Episode 146: On Preparing for a Tough Political Season (Part 2)
How can pastors shepherd their congregation well during divisive political seasons? In this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman encourage pastors facing a hard political season, discuss how Charles Spurgeon addressed modern-day issues in his preaching, and how that can be applied today. They flesh out how pastors should work towards better elects but must also accept imperfect elections. They end by addressing repentance and prayer among churches and members who have been divided by political rancor.
- Encouragement for Pastors Preparing for a Tough Political Season
- How Did Charles Spurgeon Address Contemporary Issues in His Preaching?
- How Pastors Can Accept Imperfect Elections
- Encouraging Repentance and Prayer During Tough Political Seasons
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Jonathan Leeman:
Hi, I am Jonathan Leeman, and with me today is Mark Dever, who’s Pastor of Capital Baptist Church. Capital Baptist Church for 26 years. Right?
Mark Dever:
This one has been longer than most of them, but anyway. Yep.
Jonathan Leeman:
Twenty-Six years. And in his usual form with us this afternoon, nine Mark exists to equip church leaders with the biblical vision and practical resources for building healthy churches. Learn more. 9marks.org. Mark, how’s pastoring going?
Mark Dever:
I am using Andy Naselli’s book with J.D. Crowley on Conscience a lot these days.
Jonathan Leeman:
How come?
Mark Dever:
Very thankful. We’re just trying to help Christians understand what we can disagree on and still be members of the same church.
Jonathan Leeman:
Is that contested?
Mark Dever:
It is front and center
Jonathan Leeman:
Like with what?
Mark Dever:
Just anything you can think of contesting, but we’re trying to stand together around the gospel and it’s a good Baptist church around believer baptism and stuff like that.
Jonathan Leeman:
Now I live in nine marks world, full-time, not pastoring a church. That’s my evening and weekend gig, if I could put it that way. In the nine marks world, I’m feeling more pressure. Are you feeling as a pastor of a church like this is a tough time or it’s just kind of more
Mark Dever:
Yeah, I feel that I’m guessing in the year 2020 there will be more pastors in America who quit the pastor than any year, certainly in my lifetime, just from conversations with folks. I think sheep are being manipulated by Russian bots.
Jonathan Leeman:
You mean that sincerely?
Mark Dever:
I do mean that quite sincerely and are like eating shepherds and I think they may well live to regret it when they’re wondering where are all the good shepherds? Well, someone was chomp, chomping, they finally chomp. Chomped a little too much.
Encouragement for Pastors Preparing for a Tough Political Season
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Are you having conversations with pastors that suggest a higher level of discouragement or frustration or perplexity or challenge?
Mark Dever:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
And how do you typically encourage them?
Mark Dever:
It super depends upon the
Jonathan Leeman:
Guy and the problem.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Yeah. Some guys should probably just turn it in. It’s a good time for them to head on out. Other guys need to get good support around them and hang in there almost daily. I haven’t having conversation like this, so I was having a conversation yesterday with the guy and it was not clear to me which of those two he should do
Jonathan Leeman:
Hang it up or hang in.
Mark Dever:
And I was giving him some advice on how he could hang it up and he got back to me late last night and said, I’m going to actually hang in there a little bit longer. Awesome. Great. God bless him.
Jonathan Leeman:
I was actually going to conclude the episode with this little bit from Kevin D. Young, but I want to read it now. He wrote an article just today, Mark, I think you’d enjoyed it.
Mark Dever:
He’s doing that most days.
Jonathan Leeman:
He says, you don’t need to hear it from me, but maybe I need to hear it from myself. Pastor, you have permission to be a pastor. You didn’t sign up. And then I’m jumping it down a little bit. You didn’t sign up to minister to become an expert in epidemiology or Supreme Court nominations.
You aren’t quite sure if masks are saving lives or the first step of government oppression. You don’t know how to fix policing in America or if it needs fixing in the first place. You’re not looking to sign up for Black Lives Matter or Trump’s reelection came in.
