Pastoral Ordination- Ben Zornes of Christ Church #pastor #ordination #crec

Welcome to the Truth in Love podcast. We are continuing our series on pastoral ordination.

Our guest this evening is Pastor Elder Ben Zorns from Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho.

Stick with us. Welcome back to the love podcast.

We are very grateful and excited to have Pastor Ben Zorns with us this evening.

I'm Rob and my co -host above me is Dan Covenanter. Dan, if you have watched us at all, you know us, but if this is your first time, you're new watching us, welcome.

We're glad to have you here and welcome to you, Pastor Zorns. Would you give us a few minutes of introduction?

Yeah, yeah. I'm a pastor out in northern Idaho. The snow is flying as we speak, so it's a winter storm watch, so we're enjoying being at the northern latitudes of the world.

I moved out here a number of years ago to go through our church's pastoral training program and have continued to serve and minister here the last several years.

I'm the executive pastor for Christ Church Moscow. A lot of folks would know the resources and ministry that are being put out by our church and some of our related ministries,

Cannon Press and the New St. Andrews College and whatnot. And of course Doug Wilson, Pastor Doug Wilson, is kind of the most well -known teacher and a voice coming out of Moscow.

And so I've been out here eight or so years. I grew up in Colorado, was a youth pastor's kid and went right out of, in the

Southern Baptist Convention, came out of high school and felt called to ministry and began sort of dipping my toe in a variety of ways of ministry.

You know, did my stint in youth ministry, did my stint in worship leading, and then as I got married and started having kids,

I realized that my sort of generic Reformed convictions were becoming a bit more clear in regards to paedo -baptism and Presbyterianism, and I wanted to look for a place that I could receive training and growth in those distinctives, and the only place

I could think where I'd want to go would be here in Moscow. And so we moved out here eight or so years ago, and I'm married, have four kids, and that's what

I do. So Christ Church Moscow is a part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which is about 120 or so churches here in North America and several around the world.

We have some, we now have some in Brazil, and we have got a candidate church in Tasmania, one in Japan, the

Philippines, so it's growing around the world, but primarily North American, and we're a communion of churches that are

Reformed and Evangelical. That's probably the best, the name sort of says it all. Right, so Dana and I decided to do this series on pastoral ordination.

We're trying to go with the heart of truth and love, and we want to speak truth in love, knowing that we don't know everything.

We don't have it all. We don't have it all together. We don't have all information, and so we want to learn from one another, and as we do that, you know, our conversation will be speaking truth in love to one another, and so we've tried to gather pastors from different denominations so that they can share, and we can learn from them, and maybe this will be a helpful resource to others from maybe some places of strengths or weaknesses that they see from other denominations, and we can maybe learn from one another, and you guys have something unique in the

CREC that is kind of what you're, I would say, that you're known for, that certain uniqueness of bringing maybe two denominations that typically haven't been together, you bring them together in a unique way, and I hopefully will explore that a little bit.

Yeah, so my first question, and Dana and I will try to rotate in asking these questions, but my first question starts with being biblical.

That term seems to be thrown out there and used loosely sometimes. We'll have a conviction, we'll have an interpretation, and we'll say, well, you know, this is biblical, and sometimes we elevate our certain interpretations to a place of prescription for our lives when the

Scripture only wants us to understand it in a descriptive way, and then sometimes when we're in a discussion with someone, we'll say, well, my position is the biblical, and yours is not, and then vice versa, and then we just, we kind of leave it at that and agree to disagree, but on the issue of pastoral ordination, we want to know what your thoughts are on it being biblical.

Is it a biblical doctrine? Is it an ordinance of the church?

You know, how do you view pastoral ordination in the biblical sense? Yeah, I think it's, yeah,

I think it's biblical for the church to have men appointed for the rule and the care of the church.

