Episode 194: On How the Puritans Have Shaped Mark’s Ministry
There is so much we can learn from the Puritans. On this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman discuss how the Puritans have shaped Mark’s vision for ministry. They start by discussing the modern church and neo-evangelicalism and flesh out eleven different distinctions about the Puritans that have helped shape Devers’s vision for ministry and the pastorate. Tune in for other resources that they recommend about this vision of the ministry.
- Puritan-Like Vision for Ministry
- What is Neo-Evangelicalism?
- 11 Points about the Puritan Vision
Transcript
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On How the Puritans Have Shaped Mark’s Ministry
Jonathan Leeman
I’m Jonathan Leeman. Already bored? Are you already bored? That was Mark Dever punching buttons once again. And welcome to this episode of the always-predictable
Mark Dever
Pastors talk.
Jonathan Leeman
Pastors talk. 9Marks exists to help church leaders and pastors build healthy churches. Learn more at 9Marks.org.
Mark Dever
And isn’t it encouraging the amount of people we hear back from who actually listen to this?
Jonathan Leeman
Surprising and encouraging.
Mark Dever
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman
Both you and I kind of thought we’d be writers when we grew up or speakers and here we are podcasting.
Mark Dever
Here we are.
Puritan-Like Vision for Ministry
Jonathan Leeman
Speaking of what you do when you grow up, you’re a pastor. You have a Puritan-like vision for the pastorate, and that’s what I want to talk about.
You recently gave a talk on this topic, and you began by noting that Puritans aren’t always the most loved of historical figures. Do you remember what Thomas Macaulay said about why Puritans didn’t like bear baiting?
Mark Dever
The fear that someone might be taking pleasure from it.
Jonathan Leeman
Not that it gave pain to the player.
Mark Dever
No, no, but pleasure to the viewers.
Jonathan Leeman
That’s right. And do you remember how H. L. Lincoln, how he defined Puritanism?
Mark Dever
The haunting fear that someone somewhere may be having fun. Yeah, that’s right. May be happy.
Jonathan Leeman
And finally, good old Garrison Keillor.
Mark Dever
The first English Puritans came across to New England in hopes of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law.
Jonathan Leeman
You have a good memory.
Mark Dever
Well, I’ve used those many times. I was doing those back when you were still riding a motorcycle.
Jonathan Leeman
Yeah, that may be – having fun.
Mark Dever
Yeah, that’s right.
Jonathan Leeman
Being anti-puritanical.
Mark Dever
There we go.
Jonathan Leeman
But I want to think about, okay, what exactly is your Puritan vision for the ministry, for the pastorate? In this talk, you went through 11 points and my exciting dynamic plan for this conversation is just to walk through those 11 points.
But before I do, I want to put a foil in place. And that goes back to some of the things we were talking about this morning in our intern discussion.
Mark Dever
Yeah
What Is Neo-Evangelicalism?
Jonathan Leeman
Sort of a neo-evangelical vision for the pastor and for the ministry. And I want to set out a few bullet points for what that looks like, feels like, and see if you have any additions. Neo-evangelical, kind of a post-1950s evangelical vision of the ministry, of the church emphasizes reaching the unreached, evangelism, fair?
Mark Dever
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman
Emphasizes cultural engagement and therefore cultural relevance.
Mark Dever
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman
Emphasizes reaching people where they are at, which in the here and now means reaching consumers, which if you’re in a Muslim nation means kind of insider movements and reaching Muslims where they’re at. Fair?
Mark Dever
It can be taken that way, but that’s obviously not what I mean by it.
Jonathan Leeman
What?
Mark Dever
I wouldn’t be in favor of the insider’s movement.
Jonathan Leeman
Oh, no, of course. But the evangelical instinct is always looking to kind of, okay, where are they at? let me not ask you to change where you’re at in a sense.
Mark Dever
Well, except we want you to repent.
Jonathan Leeman
Yeah, they do call for it. Evangelicalism calls for repentance, absolutely. A de-emphasis on the local church and those things that give local churches their edges and structures and distinctiveness.
Mark Dever
Well, and when you say evangelicalism or puritanism, what we mean is biblical.
Jonathan Leeman
Well, that’s why I’ve been saying neo-evangelicalism.
