|
The necessary limitation of the number of these lectures caused the giving up of the first intention to open the course with a treatment of the historical method of Bible study. Every lecture is based upon the use of that method. ...the Scriptures cannot be understood, nor their power appreciated, without some knowledge of the historical situations out of which they grew. [From the preface.]
I
THE NEED AND OPPORTUNITY FOR HIS MINISTRY
Concentration of Functions in the Pastor�s Work
We are not unmindful of the work which the modern pastor is called upon to do. All functions of the ministry outlined in the New Testament are now expected of one man, and in addition many other forms of service that were not contemplated by the church in the first century, due to the development of human life and of the church itself. Possibly in the future, at a time not yet visible to us, all these particular groups which now are separated into denominations seeking to build up themselves, may come together, and once more we may have a number of men and women exercising the functions described by the New Testament. Our present divisions, with their clamor for money for self-support and sectarian propaganda, make it financially impossible, with rare exceptions, for Christians in a local church to have the ministry existing in the early undivided group. The same sad condition forces upon a single human being not only the function for which he is fitted, but many others in which neither personality nor training could make him expert. Special endowments for diverse services are recognized in the New Testament,1 each of which the Holy Spirit craves for the upbuilding of the church. It is only one of the shameful results of schisms in the Body of Christ that local churches are denied the help of all these various functions, each performed by a person specially gifted and trained.
1Rom. 12: 6-9; 1Cor. 12: 4-11; Eph. 4: 11-13; 1Peter 4: 10, 11.
Far be it from our purpose, then, to minimize or underestimate any form of ministry to the church and to the world. The Holy Spirit would use any ability which any individual Christian has and consecrate that to the development of individual life and to the growth of the kingdom of God. The evil days of sectarianism, with its financial burdens and consequent waste, not only prevent church-members from having the full help they need, but impose upon one man the functions distributed among many in the early church. He must be preacher, pastor, teacher, exhorter, administrator, student, counselor, source of knowledge and wisdom, evangelist, missionary, and all else. This is too much for any one person. None is so wonderfully gifted in personality as to discharge skilfully all these offices. No college or seminary training can produce such a prodigy. The time may come when our unhappy sectarian divisions may seem less important than the �perfecting of the saints for the work of ministration, for the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.�2 But it will come only when the �ascension gifts� in all their variety are at work, and the pastor is not expected to converge all in himself.
2Eph. 4: 12, 13.
I�� A. The Need for The Teaching Ministry
If these lectures emphasize the need for one special function, that of teaching, it is not because any others are held to be of less importance. All are necessary. We lay stress upon the teaching function because of the conditions that seem to call for this special ministry.
Let us think of the need for this function. Is it not as true today as of those early Hebrew Christians, and with much less excuse than they had, that our church-members should be teachers and yet have need that some one should instruct them?3 How many have left the elements of the doctrine of Christ and have pressed on to maturity? 4
3Heb. 5: 12. 4Heb. 6: 2.
IA�� 1. Enlightening Ignorance of the Bible
Consider the lack of intelligence as to the Bible. It is not at all idle to ask the question of Philip to the Ethiopian pilgrim, �Understandest thou what thou readest?� And the honest answer of the African5 would be in the mouths of most Christians, �How can I, except some one should guide me?� The simple fact is that the rank and file of our church-members do not know the Bible. They are living upon so much of its truth as has come to them in sermons, or has been obtained through other channels. The great ethical ideals of the Scriptures are known not only by the church-members, but by the world outside. But the book itself is a sealed volume to most of those who call themselves Christian. They love it, sing about it, give money for its circulation, read short selections before going to bed at night, with the aid of lesson helps try to extract spiritual meaning from detached sections in Sunday schools, fight about its meaning, dispute over systems of doctrine supposed to be taught in the volume�in short, do everything except faithfully, systematically study the priceless literature, which records the highest human experience of God during the days in which its different books were written.
5Acts 8: 30, 31.