There's a couple places in Scripture where that's, I think, made pretty explicit, one being in Hebrews where it says, give honor to those who bear the rule over you, knowing that they'll be made to give an account, which means members of the

Church of Jesus Christ need to know who they're to render honor to, who are ruling over them.

It's not just a authority in the void. It's not telling children, obey your parents and the

Lord, but not defining what parents are. It's very clear that there is a governmental authority given to certain men in the church who are put forward for stewarding and caring for, shepherding the body of Christ.

The other place I would look would be where it says in 1

Corinthians 4, I believe, that Paul says, unto us we are made the stewards of the mysteries of God.

And in the Latin, mysterion would be translated sacramentum, which is where you get the word sacraments from.

And so there's a kind of thread there of ministers and elders being given the charge to rule and to steward the sacraments, the ministry of word and sacraments, baptism in the

Lord's Supper, for the building up of the church, the edification of the church, the care of the saints, the watchfulness over the souls of the flock of God.

And that also means, on the flip side, for somebody who's an elder or a pastor, they are made to give an account, which means they need to have a list of people they're responsible for.

You know, if you've ever taken your kids to a amusement park, I was telling somebody the other day that 90 % of parenting in public is counting.

How many kids do I have and are they all there? And that's somewhat pastoral ministry.

Who are my people? And, golly, I haven't seen so -and -so for the last several weeks. I hope they're doing okay.

I wonder if they're walking with the Lord. I wonder if they're straying. And so that means that the congregation needs to know who are the men assigned to bear rule over them.

And then the pastors need to know, who am I caring for? Excuse me.

I'm feeling a little under the weather, but we'll give it a shot. So, as far as pastoral ordination goes, do you believe somebody, obviously you believe that pastoral ordination is a biblical concept, but is it a requirement?

Is it something that has to happen? Does a pastor have to be ordained? And it might be helpful also to maybe give a short definition of what ordination is.

Sure. I think the New Testament, drawing from Old Testament and Sanhedrin and the practices in the

Sanhedrin of electing the elders who would oversee the Sanhedrins in Israel's governmental structure, the concept of laying on of hands or the term that we get, senator, which simply means elder, the biblical case for it is that when

Paul tells, or when the Apostles tell the early church to seek for amongst yourselves men who are able to serve the tables in regards to electing deacons, it also refers to the laying on of hands for elders as well.

Meaning these are men that are set aside, and the congregation is acknowledging the character and the virtues in this man who is demonstrating a faithfulness to the

Apostles' doctrine. And so the laying on of hands also has connotations, of course, of Old Testament sacrificial imagery of this is a lamb being led to the slaughter.

This is a sacrificial ministry, not in the sense that you are atoning for anyone's sin, but you are laying down your life.

You're a shepherd who imitates the good shepherd who lays down his life for the flock. And so yes,

I believe ordination, the setting apart of certain men to care for the church, is a biblical one.

And I think there's an important distinction, then, that needs to be made of there are principles and methods.

The principle is that God has given the rule of his church to the elders, and now the methods whereby individual churches might elect those elders or appoint those elders,

I think, has varied, of course, throughout church history. But that doesn't mean that there's not a clearly biblical way of doing it.

It's not a, your way is better, my way is better, or who's to tell which way is better. And we ought to be faithful students of Scripture to discern what is the most faithful biblical method for ordaining and installing men who are charged with caring for the congregation of God, the church of God.

But again, the distinction there would be there's the principle of men who are caring for the flock of Christ, appointed by God, answerable to God, accountable to God for the flock.

And then there's methods, which there's kind of three broad categories, I think, where the church has opted to structure itself.

There's the monarchical way, which is what you get in kind of the Roman Catholic or the Episcopalian Anglican way, which is sort of top -down, and it matches, consequently, their civil government structure.

You've got the king, and then it's all top -down. You've got the more democratic way, which would be congregation churches, where it's every baptized believer has a say in it.

And then there's the Presbyterian or representative way, which is appointing.

