Podcast: Embracing Spiritual Authority in the Face of Pastoral Failure
Godly Leaders and Fallen Leaders
In today's episode, David Mathis discusses the topic of spiritual authority—what it is, who has it, and how we should respond when that authority is abused.
Matt Tully
You open your book by noting something that I’m sure many of our listeners have noticed themselves—maybe they even feel it themselves—and it’s that we live in an age that is increasingly cynical and sceptical about the idea of leadership. You say that some of that cynicism is for good reasons, and some of it has maybe more to do with just the mood of our times. So I’d love for you to unpack both of those things for us, maybe starting with the good reasons. What are some of the good reasons for our ambivalence about leadership today?
David Mathis
Matt, you know we got access to a lot of stories these days through social media, through our various media, and the tide has changed on if there’s a bad leader story, whether the social pressure is to suppress it or whether the social pressure is to now speak truth to power. Now you’ve got something to share and something to go big time with. There’s been a sea change there in many circles. And so we have access to a lot of stories. Out of every human on this planet, there is one human—the God-man—who’s perfect, but everyone on this planet is a sinner. So merely human leaders—leaders other than Jesus—are going to be sinful.
The best leaders are imperfect and sinful, and there are a lot of really bad, immature, and even evil leaders. And so there are good reasons for us to be careful and not treat our leaders as perfect or treat our leaders as Jesus.
This is a calling for Christians that we know a clear difference between the great Shepherd of the sheep, who is our Lord, who is our Savior, who is our supreme treasure and the leaders, with their maturity and their plurality, that he gives us in the local church for which we can be thankful, and yet we know they are not Jesus. And we always have that distinction in our minds as Christians.
Matt Tully
I did a quick Google search just for the word “pastor.” I was looking for news articles that had that word in the headline. It was surprising how many stories, to your point about how prevalent this information is today, how many stories there were of pastoral failing, pastoral abuse, pastoral misconduct—all kinds of things that are just constantly popping up on our news feeds, on the local news, and the newspapers.
So it does feel like there is a media environment that makes it all the easier for us to hear about these things. But do you think that that message of we need to recognize what good leadership looks like and also recognize what bad leadership looks like, is something that you think that maybe some Christians do need to hear and kind of be more attuned to? Have you seen Christians that you would say maybe don’t want to recognize that as a reality right now?
David Mathis
I think much more than the need of the hour these days—and the world is so complex. Who am I, or anyone in human flesh, to survey the landscape and say that they’ve seen it all. But in the limited number of circles I see, the big threat is not that people are largely naive about the sinful nature of their leaders; it’s the other. Especially in our media and in our social media, we are so aware of, and on the edge any leadership failures.
We see wolves’ underwear sometimes. We think This must be a wolf in hiding. This guy must be really good because he seems like such a mature, biblical leader, but I know he must be a wolf down deep underneath. There is that kind of suspicion among people. And into that milieu, the Scriptures and the New Testament speak a very clear word about the God-appointed goodness of human leaders.
Imperfect human leaders, but God’s word, and particularly the New Testament and the elder qualifications in 1 Timothy three and in Titus 1, provide some flashpoints of maturity characteristics—character traits that would embody those who are the leaders in the church. And those leaders are given, Ephesians 4 says, “from the risen Christ as gifts to his church.” The risen Christ is building his church. He is Lord of the church and groom of the church, and he is gifting his local churches with leaders. And typically, it’s not a single leader. He typically gifts his church with a team of leaders.
And that’s one thing we can talk about here, Matt, at some point, about the principle of plurality and how every local church instance that we have in the New Testament bears evidence of a plurality of pastors and elders. And so this is a good gift from the risen Christ. He knows better than we do that the human leaders he gives us are not perfect. They are sinners.
They are in a renovation of their own soul, being brought about by the Holy Spirit and through faith, and he gives those leaders and provides the checks and balances (Americans have loved to talk about checks and balances for the last 250 years) the checks and balances of plurality, of that leadership happening in a team. It’s important in our age, here in 2022, the twenty-first century, that we recognize leadership as a gift.