Our very aphorisms commit us to the knowledge of the Scriptures. Such sayings as Chillingworth�s, �The Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants,� or that of Campbell, adopted by the Disciples denomination, �Where the Scriptures speak we speak; and where they are silent we are silent,� or Paul�s,6 �Thus saith the Scriptures,� or the Baptist�s,7 �The New Testament is the all-sufficient ground of our faith and practise,� and others equally well-known would seem to commit all who use them to patient, diligent study of the Bible. In spite of years of handling the material book, of attendance upon the Sunday school, and of faithful churchgoing, the ignorance of the Scriptures is amazing. The minds of most Christians contain the crudest conceptions of what the book really is. Earnest people sincere in their motives, have resorted to all kinds of devices to discover so-called spiritual meanings in verses entirely severed from their connections and considered without reference to the purposes of the writer. Councils for the ordination of men to the gospel ministry have put the seal of their approval upon candidates whose examination showed no knowledge whatever of the mere contents of the Bible, much less of the messages of its books. There are in the ministry today many men whose lives indeed are pure and blameless, who have been given a denominational standing equal to that of the ripest scholar, who have been put in positions of leadership and stand before the public as authoritative interpreters of the Scriptures of which they know little. No one can wonder at the amazing lack of Biblical knowledge by church-members when such men are shepherds of the people, or when competent pastors are overburdened with the cares of preaching, visiting, administration, public service, and other responsibilities that consume all the time and strength of one man. If one were asked concerning the efficiency of Sunday-school methods in the past, it would be enough to answer that those who have for years been members of Sunday schools have not become qualified to teach the only book they were studying. What is to be thought of an institution called a �school� when those who have pursued its curriculum are incompetent to teach the very literature they have been supposed to study?
6Gal. 4: 30. 7Northern Baptist Convention Annual, 1922, p.133, Item 118.
IA�� 2. Correcting Mistaken Ideas
The pastor should correct mistaken ideas, produced not only by inaccurate conceptions of what the Bible is, but also by faulty methods of Bible study. Conceptions of God, of providence, of sin, and of many other religious factors have suffered because of erroneous methods of study. No intelligent minister will live long with the average congregation before he discovers these errors. This is a serious matter. People have rightly been taught to attach high authority to the Scriptures. They have been declared to be the rule of faith and practise among Christians. It is, therefore, no light matter to appeal to them. When a high ideal of Biblical authority is joined with mistaken methods of interpretation and ignorance of what the Bible really teaches, the lives of sincere but misguided people are harmed. Many have put divine authority behind their erroneous conceptions. The result has been distortion, deformity, and disease of spiritual life. Here a real healing ministry is possible. Souls that have known the afflictions of their errors can be restored to comfort, peace, joy, and enthusiasm by the teaching of the pastor. Those who have known the delight of this ministry can easily recall many illustrations of deliverance from the blight of mistaken ideas. When one has understood the truth uttered by our Lord8 that the kingdom of God has developed �First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear,� and that this has been the method by which God has unfolded himself in the experiences of men as recorded in the Scriptures, then such a soul is relieved of the burden of crude beliefs which have come from exalting into finality the early, partial, and incomplete revelations of religious ideas. The correction of these mistaken opinions which control the lives of earnest Christians comes by education through the teaching ministry of the pastor.
8Mark 4: 28.
The persistence of what is learned in early years is well known. It is hard to unlearn. When Peter was on the housetop at Joppa, and the delayed dinner only whetted his hunger, he fell into a trance and saw a whole menagerie let down from heaven. God would teach him readiness to receive the messengers of the Roman Cornelius. But the heart of the Jew had little hospitality for the Gentile. Three times the vision came, thrice the voice. The only answer was:9 �Not so, Lord; for I never have.� Neither in trance nor in sane wakefulness could this apostle understand, for �he doubted in himself what the vision which he had seen should mean.� How many times the teacher is met by that Petrine consistency! To all that would introduce new truth, sane but unfamiliar methods, it has been thought an ample reason for clinging to a mistaken notion to reply, �Not so, I never have.� Peter soon learned that he was not inspired in his refusal, nor was his past experience infallible as a guide. One wonders why he had not learned the lesson before, when in the Petrine Gospel of Mark10 there is recorded our Lord�s revolutionary teaching concerning the impossibility of defilement by eating. Was it not after this experience and also after his inconsistent actions at Antioch11 that his Gospel was written by Mark, and he added to the works Jesus about unclean foods the comment,12 �This he said, making all foods clean�? If it was so hard for Jesus by direct teaching, and the heavenly Father through a vision, to teach a truth to one of the greatest of the Twelve, we must not expect an easy time now in displacing mistaken conceptions. Yet precisely that ministry is necessary for Christians and the growth of the Christian society.