It's the Jethro model, right, of elect elders over tens, fifties, hundreds, thousands.

It's tiered, but it's representative. It's covenantal in that respect. So I think there's...

I'm Presbyterian, so I would make the case that that's the biblical model, but the church has structured itself in other ways that I think have...

they've got Bible verses to support their view. But I think, yeah, we ought to strive for as great biblical fidelity as we can.

You're outnumbered, Rob. That's okay. That's okay. And I grew up Southern Baptist and still am

Southern Baptist, so I don't mind if I take a jab. As you were describing those different models, the

Southern Baptist would claim more congregational model style, but yet somehow, some way, it seems like there's going to be an elevation of somebody or a group of people that elevate themselves up to that monarchical position in the local church.

It's crazy how that works. So let's jump into, in these next questions, the meat of the conversation of where you guys are coming from.

You said that you are the executive pastor there, so you are one of the ordained pastors, elders at Christ Church.

Describe this ordination process at Christ Church, and then if there's any differences between your church and the rest of the churches in the

CREC, maybe describe some of those differences. But just that process of what you guys, or what a pastor would go through to become ordained.

Yeah, I'll try to explain it maybe at a couple levels. Christ Church holds to a four -office view of church government.

So you'd have the elders, which consist of three distinct offices of elders.

They all get one vote at a session meeting, at an elder meeting. You'd have the ministers, who are ordained as ministers of Word and Sacrament.

You'd have teaching elders, which is drawing from kind of the Genevan, Calvin's Geneva, had the theological doctors who were primarily tasked with teaching theology, often in the schools, but also caring for the doctrine of the church, and that sort of thing.

Gifted men in instruction, in particular. And then we have what are called parish elders, or what the

PCA might, some other Presbyterian denominations would call ruling elders.

We call them parish elders because we want them to be, we like the terminology parish elder because it indicates sort of a neighborhood elder who's cared for this distinct group of people.

And those guys, so those three offices, we would call all of them elders, but they have sort of different job descriptions, you might say.

And then the fourth office being deacons. So that's what our church holds to, but within the

CREC there's three office and two office views as well.

So we allow for it all. The office being just elders and deacons, three office being ruling elders, teaching elders, and deacons, which would be more,

I think, your more typical broad Presbyterian way of structuring it.

At Christ Church, to elect an elder, each of those categories have a bit of a different process, but effectively you'd have a, for the parish elders, it would be anyone theoretically in the church could nominate someone to be an elder.

Hey, this is a good guy. He's got his family in order. Everybody looks up to him. We want him to be leading us and caring for us.

And we would, the elders would then vet him, ask him a series of questions, have him go through a questionnaire, get to know him.

He may, we may already know him pretty well and have no objections to moving him forward. And then we would put him forward for an election by the congregation.

Sometimes we'd accompany that with maybe having him read a handful of books on a variety of topics, but he'd be elected by the church, by heads of household, so each household would get one vote in it.

If there's any no votes, we would chase those down. What's your reasons for voting no? Do you know where his, and they might say, yeah,

I know where his mistress in Kentucky is, and that would be a not fun surprise.

You know, hopefully have discovered anything scandalous before putting someone forward, but we want to give our congregation opportunity to say no thanks.

And then they serve for two -year terms and then five -year terms and then life terms. For a minister, and we could do this all as well for our teaching elders, but primarily for the ministers, we would call them, have a congregational meeting to call a man as a pastor.

If he's not already ordained, we would then ask Presbytery to form an ordination committee, and that's where the guy has to go through what

I like to fondly refer to as a theological colonoscopy. You know, it's, you're gonna get everything looked at.

You know, you need to know your stuff. You're gonna be, you're gonna be tasked with teaching and preaching and explaining and defending the faith, more so than the parish elders are.

They're tasked with, here's your 20 families. You can just be checking in on them, praying for them. If there's something that goes sideways, kicking it up to the pastors to have them provide maybe more thorough pastoral counseling, but we just want sheepdogs.

