift), we are now ready to test everything else (practical discernment). In observing this order, it should be plain that how we think in the inner life of mind will determine our affections, which in turn determine our decisions. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” The word “train” (khaw-nak’) comes from the ancient world of midwifery. Newborn infants would have crushed dates rubbed into their gums to cultivate a taste for the mother’s milk. Why do so many kids from Christian homes rebel once they leave the home? It is because their good behavior was merely external—driven by fear, manipulation, or shallowness of the soul, as Voddie Baucham explains:

Our children will ultimately act on what they believe too. If we do not give our children a biblical worldview, they will simply follow our rules while they are under our watchful eye, but as soon as they gain independence, they will begin to make decisions based upon their worldview. How many times have we seen this scenario played out? A young man or woman who was raised in a ‘good Christian home’ goes off to college and loses his cotton-pickin’ mind! What happened? It’s actually quite simple; the restraints were removed, and his worldview took over.[1]

When the human soul is not persuaded that the world is actually bigger than the one in which current sinful behavior is justified, there remains no motivation to break loyalties with the sin in question. That is why the current trend in application-saturated preaching and discipleship needs to be taken with a block of salt. As with childrearing, so with other forms of disciple-making: If we do not train up the whole soul by transforming the mind, then any momentary behavioral change will be nothing more than a reshuffling of the dirty deck of cards. In other words, application is always a dangerous thing to be holding in our hands. If it is not done with a constant connection to overarching biblical doctrines, then it will only serve to bolster the sinner’s more underlying problem. They will simply shift the plot of land in which the root of sin sprouts up, though the particular plant may look different to the naked eye. Though there is no space for it here, another consequence of application without doctrinal roots is a principle-legalism, where one or more of these behavioral shifts actually become attractive to the hearer; but, having missed the forest for the tree, he or she begins to beat those around her with that tree.[2]

An obvious question that results from this will be: “But isn’t preaching for doctrine, and the other ministries for application?” No—not at all. Both the preacher and the small group leader must labor to drive the truth deep into the soil, and that requires two things—a real seed and a good shovel. Beware of setting these against each other! And, oh by the way, even when you think hard about both of those, there needs to be a total contentment in the rain and the soil as well. All of these are necessary: seed (the Word), the shovel (application), the soil (the heart and its context), and the rain (the Holy Spirit). Any vision of ministering to real people that does not grapple with all four of these, all the time, is going to be shortsighted.

In terms of balancing out the pulpit with the small group, we should say that the sermon must be heavy on the doctrine so that there is weight of application that will drop, and then the small group leader must ensure that the soil is still flooded and stirring with seed before he or she begins working the ground. So both the pulpit and the small group engage in both doctrine and application. The difference is that the small group leader has much more flexibility to take a dozen or so people down to the soil to get their own hands dirty and inspect for that transformation. A mentor discipling a single person at a coffee house has even more of this flexibility.

Everything in the contemporary church culture screams out against such a holistic, top-down approach. Yet the Bible knows of nothing else. The letters are all written in this form—doctrine first; practice following—and when anyone attempts to get us to see things otherwise, common sense might ask: Apply what? Practice what? Works for what? When Paul wanted to set Titus apart from the wolves that assailed the Cretan believers, he said “But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine” [Titus 2:1]. What is so instructive about the second chapter of Titus is that what the Apostle goes on to instruct his protégé in were the doctrines of masculinity, femininity, and vocation—all very practical things to be sure. The Greek word he uses for “teach” is lalei instead of the ordinary word for the apostles’ teaching, didache. Nor did he use the regular word for preaching, kerygma. Unlike these more normative terms, the command to lalei in sound doctrine refers to common, everyday talk—table talk. It is this that is the heart and soul of discipleship: a doctrine of gender identity, a doctrine of relationships, a doctrine of dress, a doctrine of calling, a doctrine of affections, a doctrine of edifying speech, etc. In other words, there is a right way to think about absolutely everything. If there was not, then what exactly are we advising people to do in the everyday things? If there is not, then Christ is less supreme, since there are things we are engaged in where we are at liberty to set up our own doctrines instead of searching out Jesus’ demands on the subject.