Mark Dever
Yeah.
Neo-Evangelicalism Influences
Jonathan Leeman
I’ve been trying to distinguish kind of that 1950s Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today, James Dobson, Billy Graham world that we grew up inside of. That vision, Willow Creek, Saddleback, Andy Stanley, that whole world that we live inside of, that vision for ministry is all the things that I’ve been saying. Emphasizing reaching the unreached.
Mark Dever
Well, maybe because I’m older than you, when I hear neo -evangelical in the way that I thought you and I were using it, I don’t hear 1970s, 80s and 90s. I don’t hear James Dobson and Willow Creek. I hear 40s, 50s and 60s.
Jonathan Leeman
Well that’s why I threw in…
Mark Dever
I hear Christianity today under Carl Henry, not Christianity today after Carl Henry. So I hear 1965 Christianity today. I don’t hear 1975 Christianity today.
Jonathan Leeman
Yeah, no, I guess I’m giving you my kind of my post-1980s and on experience of it. CCM, right?
Mark Dever
I would understand neo-evangelical with Harold John Ockengay, Carl F. H. Henry to be very much the kind of way you and I would describe nine marks biblical, yeah.
Jonathan Leeman
Okay, well, this is an interesting side conversation. My understanding would be that yes, what you just said, but there was a DNA in place. There was an emphasis in place that downplayed as it were the local church and upplayed individual
Mark Dever
That’s true
Jonathan Leeman
Christian discipleship in a way that diminished our Baptist Presbyterian distinctives. It’s all about reaching the unreached that evolved into the kind of 1980s evangelicalism as I experienced it growing up.
Mark Dever
That’s true. And I would not affirm that.
Jonathan Leeman
You personally wouldn’t. No, right.
Mark Dever
Right.
Jonathan Leeman
But historically
Mark Dever
I do think you’re correct.
Jonathan Leeman
Okay, that’s what I’m talking about. I’m going to contrast that with a Puritan vision,
Mark Dever
Okay
Jonathan Leeman
as you have outlined in these 11 points.
Mark Dever
Which you just say is more churchly.
Jonathan Leeman
Absolutely.
Mark Dever
More biblical.
Jonathan Leeman
Well, more transcendent. There’s more transcendence. There’s more holiness of God. There’s more… It’s less me trying to reach the person where they’re at and me coming with a vision of God.
Mark Dever
There’s more recognition of God’s holiness.
11 Points about the Puritan Vision
Jonathan Leeman
No, that’s right. Okay, let’s jump in. Sort of set against that backdrop, what I think most pastors driving along in their cars, listening to this podcast have experienced church life to be like what I just described, something closer to that.
You offer these 11 points. Number one, Reformed theology.
Point One: Reformed Theology
Mark Dever
Yep.
Jonathan Leeman
Explain why that’s distinct.
Mark Dever
Well, it’s distinct from Roman Catholicism. It’s distinct from self-salvation. It’s distinct from Arminian, I have to sort of save myself by working along with whatever Christ has done.
Jonathan Leeman
Is it distinct from what many Christians might hear in churches today?
Mark Dever
Yeah, but it’s also, there are many churches where they would hear, a good Jonah 2 emphasis on salvation is of the Lord.
Jonathan Leeman
Why’d you start number one, Reformed theology?
Mark Dever
Because that sets the geocentricity, you know, in this case, the deocentricity, the deus, the God-centeredness of the whole manner of thought. You know, like if you’re talking about astronomy, you need to know you’re talking about geocentricity or heliocentricity, you know, earth-centered or sun-centered.
And the Copernican Revolution brought about a heliocentric understanding. Well, I think Reformed theology brings about a God-centered understanding of what so often has been a man -centered understanding in people’s experience as an evangelical Christian.
Jonathan Leeman
And this is why Piper has played a singular, not singular, a crucial role in the Young Resource Reform Movement.
Mark Dever
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman
Because he’s just like, it’s all about God, that thing.
Mark Dever
Yeah. John’s exuberant God-centeredness has been a huge encouragement to people in everything from thinking about world missions, all the way back to thinking about inside the nature of God himself, what he enjoys, what he delights in, what he takes pleasure in.