That's what the parish elders do. For the ministers, we want them to be thoroughly vetted, so to speak, by the broader assembly of the body of Christ, and that process usually takes, you know, nine months to a year.

There's a written exam, there's papers, there's examinations before the floor, before you get to the floor of Presbytery, just to make sure the guy doesn't faceplant at the floor of Presbytery and say, gee, the

Trinity is like a shamrock, or it's like it's like water, ice, vapor, like just to make sure he doesn't just collapse into a puddle on the floor of Presbytery and embarrass us all.

And so then the Presbytery, so here's where the CREC gets a little bit different from the more typical

Presbyterian structure. The CREC at Presbytery then, the guy would be examined by the

Presbytery. They would vote to commend him to the local church for ordination, whereas in the

PCAOPC, some other Presbyterian denominations, it's the Presbytery that holds the man's credentials.

He's ordination rests with the local church, where he's a member of his local church.

They're the ones that are going to sniff if he's going woke, or if his family's in shambles, or if something's going awry.

They're going to be the first, the immune system that's going to first sense anything going sideways.

So that's where we're a bit different, a little bit decentralized. I fondly refer to the

CREC as the Wild West of the Reformed denominations, of the Presbyterian denominations, precisely because it's a bit more decentralized.

The only property that the CREC, the denomination as a whole, owns is its website.

There's no denominational headquarters. There's no standing committees. There's a presiding minister over it, and he has a three -year term, but we've really sought to decentralize it so there's not a mega headquarters with a staff and a salary that's sort of unaccountable to anybody.

It can become an entity that outgrows everything else, and that's where the real power lies.

That's where the committees, that's where the conference circuit, the book deals, that's where the power, prestige, and fame rests.

We've sought to decentralize it as much as possible, and I think you see that particularly in Presbytery recommending a man to be ordained, but that it's his local church that's calling him that would ordain him and hold his credentials as a minister.

Does that cover the waterfront? Yeah, that's great, and you just using the term decentralization is taking me in a political direction, which we're not going to go, but it would be interesting to have you back and go that route and take that, because there may be some similarities.

I would like to ask you if there's some similarities there in your thought process and why you do what you do, but Dan, go ahead.

I could touch on that briefly. The Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches is a, you might even call it like a confederation of churches, where the authority rests in the local church instead of it being a federal government, top -down, it's decentralized in that way, which

I think is refreshing. As a

Baptist, I concur. So y 'all allow for a

Credo Baptist and Pedo Baptist positions within the denomination. Is that something that is also by church, there are churches within the denomination that have maybe ministers who are operating from different theological perspectives, and if so, how do they navigate those theological waters as they seek to serve the church as a unified under Christ, but maybe with some differing perspectives on some things?

That's a live issue for our denomination right now. We're 25 years old, the denomination is 25 years old, and when it set up, it was three churches that had been

Baptist churches that became Presbyterian, became Pedo Baptist, Doug Wilson in our church being one of the founding members of the

CRAC, having been churches that had been Baptist and changed convictions and navigated those waters fairly peaceably with the congregants themselves, not causing a church split, but saying we want to say that our

Baptist brothers, we're not going to try to drown them anytime soon, we want to get along with each other, fellowship together, worship together, partake of Lord's Supper together, and have a good time doing it.

So when the CRAC was founded, we sort of knew that the founders knew that eventually this bridge would have to be crossed as far as what do we do with Reformed Baptists and Pedo Baptists being in the same communion of churches.

What do you do? And this is kind of, as we've grown, there's a number of spots where we're working through how do we acknowledge, so members moving from, say, a

Pedo Baptist family moving from the church in Moscow, and they go to some

London Baptist Confession Church, and their kids have been baptized, have been communing, and they show up at the

Credo Baptist Church and say we would like our kids to continue taking the Lord's Supper. How does the

Reformed Baptist Church on board those, how do they receive those members?