We may feel like it’s an assault on the self. We have been told in a thousand ways, and in subtle ways, that we’re the masters of our own soul and that we want to choose what we want to choose and have the great almighty self. And leadership often confronts that. We like to make our own calls rather than defer to the wise leadership of others. And so there is a challenge to the self in the reception of leadership from Christ as good. And that’s a challenge we need in our times.
Matt Tully
What would you say to the Christian who hears that and would acknowledge, Yeah, in an ideal world, Scripture does portray leadership, spiritual leadership, as a good thing. I see that that is valuable. But there’s just too much evidence right now, and there are too many examples of leaders not having that accountability, not being surrounded by a plurality of others who are helping to keep them on the straight and narrow, so to speak.
And so it actually is right that we are focused right now on, and that the actual need of the hour right now is, to kind of fix the broken culture of leadership that exists rather than worry too much about people kind of just being too critical of leadership itself. How would you respond to something like that?
David Mathis
I may start by asking some personal and local questions. The personal one would be, What proportion of your inputs is media, as opposed to God’s word? If it’s just a quick kind of concession, Oh yeah, God’s word says that. I got a couple quick minutes today for God’s word, and then I’m going to spend hours with my ears open to the voice of the world—then I’d want to talk about the proportion and priority of the voice of the risen Christ through his prophets and apostles in the word by the Spirit.
So I would want to talk about that aspect. That’s the personal side. What are your influential sources? And that gets into the social media thing, the news thing, the national bent over real, live life that you can affect. The local question, then, would be about a local church. Why would you think you can pretend to fix something nationally or internationally that is far more complicated than you can see from your stream of voices without first attending to what God has given you in your local church?
So I would want to talk to them about their local situation first. Like, all right, hey, if you’re so sharp, if you know so well what leadership should be like, then what are you looking for in local leaders? In your city and in your neighbourhood—you’re part of the city—what are you looking for in leadership? And that’s one of the big things I seek to deal with in this book is these are the kinds of traits that the risen Christ through the apostle Paul has made very clear should be true of leaders in the local church.
And not just once in 1 Timothy; he did it again in Titus 1 and throughout the New Testament. It is a very clear composite of the kind of man who should be on a team in leading a local church. And to the degree that you’re aware of that and informed by Scripture of that, how might you go back first and foremost in your setting? How are you pursuing it in your setting before playing armchair quarterback online?
10:04 - The Intersection of Spiritual Authority and Celebrity
Matt Tully
That’s such an important thing to emphasize. So much of the way that we think about these issues can be on this national, social media-type context or scale, and we neglect the local, lived experience of our own churches and our own relationships. It does seem to me, though, that a lot of the cynicism that we’re seeing today related to leadership in the church does relate, ironically, to the celebrity culture that so often surrounds spiritual leadership. So how should we think about the intersection of spiritual leadership and authority in a church and that issue of celebrity?
David Mathis
Well, first and foremost, to lean right back into the local thing. What we have very clear in the New Testament is speaking into local churches—Crete, Ephesus, Colossae, Rome—those are all instances of a plurality of leadership. And I think that’s one of the big emphases of the book and one of the things that I think are most needing of that fresh emphasis from the New Testament today in our local situations.
So often, celebrity stories are about a particular leader who is, for a good reason, greatly appreciated. And then the status of appreciation rises and rises and rises. And as Americans (maybe it’s just modern people), we are conditioned to build up folks. We love to help the rise. We boost the rise. We lift the rise, and then we love the fall stories.
We love to raise people up, and then we love to take ’em down. The rise stories often happen with individuals, where the pastoral calling begins to get subtly turned over in various ways so that the organization, the church, is now serving the rise of this leader and the prominence of this leader, which is often a typical individual, rather than the kind of accountability and the kind of self-humbling that happens in a plural, team-leadership context. It’s really a team.