You don’t have an opinion on everything, or at least not an opinion you think needs to be shared with everyone. But somehow you’re wondering if you’re a squish for plotting along with social distancing in masks and being insufficiently attuned to social justice. You’d like to think that reading old books, reading commentaries and reading your Greek and Hebrew are still the most important things you can read each week, but it doesn’t feel like that.
Jonathan Leeman:
It feels like being up on the news is more important than being up on the mountain with God. You’d like to think even in the midst of covid that the old paths are still the right paths, that the ordinary means of grace are still the right means of grace. But that’s not what you’re hearing experts are saying, we can’t go back to the way ministry was before.
What’s the pastor to do? And he goes on like that and again, he just says, I’m going to give you permission to pastor. And I found that encouraging to read over right.
Mark Dever:
Preaching the word of God, right. Administration of the Lord’s Supper and Kevin of baptism as his good friend and coauthor Greg Gilbert would say, talking about politics does not always have to be part of that. There’s an article in the issue of the journal that’s just come out from nine marks by Greg about how, as a pastor, you don’t have to always talk about politics.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Did you see his first article on the web page itself? When you click on the first article, there’s a little surprise waiting for you and then look at the appendix there. That is. But anyway, I did want to talk about the journal that just came out pastoring through political turmoil, A lot of really good pieces and the goal of the journal was not to say,
Mark Dever:
What would you say would be your least favorite piece in there?
Jonathan Leeman:
Mine, probably mine on voting. I don’t know. Yeah.
Mark Dever:
Alex came up with one from a meme.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, sir, this is not an Arby’s.
Mark Dever:
You want to summarize for the listener
Jonathan Leeman:
There, there’s this meme going around. Somebody comes along and says, I can’t believe this is going. They kind of go off in their little political rant and somebody responds, sir, this is not an Arby’s. You go up to the guy at Arby’s and you go on your political ramp. The joke is this has nothing to do with anything.
Why are you going on your ramp? And his point is people want churches to adopt various agendas and the response is, sir, this is a church. Right. So it’s a good piece and I think a central crucial piece for reminding pastors what a church is and why are we called to do it.
Mark Dever:
So is this whole journal aimed at teaching people not to feel aggrieved
Jonathan Leeman:
About this or that political agenda that they’re feeling
Mark Dever:
About anything they may be tempted to feel aggrieved about?
How Did Charles Spurgeon Address Contemporary Issues in His Preaching?
Jonathan Leeman:
No, it’s not. But it is certainly trying to recognize the distinction between things of this realm, temporal things, and eternal things, and working to keep that prioritization correct. In fact, let me start there and get your perspective. So Jeff Chang and Alex dma, how did Charles Spurgeon address contemporary issues in his preaching?
On the one hand, you have Spurgeon saying, let me give you a couple of Spurgeon lines. He says, take the 18 volumes of the metropolitan Tabernacle pulpit and see if you can find 18 pages of matter, which even look toward politics anymore. See if there be one solitary sentence concerning politics, which did not to the preacher’s mind, appear to arise out of his text. And then he goes on to say in proportion, as the preaching becomes political and the pastor sinks the spiritual into the temporal strength is lost not gained.
So in the one hand he says that on the other hand, he was willing to address slavery and political issues of the day. And Jeff and Alex give other examples of responding say to the cholera outbreak out of 1866 and preaching. Amos three, three, cholera, cholera. Cholera. Thank you. And when it came out of my mouth, I’m like, that didn’t sound right.
Mark Dever:
Sorry. We don’t normally record times this late at night, guys. It’s like 2:30 in the morning and we’re doing this. It is amazing that Mr. Lehman’s up at an hour like this.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m not sure I get the inside here joke, Caleb, do you Caleb’s long in bed?
Mark Dever:
It’s you’re imagining things.