So that's a live issue for us that we're working through, and I think we've landed in a few good, some good spots that I think are really workable.

The problem in a lot of Christian circles that try to aim for unity or ecumenicalism is that they bake it down to the least common denominator, right?

They go, we all believe in God, and they say, so we can all get along.

We can have the Mormons here, the Jehovah's Witness here, the Hindu, and the

Roman Catholic priest, and the Lesbiterian bishop, and all that sort of, we can have, we can all get along because we're, we all believe in a

God, we all believe in a deity, and they go for like lowest common denominator. I think what the CRAC is trying to do is aim for the highest common denominator, which is we have these great

Reformed creeds, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Three Forms of Unity, the 39

Articles, the London Baptist Confession, and each church that comes into the

CRAC has to hold to the three ecumenical creeds, you know, Nicene Creed, Apostles Creed, Definition of Chalcedon, and they also have to adopt into their

Constitution one of those Reformed creeds that is stipulated in the CRAC. Now we recognize that that's going to cause tension between churches, but we think it's workable because we're saying good fences make good neighbors.

We know that we're a Westminster Confession of Faith church, and we know that you're a London Baptist Confession church, and because we now know where each of us sit, we can labor together for the gospel.

We can labor together for this vision of Christ being

King over our nation. We can labor for the conversion of souls and the raising of godly families. We can labor together in these things, even while we work through these finer points of difference, specifically in regards to the sacraments of baptism and the

Lord's Supper, because predominantly in the CRAC we're also paedo -communion.

Most churches in the CRAC would administer the Lord's Supper to baptized children kind of as soon as the baby is tracking with the service.

They're not asleep in the car seat anymore. Those who have come through the door should get to eat at the table is the broad view in the

CRAC, and there's a few churches that are paedo -communion, and so that's another bridge that we have to have to work through, of how do we play nicely with each other in regards to those situations.

All right, so forgive me if I ask this question and I missed anything.

So I guess this will be more for clarification. This concept is very intriguing to me, and it sounds like a third podcast that we could have you back on to discuss, because Dan and I have talked about this before.

We're both holding to the post -millennial view, and what does that look like for, I guess we would start out with the

Presbyterian and Baptist. If we all believe we're going in one direction, we're all heading towards Zion, we're eventually going to look more and more alike as we come towards Christ, and so maybe one day we can touch on that and what that may look like, and that process, and how you guys are thinking through what you just described.

But on this issue of pastoral ordination, do you guys have

Baptists at Christ Church, Reformed Baptists at Christ Church? Yeah, we do. We've got a good handful of them, and we've had them as church officers, as deacons, and as elders.

We wouldn't say to a Baptist man who's got his family in order, who's a faithful teacher of Scripture, and everybody looks up to him, we would say, well, because you hold the

London Baptist Confession, you know, you're not welcome here. No, specifically as a parish elder,

I think we would want to make use of a godly man in our midst, if his character is above reproach, if he's faithful and godly.

Now what that would mean is Christ Church holds to the

Westminster Confession of Faith. That would mean a Credo Baptist elder or pastor would have to be humble enough and willing enough to say,

I'm happy to, this is what you're gonna teach, this is what you're gonna hear from the pulpit, is sort of Westminsterian doctrine.

And if he's happy to say, I'm a Baptist, but I'm happy to leave that stuff sort of on the side or hold it without causing, trying to create the little

Credo Baptist party over here, we can get along, and we can be fine and say, we love him, and he can fill the pulpit occasionally, but the standards for what we're gonna teach would be

Westminsterian. So you wouldn't require then a

Reformed Baptist who has taken one of those positions to have their children take communion or be baptized.

They could hold those convictions in their families, they just wouldn't form those divisive groups.

