Jed Ostoich Interview--Driscoll and Ghostwriting

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry.

The Ministry’s Biblical and Provocative Mission

My name is Mike Abendroth. We have a little slogan, and that is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. And my main goal, really, is to get you to think. Remember, Jesus said, regarding the great commandment, �To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul.

And it wasn�t in Hebrew, but it was implicit there in Hebrew. And he brings it out in Greek, �mind and strength. So, we want you to use your mind, the renewing of your mind. And the theme usually is around who the Lord Jesus is, because while I compromise, to my shame, Jesus never compromised a perfect life He lived.

And then we love to talk about the cross, because at Calvary, none of His attributes were compromised. God�s justice was seen on display, His holiness, His love, His compassion, et cetera. On Wednesdays on No Compromise Radio, I like to have guests on and interview them, hear about their ministry, what the Lord has done in their life, authors, theologians.

And I�m trying to think of something funny here to say about Ghost Riders, but today I do have an author-theologian on, and if you go to his Twitter, it is TheJedditor, like the editor with a J, because his first name is Jed and his last name is Ostich.

Jed, welcome to No Compromise Radio. Absolutely, thanks for having me on. Okay, so it's Ostich.

What kind of background is the name? It's Serbia. It used to be Astoyich when they came over through Ellis Island, or I�m not really sure what port of call they made on the East Coast, but some letters got added, some letters got dropped, and now we've got a silent O in the middle of the name.

All right. And I see your picture on your Twitter site, and are those rings on your fingers tattooed rings? Are they real rings?

You know, I don't think my wife would let me get them tattooed, so I had to settle with, you know, the traditional.

I went surfing with my wife years ago, Jed, and we're now married 29 years, and I think it was maybe three or four years into it, and when we were in the Pacific Ocean up by Santa Cruz, it was pretty cold, and my finger shrank a little bit, and my ring fell off, my wedding ring, and I said, �Honey, I lost my wedding ring and I thought she was going to get mad, and she said, �I never really liked it anyway.

Well then, why did you help me pick it out? That was my question. I know, right? I know. So Jed, the reason why I have you on No Compromise Radio is I was listening to PresbyCast, and you were interviewed there, and I have to say that out of the, you know, hours I listen to podcasts per week, usually at 1 .5 speed, I listen to quite a few at the gym or riding the bicycle or whatever, some really stick out.

I mean, when I listen to Jocko interview Dakota Meyer about his fight, that one I just won't forget. When I listen to Hardcore History about some of the prophets of the monsterites and weird Anabaptists, I didn't forget that one.

And there's another one I couldn't forget, but I'm forgetting right now. I listen to yours, and I put that in the same category as you were talking about your background and your association in ghostwriting and Mark Driscoll and all that.

So that's why I'm having you on. But before we talk about that, just tell us a little bit about yourself. You mentioned something about your wife, where you live, what do you do, how God saved you, just anything in general so we can kind of put these pieces together.

Jed Ostoich’s Background and Path into Writing

Yeah, absolutely. So I was born the son of a pastor and a missionary kid. My mom grew up in Brazil. Her parents founded the Brazil Inland Mission, which is the first real organized mission to southern Brazil.

My dad grew up mechanic-ing and decided he wanted to serve God in full-time ministry, and so he went to Bible school and seminary. So I was kind of born into that world. And then being someone who likes data, likes facts, likes information, I kind of absorbed everything I possibly could from a very early age, as far as the Bible is concerned, theology is concerned.

I was a kid in Sunday school class that teachers would warn each other about. Like, you know, if you get something wrong in your second grade Sunday school class, Jed will call you out on it. So... Snitches get stitches.

What's that? Snitches get stitches. I know. I know. It was an important deal. Growing up, I wanted to be an architect, and then in about ninth grade, I was at a missions conference and was so taken by the thought of men and women who were serving Jesus with their whole heart, throwing everything on the line, pulled to the ends of the earth.

I was like, you know what? I don't feel like I can do what I want to do sitting behind a desk. I don't think I... I don't feel like I can serve God 100 of the way in vocational work, so I'm going to go chase full-time ministry.

And I did. I went to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. I met my wife while I was there. We got married, and then a month later, we moved down to Dallas so that I could go to Dallas Theological Seminary.

And I had the full intentions of becoming a Old Testament scholar, teacher in higher education. I loved Hebrew, still love Hebrew, love the Old Testament, did my degrees both at Moody and at DTS in Old Testament Semitics.

