Is Hiring a Pastor is Biblical?

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The main issue for pastoral qualification is character.
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Now I know there's a lot of churches that hire people as lay pastors, but as we look at the issue of a lay pastor, sometimes they're hired because they have good business mindsets.
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They're really good in the business world, or maybe they're large donors. The amount that someone gives does not qualify a person as a pastor.
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Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.
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This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.
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Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rapoport, the
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Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member.
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We are here to give you biblical interpretations and applications for the Christian life, and we are going through a series.
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We're in episode 8 of the series on what is a pastor, and we have dealt with some topics like what a pastor is not.
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We've said that a pastor is not a woman, a pastor is not a street preacher, we've talked about the function of a pastor, the qualifications of a pastor, and in the beginning of this series,
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I said that I think the way we go about hiring pastors is not only not biblical—that's a double negative—that it is unbiblical, but not really.
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So there's a difference between unbiblical and not biblical. So unbiblical means that the idea is it is against the
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Bible, where not biblical means that it's just not in the Bible. And so I'm arguing—so I know there's a double negative there, but sometimes it's necessary—it is not biblical, meaning that the way we go about hiring pastors
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I don't believe is in the Bible. I think that it's not necessarily a sin or against the
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Bible, but I do think it presents a lot of problems in the Church today.
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And you say, wait a minute, Andrew, that is a bold statement. I know, I get it. And I said that from the very beginning, and some people have emailed in and talked about that, and so we want to cover that today.
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And why now? Well, it took building up all of these previous episodes to get to this, because as I get to this now,
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I think if you have heard the previous episodes, and if you haven't, may I encourage you to go back and listen to the full series, to listen to the seven last episodes, so that you get the foundation and the basis for where we're coming to with this.
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And as I work through this, I know a lot of people who have—they hear a knee -jerk reaction that I say that it's unbiblical or not biblical, the way we go about hiring pastors, and people go, wait, what's wrong with the way we're doing it?
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And after I explain this, with all the build -up, people tend to agree with me. I hope that's the case with you.
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And so I want to make a case against the way that we hire pastors, at least in America.
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I've kind of given some indications to this. But first, there's another aspect of how we hire pastors
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I want to bring in, and that's going to be about their education. Now, next week will be an episode we'll do on how to encourage your pastor.
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That'll be a very important one, and really, this whole series was building up to that. But we got a number of questions that did come in that we didn't answer throughout, and so I may do a short—maybe it's short unless the rest of you send me in more emails, and if you want to, it's info at striving4eternity .com.
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So that's info at striving4eternity .com. It's in the show notes, but that's how you can email us any questions that you feel we haven't answered throughout the series.
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But I may do a shorter question and answer episode, because we have had some questions that came in that just weren't answered throughout the series.
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So we'll probably have two more episodes in the series. But let's start with the qualifications.
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As we've gone through all of the qualifications, and the last two episodes in the series are really important, as we looked through 1 and 2
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Timothy, and then 1 Timothy 3, and Titus 1, and look at the qualifications, we talked about the fact that these are all character issues.
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Character is not something you can learn in seminary. Character is not something that you can see after meeting a person for just a short period of time, and that's gonna be a basis for everything
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I'm gonna say in this episode. Character matters when it comes to church leadership.
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It matters immensely. It's extremely, extremely important. If you have men in leadership that don't have character, you don't have a good leadership.
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And I would argue that's God's whole point of looking at these qualifications that we have, and his emphasis is on the character.
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And so let me begin with an email that we got from Quentin. I will read this.
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It's a little bit longer of an email, but this deals with the question of the education of a
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And I want to start with that before we jump into looking at the hiring practice, because the first thing
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I think we have is this question of the education. Many people think that you need to have someone who has a
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Master's of Divinity, that there are a lot of churches that's a requirement. Is it necessary?
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Well, let me read this from Quentin. He's from Oklahoma. He says this, Hello. I was recently listening to The Function of the
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Pastor Part 1 on The Rap Report, where a comment was made by Andrew R. saying he believes the hiring process for a pastor is often done unbiblically.
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I do not know the intended meaning of this comment, but it made me consider the educational qualifications of a pastor, like falling into spiritual maturity requirement for a pastor.
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Specifically, that pastoral ministry is an occupation often requires some sort of seminary degree.
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Should a pastoral position be barred by the requirement of a college degree? Are seminary graduates always more spiritually mature than those without this education?
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I raise this question because God has used many pastors throughout history to advance the gospel who are not formally trained or educated as pastors.
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This makes me wonder what the Bible says about the educational requirements for someone to be qualified to pastor a church.
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I'm interested in hearing what your thoughts are about this topic, and I want to know whether or not this is worth consideration or not.