Jonathan Leeman:
Do you think the Spurgeon strikes the right balance?
Mark Dever:
I do. I think Spurgeon is a lot more controversial than people often realize. I’m a frequent reader of Spurgeon’s sermons. He often discharges his conscience about all manner of things, and he does sometimes make comments that are political, but I think Jeff’s right that they’re always in his mind arising from the point of the text.
I read this one rant of his on a sermon from Philippians one six where he just goes off on half a page-long paragraph on Anglican infant baptism and he just warmed the cockles of my heart. So it’s not always clear that his asides arise from the text exactly directly from the text, Jeff.
But in his mind, which I think you gave that careful qualifier, I can see how oh, we were on this topic and while I’m here, let me just look over to the left and let me make this point.
Jonathan Leeman:
So I hear him saying, don’t preach politics, but sometimes preaching politics
Mark Dever:
Well, you’re always preaching scripture and you’re attempting to well and apply it well. And yeah, sometimes that’s going to end you up in statements that are either A, that are just flatly political, or, B, are taken to be political.
How Did Puritans Handle Political Conflict?
Jonathan Leeman:
How did the Puritans handle this and did they give examples for us?
Mark Dever:
Well, they’re just in a fundamentally different place than us in Spurgeon. We in Spurgeon are in a time when we’re very familiar with Disestablishment. Now Spurgeon was living in a land with an established church, but he was not a minister in that church.
You and I are living in a land with no established church. There’s been no establishment in North America for almost in the United States for almost 200 years. The world of the Puritans lived in their name in trying to purify the established church, the Church of England.
So they were all about trying to use the money that was there and get the magistrates to be more responsible with their authority. So they were in a very different situation.
Jonathan Leeman:
So the whole phrase, preaching politics just means something different with an established church.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, because what you and I think about the First Amendment like freedom of speech, of worship, of assembly, they wouldn’t have understood any of those things in quite the same way.
And they certainly wouldn’t have understood them in a way without reference to Christianity or scripture as our government has it in our written documents. They would not understand that to be virtuous, I don’t think they would be transparent to them. That was virtuous.
Jonathan Leeman:
So any lessons to take from the Puritans?
Mark Dever:
Well, sure. I mean 1662
Jonathan Leeman:
On this question of what we call preaching politics.
Mark Dever:
Well, they understood they had the responsibility to advise the government. And so when King James was not supporting his daughter Elizabeth of Bohemia at the beginning of what we now know as the 30 Years War, they from the pulpits very regularly would thunder out denunciations of indifference toward the gospel.
And what they meant by that is you should get English arms over there to help our Protestant cousins in Germany. And then they were doing the same thing about the HU in France.
Mark Dever:
So they looked at the British government as essentially a Protestant government and they understood it had the responsibility to wield the sword against Catholic powers that they saw as threatening the freedoms and maybe even the lives of their brothers and sisters who were Protestants on the continent.
So that’s a pretty different situation than what you and I are in with our government here in America. Our government is certainly a moral actor and we care, but we as Christians don’t act as straightforward advisors as if the government is the nursing mother of the church in the way
Jonathan Leeman:
That Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of.
Mark Dever:
Whereas in New England before the American Revolution, those colonies understood the government to be the nursing mother of the church. Whereas now the government is more understood to be the person who makes sure that the party makes sure there’s a sort of clean playing field so that citizens can be honest and can say what they think is true and associate together with others who agree with them and without being hobbled or prejudiced against by that.
Jonathan Leeman:
Another great article in this journal is Kim Bogas pastoring through a contested election, a Kenyan perspective, and he starts by saying, I’ve yet to witness a Kenyan election that was not contested. He goes on to say the evil of tribalism that we had managed to domesticate so well and for so long violently erupted in our society under all its grotesque ugliness.