Yeah, if they're trying to form like a First Baptist Church of the broom closet, then we would say, hey, what can we do to help you plant a

Baptist church down the street? But if he loves the fellowship, loves the teaching, winces a little bit when we get to Ezekiel 36 or Deuteronomy 30 or whatnot, if he sort of struggles through those passages, we're happy to accommodate our

Credo Baptist brothers. And we would perform, when their kids get old enough and make a credible profession of faith, we baptize them.

We've got some horse troughs around here that we haul out and do that by immersion. So we accommodate that, because I think we have a lot more in common when you look at the

London Baptist Confession and the Westminster Confession of Faith. It's like copy -paste with very sizable disagreements on baptism.

But it's one of those, we've got a lot more in common, we're cousins, let's get along with each other.

The problem, like I said earlier, with a lot of the ecumenicalism of liberal denominations is finding people you're not related to at all and then trying to get along.

It's not cousins that you're dealing with, it's different species, practically. You're dealing with, no, we can't have concord between Hindus and Christians.

What fellowship has Christ with the Temple of Idols? So yes,

Credo Baptist families, we've got a good handful of them at Christ Church, and they love it, and they know that they're the odd duck, but they're happy to be the odd duck, and we're happy to baptize their kids when their kids make a profession of faith.

And at the same time, every

Sunday when I'm passing out the Lord's Supper and I get to that row where the Baptist family sits, and I hand the elements to the father and the mother and maybe one or two of the older kids who have been baptized,

I have to be humble enough to say to the little ones who aren't baptized yet, not yet little one,

I have to be humble enough to bend a little bit in my convictions, and so we're submitting one to another in that respect, forbearing with one another, even though I think they should baptize their kids, and they should give them the

Lord's Supper, but I want to not divide over the sign that unites us.

And if it is too much for one of your Reformed Baptist, Creole Baptist brethren there, then they could lovingly go to one of the other churches in the

CREC that is a confessional London Baptist Confession Church, or you gave the example of help them start a

First Baptist Church in Moscow, and they could potentially be in the

CREC. I just think that's a beautiful relationship and a beautiful thing that you guys do.

And it's worked. It's not without difficulty that you've got points where you have to, just like you do with your cousins, you know, you occasionally have arguments and disagreements and you just have to labor for the unity of the

Spirit. You know, we oftentimes labor for the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. We talk about unity, unity, unity, unity, but that phrase begins with a verb, labor, exertion, and that takes work.

Blood, sweat, and tears sometimes to say, okay, yeah, we can sign off on that. What the

CREC adopted at our last council are every three years we have all the

Presbyterians, all the churches gathered together, and then there's delegates from each Presbytery that are on council, and that's how constitutional amendments are made.

They just passed sort of the first stage of, I think, a way in which this can work between churches that makes it a little bit more clear than it had been in our

Constitution, using the language that a Baptist Church holding to the London Baptist Confession could hold that an infant baptism is valid but improper, valid but improper, and therefore receive a

Paedo -Baptist family to their church, wince a little bit that they're not, you sort of think they should have waited until there was a credible profession of faith, but acknowledge it as a valid but improper baptism.

Like I would if there was a group of teenagers at a summer camp and they get whizzed up about Jesus and say, let's go get baptized, and they go out to the river and they baptize one another in the name of the

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and you'd go, well that was irregular, but we're gonna count it, you know, we're gonna, we'll, obviously there may be situations where you wouldn't, if it was not in the triune name or, you know, there was some other monkey business going on, but there were drugs involved or something like that, but I would receive those baptisms as irregular but valid.

And so that's the language, and that's actually, Joe Rigney brought this to our attention as he's moved to Moscow and he's coming into the

CREC, he's obviously from a Reformed Baptist background, and he pointed this out that in the

London Baptist Confession and in some of the footnotes and appendices of the original documents of it all, there was actually within England at the time when it was drafted, that question was a live one for them.

Like, okay, we love our Reformed brethren here, our Presbyterian brethren here, and we've got their families in our churches.