This team does not exist to boost a single person’s personality, ministry, profile, or celebrity. This team exists—a group of mature men—to boost this local church, to serve this local church. Not to make a great name of this local church in a certain metro area or across the country. It’s not about the local church’s name. It’s about the name of Jesus, and it’s about serving the needs of this local congregation. And in that context, the various on-ramps to celebrity, the various flashpoints of boosting celebrity, are gonna be the things that are not extended to local church pastors or are not received because of that context of team and accountability. It hopefully keeps the church right side up instead of being turned upside down, that the church now begins to serve the individual. Rather, the pastors as a team continue to serve and minister to that church.
Matt Tully
Take us down to the ground level than for your church. You’re a pastor at Cities Church; you’re one of a number of pastors there. How have you guys sought to share that influence, to fight against the celebrity that could build up? You’ve written books, and you go on podcasts like this, so you have a level of influence that even goes beyond your own church. How have you guys very practically worked together to mitigate against the dangers that can come with that?
David Mathis
From the beginning, one thing that has helped us—and let me just give the disclaimer. We’re a seven-and-a-half-year-old church, so no pretence here that we haven’t figured out or that we’ve settled into these patterns over long decades, and there’s all this accumulated wisdom. However, I should pay tribute to our mother church because we didn’t plan for ourselves.
Bethlehem Baptist here in Minneapolis planted us seven-and-a-half years ago, and we benefited immensely from Bethlehem’s affirmation of faith and patterns and values and a whole generation of ministry under John Piper in Minneapolis that led to the planting of the church. The conviction for us early on that the pastors would be plural and that the pastors would be teachers has had a very significant influence on us in the church, on that collegiality, on that dynamic of being equals as pastors. We share the teaching.
At our church, we’ve gone so far as to share the preaching, which is a little more extreme or unusual, though I think it’s a very healthy thing. We do team preaching as a conviction.
Matt Tully
It’s not just a convenience or a necessity because the guy needs a break.
David Mathis
No, not at all. In fact, our lead pastor, Jonathan, tells us regularly he’d like to preach more, but we’re not shaping the church around his preferences. He does preach the most often; as our lead pastor, he preaches most often. But it’s no more than half the time. It’s typically less than half the time. And there are three or four of us that do multiple preachings throughout the year and others who will chime in at times. So that’s one flashpoint. I wouldn’t want it all to come down to that. I don’t think that a church is disobedient or unfaithful if they don’t have a pretty aggressive team preaching model.
But team preaching is one flashpoint of that kind of parody among the leaders because, especially for Protestant searches, I think it should be this way. Teaching happens throughout the week, but that preaching moment on Sundays is very significant. That is a very influential moment. That is holy stewardship. The way that Paul talks to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2 about preaching the word and being ready in season and out of season.
That is a holy moment in the life of the church when the church’s mouth is closed, and (in modern society) we sit down to hear the preacher who’s standing up. It hasn’t always been that way, but we hear the preacher step to the pulpit, and he delivers to us. We know it’s imperfect. We know he’s a sinner; he’s not perfect. But he delivers to us a word from God, from God’s word. That is a very important moment in life in the church.
And when a preacher does that well, time after time, year after year, he gains for himself, so to speak, a great amount of influence in the church. And not only is that offset by multiple preachers gaining the congregation’s trust over time, but also I hope that the teaching over time is more healthy, more balanced, and more proportional for the people because the idiosyncrasies of any of us—I got mine, Johnson’s got his, Joe’s got his, Kenny’s got him—none of our idiosyncrasies, I hope, are quite as pronounced in the overall flavour of the preaching, because we’re checking each other and we’re doing that as a team.
17:34 - Who Has the Power?
Matt Tully
You mentioned the sermon as this incredibly influential and, dare I say, powerful expression of the leadership of the spiritual leaders of the church, and I think that probably would ring true with most people listening right now, that what the pastor says on a Sunday morning from the pulpit really does set the trajectory for the church in a lot of ways.
It ties into this other hot-button topic that relates to the issue of celebrity and authority, and that is just the idea of power in general. Who has the power? How is it wielded in a context? Is it formal or even informal power? And so I just wonder, could you speak to that? How should a pastor think about his power in the context of a church?