Jonathan Leeman
And the ministry that you’ve been about in your own local church and that you’ve been about in encouraging other churches has been about a God-centered ministry.
Mark Dever
That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman
Almost like expositional preaching is the first mark. There’s a sense in which this sort of God-centered is the first mark in a Puritan vision, we could say.
Mark Dever
Yeah. I mean, the second mark in nine marks of all the churches, biblical theology or biblical understanding of the gospel or gospel doctrine. And it’s putting the whole theology of the Bible together in such a way that it’s clear who the creator and judge is, and therefore it’s clear who the Savior must be.
Point Two: The Church is God’s
Jonathan Leeman
The second mark you offer in A Puritan Vision is that the church is God’s, not the minister’s, not the leader’s, or the donor’s, or even the congregation’s. Why did you say that? Why is this the second thing you want to highlight?
Mark Dever
Well, when I was originally coming up with that list of eleven that you’re talking about, I was not trying to characterize merely what I would do with a sort of white sheet of paper starting from scratch, pulling together church today. I was trying to describe how the Puritans understood ministry. So looking back…
Jonathan Leeman
You’re doing something more historical than sociological?
Mark Dever
Yeah, that’s right. Or theological, or pastoral. But the intersection of all is there, the Puritans were a pastoral movement and I agree with them.
I believe they’re biblical in their assertions about the local church. Yeah, particularly if we’re talking about the Congregationalist, the Baptist in 1660, 70, 80.
And one of the things that they saw very clearly is it’s not a local patron, a Lord who owns the manor, who names the preacher in the church, nor is it a bishop from some external city who has the responsibility for all the 30 surrounding towns and naming their minister, nor is it a committee of pastors, as in a Presbyterian system, and nor is it even ultimately the congregations – though they have a crucial role in consenting and working with.
Ultimately, the church belongs to God. It’s Christ who has shed his blood for the sheep, or in Acts 20:28, even God shed his own blood for the sheep. It’s his flock, he’s purchased them, they’re not ours.
And so it’s very easy for us to operate thinking like, oh, well, that belongs to the Methodist church, or that’s Jonathan’s church, or that’s… And we may know a sense in which those things would be true, but most fundamentally and most normally in our minds, we think of a local church, we need to think of it as belonging to God.
And if we do that, that will cause us to treat that local church differently and ourselves as part of it and ourselves as those who are tempted, ourselves as those who are open to fear or open to hoping in the wrong things or self-exaltation. I mean, there’s just all kinds of things that when we understand the local church to belong to God, to be His creation and to be accountable to Him ultimately, there are many decisions that will affect in how we approach our own pastoral ministry.
Jonathan Leeman
Now, I assume there’s scarcely a minister out there who would say the local church is mine, not God’s. I assume all would give lip service to what you’re saying.
Of course, the church belongs to God. Nonetheless, you’re saying there’s practices, there’s postures that lend themselves to forgetting that fact. Can you give me a concrete example of what I might be doing when I forget that fact?
Mark Dever
I would be trading too much upon the churches owing me something for the work I’ve put into it. I would be trading too much on the church having a certain regard for me or respect for me personally, or I would be too aggressive in trying to delineate what are my rights and my things that the congregation is obliged to give to me for my work.
Jonathan Leeman
One other area that occurs to me is a lack of small c Catholicity, a lack of recognizing I’m working together with other churches and praying for other churches and their success and partnering and associating with them.
Mark Dever
That’s right, because the God who has called me, the God who has saved me, the God who saved the congregation I’m working with, has not just saved us, he saved all these others and he’s not paid less price for them. He doesn’t care less about them.
And so if my motivation for caring and loving really is what I say it is, if it really is what God has done in Christ, then while my specific responsibilities may be more limited to this particular group of people, like I have husbandly responsibility, only to one wife. Nevertheless, I’m to have a charity, the greatest commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, love your neighbor as yourself.
I’m to have that second kind of love and charity for everyone else and in the analogy here with pastors, for all other churches, I’m to see God’s hand at work. And I’m to be zealous and encouraged by and thankful for…
Jonathan Leeman
Generous with.
Mark Dever
That’s right, and wanting to see it built up.