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Thank you for your ministry. I pray that this ministry will continue to edify the Church and encourage believers to give glory to our
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Lord. Signed by Quinton. I think this is a really good question, and I wanted to address it, and I thank
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Quinton for the email so that we could address this. I was planning to anyway, because there is a question about a seminary degree, and I like the way
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Quinton worded this because when he asks about this and he says he doesn't know my intended meaning of saying that it's not biblical, well,
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Quinton, you're gonna hear it this episode. But he also talks about the education.
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Now there are churches, many churches I know, where when it comes to hiring a pastor, they require, as I said, a degree, at least a
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Master's of Theology, or most often a Master's of Divinity.
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Now the difference is there is just the number of courses that you take. A Master's of Divinity is going to require
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Greek and Hebrew and counseling classes that you could avoid with a
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Master of Arts in Theology. So is it necessary? Well obviously not, because they didn't have those degrees in biblical times.
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So it wasn't something that was required by the Bible. What is the qualification?
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Well, as we've seen in the previous episodes, I've said the main issue for pastoral qualification is character.
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Now I know there's a lot of churches that hire people as lay pastors. Sometimes they call them elders.
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I make no distinction between pastor and elder. You can go back to a previous episode where I explained that. But as we look at the issue of a lay pastor, sometimes they're hired because they have good business mindsets.
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They're really good in the business world. Or maybe there are large donors. The amount that someone gives does not qualify a person as a pastor.
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So no church should be asking someone to be a pastor of the church based on their giving.
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What if they're really good in business? Well, in the previous episode, I mentioned that there's a difference between the way the church is run and the way business is run.
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See, a business, failure is not acceptable. You run a business, you hire people to do a job, they pay them, and if they fail, you fire them.
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Well, maybe not in the first time, but failure gets fired. You don't allow for failure in a business mindset.
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But in ministry, we all learn from our mistakes. You're dealing with volunteers, so you have to not only allow for failure, but train people so that they don't fail.
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In other words, it's not something you can just say, well, hey, they're not doing it the right way, so we just get rid of them.
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No, they need to learn how to use their spiritual gifts to serve the church. And so there's a difference in mindset.
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So just because someone has a good business mindset doesn't necessarily make them a good pastor.
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Now, I'm going to extend that when it comes to the education. Just because someone has a seminary education does not necessarily mean they've been trained for character, for the main issue.
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They may be trained to have an education and to learn a lot, to know a lot, and that's helpful, but the question that Quentin is asking, and the question
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I think many of you in the audience are asking is, is it necessary? The way
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Quentin had asked it was, should a pastoral position be barred by someone by the requirement of a college degree?
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I would say no. In fact, some of the men that I know that have been great pastors have not had a seminary degree, but what they do have is a fear of the
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Lord. When they stand up at that pulpit, they're so afraid to say something wrong that they study harder maybe than someone who is confident in his education.
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It's one of the things I know from practice. When I used to be a manager in the IT field, we used to have this requirement that you had to have at least a bachelor's, and when
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I would hire people, I did not have that. I would restrict that, and I would look at people that didn't have a bachelor's or a master's.
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Why? Because I discovered that many of the people who don't have that degree worked harder than those with the degree because they didn't have the degree.
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They felt they had to work even harder, so when when they were at the job, they did even more than most people.
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They would go and do the research to learn new things, to be on the cutting edge, to make sure they were always better than the people with the degree, and I would always gravitate toward hiring someone like that rather than someone who is confident.
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I remember as a manager, I had a gentleman come in. I wanted a job, and I looked at his his resume, and with the resume that we'd have this thing that would ask a bunch of technical questions, different things about IT.
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You know, there'd be different languages. How well do you know the programming language C or C++ or the operating system
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Unix? Different things like this. Well, this guy scored 10 out of 10 on everything. I mean, he knew everything.
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So I looked at this. He comes in the office, and I said, I see you scored, you marked a 10 out of 10 on everything.
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Is there anything you don't know? And he says, nope, I know it all, and I just asked him. You know, he had a
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PhD. He's very well educated, so I asked him a very interesting question. There's a
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Unix command that is called the create command. C -R -E -A -T.
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Notice anything missing? Yeah, there's no E at the end of the create command. So I asked him,
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I said, why does the create command not have an E at the end of it? And he looked at me, puzzled, and said,
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I don't know. I said, well, okay, this interview is over. And he was amazed. He said, what do you, just because I don't know that there's, why there's no
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E in create? I said, well, the reason there's no E at the end of the word create in the create command is because it was a typo.
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It was a spelling error. They forgot to add that, and that's why it's not there. It was a goof, but that's not why the interview is over.
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He's like, well, why is the interview over? I said, because you don't know what you don't know. I said, the problem
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I have in hiring you is you will tell me you can get everything done, but I can't trust that.
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I can't trust when you say you can get a job done because you're unaware of what you don't know.
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I want someone who knows what they know, but also knows what they don't know, so when I ask them, can you get this done?
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They're gonna know and be able to tell me I have to do research on this area. And so that was probably the quickest interview
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I ever had. I hope that young man learned a lesson, but it went to show that even if you have a
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PhD, it doesn't mean that you know everything. And so I would say a seminary degree, even a bachelor's degree, should not bar anybody from a pastoral position.