Sadly, this affected our church unkind evil words were spoken with conviction by professing believers on both sides of the divide. Words were scrutinized, motives were judged, opinions were dichotomized, and the options were Tyra radically simplified members displayed a little empathy for one another. Do you share Ken’s concern in your context?
Mark Dever:
No. In America, we don’t have the same kind of partisan violent riots that typify the coming of an election
Jonathan Leeman:
In Nairobi
Mark Dever:
That they have suffered in Nairobi between tribal parties. If Spurgeon had seen that happening on the streets of London, it’d be interesting to see whether or not he would’ve said something in his sermons.
So Ken Amis or whoever is preaching this Sunday at Emanuel Baptist Church in Nairobi, Kenya may well feel were he in the midst of an election cycle and with election results coming out, he may feel a responsibility to address a topic that Spurgeon in his situation didn’t feel or that you and I don’t feel here in the DC area.
Jonathan Leeman:
Nonetheless, you recently tweeted, this is Mark Dever.
Mark Dever:
Well, we’re going to Twitter.
Jonathan Leeman:
Can we see this?
Mark Dever:
Is this going to be like a basement podcast? Alright, wait, I’m going to hop online and start digging up some of your old tweets.
Jonathan Leeman:
No,
Mark Dever:
Jonathan Leeman recently tweeted
Jonathan Leeman:
This. This is my gotcha moment though.
Mark Dever:
Alright.
How Pastors Can Accept Imperfect Elections
Jonathan Leeman:
Can we see the significance of working for better elections and at the same time the importance of accepting the results of imperfect elections?
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Why’d you tweet that?
Mark Dever:
Because I’ve been hearing Christians that I love, use language that I feel is overwrought and more dangerous socially than they might realize. I feel that the Republicans are getting us ready to delegitimize the results of the election if they don’t like it
Jonathan Leeman:
By talking about voter fraud.
Mark Dever:
And the Democrats are getting us ready to delegitimize the results of the rejection election if they don’t like it by talking about voter suppression.
Jonathan Leeman:
Voter suppression.
Mark Dever:
And I don’t want in any way to stop members of our churches from working to improve our elections. Voter suppression is terrible, is a bad history of the us. We don’t want to encourage voter suppression.
We would like every American citizen who wants to be able to participate, and we certainly don’t want to just dismiss voter fraud. I mean, Caleb and I could sadly joke about all of the ballots that are available to a resident of any DC apartment building.
If you’re a DC apartment resident change, you could vote 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 times in any election if you want to, if your conscience didn’t bother you. And so there’s all kinds of ways that these are very real issues and really worth working on to clean up. But having said that,
Jonathan Leeman:
All of that was the intro.
Mark Dever:
All of that’s the intro.
Jonathan Leeman:
Here’s your point
Mark Dever:
We’ve got two legitimate sides with problems and I don’t think there’s any Democrat who should belittle the problem of voter fraud or any Republican who should be little to the problem of voter suppression.
Jonathan Leeman:
But your concern as a pastor is
Mark Dever:
Well, and I assume in different places those problems may be differently arranged. So I don’t mean to say they’re exactly equivalent, I’m just
Jonathan Leeman:
Got it.
Mark Dever:
I don’t know all that stuff, but I am saying that I think the elections that have been more typical of what we have had in the US as opposed to what our brother Ken has experienced in Kenya are good. Richard Nixon to meet up with John Kennedy and tell him privately, I think you stole the election, but I’m not going to say anything because I think the piece of America is more important than who sits in the White House.
I think that kind of American citizenship, or frankly, as Al Gore said, when the Supreme Court ruled against him in Bush v Gore, Vice President Gore got on television and he supported the decision of the court. And regardless of whether or not the court came to the right decision, that’s for us as a country, people who are living here peacefully.
If we’re supposed to pray that we can live lives in godliness and quietness, accepting the results of imperfect elections will help our congregations more than literally killing each other over having better imperfect elections. I think there’s a middle speed. I think we don’t have to be indifferent on the one hand or have violence on the other.