But then my very last year, I had saved all my communications electives for the very end because I didn't want to take them. And as a result of some very brutal first-year classes I was taking as a, you know, last-year student, I ended up realizing that there was a lot to be said for the power of the written word.

So, after a year graduating from DTS, I spent looking for jobs, finding absolutely nothing, ended up working in the writing world full-time for a Christian media production company, but also freelancing and also helping get some of my old students a magazine.

They started Fathom Magazine up and running, so I've been helping with that.

Did you—Jed, did you write a lot in seminary and for classes and papers and essays, and then you thought, you know what, I like to write about theology and, you know, the Lord has gifted me and I enjoy doing that and I'm decent at it?

Yeah, absolutely.

The joke was that I could write all of my semester's papers in the last three days of finals week. I've always been really, very fast when it comes to writing. Once I get an idea in my head, I can put it down on paper relatively quickly.

I like to think well-worded. Other people may have a different opinion.

When you read other people, is it pretty painful? I mean, if you were to read one of my books, you would think, oh, that is painful. How do you read other people, especially when you just want to learn and you don't want to critique the whole time?

Can you ever be the non-Jeditor editor? Oh, man.

For the most part, I can. I can turn it off. A lot of it has to do with whether or not what people are claiming as far as their expertise. So if I was reading a book on theology, I'm more interested in the logic and the argument than the beauty of the prose or the correct use of the Oxford comma.

That kind of thing doesn't really bother me as far as reading. Now, if someone's claiming to be the absolute epitome of fiction writing, then you better believe I'll be thinking through their writing a little bit more carefully.

Now, before I forget, you have a website, and if they go to the Twitter site, they can get there. If somebody wants some editing done, you will help edit it, right? Edit them. It is getjedited at J-E-D-O-S-T-O-I-C-H .org.

Is that correct? Yep.

Absolutely. I do offer freelance editing services. I pride myself not on creating necessarily good writing for people, but creating good writers. I'm more interested in helping people develop as the masters of their craft rather than just helping them develop a single piece or a single aspect of their craft.

I think people are more important than words, and if you can create people who know how to write and people who understand themselves, that's going to affect their writing in ways that just editing words on a page never would.

So that's my philosophy when it comes to writing and editing, and I do offer those services to people who may find them helpful.

Jed, when I go back to some of my books and read little snippets for whatever reason—maybe I need a quote or maybe I want to see what I had already studied and use that for a sermon or somebody needs an article and I'm too lazy to write one, so I pull out something that's old—once in a while, I will say to myself, you know what?

That was a pretty good sentence. That was a nice paragraph. I don't know how I did it, but, you know, praise the Lord. But most of the time, I think, that was just awful. How did that get past any editor?

So that's my experience. I understand that. So the job you have now, is it full-time editing other people's work? Yeah.

Like I said, I work in the Christian media world. I have my fingers on a couple of different projects and organizations. I do have a full-time job writing and editing, but I also do freelance work. I also work with Fathom, like I said, on a volunteer basis.

And a lot of it—I mean, if you had asked me four years ago when I was finishing seminary if this is where I would be, I would have looked at you like you were crazy. But God has a way of, I think, changing our paths and oftentimes, for the better, revealing to us things about ourselves and what He's called us to do that may not have been apparent when we were first setting up our plan.

Well, you could probably do two things when you're editing, and you can probably just do that in your sleep. Since I am the professional radio guy and I do this for a living, I just sent you a picture on the Twitter instant message of somebody that we probably both know, and I think you'll find it funny.

So if you can do that while we're talking, great. If not, look after the show. All right. I'll check it out after the show. Okay. So here's what we're after, just big picture today, theologically and even as we think about our Christian walk.

There are obviously Christians that the Lord has so blessed, they weren't looking for big platforms and opportunities and thousands of people to listen to them and millions of subscribers to their podcasts.

And they have just, you know, step by step, William Carey, I can plod, I don't care who sees, and God has blessed them. And there are some of those people out there. But celebrityism, a celebrity culture, there's kind of a catnip to it.

And even though I'm far from a big shot celebrity, I have done some speaking and maybe I'm like a G-less celebrity. It does crazy things to your mind. And again, I'm a nobody, but it's messed with my mind.

