Advice For New Pastors and Their Congregations 

Advice for New Pastors and Encouraging the Congregation

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. It has been a long time since I've been in this studio, and especially a long time since I've been in here with Esteban de Cooley. Steve, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me. It was very kind of you to fly me in from the Caribbean.

Well, your rider had all kinds of funny things in there, so I don't know. Here, I'm going to mute you. Pull that thing up.

Go. All right.

Are you ready?

Yes.

All right. All right. Now, you're set and up and going. In front of me, I have this Second Timothy commentary by D. Edmund Hebert, Every Man's Bible Commentary. I think I got that at Archives.

Yeah.

They don't print those anymore, because every man's, you know, it's not...

Oh, every man's.

That's what it is.

It needs to be every person's.

Oh.

Yeah.

But it's Second Timothy. Isn't Timothy a man?

I don't know. He's not around to ask him how he identifies.

Well, there are, you know, submission headship source debates going around the world.

So...

Dude.

Let's see.

You're back from the Shepherd's Conference. Did you buy any good books from the bookstore?

Let's go get my boxes and see what I bought.

I think I wandered around the tent, the bookstore tent, and I think I bought maybe five books. I didn't get the free bag, obviously. So I bought the Van Drunen Natural Law book. I started that the other day.

I think I got that, too.

Yeah.

That was in the freebie deal for you guys. And I bought a book, Justification, written by... It was like the history of justification, even in medieval times and all that. It was by a Lutheran. I got that.

I got a book by, of all people, Kevin de Young, Impossible Christianity. And I thought, I wish I would have written that book. When you're not radical, when you're not this, when you're not that, do you have to feel miserable all the time?

And I think that was it.

Do you have to feel...

I think that was one of the subtitles.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, I mean, I got two Spanish language books. One is because I've been studying Spanish for so long, I thought, maybe it's about time I started reading in Spanish, because I'm not going to get the vocabulary any other way than by doing this.

So...

Es verdad.

Yeah.

So that's one of my goals.

Tu quieres leer en Español?

You speak like a native.

But that was right, though.

Yeah, it was.

Do you want to read in Spanish?

Tu quieres leer en Español?

Si.

So the other day I was doing Duolingo, and I do Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Spanish. And I was in the whatever, I was in some kind of league, I can't remember what league, and I was in the semifinals, and I'm trying to get to the finals.

And so I did a couple of these special double XP things, and I got 80, and then I got 90, and I got another 80. And then the program glitched, and it brought me down to 24 points. I'm last in the tournament, and I would have been way up there.

So I just got frustrated.

Yeah, I hate it when it glitches. But I also hate the whole gamification thing. It really bothers me. It's one of the reasons. I did cancel my subscription to Duolingo, but then they offered me two free weeks, so I took them up on it.

But yeah, I don't like it. I mean, and I'm in a section now that's totally woke.

Oh, and when I, I think the Spanish section I had, you know, Jim has a husband.

Yeah.

Yeah, they give you all kinds of stuff like that, and I hate it.

Why New Pastors Need to Love and Explain Their Congregations

So Steve, today, I thought we would talk a little bit about nothing. Oh, no, sorry. We just did that for four minutes. That's four, we're four minutes in, we haven't said a word.

Nothing edifying with all apologies.

Today's topic is advice for new pastors. Now, how are we going to spin this so if people aren't pastors, they keep listening?

Well, how to encourage your new pastor.

Okay, perfect. Okay, that would be another show too. We could do, which one do you want to do? Advice for new pastors or how to encourage new pastors?

I don't know, whichever strikes your fancy. It might be, you know, let's just do a Shepherd's Conference special.

We'll do both.

All right, so let's start off with advice for new pastors. If there is, now you're 64, I'm almost 64, and a new pastor said, do you have any advice now that you've probably done some things well by God's grace and a lot of things not so well by your own doing?

Just anything about anything I'd like to know ahead of time.

See, I want to frame it like sarcastically, like, okay, let's do it, it's radio, like ignore the, ignore the needs of the flock.

Yeah, this is, I mean, the alt universe.

I'm not kidding, though. I've known guys who are just like, yeah, you know, I just do what I do and if the people don't get it, that's their fault.

Okay, so now, now we're into this. This is perfect because I just needed some of your thoughts to bounce off of. One of the things I did when I got here, Steve, is I somehow thought that if I just preached well that everything else would take care of itself.

