I give thanks for my seminary education. All that time and energy devoted to studying the Scriptures revealed, among many other things, that the Bible says not the first word about seminary. It does, however, tell us a thing or two about how we might prepare men for the ministry. We find in Paul the locus classicus on this issue: 1 Timothy 3:2–5. Paul describes the elder as one who is “blameless, the husband of one wife, temperate, sober minded, of good behavior, hospitable, able to teach, not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for money, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not covetous; one who rules his own house well.”
Read through that list one more time, this time asking yourself, do any of these not apply to all men? Sure enough one could argue that one could be a spiritual giant without having the ability to teach. But everything else on the list is a call to all men in Christ. How have we missed the obvious, that preparing men for ministry was virtually identical with preparing men to be men?
Protestants have done well to reject Romish clericalism. Luther served us all well in teaching us the priesthood of the believer. But we are not yet out of the woods. Because we are so shaped by our culture, we miss the boat here in two important ways.
First, because we are pragmatists, “mobilizing the laity” means to most of us getting laypeople to man our programs at church. “The work of the ministry” has taken on this curious tint of keeping the machines running. We “mobilize the laity” by creating a rotating “service team” that puts the chairs up in the gym for Sunday morning, and takes them down again Sunday night, and another to chaperone the youth group at the local water park.
Worse still, because we are children of the Enlightenment, because we believe that education will cure all our ills, we come to Paul’s list and “mobilize the laity” by pumping them full of the one thing that distinguishes the clergy from the laity. That is, we think we are mobilizing the laity by creating an army of armchair theologians.
This is the work of ministry, to be blameless, and encourage others to do the same, to be faithful to our wives, and encourage others to do the same, to be temperate, sober minded, of good behavior and hospitable, and encourage others to do the same. The church is full of men who can parse Greek, who have earned advanced degrees, who are able teachers. These are good things, great gifts from God. But what we lack are men of character, men who will love their wives as Christ loves the church, who will raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
It should not surprise us, for clergy cast the vision. It is only natural that they should emphasize the one thing in Paul’s list that is unique to them. We are made to teach, and we delight to have students. But the laity should be theologians enough, Bereans enough, students enough to know that their calling isn’t to become little shepherds, but that their calling is to become ever more pure sheep.
Those who serve as clergy, in turn, must be sober minded enough to teach the text. They must be sober minded enough to know that the goal isn’t to teach their way to carbon copies of ourselves, but to teach faithfully such that they might make copies of Christ. They must be sober minded enough to remember that the Christian life isn’t just lived in our minds. Such will not merely move the laity, but will, by the grace and power of God, move the world.