David Mathis
Thanks, Matt. It’s a really important question. My own sense or guess is that many pastors—most pastors, the rank and file—are the guys that nobody’s writing a story about because they’re just faithful. They love their Bible, they read their Bible, and they teach their Bible faithfully.
They make decisions that are difficult for them personally and benefit their congregations. These are just good pastors. Most pastors are like this. That kind of pastor looks at himself in the mirror, and he doesn’t think, Well, I got a lot of power. I got a lot of influence. He’s aware of his failures.
He’s aware of the many things that don’t go the way that he wishes would go his way. And I think that the pastor probably doesn’t understand how great his influence is in the congregation. There are some pastors who are arrogant, conceited, and swollen with pride, and they tell themselves they have more power than they do, and they’re angling for more power. They love to have power and have their big decisions and whims catered to by other people. There are some people like that. That’s a shame.
It’s immature, and it’s potentially evil. But many pastors, I think, don’t know how much influence they have in their local congregation. They don’t think about, Oh, I’m an officer, and just to formally be called pastor here and to have the vote of the congregation, or their support, or to be official—however that is in the different polities, whoever made you official, officially—you are an officer there. We call it “officer” for a reason because that’s an official leader. So there is power, in that sense, tied to the office.
Then also, the very nature of the Christian faith as a teaching movement, Jesus as the consummate teacher. The way the church grows is through teaching the Scriptures, the Old Testament, and the New Testament. Teaching is at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian church. Christianity is a teaching movement, and those who teach well gain influence in the church because the church is a teaching movement.
Good teachers who are official, if they teach regularly and do so faithfully if they’re good teachers, if they’re effective, then they gain influence with that. Another thing is if the church is being, I think, the full expression of a New Testament church, a local church, having a plurality of leadership, now you have a pooling of power. You have officers, elders, and pastors. This group is not just governors who make decisions.
This group is also the best teacher in the church. So, whatever that is—three guys, five guys. At our church, we have ten pastors. I think it’d be fair to say these ten pastors are all official. They have a congregational vote saying, You are officially a pastor-elder. And, by and large, for the most part, these are the ten most gifted teachers in the church. And Christianity is a teaching faith. And those men are friends. They’re on a council together. They’re elders, and they’re pastors together. So there’s the pooling of their power. And I think, in light of that, humble pastors don’t realize how influential they are in their local church.
I want to help guys be aware of this, pastors to be aware of this, that in light of those things and other realities, you have more influence probably than you think. And if you’re a decent, humble, modest pastor, you probably have more influence than you’re constantly aware of, and it’s probably good that you not be aware of it often. But there also are times for us to remind each other and say, All right, brothers. Remember here that we’re the teachers.
We’re the officers. We’ve pooled our power here as in a plurality, and so we need to make sure that we are leveraging this for the good of this body. This is not for our personal convenience. This is a danger for pluralities and for any group. You hear about the boys club or whatever it would be, that a group would begin to have a spirit where its decisions would suddenly serve the comfort of that group to the detriment of the group it’s supposed to serve.
And what we are called to do as pastors in the church is keep each other accountable, and keep ourselves laid bare before God and his word. We want to make collective decisions as pastors that often are more costly for us personally because it’s better for the church. And I think most pastors who have done this for a while would know that you often come to junctures in difficult decisions, and one way to cast the fork in the road is, Well, this way would be better for the church, but this way would be easier for us.
And it is so important, at those junctures, that the pastors together say, We are called to do this for the joy of the church. And part of being a spiritual leader is that we are taking on more burdens. We’re often taking on the harder option rather than, the easier one to serve the needs of this flock. And it’s good in Christ Jesus.
Matt Tully
A minute ago, you mentioned Scripture and even the conversation about the priority of teaching for elders and pastors in a church, and kind of the question is, Teaching what? And I think as Protestants, we would say teaching Scripture, and we would embrace the idea of sola scriptura—that Scripture alone is the ultimate authority for us in our lives and what we believe about God. How does a pastor’s authority or power, in the context of his church, relate to the Bible’s authority? And maybe to kind of put a more fine point on it, does a pastor need a Bible verse to back up everything that he might want to say in a church? Or, for every bit of counsel or advice he’d want to give to somebody, does it always have to have a Bible verse attached to it because that’s where all the power lies?