And of course, the pulpit and fidelity and preach the word and 2 Timothy 4, I would never denigrate that. But it's interesting, in light of what you just said, how people appreciated my sermons more when I had visited their grandpa in the hospital and when I was there for the babies that were sick, or I showed up at the widow's house to try to encourage them.

They like my sermons better.

It's funny because you almost expect them to say something like, his sermons are great, but you know, I don't know how much I really like him, as if it's just about personality. It is a bizarre thing, but I, but I think, you know, the attitude of some pastors that I have spoken with is, is generally speaking, if people don't get what I'm doing, that's their fault.

And I'm like, is it?

Which leads us to another good sub point to this, maybe. I think I probably should have telegraphed things more than I did.

Yes.

In other words, explaining what was going on instead of just doing them and having the people somehow organically picking up on what I was doing.

Are you picking up on what I'm laying down?

I mean, when you're a new pastor, you're so excited, you get to teach the Bible and you're encouraged. And how could I, I mean, didn't you think that when you were younger and you first were.

Saved?

How could I ever be a pastor? I mean, that's like a different stratosphere.

All the time.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, it was more like, how could I ever be a deacon? I mean, you remember when you got that letter from Grace Community Church, hey, you've been nominated to be a deacon. And you're just like, me?

I think we had, you know, people pitied us. Bill Shannon was very kind to us. He wanted us to be deacons. I think that was the story. So spending time with people, what would be some ways to spend time with people?

I think what I did was we would have campfires at the lake every Sunday night and we had rented a place on the lake and we would just invite anybody over. So they were always invited over to the pastor's house on a Sunday night if they wanted to.

Something like that. Does that sound good?

Something like that works. You know, s'mores, ice skating, oh, the ice cracked again.

Ice skating ministries. Well, you know, when you're there, what's the old slogan with ministry? Pastors are there when people are hatched, their births. When they're matched, you officiate their wedding.

And when they're dispatched, they're dispatched.

That's right.

Speaking of which, what a joy it is to officiate or be part of a funeral where you know the person was a Christian and while their body might be there, you know where their spirit is, where their soul is.

And Fred Thiebaud died a while ago and he was a faithful servant here, believing in the faithful one. Fred's happy.

Yeah.

I watched the, I was in California, I watched the funeral online and I thought it was a, it was very nice and very fitting. You know, you like, I like funerals that somehow, I mean, obviously we want them to glorify the Lord and reflect the gospel.

But I also want them to teach us something about the person, you know, because it should be, in some sense, a celebration of their life as God blessed them, as God grew them, you know, all these kind of things.

And Fred was, Fred was pretty amazing. I mean, when I first got here, I can remember, you know, hearing, hearing this noise up on the rooftop and just thinking, thinking, and not knowing even it was the rooftop.

I just thought, okay, we've got critters in the, in the attic or, you know, upstairs there's rats crawling around or something. And you go, nah, that's just Fred.

That's just Fred.

I go, Fred? Fred's too old to be up on the roof. And there he was. That was Fred, you know, spelunking up there.

Patience, Novice Ministry, and Training Men for 2 Timothy 2

Talking today about advice for new pastors, I mean, how to pray for your pastor and encourage the pastor. How about this one for number two, Steve? If you're a new pastor, why don't you really focus on being thankful for the patience of the congregation?

Well, if I meet someone who's 17 years old, and they say they're a Christian, by definition, they're an immature Christian, because they can't be a Christian for 30 years when they just got saved three years ago.

And you can't be an experienced, well-seasoned, wise in ministry pastor, if you've just been there for six months, right? By definition, you're a novice. And I think what I did wrongly, Steve, was I thought these people here out in the middle of West Boylston should be thankful to have a pastor like me who wants to do.

Expository.

Preaching.

When looking back, I should have been thankful for them to put up with such a novice in the pulpit.

And I think, you know, the opposite is true, too. You know, the church should be thankful to have, especially, sorry, I'm not trying to beat our collective chest here. But up in New England, you know, where ministry is tough, but people should be thankful to have, you know, somebody faithful to get up in the pulpit.

But I just remember when I, you know, when I got here, just kind of not knowing a lot. I mean, if you didn't know that much, I knew less than you. And just sort of trying to figure out what my niche was, you know, where I was going to fit in, where I was going to slot in.