9Acts 10: 9-17. 10Mark 7: 14-23. 11Gal. 2: 12. 12Mark 7: 19 A.R.V.
IA�� 3. Preventing Wrong Conceptions
There is also a preventive ministry which the pastor can exercise. It is far better to teach truth that will never have to be unlearned than to suffer faulty conceptions to take root and then expose the soul to the painful process of pulling out the tares from the mind and heart. The teaching pastor can at least make his people acquainted with sane methods of interpretation, can cause them to see that results depend upon processes, that the teachings of the Bible are not always to be gathered from the surface of the literature by any silly, fanciful, or lazy saint, that the understanding of the Scriptures must be the fruit of an intelligent method of study. He can go far to forestall wild speculation from making inroads upon his congregation. Ignorance is the soil in which all kinds of soul-blights flourish. These are fungi that grow upon the tree of knowledge where the pastoral forester does not protect it. They are fads that flourish in the absence of real instruction. There are many who wrest the Scriptures to their own destruction.13 Our Protestant churches have become fertile soil for many so-called religious movements that appeal to genuine religious instincts, but poison the minds of men and women with grotesque views of God, the error of the unreality of sin, a wretched caricature of Jesus, and other hideous distortions of truth. Our people have been taught to revere the Bible as the word of God, but have not been properly educated or trained in methods of interpretation. It is easy to realize that these so-called religious movements, many of them so grotesque as to defy any adjective which our vocabulary possesses, could never have been originated and propagated unless they had begun and continued through faulty ideas of the Bible, and erroneous processes of interpreting it.
13Peter 3: 16.
The remedy is not denunciation, nor satire, nor ridicule; it is education. Those who have tried to pursue this ministry have often seen really pious and earnest people in the effort to satisfy their heart-hungers for spiritual reality prevented from going astray by a sane method of interpreting the Bible. Indeed, this prophylactic ministry is the critical thing. The minister who uses his Bible simply as a collection of texts without regard to the significance of the words of his text in the mind of the one who wrote or spoke them, is deliberately leading his people into the opinion that it made no difference with Biblical writers or speakers what they were saying, and that it makes no difference with us what they did say or mean, provided we can use their language as a motto from which we can derive divine authority for our own notions. So great is the need for this preventive ministry of the teaching pastor that people are bewildered by counter claims of those who urge the fads and those who combat them. Often it is more difficult to decide who knows less of the Scriptures, those who seek to establish their mistaken notions by appeal to the Bible, or those who go to the Bible for weapons to destroy such notions. Frequently both alike show equal ignorance of the Scriptures. The teaching pastor will so ground his people in a true idea of what the Bible is, and in sane methods of studying it that they will be unaffected by either the queer and fanciful ideas that the incompetent imagine they derive from the Scriptures, or the ridiculous methods by which such ideas are obtained. If Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy had known either what the Bible really is, or the proper way to study it, there would never have been any such thing as �Christian Science.� And if our pastors now realized the nature of the Scriptures and how to understand them, and faithfully educated their flocks in both these matters, there would be no straying into these grotesque folds except by those who were determined not to know the truth.
IA�� 4. Helping in Practical Living
This teaching ministry will vastly help the practical living of Christians. It is a sad sight upon which no one likes to gaze�this spectacle of souls misled by misused Scriptures. Some persons take the very words of an English translation as talismanic. They think there is a magical force in the language of the Bible. I have known deeply pious church-members to open the book at random and construe the first words that met their eyes as indicating the will of God for their guidance in the particular perplexity that existed. I have known Christians to take the Bible by the covers, and hold it a few inches above a table and drop it, and then put an index finger into the tangled leaves, and assume that the particular text upon which the tip of the forefinger rested was sent to them by the Holy Spirit for their guidance at that particular moment. Many other equally insane methods of dealing with the Bible have prevailed far too frequently. Of course this is divination pure and simple. Such persons are the lineal spiritual descendants of those who sought the will of God through haruspication, astrology, lots, and other fortuitous methods. The evil effects upon the lives of those who treat the Scriptures in this way cannot be exaggerated. There have been used disconnected texts that had absolutely no relation to one another, or to the problems whose solution was sought. These have been strung upon the threads of thought, as beads of different material, shape, and color would be strung, and the necklace of texts thus formed has been worn around the soul as an amulet, as a kind of scapular. We are relating only what has actually been seen. No one can distinguish between the superstition which thus uses texts of Scripture and that which uses other material, ornithological, visceral, or what not to obtain divine guidance.