David Mathis
Good question. So, two different things. Let me go to the last part of the question first. A danger to beware of is when you make, as a pastor or as pastors together when you’re advocating for a certain direction, which is a manifestation of wisdom; it’s seeking to navigate circumstances; it’s prudential. Make sure that it’s not one-for-one obedience to a particular verse. You should beware of putting a verse with it because later on, when you change that, and you go a different direction, it’s wise to not make our people think that this is one-for-one obedience to a particular direction. But here’s the thing, Matt, it’s a tension because we as pastors want to be leading with Bible all the time.
This is at the heart of our calling. What makes us fit governors of a local church is that we are the Bible guys. We gotta know the Bible backwards and forwards. We gotta be the kind of men who, when we get together, we talk about, Hey, I saw this in this verse this morning. Did you ever know that?
We text each other. Did you see this in 2 Timothy 2:24? Have you ever thought about that? We are Bible-saturated men who make that the explicit talk of our conversations and as we lead the church. So, that’s in counselling appointments, that’s in community groups, that’s in Sunday school classes, that’s from the pulpit, that’s throughout the service. We want to be Scripture-saturated.
We want to be constantly throwing our pebbles of Bible influence, teaching the Bible, teaching the Bible throwing pebbles in the water to create ripples. So we want to be that kind of man that our people would think; we do the Bible here. We love the Bible here. In the community group, I pick up an insight. In the welcome, I pick up an insight. In a conversation, I pick up an insight. The whole Bible is more alive and makes more sense and is more real in my life because this group of men just teaches all the time.
They love to teach, and it seems so real. So we have that on the one hand, and we do want to put verses on stuff. We want to give a feel, we want to give a banner, and we want to put a verse at the top of a paper where we make a case. And at the same time, be very careful that we do not put a text on everything as a kind of proof text that, on the one hand, Congregation, does this. Approve this. Don’t raise any questions about this because I got a verse in parentheses. That would be, I think, unwise and will erode the pastor’s trust capital over time as Bible teachers and as leaders of the church.
27:26 - Be Sober-Minded
Matt Tully
Another big emphasis that you often see in maybe more conservative quarters when it comes to thinking about what it means to be a godly man, but then even more specifically a godly leader in the context of a church, is the idea of strength—men being strong and courageous and willing to stand up for the truth and what is right.
But in a chapter you have about the idea of sober-mindedness, and why that’s an important quality for a pastor, you write, “Pastors should not be preoccupied with fighting but with the faith, even if that takes some occasional combat.” I think that raises that issue of maybe a definition of strength, but also of the willingness that a pastor should have to actually fight—to stand up for things that he thinks are right or wrong, even when it’s unpopular. Whether that’s false teaching or immorality or an injustice of some kind. What would you say to that? Should pastors be willing to take stand on some of those issues in a public way? And if so, when and how should they do that?
David Mathis
Matt, that’s a question of our time in many ways. Not the question, but a question of our time. And there’s a nexus of issues right there. One of them is the elder qualification of sober-mindedness, which is something like balance or spiritual EQ. I think it would be like this: the ability to teach (being apt to teach or prone to teach, and that gets at that teaching aspect of local church pastors and elders), and the sober-mindedness extends toward the governing, toward the leading, of the church.
We don’t want imbalanced extremists who are leading the church this way and that way and doing this extreme thing and that extreme thing. We want balanced men who can take—and this is together in the context of plurality—a group of sober-minded men who can take in the various aspects and make those difficult decisions. There’s not answer to prescribe ahead of time that a church should always take up the next battle, move from one battle to the next, or never take up a battle and always seek peace and say, Peace! Peace! when there is no peace. So there’s the sober-mindedness angle.
Another one, then, is just the very nature of teaching. Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:4 about preaching that we should do it with complete patience and teaching. Patience and teaching go together. A teacher doesn’t roll into a room and give a final exam. A teacher comes into a room and teaches day after day, week after week. There’s going to be a final exam a few months from now, but a teacher with patience brings the people along.