And, you know, trying to do different things. I mean, like, it's trial and error, some of it. You know, like, even Sunday school. Like, you know, how do you do Sunday school? And eventually, you know, coming up with a format that complements what I want to do anyway and, you know, figuring these things out.

And so, it really is a matter, I think, and I think you would probably agree with this, that we do grow. We learn what we do well and what we don't do well.

Right?

And so, if it's something that we do well, we know how to just kind of do it, and it's pretty easy. And if it's something we don't do well, then we have to work extra hard at it. But we kind of learn more what our strengths and weaknesses are over the years.

And that's something a new pastor hasn't figured out.

How could they?

No, there's no way for them to do it. So, you know, in their minds, they think that they probably think they're doing better than they are.

You know?

I think we all think we're better than we are.

Yeah, way better.

Not just in ministry, but even lay people. Steve, when I first got here, they started recording the sermons, of course, on cassette tapes. And I think, I don't know if there was any websites at the time.

I'm not sure. But they would have them recorded, and then you could get them in little, you know, six part series in Ephesians or something, you know, one of those little albums of cassettes. I remember somebody coming up to me and said, pastor, you know, your, I don't know, your Mark chapter two sermon, somehow they didn't push the record button and it didn't get recorded.

Oh, I mean, what can I say? I just said, oh, I'm sorry. Let's try to figure out a way not to let that happen again. But on the inside, I was thinking, I put 30 hours of study into that. That needs to be, you know, in the album, up on the website, et cetera, et cetera.

So you need Greta right now. She could go, how dare you? You need that sound effect.

Right.

And we should add that in. And now I think, Steve, it probably, if it would have been in Mark, I probably taught Mark in many ways in a moralistic way. And since Jesus was tempted and used, you know, Deuteronomy to counteract Satan, when we're tempted, we should use Deuteronomy.

By the way, that's probably true, but that's not the point of the passage, the main point. So that was a blessing of the Lord that he did not let that person hit record that time. What else could we learn?

Or what else could people learn? Any advice to new pastors? How about this, Steve? Be careful not to spend all your time in counseling cases with people. Make sure you also spend time with men to train men for 2 Timothy 2 to training faithful men so they can teach others.

How does that all play out?

Well, I think it's hard, but you're right. And, you know, one of the things that I think, again, you know, having just got back from Shepherds Conference that I think young pastors sometimes fail to do is exactly what you're talking about.

If you train the men how to preach, how to teach, that's going to have impact on the families of the church. It has to, right? And it's because it's going to build up the men. It's going to give them more confidence in teaching their families, but it's also going to cause them to, I would say, be dialed in more on Sundays, right?

Even if they're, and it's OK with me if people want to evaluate me and go, you know, did you get that right? I had somebody ask me a few weeks ago about something I said, and I'm going, well, I'm glad you caught that, you know, but I thought it was something that wasn't a central part of my sermon.

And, you know, we can agree to disagree on that one, you know.

Oh, I think I know what you're talking about.

So, and, you know, sometimes things, circumstances just dictate how certain things go. I mean, sometimes you, you know, you don't get the, maybe you don't have the time that you would like to have to do things, you know, so things come up and you just adapt and you do the best you can.

Myke Abendroth with Steve Cooley today on No Compromise Radio Ministry.

Can I give you one?

You can do whatever you want.

I was going to say, I think a new pastor ought not to be thinking this way, like the R .C. Sproul meme, what's wrong with you people?

Well, it's true. It gets back to our conversation we had just a while ago off air. I mean, I guess there's two ways to look at this. Maybe you go to a place that is typical evangelical, watered down, middle of the road stuff, and you think maybe a lot of people aren't even saved.

And so you start preaching sermons that would call people to repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus. But then there are also churches that you go to and that people have been taught well, and you want to assume that most of the folks there are Christians if they've been taught.

Well.

And so you shouldn't have to slam people every week saying, how can you call yourself a Christian and live like that? If it's a mature congregation, I'm sorry you live like that, but you should still call yourself a Christian.

And if you do have a mature congregation, then it would probably watch Behoove You. You would probably do well to make sure that there's more theology kind of infused into your sermons. Because they will go, oh, you know, I like that.

I like how you tie that, you know, bit of the 1689 into, you know, that part of the sermon or, you know, the different you kind of have you should have more freedom in the pulpit to sort of expand the not get away from the text, but expand the range of the text a little bit because they are more mature.