I think we can work vigorously for better elections and accept the consequences of our inevitably imperfect election. I think the proponents of being more vigilant against voter fraud or being more active in trying to enable voter participation and in voter suppression feel that they need to use as high a language as they can in order to motivate people. And I think that tears at the fabric of our republic.
Jonathan Leeman:
Now, when you talk about tearing at the fabric of a republic, I understand why you’re talking as a US citizen, but to talk as a pastor for a moment. Well, you have been, I’m sorry.
Mark Dever:
Well, no, you’re right. This would be true in every country where a democratic process is part of this.
Jonathan Leeman:
Why this concerns you as a pastor, what you would say to other pastors, Hey brothers, in so far as you hear more and more church members talking about fraud or suppression, your concern is X and your encouragement is what
Mark Dever:
My concern is that they overspeak on its significance.
Jonathan Leeman:
Members are
Mark Dever:
Yeah. And that they should be aware of that. Therefore, it makes it seem that the agreement on this issue is more important than the agreement on the gospel. This is more fundamental to my identity than being in Christ and being united with Christ and being as Romans 12 five says, members of one another.
Jonathan Leeman:
And so in some sense, you’re treating this, you’re saying, Hey, this is another jagged line issue and we need to allow for freedom of conscience here
Mark Dever:
Shorthand. Yes. Now you could make a certain situation, you could concoct him, which I might be like, ah, no, that’s more, you’re pushing the line there. But yes, on the whole, I am.
Encouraging Repentance and Prayer During Tough Political Seasons
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Got it. Ken follows up. So what did we do? We confessed our sins in corporate prayer. We confess not as tribalistic units, but as United sisters sinners who have been brought together through the blood of Jesus.
We also sought to interpret the state of our country primarily through a doctrine of sin. Our division as a nation was the surest evidence of our division from God. How do you encourage a church towards repentance when it’s been divided by political rankers, assuming that your church cannot yet see its rancorous, unloving, uncharitable sin,
Mark Dever:
Prayer, love, patient teaching from the word trying to instruct as Christians have from. Caleb has a great article on William Perkins on the conscience in this Caleb Morrell in this journal all the way up to the little booklet you and Andy Nasally did together on differences in politics. The little red booklet,
Mark Dever:
Just patient repeated teaching like that of Christian truths in order to equip members of the congregation to love each other, including those with whom they disagree. The wider our disagreements are inside a local church, the more testimony can be given to the gospel the clarity of the gospel, and the uniqueness of the gospel. If everybody, it’s kind of what Jamie and I argued in compelling community.
If everybody in the church already agreed on everything on all political matters before, it’s right now not straight-up social matters that are dictated in scripture, one Corinthians six things that are condemned we need to condemn, but other issues that are more debatable if we are able to see people who hold different positions on debatable issues at the same church.
It shows that those things we agree on are more important and heavier in our identity than those other things that we might have serious disagreements about. So serious that we change our jobs over and we write alarming editorials about it. But we still even given all that seem more in common with that person who’s on the opposite side of an issue than I am if we’re both in Christ.
Jonathan Leeman:
I like what you just added in terms of it showing the gospel’s heavier because I’m still here with you because of the gospel, not because you almost want to say that a healthy church is going to have some measure of political tension in it.
Mark Dever:
I think so.
Jonathan Leeman:
I don’t recall you ever saying, kind of going back to my first question though about calling a church to repentance. You don’t you do that in your pastoral prayers perhaps, or prayers or confession?
I can’t think of times where you’re like, church, we need to repent. Do you use that kind of language? I mean you’ll call individuals, but I mean, will you call for corporate repentance?
Mark Dever:
Certainly my pastoral prayer. I’ll say things like that. Evocatively addressing the church with command. I’m going to be very
Jonathan Leeman:
Not sure in a Daniel Nine sort of way.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
That doesn’t seem to be, I’m not saying one should use such language, just I’m reflecting out loud here.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. I’m very aware that in public it’s easy to repent corporately, and what you’re really doing is repenting for other people’s sins. And I want to be very loathed to lead an example publicly of doing that.