There have been many so-called �Bible readings� in which �concordance theology� has been the goal of the reader. Words change during centuries be cause life continually pours its fulness into language. Men have rummaged through the books of the Bible, have assumed that the same words always mean the same thing, that the Scriptures were like a storehouse of automobile parts, and that all that the reader had to do was to pick out a part wherever he could find it under the belief that every part was standardized and all alike wherever found. There is no telling what harm has been done by these unintelligent Bible readings that fail utterly to take into account the differences of situation and purpose which produced different parts of the Scriptures.
Who can estimate the number of persons who have been misled by the methods alluded to, and by others we will not take time to indicate? When honest and sincere souls surrender themselves to a spiritual conception as being the will of God for human life, the utmost care should be taken that the idea to which we surrender is really and truly the mind of God. All this is only to say that sane methods of Bible study and true methods of pastoral teachings have enormous value for perfecting the saints in the holy life. After all, lives are simply the fruit of ideals. As Jesus was the Word made flesh, so our lives are the incarnations of our conceptions of truth. Jesus declared,14 �I am the truth.� He was indeed the reality lived before us, and there is no higher calling of the pastor than so to present spiritual reality that men may love it and live it. �He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.�15 To understand Jesus, to find the principles of living incarnated in him, to interpret his life rightly, and spare no effort to learn from him, is to find the way of life. There is no use of the Scriptures so worth while as this, and to this the teaching pastor can lead his people.
14John 14: 6. 15John 8: 12.
IA�� 5. Neutralizing Unintelligent Teaching
The need for this teaching ministry by the pastor is also revealed in the unintelligent methods of teaching which have arisen, and of institutions which are based upon them. Some of these are dominated by theories, and the attempt is made to press facts into the molds of these theories. Surely in dealing with divine things the spiritual and ethical order must be first the facts, and then the interpretation of the facts, and then the theories which grow out of these realities as understood. The Scriptures themselves are continually revealing to us the misfortunes that come from preconceptions. When Naaman, the Syrian, went to the prophet, through every step of the journey he was under the spell of a preconception. �Behold, I thought,� he said,16 and came near missing the great aim of his journey because of his preconceptions. John the Baptist had a program for the Messiah, and when his program was not carried out he appointed a committee of two of his followers to ask Jesus whether he was really the Messiah, or whether he should look for some one else.17 We cannot enlarge upon the inevitable disappointments that come to human life when it is either built upon theories which facts do not justify, or orders itself by theories and then seeks to compress facts into accord with preconceptions. There is a terrible waste of money in sustaining institutions that violate the divine order just alluded to; a junking of life that tries to order itself by first forming theories and then irreverently pressing facts into conformity with theories. The rude awakening which is inevitable when once the majesty of facts is perceived and conscience affirms their authority, and theories are shattered, has often been experienced, and brings no comfort to any soul. If the shepherd of souls seeks to lead his sheep into the pastures which the Bible provides, and feeds the minds and emotions and souls of his flock upon the great facts which patient, intelligent study of the Scriptures provides, he will save his people from many a jar and from experiences that in the end will inevitably bring all kinds of disappointment. Surely there can be no greater need for Christian people than to become wise in the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. They will be made wise unto salvation, which means full of wisdom in the right relation to God and to their fellow men.
162Kings 5. 17Matt. 3: 7-12; 11: 2-6.
I�� B. The Opportunity for This Ministry
IB�� 1. The Official Position as Pastor
Sincerity alone is not enough.18 It demands the aid of intelligence. Well-meaning people need the light that comes from the use of methods that are sane and commend themselves to our rational natures. God never gave us our intellectual powers that we might insult them in the name of Christ.