You know, they're ready for more meat, as it were, you know, rather than just milk. But if you've got a congregation that's not ready for that kind of thing, well, then maybe you do just kind of hit the gospel from, you know, every possible direction week after week after week after week until people go, you know, Pastor, I think you're trying to tell us.

Well, what happens when Steve and I are on the radio, I feed him thoughts, he feeds me thoughts as the other person is talking. What I thought of, Steve, when you were talking about that is, Pastor, when you're preaching, you're at a brand new church, and even now, 30 years later, 40 years later, if you

Don't be afraid to use big words. Just explain those big words.

Yes, absolutely.

And if you say propitiation, say, in other words, assuaging God's wrath because He's holy, and you're just teaching people, right? There'll be new people coming in all the time, younger believers, new believers, people transferring over from a Southern Baptist megachurch or whatever it might be, and just make sure you tell people, this is what I mean by what I say.

I think it's wrong to say, well, we're never going to use polysyllabic words.

Well, especially if they're in the Bible, like propitiation, right? I mean, it's pretty hard to say, well, I don't ever want to use that word. Well, okay, don't teach our Romans 3 then, you know.

Unless it's the some of the English translations that take that out and either make it atonement or expiation.

Ugh.

How about this? What if you are a confessional and you come to a church? They don't really have a confession. They have just like a 10-point statement of faith. Is there a way you could introduce some of the confessional theology without saying, 1689 said this, Westminster says that, Belgic says that?

How about, could you say some Reformation documents say or something like that?

Historically, you know, the church has taught this or even, you know, start quoting, you know, different people who say roughly what the confessions say. Yeah, I think there are a variety of ways to get to that.

And I do think, you know, eventually what I would want to talk to the elders about is why do we have a statement of faith that was written in 1995, you know, by somebody in the back of a napkin instead of something where men dozens or scores of men, you know, sat around for years, you know, without TV, without the internet, without anything, without any distractions and just said, what do we really believe?

That is a time-tested, well, you know, well-discussed, well-thought-out document. So, why don't we use that instead of, you know, Billy's napkin confession?

Steve, I can speak for you in this, I know, because we were there in the same room right here. We are so stupid sometimes because remember, we're thinking, all right, we like the 1689 mainly, but at the time, theological covenants like covenant of redemption or covenant of works, covenant of grace, we don't want to use those.

Law of God, you know, is it really the Ten Commandments, moral law of God, not understanding three uses of the law, understanding three types of law, okay, fine. Then we just start rewriting the 1689.

Redaction. It was like, you know, we took, you know, I don't know, what is the confession, a hundred pages, I don't know what it is, you know, and we're like, we just, hey, we'll just black out all this.

It was like, you know, an FBI witness.

But I think the law of God section, we mutilated that.

Pete. You remember when Carl Truman got here and he's like, oh, you have an edited version, so you're a cult then.

Steve. Well, I mean, that was dumb, but I think maybe it's just as dumb or could possibly be dumber if the local elders sit around and with the pastor and write up their own statement of faith, right?

Because if you look at the Westminster divines, 230 of them or so over how many years, four or five years, I forgot the exact number, but they had to hammer these things out. Pete.

The debates, I mean, there are all these, you know, we still, you can still read about these things, all the things that were debated and why they were debated and why the language turned out exactly the way it is.

And, you know, we just think, ah, what's the big deal? Statement of faith, you know, we believe in triune God. Steve.

The Bible's the Bible. Church and state should be separated. That's usually in the Baptist ones.

Pete. And the Lord's coming back.

Steve. Uh-huh. And then you make mistakes when that happens, because you're not a great theologian when you're a new pastor, most likely, unless you're 60 years old or something. You've been in ministry and you're finally a pastor, but typically you don't know all that.

And all of a sudden then you think, okay, eternal functional subordination, do I know about that? Easier things like is there's regeneration, proceed faith and how to look at things logically and chronologically.

Right? Are there covenants in the Bible that aren't like explicitly stated, like the Davidic covenant is stated, but covenant of redemption is not? We didn't know any of that. Pete.

Yeah. So, an analogy I would make is, you know, you've got a contract that you need drawn up and it's super important. You know, would you take somebody who just graduated from law school, you know, yesterday and say, I need this contract and it's got to be airtight?

Or would you do, you know, hire somebody who's been doing contract law for 20 years, who's already made all their mistakes, you know, and has not just book learning, but they've actually got experience in the law.