Tell our listeners a little bit about your experience with editing and your particular experience that we talked about off-air, and let's just kind of work through the perils of Christian celebrity and evangelicalism at a big picture, and then you take it wherever you want.

The Rise of Christian Celebrity and the Demand for Ghostwriting

Yeah, absolutely. So when I first started at Dallas Seminary, I was looking for work, as most seminary students would want to do. And I had a friend who had been at seminary prior to me who recommended working with the Docent Research Group.

And so I emailed the guy who was in charge of the group and said, Hey, I'm looking for work. Do you have anything for me? Here's what I can do. And the group is essentially originally designed, and I think they would still say that this is their primary goal, to provide accessible and well-researched content for pastors or writers in the Christian world who, because of their teaching schedule or because of their preaching schedule, for whatever reason, don't find themselves with a surplus of hours in the week to do a lot of the back-end research that's often necessary for really well-worded books or really well-argued sermons.

And so the organization, I think, has a good intention of providing a resource to pastors who might need a little bit more help. And so I contacted them, and they got me set up originally with a guy who came out of the business world.

He had no formal education as far as seminary training or Bible school training was concerned, but for better or for worse, he was the chair of the elder board of his church when their senior pastor left, and the church basically put the responsibilities of the pastor on his shoulders and said, Here you go.

And then eventually, I don't think they'd said they were going to find a guy to replace him, and then they never did. So here's a guy who is leading an 800-person church, trying to figure out how to shepherd his people, and he wants to do it well.

He wants to handle the Bible well. So I worked with him. He was my first contact and my first project there. In a lot of ways, I was actually teaching him in the content that I was sending him every week of how do you read the Bible well, how do you think expositionally through a passage.

And it was a great relationship. I think we both grew a lot. I learned how to make complex ideas simple and straightforward, and he learned how to read and interpret and preach the Bible. And I think in that sense, in that kind of arrangement, it was a really healthy relationship.

But towards the end of my time in seminary, my wife and I were in a small group that had just started going through a Mark Driscoll study on sexuality and marriage, and it had very much frustrated my wife, because she felt like he was royally mishandling the Bible in the way that he was talking about different aspects of marriage and human sexuality.

And so we had long conversations about it, and we were both very frustrated about it. And no sooner had we kind of wrapped up our week of ranting about Mark Driscoll than I got a call from my boss, a docent, saying, hey, we're putting together a team to work on research for Mark Driscoll.

Would you be part of it? Which kind of caught me by surprise. And I laughed, and he asked me why I was laughing, and I didn't think it was prudent for me to tell him why. So I agreed. I thought, you know what?

I'll come on, and then maybe I'll be able to provide some research like I had with my previous pastor and help shepherd this celebrity in the right direction, what I presumed to be the right direction.

Granted, I was a seminary student, and seminary students tend to think they know everything. So my attitude may have not been the most humble. But that started a relationship then with Marcel and Mark Driscoll that kind of opened my eyes to the world of celebrity culture and what men and women are willing to do, I think, to preserve not just their status as kind of a celebrity to be followed, but also their status as someone who's nearly superhuman in their ability to produce content, whether it's spoken content or written content.

And Driscoll relied very, very heavily on me and, at first, a team of other people to produce most of his written content he was putting up on his website for him. And what made it funny is, because originally when the arrangement was described to me, it was, again, we're going to provide research for him to use in his writing and kind of doing some of the initial research work for him so he doesn't have to spend so much time in the library.

But the very first project I did was trying to answer the question about what does—I think it's in Timothy where Paul says women will be saved through childbearing. And so I put together kind of three views on that topic and sent it over to him, figuring, you know, Driscoll will look at it, pick the one he likes the most, and then he'll write a blog post about it.

Well, to my surprise, the blog post ended up, word for word, exactly as I had written it on his website the next day. And I thought, hmm, okay, well, this is new. This is not what I expected from this process.

And that kind of began what ended up being about a year of me, and not necessarily unwillingly, but kind of begrudgingly ghostwriting for Mark Driscoll.

Ghostwriting Mark Driscoll and the Ethics of Borrowed Content

All right, well, Jed, before we dive into that a little bit more, just kind of thinking big picture, I'm looking at the docentgroup .com website now, and it says pastors didn't seem to have enough time in the week to execute this high-wire act, attend to their other responsibilities, comma, and still—I'll put the comma in for you—and still place the Lord and family first in their priorities.