19 Untrained pastors cannot fulfil the teaching ministry. The blind cannot lead the blind without disaster to both.20 Nor can an ill-prepared minister hope to accomplish for his people the ideals herein-before set forth. Unintentionally, but none the less really, all institutions that would send out into the pastorate men who cannot teach because they do not know, are retarding the development of the church at large. The greatest need of the church today is the leadership of a teaching ministry. People look to the pastor for instruction. It is possible for him, by virtue of his continuous relation, to concentrate and make cumulative his educational ministry, without sacrificing other essential aspects of his work. Churches seldom think about this ministry when considering a pastor. His ability to preach is the main consideration, and the prophetic skill of a �candidate� is judged by one or two show sermons. This is but little more sensible than forming an idea of the architecture of a house, its inside plan, and furnishings by taking a few bricks from the walls as samples. What committee to nominate a pastor ever asks about his equipment and ability for teaching? And yet he is all the time teaching by virtue of his very ministry. Sundays and in midweek services, on all occasions, whether he is conscious of it or not, he is teaching something. Why not use his relation to his charge intelligently, and deliberately plan that his ministry shall be educational as well as hortatory?18Acts 26: 9. 19Matt. 6: 22, 23. 20Matt. 15: 14.
When we say �educational,� we do not mean a mere eruption of information from public addresses, as if the pulpit or platform were to be an encyclopedic volcano with the preacher as its loquacious crater. Far different is the idea. Education is the unfolding of life, the stimulation and development of all the powers of personality. And for this supreme ideal for the ministry there is no literature so serviceable as the Bible, and no ministerial work so fruitful as that which makes others know the nature of the Scriptures, and endows one�s parishioners with correct methods of Bible study. Such an opportunity is inherent in the very relation of the pastor. Long after any mere emotion he may arouse has faded away, long after any dazzling rhetorical picture he has painted by the free use of lurid adjectives has vanished into the cold, gray waste of prosaic life, long after flashings of scintillating phrases have died away into oblivion, there will endure the deep convictions of truth made by the teaching ministry. God forbid that any one should marry dulness to reality, or dryness to the water of life. The teaching pastor will build into lives he touches the very heart-beats of Biblical characters, and will in time lead his flock into fellowship with all the great and good whose lives are recorded in the Scriptures. No other calling offers such an opportunity as does the ministry, and in that calling only the teaching pastor seizes upon that opportunity.
IB�� 2. Control of Church School Instruction
If the pastor rightly controls instruction in his church school, he can through others further this teaching ministry. He should make the Sunday school a genuine educational institution, organized and constructed upon true educational ideals. The curriculum of the school must rest upon intelligent conceptions of the Bible, a broad and comprehensive knowledge of it, and instruction therein must be based upon correct pedagogical principles. There is no other sane way of giving to both young and old alike the truth which is the instrument of the Holy Spirit in the regeneration of men and their growth in Christian character. The church school should not be a mere Sunday morning or afternoon day-nursery for children to give a period of relief to uninterested parents. The adult members of the church without regard to age should be brought into the church school for this very instruction we are advocating. Under the guidance of the pastor the fruits of the church school should be not only educational evangelism for the young; but an intelligent knowledge of the Scriptures by everybody, and as the crowning achievement of the school the training of church-members by virtue of their experiences therein. It is naturally to be expected that any real educational institution shall so train those who have pursued its courses of study that they shall become competent to teach what they have learned. Every pastor should redeem the Sunday-school idea from the vain and empty and often contemptuous significance into which it has fallen. Church-members without regard to age should be impressed with the truth that attendance upon or absence from the church school indicates a revelation of their interest in or indifference to the knowledge of the Scriptures. Here is a ready-made opportunity for the pastor to emphasize his teaching ministry.
If it be objected that laymen control the church school and are unwilling to yield to sensible ideals for its educational conduct, or are unwilling to fit themselves to realize these ideals in their management of the institution, then somehow they must be brought to see that their petrifaction, or their Diotrephesian appetite21 must yield to the spiritual interests of the young, and the efficiency of the school as an institution. The present gratifying interest in church-school development only enhances the opportunity of the qualified pastor in the realm of religious education where the Bible must continue to be central.
213John 9.