Do we excommunicate all these kids? You know, what do we do with these kids who are baptized? They don't do anything, you know, like how do we deal with it?

And so that's, Joe Rigney brought that to our attention. I think he was the one that formulated that phrase of valid but improper as a way in which

I think a conscientious Baptist could get along with us, with the broader

CREC, who's Presbyterian, 98 % of it is Presbyterian, but an

LBC church could have that workaround, so to speak.

So in thinking about the ordination process in the

CREC, what do you think some of the strengths are that you have over maybe some of the ways that other folks have done it, and what are some of the weaknesses that maybe you'd like to kick around with some folks and maybe get them to tighten up a little bit?

Yeah, I think the difference, you know, obviously you've got the

Evangelical Church in America, there's varying degrees of bars for entry, you might say, like what does the exam consist of?

There are denominations where it's, hey, you're a warm body, you could be the pastor, there's fill out this form on a website and get your ordination certificate in the mail, you know, there's, and then there's the much more thorough, which

I think, I think ours is very thorough, I think it's it's strong in that regard. The written exam is thorough, the oral exam at Presbytery and the sort of practice exams with your ordination committee along the way are thorough and they're they're robust.

I think one of the things that we have ordination candidates do is in the

CREC Constitution we have what's called memorials, which are basically statements that aren't covered in the

Reformed confessions, so things like abortion, gay mirage, six -day literal creation, various other topics that maybe aren't addressed clearly in in the various Reformed confessions, but which obviously in our day and age we don't want to say, this guy can spout off every jot and tittle of the

Confession of Faith, but he's squishy when it comes to marriage or, you know, sexuality or to abortion.

And so one of the, I think, the strengths is that we we care quite a bit more about a man's character and his worldview than his credentials, you know, his academic chops, and I think that's maybe, that's a strength,

I think, on our side. We want to have robust academic expectations for our ministers, that they know their stuff, but that's that's not primary, and I think that a lot of modern churches have gotten into, especially in the mainline denominations, that a degree conferred from some prestigious seminary has caused a lot of churches to overlook character issues in pastoral candidates because he was, he aced his

Greek final, you know, but his marriage is in shambles, he's made terrible financial decisions, you know, he's got gambling debts in Vegas, you know, so we want to, so I think that's one of our strengths.

And, you know, as far as we recently overhauled the written exam, and so to the question about the weaknesses,

I think we've just recently sort of addressed some of those some of those areas that maybe were a little bit weaker or not as thorough as they could have been.

So I'm trying to think if there'd be anything else to to cover on that front, but again, I think the main emphasis would be on evaluating a man's character, his family, his personal life, his moral life, because that's what

Scripture gives us as the requirement for a pastor and an elder is he's blameless, husband of one wife, his children are not, you know, shooting out streetlights, hitting mailboxes in the neighborhoods.

So we're winding down to the end. And so two very important questions for the last two questions.

Yeah. And so I'll go ahead and offer them up at once. What advice would you give to men, young men?

Yeah. Older men? What advice would you give to them who have a desire, who have that,

I guess Baptists call it a calling, have a desire to become a pastor or inquiring about it?

What advice would you give to them? And then when you finish, if you would share the gospel with our listeners.

Yeah, happy to. Yes, I think for young men in particular who desire the call to have a sense of call to ministry,

Calvin, of course, has that really wonderful paradigm of the internal call and the external call. You might be really jazzed to become a pastor, but if nobody around you is saying yes and amen, if the church around you is saying ah, then you should hear the voice of God through his church if they're saying no.

But if they're saying like the calling of John Knox where the bishop points at him and says you, son, will be preaching here in this church one day, and he bursts into tears, if the church around you is saying we believe that what

God's doing in your life is worthy of remark, worthy of its exemplary, we want to support you as you pursue training and equipping in pastoral ministry, then

I think a young man can take that and run with it. But I think what Scripture gives, you know, in Acts 20,

Paul to the Ephesian elders says take heed unto yourselves and unto the church.