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In fact, one of the most quoted preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, did not have a degree, even though he had a school where he was the president, right?
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So he had students he trained up, but not formally educated. Many people are like that, and so the issue
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I have more concern with, and I think God would as well we see after all these lessons of what is a pastor, is does the man have character?
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Does he have a fear for the Lord? And so in Quentin's question he said, are seminary graduates always more spiritually mature than those without this education?
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The answer to that is no. No, seminary degrees do not make you more spiritually mature.
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It fills your head with knowledge, and a good seminary is gonna have professors around the students, and they're getting to learn their character.
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I know one at my seminary, I had one gentleman, he went through seminary, and the professors kind of knew him.
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They got to see some things in him, and I remember the dean reaching out to me, and there were different professors who had a concern because this one individual had a lot of knowledge, but they were concerned about putting their stamp on him saying that he would graduate with a degree that could get him to be a pastor because they just didn't see the character of a pastor.
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They didn't see a shepherd's heart. They saw a man who liked to study, but not a man who liked to have the character that was necessary, and I remember the dean reached out to me since I knew this individual well, and they had some concerns, and the professors saw it, but they wanted to verify, really, with someone who knew him well, and so unfortunately,
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I had to say I had some of the same concerns with this student that I knew well. I would be concerned with saying that he is a shepherd, and so the school decided to make the decision that they would not allow him to graduate because they didn't want to be associated with someone that didn't have the character, and that becomes an issue that, to this point, is that just having the education, there's some men who just, they're in the pastorate because they like to study, but they're not shepherds.
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Some can't teach, but as we saw in the last episode with the qualifications, if he can't teach, he shouldn't be a pastor.
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So when it comes to the seminary degree, no, it's not necessary. I think that it is something where some people put that as a restriction because it makes it easy.
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Look, for folks who don't understand, there's a lot of pastors looking for work. A church goes out and they put out a thing saying, hey, we need a pastor.
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You could have three, four, six hundred resumes that come in. I remember in one church, we had over 600 resumes that came in over several months where I was on the committee that was going to choose the next pastor, and when you have that many resumes, you need some way of just eliminating people.
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It's hard to go through all those, and so yes, sometimes they make a degree the issue. I would say that shouldn't be, but there's different reasons that people have to cut off.
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I remember when a pastor that lived by me, he had passed away. It was very kind.
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His wife contacted me afterwards and asked whether I could come over and said that her husband had specifically requested if I would be willing to take over his library.
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She said she wanted, she knew, he had known that I would put the books to use and he wanted them used, and he just, in the last years of his life,
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I spent lots of time with him, ministering with him, and he really just had the desire that I would pick up where he left off, and so I had taken his library.
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One of the other things I ended up doing was applying for that church for the pastor in his absence.
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Now the interesting thing was that I was one of the few people that they accepted to candidate and to look at, and they ultimately made their decision because at the time
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I didn't have my MDiv. I had a Master's of Arts in theology, and they based it just on that, and the chairman of that committee contacted me because he kind of felt bad because he really wanted to see me in that role, especially since the previous pastor had recommended before he died that I'd be there, but it was just based on the degree, and I asked him,
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I said, do you know the difference between a Master of Arts and a Master's of Divinity? He said no.
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I said, is anyone on the committee? He's like, well, not really. I said, well, the real difference would be in the languages and in the counseling.
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I said no. At that time, I said I had been counseling people for near on 15 years, and I'm not fluent in the languages.
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I have tools that help me with that, and I do my own translation when I preach. So what would require me from needing the degree?
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And he literally said, well, we really don't know. It's just the fact that we put that requirement, and you didn't have it.
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So okay. Do I think that's a biblical way to go? No. And to Quentin's question,
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I mean, and a lot of people have this question, should the degree limit us? No, it shouldn't. Is the seminary degree helpful?
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Absolutely. If you can get a seminary degree, even if you're not going to be a pastor in the church.
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We have one of the deacons in my church who has a Master, actually from the same school that I went to, a
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Master of Arts in Theology. Same degree that I got at that school, and so he's not a pastor though.
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He's the deacon. Did he get a lot of value out of that? Yeah, I'm sure everyone would get value out of more learning, and at a seminary level, the learning is, there's a higher expectation.
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So is it helpful? Absolutely. A good seminary is going to teach you not just a bunch of head knowledge, teach you how to interpret the
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Bible, and teach you your systematic theology, and give you some counseling and languages, but a good seminary is going to teach you how to function as a pastor, what ministry is actually like, so that people are aware.
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I remember taking courses on how to write a constitution, because that's something, especially if you're doing church planting, you're gonna do.
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And so there's aspects that are beyond just the head knowledge of the
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Bible, but practical things as well. There's courses that you could take on, you know, just dealing with building projects, because that becomes something that pastors don't always know about when they get into having to buy a building, and it's overwhelming.