Practical Application that Rises Above Pragmatism

Pragmatism is the philosophy that says that matters of truth are resolved by what works in actual experience: If it works, do it. This degenerates rather quickly into a market full of “how-to’s” that does not even concern itself with matters of truth. Thus pragmatism is a lifestyle of blissfully ignorant omni-competence. It deliberately eschews the primary question: “What are we doing and why?” with the incessant chattering of commands and incentives. The “what” and the “why” is inconvenient to the “how to.” Os Guinness describes the pragmatism of William James—the man most credited as its founder—as the view “that religious beliefs were only true because of their consequences for human behavior, not because of their philosophical claims.”[3] That is an apt description since a Christianity that is more about what we see happening down in the temporal (behavior) than it is about how eternity is invading (grace and truth) will be less like the faith of the Bible. Whether it is in the sphere of religion or politics, business or education, the most certain effect of pragmatism is that it feeds the individual sinner with more sophisticated tools with which to commit more cultured versions of the same basic sins. A sinner with a new machine (a principle for shifting external behavior) may now mass-produce his sin. Give a sinner a moral mechanism and he will give you a new religion. But what you have not done is to engage the blueprints or the foundations of his sin factory.

Perhaps the greatest irony of pragmatism is that when it is full bloom, the practical is called the Real, and the theoretical the Ethereal. Nobody seems to understand that this idea is rooted in Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics that divorced theory from practice precisely because the Real could not be attained by pure reason. The philosophy of Kant changed the way that the Western world views all of reality. It can best be explained as a splintering of reality into two basic parts—what he called the Noumenal and Phenomenal realms. The Noumenal was the Real world: the way things were in themselves. Objective realities such as God, the self, freedom, and truth exist there. The trouble is that we live in the world of appearance, the Phenomenal, where, no matter what we’re looking at, we are not really getting at the essence of what that thing is—the thing in itself, it’s objective character. So in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he argued that we cannot really know anything of that higher realm by rational demonstration. Of course he knew that this spelt death not only for biblical Christianity, but for all other areas of life as well. Yet because the whole dream of the Enlightenment was the good society, there were two things that rational man still needed—science and ethics. He needed to know about his world, and he needed to know how to behave within it. In short, he needed to get on with life, even if he could not ponder it very deeply as Western man had previously (and naively, we suppose) sought to do.

So for Kant we cannot know that God is there or what He is like, but we have to assume that He exists as a rational principle of human knowledge and behavior. We had to resort to practical judgment to settle life’s constant needs. From this flows the popular language so dominant in our time, that of separating the theoretical from the practical. We talk like this so much that it is almost sacrilege and positively offends to suggest that the two should not be divorced! But make no mistake, the philosophy of pragmatism stems from this splintering of the lower from the higher. And one of the reasons that it is so damaging to our thinking is that it borrows from this notion that we cannot (and perhaps, should not) know what the “true” or “real” nature of things are in themselves, and from this infers that such things are not relevant in the real world. Incredible! We cannot know the real—so let’s get back to the real? I think somebody is a bit confused! In other words, pragmatism only exists because of a philosophy that is diametrically opposed to it! It is self-refuting, and therefore so is everything else that follows.

Any Christian leader, I suppose, may read this and say: “Very well—it’s a good thing I’m not an agnostic like Kant!” The trouble with this quick response is that it assumes that the only way one can splinter reality in this way is to treat God as the thing which is unknowable in himself. The reality is that our whole education and culture is steeped in the post-Kantian way of thinking, and that unless you have already studied this, you may be assured that you have been trained to think like this on many levels. And the moment you say: “I don’t need to be trained against Kant so much as I need to be trained in the Scriptures!” True statement—but are you sure that is what you received? What if I told you that if you show me any denomination (or non-denominational strand) within Christendom that you learned your Bible under, I will show you that what you read from those pages of Scripture was not so much Christianity, but Kantianity? What if? Because that is exactly what we must be shown. The way that we talk about virtually everything—if pressed enough—begins to reveal this two-tiered splintering of reality into “theory and practice.”

Impatience with the practicality of teaching is yet another damaging effect of pragmatism. We assume that when people do not “translate” truth into practice, that the problem must always be the loftiness of the truth declared. Just the opposite is true. Our souls do not match up to the real world precisely because sin has shrunk their vision. Conversely our souls begin to match up to the real world if and only if they have been enlarged by a greater vision of God.

[1] Voddie Baucham, Family Driven Faith (Crossway Books, Wheaton, IL 2007); p. 74
[2] Baucham briefly discusses this principle-legalism as well, ibid., pp. 85-88
[3] Os Guinness, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think & What to do About It (Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI 1994); p. 55