And so their desire is to, you know, I'm preaching Sunday morning, Sunday night, and I need a lot of data or something like that. And maybe it's easier for you to say in retrospect, but for me as a pastor, I'm thinking, but that is my number one job.

That is my job, not necessarily to get stories and illustrations and all that, although I threw all those books out years ago because I've been preaching for 25 years, and, you know, life just brings experiences.

But research, you know, I have Google, so if I want to do any kind of data or research or barna or anything like that, I can get that data. But then to do the exegetical work and help pastors, you know, how to do exposition.

For me, if you said, Mike, I want to help you with that, I would say, well, I certainly could use help, Jed, but that's, to me, the most wonderful time of my week where I get to study, and that's why I don't want to read commentaries first, because I want to have the joy of discovery and say, oh, I see that little, that special nuance there in the text designed to teach me such and such.

And then I read the commentary and I think, well, I learned that before Sinclair Ferguson ever did. Right? So is there something, is there just something wrong in the process where I think to myself, I'm so busy, I have to farm out my number one job versus I'm so busy, I have to protect my study, and if I can get to that business meeting, if I can get to that practical thing, I will, but if I can't, I won't.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the fact that Docent exists is a testament to a culture in evangelicalism, at least in the Western world, that puts a higher premium on a pastor's ability to do a huge number of things, whether it's speaking engagements or book writing deals, and that's the important thing that they're producing than what they're producing being not just solid and good and biblical but also deriving from their own research, their own study, their own time in and working with God's Word.

And so Docent stepped into a void, not necessarily, they didn't create the void. I think the celebrity culture, the popularity culture, the production-oriented culture of evangelicalism in America created a void that pastors needed to fill.

They simply didn't have the time because the Church or their congregation or the culture at large was expecting them to do something that, to be honest, no single human being can. And so as a result, you have teams of researchers who come in, like you said, to take out of the hands of the pastor what probably should be the pastor's most closely guarded responsibility, and that's to study and spend time in God's Word.

Jed, when I think of, let's say, the man who would hire you to do that, I mean, shame on the pastor to have a ghostwriter that would write everything and I would just kind of copy and paste it. But there's something to be said, too, for the congregation, for the audience, for those that demand celebrities to be celebrities.

When Tom Clancy becomes so popular, he can't write fast enough to give enough supply for the demand. He hires ghostwriters who kind of write in his style, so everybody's happy with the new Tom Clancy book out every six months.

What kind of responsibility do we have as consumers, listeners, congregation, or those who follow these celebrities?

Right. I think putting the onus back on the shoulders of those who are creating the demand is really important. I mean, demand drives economy, and it's no different in the evangelical church world. And I use the term evangelical very loosely, but in the world that's creating these celebrity pastors, the demand exists, and so the pastors will step up to it.

Now, some of them do so begrudgingly, kind of like you said, they're not chasing fame, they're not chasing huge platforms, but for whatever reason, they connect with people, and the increasing demand kind of forces them into the spotlight.

Other men chase it, and they're looking for it, but the effect is the same. That when congregations are looking for, when they're treating the preaching of God's Word or writing about and applying God's Word as a product to be consumed voraciously, rather than as part and parcel of the sacredness of what God has designed for the church to provide to its people, then inevitably we're going to end up creating a culture that demands celebrities who have to outproduce what any human being could.

Talking to Jed Osich today on No Compromise Radio. Jed, tell us, then, kind of the next step. You send 1 Timothy 3, verse 15—it's not 315, it's 215—215 with the different views of women are saved through childbearing, you send that over there, it's copied word for word, how did it get to the next step?

I mean, in my mind, I don't know the difference between ghostwriting, is it every word, is it themes, is it mixing in things, there's probably different levels, but how did you get from you send that first thing in to now, I think, if Presbycast memories serve me, you would send him a Minor Prophet series and he would teach exactly from what you sent him.

Right, yeah. It originally started, like I said, I went in with the expectation of looking to do research that would then be used to create original content. I figured, like the other pastors that I'd worked with, I would provide research that then they would take as kind of the starting point for their own, whether it's written material or spoken material, they would be the ones who are building the content.

Well, it wasn't like that at all with Driscoll from day one. What I wrote and what my fellow researchers ended up writing was copied word for word, for the most part, into either his written material or his spoken material.

Now, technically, there's nothing illegal going on there. Mark Driscoll purchased the right to the content that we were producing, and that was just the deal, that's how it's done, but it became more and more apparent to me as I was writing that this was going to be the norm, not the exception to the rule.