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In fact, the stats are very high that after a church buys a new building, the pastor resigns within a year or two, because they've been so overwhelmed with that and distracted with that, that it ends up affecting their ability to, they get burnt out.
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So I think that a seminary degree is very helpful. Is it necessary? No. Should it bar someone?
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I would say no. Now, that's gonna get us to the point of asking, well, how should we hire pastors?
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Because if we're not going to say that we're limiting them based on a seminary degree, what are the qualifications?
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How should we go about this? I am very glad you asked that, and I would be happy to answer that right after this word from our sponsor.
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Support a fellow brother in Christ. So as we come back to your discussion,
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I would like us to evaluate and look at how we hire pastors, and why is it that I say that it is not a biblical practice?
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Now again, I'm making a distinction. I'm not saying it is unbiblical, so the differentiation again that I'm trying to make there is the difference being unbiblical would say that it is against the
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Bible, where not biblical means it's not in the Bible. Okay? So I want to make that distinction.
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So I'm not saying that the way we hire is sinful. I'm just saying it's not the way that they did it in the first century, and I would say it's not the way we should do it today.
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How do most churches hire a pastor? Well, when the pastor retires, passes away, leaves, whatever, most churches, what they do is they'll reach out to a local seminary or seminary that they are in line with and say, do you have any candidates for us?
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Or they may go out to some different job posts. There's different places for people to put ads out that their church is looking for a pastor, and as they do that, there will be many people that apply.
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The church will probably have a committee that's going to evaluate this, and they're going to look at who's going to be the best candidate.
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They'll have some sort of questions probably that they send out to each of the candidates. Those people will fill those things in.
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They'll evaluate those answers. They'll find some that they, for whatever reason, maybe it's the seminary degree, maybe it's the way they answer, whatever it is, they're going to reject them.
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There's going to be others that they're going to look at, and they're going to consider, and typically they'll do some interviews.
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They'll either have the person come out. It used to be that. Now we have Zoom meetings and things like that, so people do stuff like that to save the money, but they'll usually do either some sort of virtual call or a fly the person out, and the person may preach, not as a candidate, just they get to hear the preaching, and so what you end up hearing is someone who is going to give their best message, generally.
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Maybe I'll tell you a story where that I think that didn't happen, but I'll hold it for now. The issue is that you got to remember that when someone comes out, they usually have a message, and a lot of these guys have a candidating message, especially coming out of seminary.
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Some seminaries help students to work on a message, a message they preached over and over again in seminary.
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They preach it at many different churches, so they craft it to be better and better and better, and so when a guy comes out, whether it's for that interview or for a candidating message, they probably have a handful of messages that are their best messages.
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It's a message they've delivered many times. They've refined it, refined it, refined it, and they have it highly tuned, and so they come out, they interview with the board either on Zoom or they come out for it.
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Either way, say the board likes this person. They usually will bring them out for one week, maybe two at most, and they'll have them preach usually one week.
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Maybe they'll have them preach one time on Sunday. Some will have them do a midweek service and a
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Sunday. I had always required that it had to be at least two Sundays. They had to do Sunday school,
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Sunday service, midweek, Sunday school, Sunday service. I preferred to have them out for two weeks so that we would be able to evaluate, and I actually had the thing where I didn't want him to have a lot of downtime.
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Now most churches want to give the guy a lot of downtime while he's there, time to study and prepare, but do you really get to know a guy's character that way?
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Think about that, and so what ends up happening is we have people that will come in with their best message, and they'll keep, if they have children, they can keep their kids in line for a week or two.
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Usually it's a week, and usually it's they'll set it up. If they have kids that are unruly, they'll try to keep the kids aside or keep the kids occupied.
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Maybe they come out without the family. You should always require the family. You want to evaluate the kids, but the thing is that someone can fake things for a week, and so what happens is you have people that come out, they deliver their best message, and what is it that everyone is voting on?
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Think about this. What are they voting on? It is a popularity contest. Is it not?
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Think about that. It's a popularity contest. Who did you like is preaching.
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Did you like them personally? Now I'm saying that, and I want you to think about that, because as we've spent the last seven episodes going through, especially the last several, when we talk about the function of the pastor, we talked about the qualifications of a pastor, did you see in there he should be popular and his preaching should excite us?
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There's some churches that hire pastors because, well, we're an older congregation, we need a young pastor with kids so that we can get some kids in here.
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Should we be voting on a pastor that, well, we want him because he's got children? No, no, I don't remember seeing that in the list of qualifications.
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No, everything in the list of qualifications is character issues. Do you know the man's character after one or two interviews and he comes out for a week?
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The answer is no, you don't, and you don't really know his theology too well, and sometimes people look for wrong things in a church.
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So I was candidating at a church out in California. I was in California and I'm candidating,
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I was their number one candidate. They had a number two candidate, and the number one candidate comes in for the interview, being me, and they asked me all kinds of questions.