IB�� 3. Week-day Classes for Study
There is no reason why instruction should be limited to one day of the week. In many places, and many churches, boys and girls are gathered for an hour after school once or twice a week, and the most helpful results follow. Certain denominations are emphasizing these additional hours for religious instruction, and their achievements should inspire others to imitation. The Bible and stereopticon pictures and even moving pictures are used. When these week-day sessions of the church school are held they become interesting, provided instruction is given in a way suitable to those who attend, and the work is made to be genuinely educational. Again what better use could be made of the midweek evening service than to center it around the Bible? From all over the land there come the tidings that the prayer-meeting is a hard service to maintain. No wonder. The saints do not have spiritual experiences enough to keep an �experience meeting� fresh and without monotony. The faithful who are regular attendants are thoroughly familiar with one another�s experiences. They have heard the victrola disk testimonies until these have become monotonous and soporific. No outsiders come to whom can be told these so-called Christian experiences in the effort to allure them into participation in such experiences, and certainly many narrations are such that none would crave to reproduce them in his own life. Why not use the midweek evening service as a regular hour for sane and systematic Bible study? The men could then attend. In a few years those who came to such a meeting would have a deepened interest in and a fuller knowledge of the Scriptures.
Again, why not have as a regular part of the pastor�s work a stated morning week-day hour for systematic Bible study? Many women who for domestic reasons could not attend the church school on Sunday mornings, or for reasons of prudence and safety could not go out alone to the midweek evening service, would be present. One pastor has had such an hour from eleven o�clock until noon, one morning each week for many years, except during the World War. In 1916 there were three hundred and twenty women enrolled in the class, seventy-five per cent. of whom were not members of that pastor�s flock. The meetings have been resumed, and the interest is growing. The story of how this class has affected persons and Bible study in other churches would be interesting, but cannot be told here.
IB�� 4. The Use of Good Books
In addition to all this there is an abundance of good books easily understood by the average person which set forth the results of reverent, modern, constructive study. These are cheap and within the reach of the ordinary man and woman. Never before has this literature been so plentiful. The old-fashioned commentary has disappeared. It took up each verse separately, tried to show its so-called spiritual meaning, suggested themes for sermons or thoughts for exhortations by Sunday-school teachers, and sometimes came perilously near twisting off the tails of commas in the King James� Version in the frantic effort to find religious significance in every verse of the Bible. Today the main task of those who issue these books is to help the reader to understand precisely what was in the mind of the author of a Biblical book. We are thus relieved by the help which others have provided from doing many things which have already been accomplished with far greater skill than most pastors could hope to have. There is no excuse today for ignorance concerning the Bible. Indifference to it is the only reason that can honestly be given for lack of knowledge concerning it. Every phase of its existence has been well set forth in books clearly written and fascinating in contents. The story of the manuscripts and translations, the way the collection came to be gathered, the historical setting of every book in the Scriptures and how and why it came to be written, are told by masters in the art of telling. All these helps are cheap and easily understood. The pastor should know of them and commend them to his people, see that they are used as text-books in the church school, introduce them into homes, and have them in a church library for the use of those who might not otherwise consult them. It has been found possible to get public libraries to instal these books for the general use of the community. What better service could any pastor render than to increase the circulation of these helps, and through them the knowledge of the Bible? The large number of such volumes covering all phases of Bible study is evidence of an increasing interest in the knowledge of the Scriptures. This deepening desire to know the Book is a great aid to those pastors who seek to make it the one book with which all Christians should be familiar.
I�� C. Cautions for the Teaching Pastor
IC�� 1. Be Qualified
Some cautions must be offered to those who undertake this service. The pastor himself should be thoroughly qualified. Any man who consents to serve a church should be equipped to undertake this work. No one will claim that three years in the cloistered life of a seminary will make him a great scholar or a great teacher. At the same time these years of special preparation will put the student so far ahead of the average church that his problem will be to keep in touch with his congregation. Far be it from our purpose to criticize the curriculum of any theological school. Nevertheless, a seminary that does not fit its graduates to pass on to those whom they are to train in the Christian life an enthusiasm for and an interest in the Scriptures, cannot be said to succeed in its work. As in all things else, the secret of successful work in this respect will largely depend upon the qualification of the leader.