Jonathan Leeman
What struck me about this second one, the church is God’s, not the minister, is that it’s immediately obvious to me how this applies in this day and age, right, with churches given over to their own little kingdom building, turf building, and so forth. And I don’t immediately go back to the 16th, 17th, 18th century and think, well, that was their problem too. But what you’re saying is that was their problem too?
Mark Dever
I think it’s always the problem of fallen human beings, even when we’re redeemed, that we would struggle with misunderstanding how this group, this local church that we work with, does not belong to us. It belongs to God. So I think that’s a natural problem of the human heart.
Jonathan Leeman
It’s going to show up different ways, different errors, but…
Mark Dever
Some, yeah.
Point Three: Theology of Grace
Jonathan Leeman
Number three, a theology of grace. How is that different from the number one reformed theology?
Mark Dever
Particularly emphasizing one aspect, so that number one can comprehend anything else I’m going to talk about.
Jonathan Leeman
Ok.
Mark Dever
But that number three, I’m particularly emphasizing the fact that there is a joyous mercy centeredness at the middle of the rejoicing and the ethics of a group like this. There is an awareness that this is not a club that we have paid our dues to get into, and therefore, you know, we’ll see if you’re up to it, but rather this is a place where we have been accepted and rescued and we long to see others rescued as well.
Jonathan Leeman
Are people more likely who have been sitting under Mark Dever’s preaching for the last 10, 15, 20 years more likely to criticize you for being too law heavy, too grace heavy? How do we, do we want to be both?
How do we balance those things? What we were talking about earlier in intern discussion?
Mark Dever
I think criticisms naturally come from different directions. So I don’t know what the current criticisms of me would mainly be, you know.
Jonathan Leeman
Do you want me to tell you?
Mark Dever
You could.
Jonathan Leeman
Actually I could.
Mark Dever
I think in the two examples you give of law and grace, the criticisms that I’m imagining from both sides will be so different, it’s going to feel and sound different. So the criticisms about grace that I’m too grace-centered would be from people who have very strong visions of what more particular entailments of their Christian faith must be in terms of policy or COVID or racial matters or, you know, political things. It would just they would see that my language of grace is a looseness with what I should be seeing and teaching and enforcing as moral and ethical implications with particular outworkings.
Jonathan Leeman
Mark, why aren’t you discipling us on these political matters?
Mark Dever
Exactly. Whereas on the other hand, people who are calling my preaching legalistic, and those are often going to be people who are very much people who enjoy reading theology and identify themselves with theological monikers, and they are especially about finding people who agree with them in their theology. And that seems to overshadow their concern for ethics and love and other matters as well.
And while I want to hear and have conversations with people across the spectrum there, in my mind, if I’m preaching the Bible as I should, both its theology and its ethical implications, the indicative and the imperative, I’m not surprised to find I get criticism from people who think it should be all imperative or all indicative.
Jonathan Leeman
Any two cents for us on balancing law and grace and our preaching?
Mark Dever
Well, I mean, your wife will often have a good idea of what you need to, if you need to rebalance some.
Jonathan Leeman
That’s good.
Mark Dever
You can, you can bring the situation up to her and just go, honey, I’m wondering if, you know, I’m too hard on people or if you think I just, I let people off the hook all the time. You know, you need to be aware of her own tendencies.
She won’t, her feedback’s not inerrant, but man, she’s going to have almost certainly really good feedback to give you as somebody who hears your preaching, knows what you’re like, hears what people say about you. She’s just in a perfect position to help you out with that.
Jonathan Leeman
Fair to say if you’re going to err in one direction, err towards grace, or do you not like that?
Mark Dever
No, I think that’s probably fair to say, but that’s so easy to say. You could be a mean fundamentalist or a wide-hearted liberal. Which would you be?
Well, what I mean by fundamentalist and what I mean by liberal, I’d rather be a hard-hearted fundamentalist if you give me that choice, because I hear fundamentalist as including the gospel, even if they’re not behaving consistently with it. Whereas I hear liberal is someone who’s lost the gospel because they’ve lost the sense of own sinfulness and therefore they don’t really need a savior.
Point Four: Pastoral Care
Jonathan Leeman
Yeah. Number four, pastoral care. Who would disagree with that? And why is that such a Puritan distinctive?