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It was fine, but I knew something about this church. The church in the area had—they grew from 100, 150 people to 450 in the last year or so, and the reason they grew was because of the fact that they had a lot of churches that were going ecumenical or emergent.
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If you don't know those terms, ecumenical just means that they were being accepting of all views. That's ecumenical.
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Emergent was this idea that, let's get rid of the hymns, let's get rid of the tradition, let's get rid of preaching, and just have a guy sitting on a stool and we have a conversation, and there were people that didn't like that.
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So they started going to this church because this church was more traditional, but were they going there for the theology, were they going there for the church itself, or were they going because the style of worship was more what they liked?
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And I had a concern. I'm gonna preach the truth, and I wasn't asked in the interview, I was not asked a single question about my theology.
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Now at first I thought maybe that was because of the fact that I had a pretty detailed doctrinal statement.
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It was like 10 -12 pages long. Maybe it answered all their questions. I turned to find out much later I knew two other men that applied for that position, and they were interviewed as well, and they were not asked any questions.
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Now there was two rounds, so I knew someone that made it to, he was the number two or three guy in the first round, and they ended up rejecting all those folks, and I was the number one in the second round.
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And so I didn't know about the church's need until the second round. Someone from that church reached out to me and asked whether I'd apply after they had no one in the first round, but no one was asked that I know of any theological questions, and that was a concern to me.
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So I asked them this question when they said, do you have any questions for us? I had one serious question I wanted to know. I said, if I preach, everything
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I preach is true, it's a hundred percent biblical and true, and yet half the people leave, what will be your reaction as church leaders?
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And I remember their deacon going, why would you want to do that? I said, oh I wouldn't want anyone to leave, but there is that possibility that people would leave if the truth is preached, because they're not coming here for the doctrine of the church, they're coming here because their church went in a direction that was non -traditional, and they just want the tradition.
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So they're not here for the teaching, they're here for the comfort, and so people may leave.
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Well, that deacon really did not like that I would even consider such a thing, and so I wasn't the candidate.
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I found it quite interesting, because the guy they ended up hiring, that they ended up having problems with, I realized that this church really,
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God probably spared me, because his candidating message, remember I said the candidates usually have a really polished message.
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Well, I'm gonna tell you his opening message, and you astute theologians are gonna pick up on what's wrong.
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I remember talking with Matt Slick about this, and it didn't take him long to go, wait a minute, and I'll tell you what it is after, but you see if you could pick up on it.
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So he preached out a revelation, and he opened it this way, saying, now this passage is talking about Jesus, and that shouldn't concern us.
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We know that God the Father was God in the Old Testament, and when Jesus walked the earth, he was
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God in person, and then we know that it's now God is the Holy Spirit, but in the future, he's going to return to being
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God the Son. Any of you see a problem with that? Yes, some of you astute theologians go, wait a minute,
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Andrew, that's modalism! Yes, it is. That's exactly what it is, and the
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Church didn't even know it, because they weren't concerned with theology. They were doing a vote on personality, and he was a likable guy.
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I was a likable guy, but they didn't want a guy that was gonna possibly split the Church, so they went with this guy, and they ended up in the same boat anyway, because many people left, because he was kind of a fire -and -brimstone type of preacher, but he kept that on the down -low while he was doing his candidacy, and then revealed it over time.
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And so the reality is, if they were theologically astute and looking for theology and character, they would have realized, hey, there's a problem here, he's teaching modalism.
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And so what we teach is important, but what's more important is the character.
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Everything that I've said in the last few episodes we talked about was character. You cannot know someone's character in one week or in a few hours of interviews, and there's things you have to look for.
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I mean, you have to be looking for character issues. That's why I say if you're gonna hire a pastor that you're bringing in from outside the
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Church, you should go to that Church and talk to people in the Church to see what they think about him.
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What do they think about his character? Because you're just not gonna know enough. And everything in the
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Bible says we hire someone or we bring someone in as pastor based on character.
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Now, I have been the preaching pastor of three churches. I've been pastor of more, but I just wasn't the preaching pastor.
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But on each of those that where I was the preaching pastor, I was in the Church, I was a member of the
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Church beforehand. Well, okay, one church where I was the preaching pastor, it was a church plant, so in that case they knew me, so a little different.
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But in each of those cases, the Church knew me. There was no vote necessary.
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I remember in my first pastorate, it was such a non -issue. There was an announcement that said, hey, in two weeks, because it was in our
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Constitution, our bylaws, we had to do it, in two weeks we're gonna be voting Andrew as the pastor. And then that was it.
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There was no Q &A, there was actually no discussion. And what ended up happening was two weeks later,
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I took my family, we went to go get something to eat while the business meeting was going on, come back to the
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Church, and I'm wondering if I got voted in or not. Yeah, everyone's in the parking lot, so I'm talking to folks and talking to one of the deacons, he's not mentioning anything.