The very nature of teaching is it’s not just a quick dictate. Teaching takes patience. And so the teachers of the church need to be patient, patient to bring others along. And the point of contrast (this is really interesting) between the false teachers in Ephesus as Paul writes the pastoral epistles to Timothy, the false teachers are known for quarrelsomeness. And Paul wants to confront that with teaching. He wants the elders of the church, the true leaders, to teach. They correct errors, and they do it with patience. They have a view to doing it over time instead of just entering in and giving their quick opinion and saying the provocative word and blowing things up and setting people off on a different course and upsetting folks with quarrelsomeness.
He wants them to teach. So there’s this confrontation here as the battle lines are drawn between teachers. There are true teachers who are patient and teach and false teachers who are quarrelsome. They give irrelevant myths and irrelevant babble—he talks about and warns about that. And that’s something for us to consider as pastors and elders who are very comfortable issuing public words. We’ve practised this over the years. We’re used to teaching, we’re used to sermons, we’re used to coming up with words on the fly. And so that can serve quarrelsome purposes. We might just like to talk and like to have people affected when we speak. And quarrelsomeness can be an avenue in which a pastor, heaven forbid, enjoys speaking his voice in public and having others respond to it. And so that’s a danger to beware.
Matt Tully
Would you say it’s possible for a pastor to be right but still quarrelsome?
David Mathis
Oh, yeah. All the time. Part of the danger is he has studied the Bible deeply; he knows he’s right for the most part on this issue, but yet he’s abandoned the calling of a teacher by just blowing things up by poking with the right answer instead of patiently bringing people along.
Now, one more thing to say. You gotta know your context, and you gotta know your timing, but I do think this whole pretence of the world interacting with the world online and reducing time and reducing locality is creating all sorts of fog and confusion for people. It’s so important to get a sense of timing and proportion in leading a church and knowing when do we patiently move on here?
When do we go after it? When do we have a particular conversation with somebody, them being a problem in our church? When do we launch a sermon series on this topic? So much of that needs to be tied to locality. For instance, here’s just an example from Minnesota. Minnesota is a very simple state in some ways in that you have the twin cities of St. Paul, which are very urban.
Minneapolis and St. Paul are very urban. And then you get a little bit outside the metro, and then you have what’s called outstate, which is a largely rural and small town. And so there was a really big divide in the last presidential election and over time where there has been more and more a sense in the urban areas of a certain field, and the rural areas are different, and the divisions are more between city and country rather than between states.
You can drive a few miles and find a very different feel and different needs between a city church and what the temptations are in downtown St. Paul versus two hours north, where my wife is from, and what the temptations are there. What sins need to be spoken about with particular clarity two hours north of us versus what is making incursions in the church and among Christians in the urban setting? And so social media flattens all that out. We need to really have a clear sense of where we are and what our calling is, and then that relates to the timing of these things. Many times quarrelsomeness has a timing problem.
There’s a lack of patience, and there is a sense of—there could be the sense for the person who’s being quarrelsome—I just wanna be right about this, and I wanna be right first. I’d like to be right about this before somebody else gets this right. And so, without a sense of patience and a sense of timing, I’m gonna rush to get this out there as quickly as possible. I’m going to abandon the patience of teaching and unhook this from my locality. I think that is particularly something for us to be aware of and be warned of in our day.
35:10 - Accountability
Matt Tully
Maybe the last couple of questions, David. I wonder if you could speak to the question of how leaders should be led themselves. You make the case in the book that leadership itself, that following a leader, is good for us as humans. We were made to follow in a very real sense, and that is healthy for us. That’s God’s design for us. How does that apply to the pastor or the leader? I’m even thinking of maybe a congregational type church like yours where you’re not a part of a broader denominational structure where the pastors are accountable to maybe a bishop or someone else. So, who are the leaders following?
David Mathis
On the first page of the book, I have that it is dedicated to the saints of Cities Church. Then, I’ve got Luke 10:20 as the banner over the book: “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” Don’t rejoice in your ministry, don’t rejoice in your leadership; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.