Mark Dever
Yeah, this wouldn’t be unique to the Puritans, but it would typify the Puritans. That is the fact that there is so much of the life and energy of a minister of the word that’s to be taken up beyond the pulpit in the care for the members of the church, teaching them house to house, small group to small group, individual discussion to individual discussion, email response to email response, conversation at the door after service to conversation at the door after the service.
And there’s just, there’s so much of that that goes on in pastoring that if you don’t have a category for that, if you see your pastoring is only being done through your public teaching, I would say, well, you might be in an extremely large church or even there, I would say like, I think you might be missing some aspects of what is normally a good and fruitful part of pastoral ministry, that is the caring for individual souls.
Jonathan Leeman
Did Spurgeon, you know, Mr. Pulpeteer himself have that kind of person-to-person pastoral care work?
Mark Dever
Yes, amazingly so. Though Spurgeon is rarely a good person to ask about as an example because he was so uniquely gifted. But if you look at the book that I think Peter Masters has out, Triumphs of Grace, where you have a recording of how people joined Metropolitan Tabernacle, you’ll see that Spurgeon is often involved personally in either a 15-minute membership interview or a later reviewing of the notes one of his elders has made of someone who’s applying for membership and they’ve summarized their testimony in writing.
Point Five: Importance of Discipline
Jonathan Leeman
Number five, the importance of discipline.
Mark Dever
Well, if you can’t say who’s out, then you’re saying who’s in doesn’t really matter much. So if you don’t have a fence, then you don’t need a gate.
Jonathan Leeman
Yeah.
Mark Dever
So there’s the whole reason that we have a church at all is because God wants a witness to something that will reflect Himself that’s not just the general run of humanity. Because the general run of humanity, we are all fallen in Adam, but now in the local church, He’s poured out His own spirit, given people new life, faith, repentance, and He’s called them together in local churches.
And together, we, with peace, joy, and love, are living out with more ethical consistency, not perfection in this life, but more ethical consistency. We are living out the image of God in us than our non-Christian neighbors and friends are who are no less made in the image of God, but nevertheless not having been regenerated, but being as Ephesians 2 says, dead in their sins and transgressions. They are still an illustration of what sad things can happen to someone who is not alive to God, alive to the one in whose image they’re made.
Jonathan Leeman
I remember one sermon, it was a sermon introduction you did or some application point in the talk, I forget, it was years ago and I have this kind of vague. I just remember you leaning into conversion means people are changed and you kept saying that word changed over and over.
The Holy Spirit actually changes us. Now, obviously, you need to guard against an over-realized eschatology and a perfectionism, but becoming a Christian means something has, is beginning to, from one degree of glory to the next
Mark Dever
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman
changing. And discipline is, as it were, the enforcer of that, the guarantee of that, the…
Mark Dever
It’s the concomitant. It goes along with it as the visible church is recalibrated to be more like the invisible church.
Jonathan Leeman
It’s a way of saying we really mean it. You’re going to be changed. That’s right. And when you act unchanged, we’re going to talk about it.
Mark Dever
Yeah. Caleb Morrell recently did an interesting article on the number of discipline excommunication cases there were in Baptist churches here in the district in the 19th century.
Jonathan Leeman
Yeah
Mark Dever
And these discipline cases, most of them involve the sin of non -non-attendance, which doesn’t mean you missed every once in a while, but it means like you were not involved in the church for months or more with no communication, no explanation given.
Point Six: Centrality of Preaching
Jonathan Leeman
Number six, centrality of preaching. Interesting you put that after pastoral care. That’s not deliberate, is it?
Mark Dever
Not that I can remember.
Jonathan Leeman
Okay. So centrality of preaching.
Mark Dever
In the churches of the Puritans, you would see that the pulpit was moved over. The altar had been at the center of the Roman Catholic churches, and when the Reformation happened in England, they physically decentered the altars. They actually destroyed them if there were altars in there.
They became movable tables. Sometimes they would be made to look like altars so that the change wouldn’t be so visible.
