Glorify Your Ministry: Why Theological Education Matters to Those who Minister

Note: This is a modified version of a talk I delivered at New Student Orientation for the South Texas School of Christian Studies for the fall semester of 2016.

In Romans 11.13, Paul says, Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I glorify my ministry. Paul does not say he glorifies the minister - he is not proud of himself. Paul says he glorifies the ministry - he takes pride in what he does. And it is worth noting that the apostle makes this statement in the midst of a sustained theological argument that gives the biblical and theological basis of the calling he pursues. I want to talk about glorifying your ministry by submitting yourself to the training necessary to carry out God’s call on your life.

You may have seen the following meme: Please do not confuse your Google search with my medical degree. There is another version: Please do not confuse your Google search with my law degree. I want to challenge you to consider yet a third version: Please do not confuse your Google search with my theology degree. After all, does a profession that deals with people’s money, or with people’s bodies, deserve more honor than one that deals with their souls?

There are people who will tell you that the glory of Christian ministry is that anyone with the Holy Spirit and a Bible can do it. They are wrong. That is the glory of the believer priesthood. The glory of Christian ministry is that one loves God enough to submit oneself to the sustained discipline of training the mind for theological thought. As pastoral theologian Craig Dykstra says, “In our society - and even in the church - the malignant assumption that pastoral ministry does not really demand or require very much surreptitiously undermines both our legitimate expectations of and our sense of gratitude for the Christian ministry.” In other words, we fail to glorify our ministry.

We might think - we certainly might wish - that the Holy Spirit worked in us like Neo in the Matrix: Someone plugs a needle into our heads, images of Greek and Hebrew and Augustine and Barth flash across our mental maps and we jolt awake to declare, “I know kung fu!” . Well, the wind bloweth where it listeth; God could do that if God chose to. But the problem with such a process would be that it robs you of the opportunity to love God with all your mind. Your investment of money, time, and energy; your sacrifice of leisure, sleep, and relaxation - are burnt offerings laid on the altar of your service to Christ.

So if you feel a call to Christian ministry, I want to challenge you to pray about pursuing a seminary degree. Such study offers you the opportunity to develop not only the practical skills or the intellectual knowledge, but also the habit of mind to think in a deeply Christian manner about all of life. Dykstra calls this “pastoral intelligence,” the idea that “to be a good pastor, you have to be very smart in lots of really interesting ways.”

And if that goal seems a long way away and you feel you are floundering just thinking about it, remember that Usain Bolt was next-to-last out of the blocks in the Olympic 100-meter dash. They don’t give medals for starting fast; they give medals for finishing well.

Do you need to pursue education to be a good minister? Let me answer in the words of the legendary pastor and scholar Dr. Gardner C. Taylor: “Formal theological training is not strictly required to begin ministry. Someone might go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. It is not likely.” You’re headed for the rapids. A boat beats a barrel. Plan ahead. Glorify your ministry.

Jesus as Racist - Mark 7.24-30

A friend who was a religious skeptic once asked the famous Baptist preacher and civil-rights leader Will D. Campbell to define Christianity in ten words or less. Campbell replied, “We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.”

On August 20, 1965 in Hayneville, Alabama, a white civil rights worker named Jonathan Daniels walked to a store with two black women, intending to purchase soft drinks. Tom L. Coleman, an unpaid sheriff’s deputy, blocked the door and blasted Daniels point-blank in the chest with a shotgun round. A grand jury indicted Coleman for manslaughter. He pled self-defense and an all-white jury acquitted him.

On the very day of the murder, Campbell, still seething with rage and grief, chanced to see his free-thinking friend again. The man reminded Campbell of his definition of Christianity then asked two questions: Were both Jonathan Daniels and Tom L. Coleman bastards? Campbell admitted that, by his own theology, that must be true. Then he asked, “Which one of those two bastards do you think God loved most?” Campbell, who was saved as a child and ordained in his teens, replied, “Damned if you ain’t made a Christian out of me. And I’m not sure I can stand it.” Campbell’s ministry transformed from one of condemning racists to one of loving and seeking to understand them, without ever changing his views on race. He once wrote, “Anyone who is not as concerned with the immortal soul of the dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something less than Christian.”

The story we read this morning is one of those which makes lay-people think that New Testament Greek is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card, a magician’s trick which can produce rabbits of spotless white orthodoxy from the blackest top hat of a text. We like to point out that, of the two words available to him for “dog,” Jesus uses the diminutive term, something more like “puppy.” This is true, but it doesn’t change anything: “Dog” was a Jewish racial slur hurled at the Gentiles by a dispossessed people seeking relief from the injustice of their own position. By taking it in his mouth, Jesus enters the worldview and uncomprehending pain of every redneck, cracker, and Kluxer, every bigoted birther and flat-earther, every neo-Nazi, race-baiter and Confederate-flag-flying poor white trash who ever burned a cross in a black man’s yard. We like to think of Jesus taking our sins on himself in his death, but I think in this instance Jesus takes our sins on himself in his life. I’m not questioning Jesus sinlessness; I’m emphasizing his incarnation. He enters the cultural space of the poor Galilean peasants he came from and lets this anonymous woman show his disciples how love trumps hate. He is so concerned with the souls of the dispossessors that he puts himself in need of redemption by the dispossessed so that his disciples can see what conquering love looks like.

Many white churches have awakened of late to the need for diversity, and usually that refers to ethnicity, and it is important that we continue to struggle forward in that regard. But I know that I, at least, have been guilty of devaluing a different kind of diversity: the diversity of the Left Behinders and the KJV’ers and the Joel Osteen followers; I have taken patronizing amusement in the views of the six-day creationists and the no-women’s-ordinationists; I’ve preached that everybody is a sinner but God loves us anyway, while secretly adding that God’s loves some more because they sin less, or at least read more. But Jesus sides with those people. He doesn’t necessarily accept their views, only their pain and their sin.

Will Campbell also tells the story of the night of his nephew’s funeral. As was the custom in the South in the old days, the family asked that Will, as the minister, sit up with the corpse. Stunned by his own grief, Campbell barely managed to remain in his pew as the church grew dark and silent. Then he became aware that someone else had stayed, an uncle who had loudly condemned Will’s civil rights work, but who cared enough to be there in the hour of need with a quiet presence and a thermos of coffee. “Until the dawn,” Campbell recalls, “I sat in the redemptive company of a racist Jesus.” May we daily find sustenance in the presence of the wrong, racist, redneck Christs who occupy our worlds and give us hard lessons to learn. May they make Christians out of us, and may we be able to stand it.