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Raising Up Pastors Is the Church's Work Part 1 of an interview with Mark Dever (conducted by Jonathan Leeman) Click here for part 2 of this interview, "How Do Pastors Raise Up Pastors? THE CHURCH'S RESPONSIBILITY 9Marks: Why do you think raising up the next generation of pastors is the local church's responsibility? Mark Dever: To begin with, we see this in Scripture. In the book of Acts, Paul and Barnabas were sent out by the local church. Paul tells Timothy, the pastor at Ephesus, to entrust gospel truths to other faithful men who will teach others (2 Tim. 2:2). Jesus gives the church the keys of the kingdom, and he promises that the church will prevail (Matt. 16:18-20). At no point does he make the church's victory contingent upon financially viable and doctrinally faithful seminaries (and I hope they are viable and faithful!). I'm not opposed to seminaries, although they are unknown among Protestants before the eighteenth or nineteenth century. I'm simply saying that in the Bible, the local churcha community where people are known, their conversion is testified to, and their gifts are witnessedis the appropriate place to make that kind of heavy statement about God's gifting and calling in somebody's life. Raising up leaders is part of the church's commission. 9M: What resources does a local church have that a seminary doesn't have for the purposes of equipping ministers? Dever: A 360-degree view of somebody's life. Friendships. Multiple people who relate to a person differently, as opposed to being one of 62 people in a class for a professor to know. The local church has been the place where God has committed the clarity of his Gospel, both in the preaching and those who are admitted to the Lord's Supper and removed from it. Schools have no such ability and no such commission. Also, you have in the local church a whole series of lives that affect the person in question. So he's seen the examplesas it says in Hebrews 13:7of the elders or leaders. He's been able to consider them and they him. So there's a natural life-on-life experience of learning. 9M: Are a pastor and a church being irresponsible by not taking measures for equipping future pastors? Dever: Well, my basic answer is "Yes." I want to be gracious and realize that there are some churches that are too small or are not equipped. But basically, yes, you should realize that raising up future ministers is an opportunity the Lord has set before you; and you should aspire and pray toward this work. 9M: When you talk about the importance of a church having a 360 degree view of person's life, you are relying on a certain philosophy of ministry. What assumptions are you making about how ministry and Christian growth work? Why not just train me in Greek and homiletics and put me behind a pulpit, like a seminary can do? Dever: That's a great question. I'm assuming that ministry is more than simple proclamation. Simple proclamation is essential to ministryit's a non-negotiable. But then that proclamation takes place in the context of a community of people who know each other. They're geographically in the same place; they assemble regularly together; and, as a consequence, they know each other. There seems to be the presumption in the New Testament of pastoral authority accompanying pastoral relationships, as in Hebrews 13, where the members are told to consider the lives of the leaders (in verse 7) before they are told to obey those leaders (in verse 17). The importance of knowing one another also fits with what we hear the Lord say in John 13 about our witness: that the world will know we are his disciples by the love we have for one another. I in no way want to denigrate the centrality of preaching the word. But if we just preach the Word without having this relational web or context for ministry, which is the local church, then we don't know how to do membership, how to do discipline, how to disciple; we're not going to be a very good witness either (or if we are, it's accidental). The fruits of the Spirit that Paul talks about in Galatians are virtues expressed to other people. There's a relational context in the reality of the church which is absolutely perfect for identifying who is gifted to be a minister, for challenging such individuals, and for raising them up. So, if I can be personal for a minute, listening to you teach a Sunday School class taught me some things about your ability to be a pastor. Watching you disciple other people, watching you inconvenience yourself, watching you take your Bible study down to Helen's room when she was recovering from her strokethat lets me know more things about you and commends you to me as a pastor in a way I would never know if you were merely a student in a class I was teaching. ON THE UTILITY OF SEMINARIES Dever: Seminaries are great gifts of God to us to for transfering
specific content-heavy information about language study, systematic theology,
and the history of Christianity concerning which the average local congregation
probably won't have sufficient expertise. Dever: It is certainly not necessary. And it is not necessarily advisable.
So I'd have to say something else. It is sometimes advisable. Click here for part 2 of this interview, "How Do Pastors Raise Up Pastors? Mark Dever is the pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church and the author of Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (Crossway, 2001).
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