But the point of making them tables is that they’d be movable so that you can shove the table aside and put the pulpit in the middle to teach God’s people. Because at the center of God’s people have to be the minister of the word teaching about God and His people, what God is calling us to be and do, and how it is we can be and do that, that He’s making us to be.
Jonathan Leeman
You say central both in the service and in the pastor’s schedule. And I’m thinking about that second half, your schedule, what do you mean?
Mark Dever
Yeah, if you take on some stuff I said just a few moments ago about pastoral visitation, you may think that all your time is to be spent in visiting…
Jonathan Leeman
Hospital visits.
Mark Dever
Yeah, or in catechizing the members of your church individually. And depending on the size of your church, you could probably do that. But if your church gets above one or two hundred people, you’re going have a very hard time doing that personally.
Meanwhile, the need for you to give yourself to study and prepare for the sermons is not going to decrease. So you just have to realize that when you are working on your sermon, you are working on pastoring the whole church, even if there’s nobody in your study while you’re working on it.
But when you’re stopping that to go talk to Tom about a particular issue he has, you’re in a sense pausing pastoring the entire congregation just to deal with Tom. Now, it’s fine to work with Tom. Tom’s a member of the congregation.
You care for him. He’s a friend. But if all your time gets taken up with that and no time is left really to prepare and you just sort of wing it all the time, then you’re really neglecting what needs to be at the very center of your schedule and what you need to really build your schedule around and build it out from. And that is time for yourself to read God’s Word, to reflect on it, and to prepare to teach it publicly.
Jonathan Leeman
You are still taking 20 hours a week, minus your quiet time is in a text. Is that right?
Mark Dever
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Probably. Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman
If a guy tells you he’s spending four hours a week preparing a sermon, is he sinning?
Mark Dever
Maybe. He may not be.
Jonathan Leeman
Do you have any recommendations on any of that?
Mark Dever
Depending so much on your own situation, what has to get done? I mean, there may be brothers who are holding down three jobs and, you know, they’re just barely making it past, you know, what they have to do every week just to pay for their life.
And yet they are the ones who are gifted to teach and this congregation has recognized them and the congregation doesn’t have enough money to pay them or pay them much. So their rules of what they’re doing are going be so different than my situation.
But we both should want to be blessing God’s people with God’s Word. And insofar as they use their resources pooled together to set aside our time, we need to happily give a substantial portion of that time to preparing to teach God’s Word publicly.
Jonathan Leeman
I probably said it here before, but I so appreciate what you said to McKinley when he left here. You said, prepare excellent sermons.
Mark Dever
That’s right.
Point Seven: Importance of Public Prayer
Jonathan Leeman
So poignant. Number seven, importance of one of these last few pretty quickly. Number seven, importance of public prayer.
Mark Dever
Often if you want to see prayer in a service, you need to make sure you go to a non -evangelical church because evangelical churches don’t take time to pray.
Jonathan Leeman
It’s crazy.
Mark Dever
In public. Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman
I’ll preach in different churches and…
Mark Dever
Maybe it’ll be a quick… know, before the singing or when the singing is going, Lord, we praise you, hear our praises today, or something like that.
Jonathan Leeman
If you have more questions on that, we’ve done at one, maybe two conversations on this in different episodes.
Mark Dever
Well, we have a journal on it.
Jonathan Leeman
We certainly do.
Mark Dever
And we have an excellent book in the Building Healthy Church series.
Point Eight: Importance of Education for Ministers
Jonathan Leeman
Number eight, importance of education for ministers, for them? What do you…
Mark Dever
Yeah, this was more historical. I was reflecting on the fact that the English Puritan movement traded on the fact that they had an excellent education.
And inside of that was an excellent education on scripture. And that when that was really pulled away from most of them in 1662 with the acts of uniformity…
Jonathan Leeman
Cut off from university training.
Mark Dever
That’s right. In England, there was no university they could go to because they would have to affirm something they didn’t affirm, which is the Book of Common Prayer is all pious and there’s nothing wrong with it.
And that’s when you have separate institutions start to get started to train ministers like Harvard and Yale and things over in New England, where in the generations after Oxford and Cambridge closed to someone with your theology or mine, we got to still figure out how to educate pastors. And so there are these dissenting academies that get going and colleges and the 1600s and the 1700s.