IC�� 2. Gain the Confidence of the People
It is of primary importance that the pastor who undertakes to lead his people into the better knowledge of the Scriptures should establish himself in the hearts of those whom he leads. When we seek to lead men into thoughts which are new to them we must not only begin with the ideas we find in their minds, but we must have gained their trust in us as leaders. This was the method of the Great Teacher. Violent assault upon traditional or imperfect or mistaken ideas can only produce a tighter grip upon them. At no point in the journey which an intelligent pastor proposes to make with those whom he teaches, should there be a break between himself and them. All assumption of authority must be set aside. People will listen to one in whose Christian life they have confidence, if his methods respect the personality and history of those whom he wishes to follow. The surest way to fail is to begin by antagonizing those whom we would lead, by ruthlessly tearing away ideas that have been cherished. Humbly and modestly we must seek to go before those who follow our pastoral leading.22 If our lives have shown a Christian character, and our sermons revealed a genuine devotion to Jesus Christ and a sincere love for the Bible, others will listen to us, and will walk into pastures new and fresh to them when their faith in the leader is strong. No locomotive will pull a freight train if the engineer jerks the throttle so quickly as to break the couplings.
22John 10: 4.
IC�� 3. Proceed Slowly
Too much stress cannot be laid upon the importance of proceeding very slowly. Time after time a pastor has wrecked himself by haste. There was profound philosophy in what the limping Jacob said23 to his athletic brother Esau when they were journeying together: �My lord knows that the children are tender, and the flocks and herds that give suck are with me; and if they drive them hard one day, all the flock will die. I will lead on in my slow way, at the pace of the cattle that are before me, and at the pace of the children until I come to my lord to Seir.� The wise pastor will see that there are no shocks beyond those of pleasant surprises, of beautiful illuminations, and of unexpected acquaintance with the richness of life. Did not our Great Teacher say24 to his followers, �I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them now�? All structures that are inadequate or outgrown, such as bridges over streams or chasms, can be replaced by stronger and better ones, without impeding the traffic, if builders will first have the material on the ground, each part accurately numbered, and then piece by piece remove the old and establish the new.
23Gen. 33: 13. 24John 16: 12; cf. Mark 4: 33.
IC�� 4. Avoid Making the Pulpit a Laboratory
Nor must the pastor make his pulpit and prayer-meeting a place where he exhibits and describes the apparatus that produces results. When people come to worship on Sundays, or to deal with the experimental and practical concerns of the Christian life at the Week-day services, they should not be conducted into a laboratory. They do not care to be taken into the kitchen, but come to sit down to its finished product in the dining-room. While a pastor in preaching should be rigidly true to sane processes of interpretation, he aims to comfort, inspire, and persuade men and to affect their lives. The exhibition of critical processes in the pulpit is not only bad taste, but is an effort to feed hungry hearers upon pots and pans and cook-stoves instead of the wholesome and appetizing food which has been prepared in them.
IC�� 5. Be Constructive in Spirit and Purpose
Above all, the spirit of the teacher should be constructive. It should be made clear that his purpose is not to tear down old notions. He can well afford to be gently positive and let everything else take care of itself. All labels indicating whether things are new or old can be thrown into the waste-basket. The emblem of such a teacher should not be an axe or a knife, but rather a trowel or the tools of a garden. The brown leaves of last summer still cling to the scrub oak. The ice, winds, and snow of the winter have not torn them away. There is a toughness in their clinging which is unaffected by outside forces. When the tilt of the earth brings our world into a new relation to the sun, the springtime comes, and the new life awakens the tree from the winter slumber, the sap begins to flow, and the old leaves drop off through the power of the new life within. Let us learn the parable of nature if we would lead our followers into a nobler appreciation of the truth and a more accurate knowledge of the great book which contains the highest religious experience of the race. Let us so constructively present reality that it shall be its own authority and claim the hearts of those whom we lead with its inherent axiomatic power.
�
Preface �� lectures: � ONE �� TWO �� THREE �� FOUR �� FIVE �� SIX ��
[Note: Lecture I carefully compared to book on Sunday, 5-31-1998. All discovered errors and omissions corrected (this is not a claim of perfection!). The use of colors and links, of course, are my additions, and the purposes may relate to considerations beyond the scope of the lecture. ...wcb2]
William C. Bitting II
wbitting@yahoo.com�� First posted 5/12/98.
�� Revised 10/20/00 (prior 6/20/98).