Lessons From Pastoring During the 2000 Election
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. You pastored through the 2000 election, which was slightly contested. Any lessons you gained from that?
Mark Dever:
Oh, the loveliness of uncontested elections. Respect for any politician who can give up what he feels to be a just claim to have been elected if he feels it serves the peace of the people. I want to be careful about speaking as if I sound indifferent to elections. I don’t mean to be, and their results, I don’t want to diminish their significance, but they’re not ultimate.
Jonathan Leeman:
You’re going to have to pastor on the other side of this upcoming moon so other people listen.
Mark Dever:
That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
Kin says, after a bitterly contested election, it doesn’t take a genius to know that some of your members will be angry and maybe even a little bitter. Meanwhile, others will be giddy and relieved. And in our particular case, we had members who spent several nights huddled with their kids frightened by the smell of tear gas from the riots near their homes. We also had members who slept soundly.
Mark Dever:
And I think what we want to do is lead our congregation to pray for those in authority. That’s what we’re told in the Pastorals. So we pray for Mayor Bowser, we pray for President Trump. We pray for senators and congressmen. We pray for state legislatures.
We pray for judges and justices of the Supreme Court. We pray for those who are in authority in other ways, in authority, in companies, in authority, in associations, in authority, in anybody who’s going to have responsibility over large numbers of other people and resources and jobs and lives. We pray for these people.
Jonathan Leeman:
Speaking of it’s worth taking a look, we won’t right now, but for the listener, Shane Walker’s publicly praying for government authorities. When he sent that in, I thought, what’s he going to say here that I haven’t, is this going to be all generic?
But it was insightful and gave me some things to think about. I hadn’t before he talked about exactly what you just said. We’re praying for peace in that to desire peace and your civic life is a good thing and we should be praying for peace.
Mark Dever:
One of those surprising articles. You had an article in there on conspiracy theories. I mean, that’s a little beyond the pale for a Nine Mark’s journal normally, isn’t it?
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, it’s funny how many questions, how many, I don’t want to exaggerate. Half a dozen pastors I’ve heard ask over the last few months, how do you respond to conspiracy theories? And Dan Darling had a chapter in a book he just released that I read through and just thought that is useful and worthwhile.
And I think it’ll help equip pastors to know how to respond to people who, in fact, we asked one guy to write it. I’m not going to tell you who. And he said I’d love to. I have a lot to say, but I can’t because immediate family members are deep in it, and so he’s
Mark Dever:
Not going to be too awkward. But Jonathan, what can you say that’s generic enough that’s going to be of general help? Is Dan psychologically profiling the conspiracy theory believer, the average typical conspiracy theory believer then hands you in this article a key to unlock them and freedom from that temptation?
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, it’s understanding what’s going on pastorally there. There’s a lot of fear and anxiety going on, and people grasp at conspiracy theories when they feel under siege and they feel like the world’s turning against them or things are divisive or contested because what are we doing?
He says we’re looking for an explanation that gives us a sense of control over the chaos that we see all around us. So you as a pastor need to go with those kinds of, so you don’t just go in and argue the ridiculous person.
Now you understand what’s going on in their heart in terms of a desire to respond to fear and control and so forth. And so, yeah, I think it’s a tremendously helpful article. The last article we got, maybe a minute left here, I’d come in is Sam’s article,
Mark Dever:
Sam Amma,
Jonathan Leeman:
Sam Amma Don’t Get Left Behind.
Mark Dever:
Is that a reference to the Rapture
Jonathan Leeman:
And a book Left Behind? Don’t Get Left Behind: Why Pastors Should Consider Preaching Through Revelation in our Cultural Moment. You recently preached through Revelation. No, you didn’t. You did it a while ago, but you encouraged your church to listen to those sermons
Mark Dever:
While we were in March and April lockdown.