Jonathan Leeman
But in England itself, that pastoral training at places like, what, Cambridge was crucial for the Puritan movement.
Mark Dever
Well, that theological training was crucial. In the pastoral training, they would get in their experience, let’s say after they graduated at Cambridge, they might go up to Boston Lincolnshire, so about an hour north, and go to St. Botolph’s Church where John Cotton was the pastor, and they might work under Cotton for a while in the local church there.
Jonathan Leeman
And that’s what you’re trying to replicate in your internship program.
Mark Dever
Exactly, yeah.
Point Nine: Personal Responsibility and Training Ministers
Jonathan Leeman
Number nine, personal responsibility and training ministers. You devote your life to this.
Mark Dever
Well, they’re not going to be prepared by a school ultimately. Well, they can be partially prepared, but they need to be… The main implement that God uses to raise up pastors, I think, are churches.
Point Ten: Trust and Strategy
Jonathan Leeman
Pastors make pastors. Churches make churches. Number ten, combination of trust and strategy. What does that mean?
Mark Dever
Sometimes people think you’re going to trust God. That means you really can’t do anything yourself because it doesn’t matter. It’s kind of a hyper-Calvinist objection.
And I would say that no, if you trust God, that should encourage you to know that He’s behind this. He wants this done it. It should encourage you in making real plans.
Jonathan Leeman
Sovereignty and responsibility.
Mark Dever
Yeah.
Point Eleven: Importance of Believing Congregations Being the Church
Jonathan Leeman
Number 11, the importance of believing congregations being the church. That’s not a Puritan thing, is it?
Mark Dever
Well, it’s with some of them, the Baptists.
Jonathan Leeman
The Baptists.
Mark Dever
Yeah, it’s where you realize that the church is not fundamentally a national institution or a countywide institution. You know, the church is a local assembly of baptized believers. And that’s what William Keach, other early Baptists like that, William Kiffin, they would have seen and understood that and talked about that.
Jonathan Leeman
And dare we say a congregation of baptized believers is ultimately more powerful for making disciples, more powerful evangelistically than a reformed state.
Mark Dever
Well, compelling community that I did with Jamie Dunlop may sort of argue that, but I want to argue it on the basis of the truth of Scripture, that this is what Scripture teaches, whether or not it’s obvious to us that it’s fruitful.
More Resources
Jonathan Leeman
One of the books you had me read way back in the year 2000 was J .I. Packer’s In Quest of Godliness. It offers something of this vision.
Mark Dever
Man, I wish we used that again in our internship. It’s so good.
Jonathan Leeman
It is glorious.
Mark Dever
It takes a while to read.
Jonathan Leeman
Other resources you’d commend on offering this vision of the ministry and of the pastor?
Mark Dever
Yeah, I think if you read that Triumphs of Grace that Peter Masters has done out of Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, and you see what their membership interviews were like get an idea. Also, the second edition of the one I did with Paul Alexander, How to Build a Healthy Church, you’ll get a simple idea there of what’s going on.
David Dixon, an old one from Scotland, the elder and his work, you’ll get some good information there of this kind of idea of ministry. If you watch the T4G address I did back in 2016, Endurance Needed, Strength for a Slow Reformation and the Dangerous Allure of Speed, that’d be another way to get at it. Lots of good ways to get at it.
Jonathan Leeman
I’m so grateful for your historical interest because I feel like so much of this vision for the ministry, which has been captured by you as well as other contemporary pastors we could point to, has been born out of this deep embeddedness in historical sources like that. And frankly, that’s just something…
I don’t naturally read history in the same way you do, a little bit here and there, but that’s just not my go-to place. But I feel like it’s that historical awareness which has kept us, well, kept a number of us grounded in a deeper, richer tradition of what the church is, whether Baptist or Presbyterian, frankly.
Mark Dever
Well, the errors of our Greek Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic friends shouldn’t mask the truth that they’re near, that tradition is important. But of course, when you say tradition is essential and tradition is the guide, the only way through which you can look at Scripture, you’ve just gone a step too far and you’ve stopped Scripture’s ability to continually reform our own thinking.
Jonathan Leeman
Brother, thank you for your time.
Mark Dever
Thank you, Jonathan.
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