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So eventually I walked up to the chairman of the deacons, I said, hey, so how was the vote? He's like, oh yeah, yeah, it was unanimous, not a problem.
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It was such a non -issue. Why? Because everybody knew my character, and that is the issue.
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You cannot know character just in a few weeks. You know a character over a long period of time, and this is why
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I think the way we hire is such a problem, because we hire people not based on character but popularity or whether we happen to like their preaching or like them as a person.
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And then they get to church, and we discover, oh, they weren't what I expected.
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Something different. So what we have to recognize is the fact that the biblical way of hiring is based specifically on character.
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You want to do things to learn a man's character. I wanted to do this at one church where I was on the pulpit committee, but they wouldn't let me.
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I wanted to fly out to his church and talk to people about him and find out what people think, and the rest of the committee was like, no, no, no, no, we shouldn't do that.
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I wanted to actually have a friend of mine who didn't attend the church to be outside the church. I wanted him to be like, to make himself really smelly and pretend to be homeless and kind of like get, like before this pastor was gonna come and preach on Sunday, to be there and kind of get in his way and see how the pastor would respond to a guy that would be homeless or be someone that he might not want to be around.
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Because that might tell me something about his character. They're like, no, no, we shouldn't do that. And then what happens? Well, we bring him in.
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We bring him in, and eventually there was a split in the church, and much of the leadership ended up leaving.
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Why? Because the man wasn't a man of character. He was a self -willed man. He had his own agenda, and that was a problem, but we couldn't recognize that right away.
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He had it well hidden. I remember on my first pulpit committee that I was on, we hired a man and we tried to do due diligence.
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We reached out to the previous church, the elders of the church, and I mean, those elders sang praises of this guy.
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And I remember seeing some issues when he came into Canada, and we talked about it, and both me and the other elder were very concerned as we were doing it, but we ended up saying, well, we'll go for this and move forward.
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And it ended up being that the guy had real character issues, and eventually, well, he left before being voted out of the church, but really did a lot of damage to the church, and very much he was disqualified.
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I remember calling the old church, and I said, you guys praised him, and this is what we're seeing, and literally the chairman of the elder board said, we're sorry about that.
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We just couldn't get rid of him when we were telling people the truth. So what did they do? It was easier just to get him to go look for another job and avoid having to deal with the issues we had to deal with, and so we ended up having to do what should have been done by the previous church, but they didn't have the maturity, maybe, to do that, and so they just pushed him off on someone else and then lied about his character so that someone would hire him.
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And this is the problem. You don't know what you're getting when you do this process. How should we hire?
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Well, I believe that you should be hiring someone from within the church. I believe that churches should be providing the same level of education to the church body that a seminary does.
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The pastors should be educating the people in such a way that they are giving them everything they would need.
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I remember in my first church, when the pastor decided to retire, resign, and move away, that we didn't have a problem with filling the pulpit.
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We had four men that were in leadership, pastors and deacons, that could preach, and we did the preaching.
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We did the teaching. The church moved on, and then eventually we brought a guy in, but that's the way.
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Why could we do that? Because we were trained from within. Now what should we have done? We should have hired one of those men to be the pastor.
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I've seen this with several churches where the pastor retires and someone from within the church is hired, and they might do a fine job, whether they're seminary trained or not, but people know their character, and that is how we should be selecting pastors.
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Not on what they offer to the church as far as having young children, not on what they can offer the church as having preaching that'll bring people in, but on their character.
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So I personally believe that we should be bringing people in as pastor who are already within the church, and maybe, as I know one church that I once attended where the pastor became the pastor because the previous pastor,
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I forget if he passed away or retired, and the church felt a conviction that they should hire based on character, and so they had a man within the church who was involved in ministry, but he wasn't in full -time ministry, and they hired him as the pastor because they knew his character.
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They ended up sending him out and getting a seminary education, and they paid for that, but he did the preaching in the church, and he was the pastor because they knew his character.
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And I find that that works better. Here's the problem that I see with the churches. Why am I against this view that I say is not biblical on how we hire is because we're not hiring based on character as the
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Bible would teach us, and what we're doing is we're creating a scenario where we bring a guy from outside into the church.
45:56
When he comes from outside, there's two dilemmas I see that happen often with this.
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From the pastoral perspective, he's going to give this a try, and if it doesn't work out, he's going to polish up his resume and go looking for another church.
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He has a commitment to the church, but very often if it's not working out, he's okay with picking up and leaving.
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From the church's perspective, they're going to give it a try, and if it doesn't work out, well, we'll let him go and bring someone else on.
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I know of one gentleman who is looking for a church right now. He was a pastor of a church, and they had a thing in their bylaws.
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I don't know that I agree with this or disagree with this, but I think they're attempting to address this issue of character, but they had a view that they would bring a pastor on for a three -year trial, and then after three years, they would vote whether he's going to stay permanently as the pastor or let him go.