Cultural and Political Lessons from Revelation?
Jonathan Leeman:
What are lessons that you would take for our culture and political moment from the Book of Revelation?
Mark Dever:
The kingship of Christ Relativizes all the other kingships of this world in a really healthy, happy, godly, hopeful, happy way. We also see that the beast in Revelation 13 does not ultimately win. So he’s bad. He’s genuinely bad. He harms. And yet,
Jonathan Leeman:
And you don’t see that as just a time figure.
Mark Dever:
I think that’s a
Jonathan Leeman:
Reoccurring,
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s a role that government, when it idolizes itself and its own power, it falls into
Jonathan Leeman:
Veers toward,
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. What Sam brought out really well is that in our temporally obsessed earthly perspective of the world, it lifts our eyes beyond political powers and pandemics and elections and economic crises to the spiritual realities that define the moment. And if we don’t have those eyes, we’re going to be subverted by what we can see with our eyes.
Mark Dever:
Amen. Yeah. Not amen that I wanted that to happen, but amen. I agree. I think that’s true.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right?
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
We’re thinking about starting this new feature at the end of our conversations. Lemme try one a little mailbag. Somebody wrote this in the final feature. Here we go. The norm for church discipline in scripture seems to be patient exhortation. You get that in Matthew.
But there are situations when a member’s sin is so destructive that we’re told to speed up and discipline more quickly. Highest 3 9 1 Corinthians five and this person writing in Mark wanted to know are there situations, what kind of situations fall into this expedited discipline situation? I think he has a situation he’s wondering about, but generically, when do you speed up the process of discipline?
Mark Dever:
Almost never. I mean, it would have to be something where,
Jonathan Leeman:
Which you have,
Mark Dever:
I can think of maybe a couple of times. Yeah, the facts would need to be pretty uncontroverted. It would need to be pretty destructive. It would need to be either known or about to be known publicly.
So there’d be a matter of the gospel and the reputation of the gospel. There might be for those people in the congregation or persons who’ve been victimized in a situation, we might have a pastoral desire to get out in front to try to help them in what’s about to be a very difficult situation.
So there are just some unique pastoral concerns that would arise that I trust the elders, and pastors of a church would see as they’re working with it. There’s no timetable given to us in Matthew 18 about the amount of time we have to allow for our church.
Normally we give two months to think and pray about something, but that’s nowhere in scripture. So there could well be times when you need to act more quickly than maybe even your constitution allows in order to feel you’re being faithful to scripture. I think it’s probably good for our constitutions to allow things like that.
Jonathan Leeman:
And finally, a fairly high degree of certainty of Unre penance, like the person is insisting on, yes, I’m here.
Mark Dever:
That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m in this. Whatever the sin is.
Mark Dever:
That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
Any other comments, brother?
Mark Dever:
Thank you for your unusually hard work, man. 2020 has not only been the year of COVID and all kinds of social difficulties but it’s been the year of the Complimentarian Journal and now pastoring through political 2019. But anyway, in the last 12 months, you have put out some honkers, some big, huge, gigantic projects that generally are not undertaken easily and lightly.
And I thank you and Sam and Alex and Alberto and just so many folks for putting in extra work on these things and blessing us through them. Thanks, man. A friend, if you’re listening, you read through this journal that’s just been released recently.
You might not agree with every article in there. You might, but you might find a good number of them that are really helpful to you and that nobody else is writing quite this closely to your work pastoring and with their Bibles open.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right. I was just praying this morning that the Lord would use it to help churches think better than we presently are if he would be pleased to help us think more biblically and better about this contested difficult domain and pastors, especially in leading their churches. But thank you for that encouragement. Thank you.
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A weekly conversation between Jonathan Leeman and Mark Dever about practical aspects of the Christian life and pastoral ministry.
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