They know what's, you know, what to do and what not to do. And of course, it's going to be the latter, you know, and if it costs you a little bit more money, you're going to think to yourself, it's well worth it because I know I've got an experienced guy on my side.

So, why not do the same thing when it comes to, you know, a statement of faith? Why wouldn't you?

Pete I'm laughing, Steve, because this week I went to see a lawyer about protecting my assets in case somehow I have to go into a rest home or Kim has to go to a rest home and there's a five-year look back period in Massachusetts.

So, you have to have things put together properly. And so, I went to a person up in Fitchburg that was, I think he was 17 years old. He's almost out of high school. He said he'd, no, it was the exact opposite.

This guy looked like he was about 68. I could smell the cigarette smoke in the office, old school calculators, and he didn't have a typewriter, but he should have. And just, it was, I thought I was walking into an office in 1960, just old school, nudity is talking about, good old boy, cowboy boots.

But the second he opened his mouth, it was just data and information and do this and don't do that. And so, obviously, legal things are important, but this is even more important. We're talking about what we believe.

All right, we're running out of time, Steve. Advice for new pastors. Last thing that I want to bring up, unless you've got a better idea, that is, how about start a little bookstore? Maybe not a store, but like a little book nook.

So, one thing I did do well when I got here is I picked somebody who liked to read, Steve Nelson, and said, I'm going to give you 10 books and I want you to read them. And I want you to write up a little review, like on a three by five card, put it by that book, and let's start introducing people to good books.

And so, we had R .C. Sproul, Chosen by God. We had a book on marriage. We had a book on hermeneutics. I wouldn't use the one that I used then. I think we had Attributes of God by Pink. We do learn over the years, don't we?

I know. And so, that way we could get the congregation reading good books. So, then they would say, those books say the same things that I did or the other way around,.

Essentially. You know, it spurs you a lot of questions like, well, what's wrong with Joyce Meyer? Listen, I mean, if you put books in the bookstore or in your church library, then people should go, oh, those are good books.

And typically, those might be good authors, right? So, what you don't want to do is, I mean, I guess there are exceptions to everything, but you definitely don't want to put somebody in. If they've got one okay book and like eight bad books, you know, I mean, you have to be selective.

And, you know, you want to be able to recommend these people. And, you know, it also lets them know why you'll quote some people from the pulpit and you won't quote others. If they think to themselves, well, I never hear him quote Mr. X from the pulpit, and there are none of those in the bookstore, there's probably a reason for that.

Good idea. And what I ended up doing here, Steve, and this is related to this advice, there was a bookstore when I got here. Excuse me, there was a library here. It was actually, I think, in this room.

And it was awful. And people basically said, I don't like these books that I have anymore. I don't use these books that I have anymore. I'll give them to the church. And then into the library they go.

So, I wouldn't do it if I was a first-year pastor or second-year pastor, but right around two or three years after I've introduced some good books to the congregation, like you said, quoting the right people from the pulpit, I would start weeding some of those books out.

I probably would just talk to the elders, or maybe I just go into myself and just start pulling some of the bad books. Because we can't have Joyce Meyer books and Benny Hinn books and stuff like that.

And there was a lot of people listening to Joyce Meyer when.

I got here. Yeah. We'll call that recycling Friday or recycling Saturday. What happened.

To all those books, Pastor? Well, recycling. I just remember walking around and seeing some books. I mean, probably the most legit books at the time that I saw congregants have here at Bethlehem Bible Church were Ravi Zacharias books.

And easy for me to say now, but it's really true. I never really liked his approach. I didn't like his style. I didn't like his Bible teaching.

But I thought at the time, at least it's orthodox. Yeah. I mean, at least he gets around to the.

Gospel and, you know, things like that. Sure. So, how do we want to put a bow on this, Steve? Advice for new pastors? Any final words, encouraging words? Well, you know, I mean,.

The obvious, don't be a bull in a china shop, assuming that, you know, you need to change everything right overnight. But also, you know, taking into account what your congregations are, what the congregants are saying and what they're doing, you know, kind of steer them, lead them, shepherd them, dare I say, in the direction that you think ultimately the church needs to go.

Sounds good. Mike Abendroth here with Steve Cooley. And the next time you talk to Steve, he's probably going to be speaking in more Spanish. I thought you used to do the German thing, though. Where's all the, how do you say false again in German?

Nein, nein, nein.