So I did several more blog posts in that series, handling some of the difficult texts in the Bible, and those more or less went up as I had written them. Every now and again, Mark would add a paragraph introducing it or a personal story, but the content, the actual theological content, was mine.

And if you think about it here, this is a little bit deceptive. I mean, it may not be illegal, but as a congregation is listening to and reading a pastor, most people I'm aware of want that pastor's perspective on whatever it is the pastor's preaching or teaching or writing on.

But for Mark Driscoll, I mean, it came to a head for me when I had a friend, a fellow graduate from Moody, who was absolutely tearing to pieces one of those blog posts that Mark had posted, tearing down the theology and the argumentation of it, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that I wrote that thing.

If he would have said, oh, Jed wrote that, would he have been nicer on you, or was he just going after Driscoll the celebrity?

I think it was the celebrity-ism, because I mean, I talked, interacted with him, kind of trying to feel out, maybe I hadn't misspoken. I mean, you know, at that time I was a third-year seminary student, again, I was very new to the process.

I'm not a theologian or a scholar, so I wanted to kind of get an idea of what he had to say, and he was far more gracious toward the argument or the logic, and far less gracious toward the one he perceived to be the originator of the word.

Did you ever once say, Jed, to yourself as you saw the machine, the Driscoll machine, going, and you say, you know what, he needs some refinement in this particular area of his theology or sanctification, and so I'm going to put a series together, a sermon that he needs to hear first, and I'll give it to him, and then he can preach it to the people.

Oh, absolutely.

Malachi, Misuse of Scripture, and Directing a Celebrity Pastor

Yeah, good. Absolutely. I got the assignment, my last assignment for the Mark Driscoll account was right before my daughter was born, so it stands out very starkly in my memory. It was to, he was going to preach the book of Malachi, and in my opinion, Malachi is one of the most mishandled books of the Old Testament, because preachers tend to use it to talk about tithing, and they jump too quickly to John the Baptist, and there's just so many easy things to jump from, to move from Malachi into New Testament content, or Malachi into topical sermons, so my thought was, you know, I'm going to take this opportunity to write a robust, expositional sermon series on the book of Malachi.

I figured, you know what, we'll...and I included lots of caveats in there, I was like, this particular passage tends to be misused, here's some of the ways it's misused, here's some of the ways that I would argue are better to treat the text fairly, to honor the writers and authorial intent, so I did all of that with a mind toward kind of shepherding Driscoll toward what I believe to be a more faithful teaching on the book of Malachi.

And the ironic thing was, those areas where I said, here's how the passage is usually misused, those are the ones that he quoted from. And so he basically said, oh, well I like how it's misused here, I'm just going to teach that.

Did you ever talk to him on the phone, or have direct conversation?

I did not. No, we worked through an intermediary. The way that DOSA was set up is that there's kind of an agent that represents especially the bigger accounts, and then that agent interfaces with the researchers that are working on that account, and he kind of acts as the go-between between me, the pastor, and the researchers.

So I never interacted directly with Driscoll.

Okay, well maybe there's some kind of confidentiality clause that you're still under, something like that. But I'm thinking, Jed, if I've got to hire somebody to do my sermons, and they do all this work, I mean, it's difficult work, right?

Prove workmen who need not be ashamed rightly dividing the word. It's hard. What would, if I won a sermon series that's eight weeks, you know, the typical evangelical little eight-week sermon series, what would that cost me?

I can tell you, so I was paid just under $150 per brief, and the brief could be anywhere from three pages of content to 15 pages of content, depending on what the pastor had essentially arranged for. I'm not sure what the rate was charged, what rate the actual pastors were charged, but I can imagine it was, I can imagine there's a decent profit margin there.

So you're looking anywhere from, I don't know, for an eight-week sermon series, you're probably looking at between $1 ,600 and $3 ,000, I would say, someone there covering all the expenses that Docent would incur as a result of producing the content.

So it's not necessarily terribly expensive if you're someone working with a multi-million dollar budget.

Right. If you travel and you need to go to another church service for Sunday for the Lord's Day, and it said, Pastor, Reverend, so-and-so, and then it said, Docent, would you attend this service?