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That's a hard sell for many men to pick up, move your family, and do that, and what ends up happening in that case...
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Now, I understand they're trying to do it with character issues. Now, in his case, he was more Reformed and Calvinistic, and the church was not as much, and so as he was preaching, they discovered that, well, his theology and their theology maybe are not completely aligned, and they just let him go.
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And so what's the mindset from the church perspective? Well, if we don't like this guy, we'll just let him go and find another.
47:28
This is kind of the business world mindset. This is the idea that it's just, hey, if it doesn't work out for us, just cut our losses and move on.
47:37
And so there's no permanency to this. I believe the pastor -church relationship should be that like a marriage, that you don't pick up and go, that you don't just quit.
47:52
You don't move on. Both sides work things out every possible way to work issues out.
48:00
You don't just leave. Now, I recognize there's times where one side or the other, just it's irreconcilable differences, and there is no other way but to break off the relationship.
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I get that. I understand. But it should be a last resort, and I believe that when you have a man who comes from within the church, it becomes an issue that they are part of the church, they feel a kinship to that church, that's their church, that was their church before they were a pastor in that church, and therefore they're not as likely to pick up and leave, and the church is not as likely to kick them out.
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I think that a lot of the issues that we see in church is because of the fact that people have a difficulty with just being able to break the relationship too easily, and I think that we need to be more careful, to be more mindful that we have to work those relationships out.
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We can't just quit, whether it be quitting on the pastor or whether it be that we quit as the pastor.
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And I think a lot of this is based in the way that we hire. I think a lot of this is based in the way we view, because the way we're hiring.
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I think that when we are going to have a man as a pastor, whether he is a paid pastor or a lay pastor, whether he's the preaching pastor or serving as a pastor in some other role, it should always be based on character and nothing else.
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We need to hire based on character. And so with that, I want to have a say, like, well, how do we do that then?
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In your church, you should be looking, if you need a pastor, he should be someone from within the church, and if you don't have anyone within the church, well, then maybe you need to train people.
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Maybe you have to have a longer -term goal to say, we need to start training people in the event that four, five, twenty years later, when there's a need for a pastor, there's men trained up for that role.
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It's a different mindset than the way churches are today. It's something that you have to put that before people, and I admit there's a lot of pastors that don't want to do that because of the fact that, well, if I do that, you know, some people may take my job.
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Look, you have to realize that for many pastors that this is their livelihood. How would you think at your job site?
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You want to train someone up that could take over your job? Well then, if they get paid less than me, they may take my—the company may just fire me and let this person do it.
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It's a thing where you have to realize that your pastor is human too, by the way. Don't know if you realize that?
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And so the pastor is someone who is gonna be concerned about his family as well, and so this is a dilemma that there is.
50:50
If you don't have that commitment, you have to have a strong commitment to your pastor, and the pastor needs to know that, to know that it's safe to train men up and that people won't undercut him or do things like that.
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There has to be a loyalty there. There has to be a firm conviction on the part of the church.
51:13
You know, let me just tell you something. So you realize I firmly—I'm not telling you to do something that I don't feel strongly about.
51:21
So at my church where I'm at currently, I've been there for two years, attending there, been able to serve in different capacities, but at the end of the year when it came time to look at the budget,
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I noticed that the church—we did not have an increase for the pastor.
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I decided that we shouldn't do that. With the economy and inflation, it hurts the pastor's ability to feed his family, and so I decided to talk to the deacons.
51:48
I said, look, here's what—I don't need to go out and eat so often. There's different things I can cut.
51:54
I can cut a little and give more, and so I said, look, I want to give more because I really feel that we should be giving the pastor something of a raise, and they ended up saying, you know what?
52:04
You're right. Even if you give or not, we're gonna make a decision on giving him a raise regardless of your giving or not and how much you give, and they decided to do that, and it takes people in the church to say, we are committed to this man, and he really appreciated that,
52:25
I believe, that the deacons decided to give him an increase because he knew that there wasn't an increase in their first budget, and then there was, so somehow they communicated, we're gonna give you an increase, and that gives him the sense that there is people behind him, and many pastors don't have that.
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I don't know if you realize, I talk to pastors all around the country as I preach in many different churches, and I talk to the pastors and hear the issues, and there's many pastors that don't feel that the congregation has their back.
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Many pastors are afraid one misstep and they're out the door, and this is why so many pastors, they don't want to ruffle feathers.
53:07
They don't preach the strong, hard things that they may need to preach or deal with the discipline issues they may need to deal with because they're afraid that they might be out the door, and so as a congregation, we have to make our pastors know that we have their back.
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As long as what they're doing is biblical, as long as they're doing the right thing, we're going to support them.
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We need to be able to do that. The pastor must feel that if he's going to stand up and proclaim the truth, because if a pastor feels that he could be out the door on any misstep, especially if you have a church that's cycled through many pastors in short periods of time, he's gonna naturally feel that way.