So, I think this is very important for the spiritual leader that first and foremost, years before he became a spiritual leader, he has been grounded in, he identifies first and foremost as sheep, not a shepherd. That he really, truly rejoices that his name is written in heaven. This is so important in our day to get this understanding. The New Testament’s very clear about this. The driving reality is having our names written in heaven; being a Christian is, I think, 10,000 times more important than being a pastor or missionary or anything we do in ministry.
Having that sense of first and foremost as a believer before my God, there’s a kind of accountability before Jesus in knowing him and in knowing the joy there is in knowing him, enjoying him, having the Holy Spirit’s power and not grieving the Holy Spirit. I do think the most fundamental accountability is the pastor before his God rightly appropriating the gospel, the Scripture, and the lordship of Jesus. And then in that, having the kind of maturity and his feet underneath him to then be part of a team that would lead in a local church.
So first and foremost, it’s Christian by the Spirit before Christ. And that’s going to be manifest through the scriptures. And there is—and this is, I think, one reason we ask the accountability question; this is why plurality is such an important reality and why Jesus may have chosen to do it this way in local churches—that there be real, on-the-ground accountability. Guys that are equal, even as one of the pastors. I think it’s inevitable that somebody’s at least going to function as chief among the equals. Somebody’s going to carry that burden, that mantle, as lead pastor, as buck-stopper, as the one who’s shouldering that responsibility. It’s going to be formal or functional, I think. But that’s a team of equals, and there’s real accountability among those brothers if it’s three brothers, if it’s ten brothers. When it gets to be twenty or thirty, it gets a little more unwieldy and the lines of communication or many.
But to have real accountability manifest in those fellow elders who would help remind each other, Brother, the most important thing is that you are saved, that you’re in Christ. If you need to get out of the ministry for the sake of your soul, that is 10,000 times more important. Don’t try to preserve this ministry. It’s not about this ministry. You’re just serving as one little piece with a team under the risen Christ. He’s building his church all over the globe. You are so tiny and small, and the most important thing for you is that your name is written in the book of life. Cling to that. Hold fast to that. Part of that goes back to how we speak to our children, how we speak to teenagers, how we speak to college students, and how we prepare them for the church (for seminary guys).
This calling, and there can be a lot at stake in this calling when you do years of formal study to prepare for vocational ministry, and the pastor begins to think, Well, I’m only trained to do this. That’s an obstacle to overcome. You being a Christian is far more important, and if you need to step away from the ministry or expose some sin you would be away from the ministry, you need to do so. So the first and foremost of accountability is before Christ. And not just in a dutiful sense, but a kind of accountability before Christ that is compelled by joy. I don’t want to live apart from the joy of being close to Jesus, seeing him in his word, having the help of the Holy Spirit to see him, to know him and enjoy him, and be held accountable by these brothers who would speak into my life as equals as well.
Matt Tully
So often, we hear the phrase, A person’s highest calling would be to pastoral ministry. I’ve heard that many times. You hear that in seminary context fairly often. And if it’s not said, then sometimes it’s even just implicit. But it seems like what you’re kind of saying is that we need to rephrase that and mean it, that a person’s highest calling is to be a Christian. And that is, in so many ways, more important than even a role of leadership in God’s church.
David Mathis
I think it probably often comes from a good motivation where, because of the supremacy of Chris—because Jesus is the greatest treasure, he’s the Lord, he’s Savior—we might think, Oh, his servants have this exalted role. The role—the gift—of leaders in the church is significant. We talked about the importance of teaching and of that preaching moment in the life of the church. But sometimes—for ministers, for pastors, for elders—they can begin to get their own identity bound up in that. And we need to think far less of ourselves, far more of Christ, of his structures, and know that we can come and go as pastors. And most important is that we are in Christ and happy in him.
Matt Tully
David, thank you so much for helping us to think through these difficult, at times, and controversial but important questions about what it means to lead in a church, what that authority should look like, and how it should be exercised. These conversations are more important now than ever before. We appreciate the time.
David Mathis