And I think that that holds true for elders whether they're desiring to become an elder, which desiring a bishop, desiring to be an elder is a good thing,

Scripture says. And if you're an old elder, an elder elder, the warning is take heed unto yourselves and unto the church.

And then in Timothy, Paul sort of says it similarly, take heed to yourself and to your doctrine.

In other words, a great deal of harm has been done in the church because of unqualified elders.

I didn't say elders who didn't have the right sort of degree or who weren't experts at parsing

Hebrew tenses. I think it's the qualifications listed in Titus and Timothy and even in the

Old Testament for some of the priestly requirements. Is this man's marriage in good shape?

Is there a secret sin? Are his children unruly? Is his home full of the aroma of Christ?

Does he love the Lord and is that evident all around him? And so I think for elders, we have our elders every year go through an elder questionnaire that's sort of just a temperature check, you know, if there's anything wobbly.

And we want to develop a culture of if there's something going wobbly in the family or in the life, we want to give guys the opportunity to say this isn't a life sentence.

It would be far better for a man to, if the teenager is starting to go wobbly, for him to take a time off as an elder, pursue his son or his daughter who's going wayward.

And winning them would further qualify him as an elder.

But oftentimes the church turns a blind eye and says, but he's such a good preacher, you know, and he's so gifted and we all love him so much, but his kids have wandered from the faith.

But what does Paul say to Titus? Like if a man can't, if his own house is not in order, how do you think he's gonna care for the

Church of Jesus? That's where the proving ground is. And so I think that's that'd be my exhortation to either men who are aspiring to be ministers and elders or men who are ministers and elders is make sure that you have the heart of the matter.

Do you love Christ? Are you mortifying sin? Are you confessing your own sin? Are you striving to make sure that you meet the qualifications that Scripture outlines?

And are you humble enough to admit where you're not meeting those qualifications and step down or ask for time off to work on those things?

Do you have that humility? And then as far as the gospel, the glorious gospel of our

Lord and Savior Jesus, I think Paul just puts it so wonderfully in 1st Corinthians 15.

He says, I delivered unto you that which I received, which is of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the

Scriptures, and he was buried and he rose again according to the Scriptures. The gospel is of first importance, is of utmost importance, because it deals with the problem of our sin.

It deals with the problem that we are cut off from the God who made us. Our sin has separated us from our

Father, from our God, but then in Christ and according to the

Scriptures, which means it takes us back to Genesis. It takes us back to the whole story of mankind, saying that all throughout the story of history, in Jesus, in the life and the ministry of Jesus, in the person of Jesus, the

Son of God, you have forgiveness of sins. Your shame is washed clean.

And not only that, but you have been buried with him and you have been risen with him. And that means you are no longer dead in your trespasses and sins, but you are alive unto

God through Jesus Christ. And so the calling then is belief. This is the word which is preached unto you, which is proclaimed unto you.

And therefore, believe. Lay hold. And as 1 John says, if you believe that Jesus is the

Son of God, you are born of God. Here's how we know that you're born of God. You believe Jesus is the

Son of God. It's not more complicated than that. Praise the

Lord. Dan, do you have any last thoughts or questions? If not, would you close with some prayer?

Yeah, let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for the time we had together to listen to this questioning of the

CREC on their ordination practices. We got to hear a lot of good stuff about your church and the gospel, and we're excited to see what you will do amongst your people.

I pray for blessings upon Pastor Zorn, and we pray that you would guide us, keep us, and hold us close to yourself.

And in Christ's name, we pray. Amen. Pastor Zorn, we are truly grateful that you gave us some of your time to share with us what goes on at Christ Church and the

CREC. Again, we are truly grateful for you. If you'll stay on just a second after I end the recording, thank you all for watching.

We appreciate you as well. Remember, as always, Jesus is King. Go live in the victory of Christ, speak with the authority of Christ, and go share the gospel of Christ.