53:49
You have pastors that are gonna be watered down the message, they're gonna be more careful to be political and make sure they're in with the power people, and not confront sin, and that's the problem that so many churches end up having.
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But if you have a pastor who knows the church has his back, that they will support him if he stands upon the truth, that pastor's gonna do what a pastor should do and guard the flock.
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He's gonna protect that flock. He's gonna protect them against error. He's gonna protect them against false teaching.
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He's gonna protect them with sound doctrine. He's gonna be more likely to do that because he knows this church is where he is going to be.
54:29
And if he grew up in that church or was always in that church, let me give you an example. The guy who
54:35
I think is probably the best preacher alive today is Pastor Jim Osmond up at Kootenai Community Church up in Kootenai, Idaho.
54:42
One of the best preachers, and that church has grown. That is, if I could handle the cold, if I could go to any church in the world,
54:51
I would move to Kootenai just for that church, not just for the pastor, for the church.
54:57
Because of the leadership he's developed, because the way that church is, the fact is that they're probably,
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I believe, one of the most biblical churches that I know of. And that, and Jim Osmond has never been a member of any other church but that one.
55:12
He got saved, started attending that church. He went to Bible school, ended up going to that church, still became the pastor of that church.
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He and that church have a tight -knit relationship. He knows they're not gonna kick him out on a whim.
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He knows that, and so he can say the strong hard things and deal with the difficult things that he may have to deal with.
55:34
Why? Because there's that close relationship between he and the church. That is what a pastor needs.
55:40
They need to know you as a church member, you have their back as long as they're preaching the truth.
55:46
That will get them to stand up and speak the truth. That's what we all need. We need our pastors to do that.
55:54
So let me say, let your pastor know that you have his back, that you support him in standing up and saying the hard things that need to be said from the
56:03
Bible. If you're going to hire a pastor, I'm gonna say get someone from within the church that you know their character.
56:10
But if not, yes, you can go through these different ways to hire someone from outside, but again, do everything you can to check their character, not their degrees, not their popularity, not how well they preach a message that they have canned messages.
56:24
I mean, in fact, one of the things I used to do is require, when I was on a pulpit committee, we would give them the message that they had to preach that following Sunday, we'd give it to them the
56:34
Sunday before. So they had to not only meet with all the people in the evenings and do everything during the day that we would require, but they also had to prepare two sermons, a
56:43
Sunday school and a sermon. Why? Because that's reality. That's what they're gonna have to do. That's part of ministry. You have to do messages while doing all the other things of pastoring.
56:51
And so we would do things, I would do things like that, so that we get to see how he's gonna handle things.
56:56
I wanted to put him in a pressure cooker, if I could, to see how his character is gonna respond.
57:03
And so you can find someone, a good man of character, but what you want to do as a church is make that pastor feel like he is part of the church, and he doesn't need to worry about that they're gonna kick him out, and a pastor needs to know that, so he could say the hard things and know that this is a family.
57:22
So I hope that's explained why I think that the way we go about hiring is not biblical. Let me just give a word out for folks.
57:29
If you're gonna be around upstate New York, we're gonna be at, in the Watertown area,
57:35
April 12th to the 14th at River of Life Church. Both Aaron Brewster and myself will be preaching up there.
57:42
The conference is going to be your responsibility in this world. I will be out in the
57:48
Philippines for two weeks, April 22nd to May 9th. We're gonna be doing a ton of ministry there, doing two conferences on two different islands, a pre -conference, a church camp, preaching at different churches.
57:59
It's gonna be Pastor Jim Osmond, Justin Peters, and myself. So that's something we could, by the way, for travel, we still could use support.
58:07
We've raised about half of the funds for our responsibility, which is the flight, so if you want to support us, go to strivingforeturning .org
58:13
slash support. June 19th to 23rd, I will be out at the
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Utah Research Center, and I will also be preaching that Sunday at Grace Bible Church in Hebron City, so if you're in that area,
58:29
I will be out there at the Utah Center. We're gonna be talking about, well, we have several different topics that I have.
58:36
Can you trust the Bible, uniqueness, Christianity, how to defend the faith, the dangers of social justice, deity of Christ, ambassador evangelism, and I think also
58:44
Catholicism, some others. So if you're in Utah and want to check that out, that'd be great. I will also be out in, and this is a big one,
58:51
I really want to encourage you, if you're in Vail, Arizona area, August 8th to the 11th, we'll be out in Vail, Arizona.
59:00
This conference is The Christian Responsibility in an Un -Christian World. I'm gonna be talking a lot about that coming forward. Some great speakers, great lineup there.
59:07
I want to make sure you guys check that one out. I'll have more details in the future. So with that, folks,
59:13
I encourage you, next episode is an important one, How to Encourage Your Pastor. I hope you'll tune in for that.
59:19
And with that, that's a wrap. ...are keeping people safe.
59:52
Join U .S. Customs and Border Protection and go beyond for something far greater than yourself. Learn more at CBP .gov