Oh, man. I don't know. As a result of having kind of spoken more publicly about the process, and my goal isn't necessarily to defame or to diminish anybody involved in research writing, I've been contacted by several people who have essentially said, you know, I did this, I worked for the same company, and I felt so uncomfortable the whole time, you know, I'm glad that someone's saying something.

And again, not because it's necessarily illegal, it just, to me, it calls into the question the whole role of what God essentially said He wants His pastors and His leaders in this church to be doing.

I wrote a book called Sexual Fidelity, and each chapter was kind of on a topic regarding that, what does the Bible say, and it was things that I taught my son over the years as we would talk man-to-man about this subject, and there's nothing graphic or anything weird about it, but maybe that would be the only time I might say, you know what, I should hire somebody to do some research, because I can't even type in the word sex into my Google search engine, because crazy stuff is going to come out.

I'm just looking for, you know, some data, and I couldn't do it. So maybe that would be an option, which that subject leads me to something else. I know we don't have too much time, Jed. The Mark Driscoll book that came out later on marriage and sex and all that stuff, did you say, or did I hear someone else say, it seemed like the chapters were so disjointed and had no continuity that it would seem like a different person wrote every chapter, and in fact, that happened?

Is that true? Right. So I can't say with 100 certainty that that's what happened, but I can say that his book on Ephesians was one of the last projects that I worked on as far as ghostwriting was concerned.

I bought the book just for the chance to go through it and highlight everything that essentially was that I wrote. But one of the things that was true about that book is it was essentially assembled by a team of researchers.

I think there were like eight of us working on that book at the same time, each assigned a different set of chapters. And so if you read his book on Ephesians, you'll pick up very quickly that there's a tonal difference from chapter to chapter.

There's a style difference, there's a language difference, and that I can 100 say is due to the fact that it was pieced together essentially from eight different writers' content. So that when you get to his book on sexuality and marriage, one of the biggest criticisms that was leveled against the book by reviewers was that it seemed really disjointed all over the place.

The tone of the writing changed from chapter to chapter, and so I'm listening and reading these reviews going, well, yeah, absolutely, because if you follow the exact same process that he did with his book on Ephesians, it would stand to reason that actually the theological content in the book at the very least—maybe not his own anecdotes and stories, but the theological content—was probably put together by a team of people who weren't necessarily sharing notes and trying to match their styles to each other.

Amazing. I think of what happens when I hire a bunch of people to write different chapters for the book, and then I frontload or preload, whatever the technical term is, to get all those books sold, I buy them myself, I can get on the New York Times bestseller list by buying books that I say I wrote but didn't even hardly write.

I mean, everything's messed up. This is a messed up world.

It really is. And Driscoll is not alone in engaging in those kind of processes. I mentioned this on the PresbyCast, and I'll say it here, I think the list of men and writers in the Christian evangelical world who don't use researchers or ghostwriters or play the New York Times bestseller list game is probably shorter than the list of men who do.

John the Baptist, he was thinking about Jesus, and he said, I must decrease so that Jesus might increase. The lust and the fame and the celebrity and that catnip that I was talking about before is so pervasive and so difficult.

Are there any ways that you might recommend congregants to just treat their pastor a certain way to not try to, you know, be a thorn in their side, to keep them humble, but how should we just treat pastors who maybe God has given a bigger platform?

Lowering Expectations and Protecting a Pastor’s Study

I think probably my first recommendation is to lower your sights. I think if we lower our expectations, and I'm not saying lower expectations for high degrees of morality or teaching God's Word well, I think those are expectations that are right and true and should be maintained.

But as far as expecting our pastors to be these superheroes that are capable of doing a superhuman-level amount of work each week—and you see this even in smaller churches. I mean, the number one problem with pastors in the United States is burnout, and it's because there's just so much that a congregation expects its pastor to be able to do on a regular basis.

And so, inevitably, a human being that's trying to live up to expectations is going to take shortcuts somewhere, and those shortcuts inevitably lead to problems. And I think that's, like I said, that's what's created the void that organizations like Docents have stepped into.

Now, if we're serving—if we're a congregation that's listening to and sitting under the preaching of a pastor who's talking to a much larger church who has a large platform, then I think absolutely, the congregation should have high expectations that that pastor do his own work, do his own research, do his own writing.

But then also allow him the opportunity to do it, create the space that he needs to do it. I think the burden ultimately comes back to the shoulders of the governing elder board or of the congregation itself to say, look, this is what we ask you to do as God's leader and God's shepherd in this church.