Expositional Leadership (eBook)

Shepherding God's People from the Pulpit

R. Scott Pace, Jim Shaddix (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Crossway (Verlag)
978-1-4335-8805-1 (ISBN)

Infos

6 Categories of Leadership That Pastors Should Integrate into Their Preaching Shepherding a congregation comes with many responsibilities. In addition to preparing weekly sermons, pastors manage church teams and minister to a variety of people with different needs. Attempting to tackle these roles separately can be exhausting and may eventually affect the health of the church. How should leaders integrate their roles to effectively shepherd their congregations? This guide shows pastors how to simplify and strengthen their ministry work by integrating leadership, preaching, and pastoring in biblical exposition. Authors Scott Pace and Jim Shaddix clearly lay out 6 categories of leadership-scriptural, spiritual, strategic, servant, situational, and sensible-and explain how to leverage them through sermon development and delivery. Offering practical advice and biblical wisdom related to each role, they help readers find balance in their ministries while nurturing their congregations in healthy, sustainable ways. - Biblical and Applicable: Shows pastors how to integrate leadership, preaching, and pastoring to effectively lead congregations - Practical: Offers biblical advice for healthy church leadership and expository sermon design and delivery - A Great Resource for New and Veteran Church Leaders: Practical manual for vocational and academic training

R. Scott Pace (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) serves as provost and associate professor of preaching and pastoral ministry at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Preaching by the Book; Pastoral Theology; Exalting Jesus in Colossians & Philemon in the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series; and Calling Out the Called.

Autor

R. Scott Pace (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) serves as provost and associate professor of preaching and pastoral ministry at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Preaching by the Book; Pastoral Theology; Exalting Jesus in Colossians & Philemon in the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series; and Calling Out the Called. Jim Shaddix (PhD, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) serves as senior professor of preaching at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, occupying the W. A. Criswell Chair of Expository Preaching, and also serves as senior fellow for the Center for Preaching and Pastoral Leadership. He is the author of several books, including The Passion-Driven Sermon and Decisional Preaching. Jim and his wife, Debra, have three grown children and eleven grandchildren.

Textauszug

Introduction

Leaders, Preachers, and Pastors

Church leadership is challenging for a variety of reasons. Beneath the surface of a local church’s culture is a complex history that can be difficult to see and assess. Every church body consists of people with various backgrounds, personalities, family situations, needs, and expectations. Often, there is also a wide range of spiritual maturity among members of the congregation that requires personal consideration and a versatile ministry approach. These challenges are compounded by the unforeseen circumstances and unexpected obstacles that pastors are constantly required to navigate as they attempt to lead the collective whole. Other pastors, as well as elders, administrative staff, and church leaders, can help shoulder some of the load, but leading a team and working with people creates additional dynamics that come with their own set of issues. In short, human beings are unpredictable, churches are complicated, and leadership is hard!

In addition to daily leadership challenges, pastors are always living under the pressure of the impending sermon. As soon as we step off the platform and emotionally exhale, the anticipation of the next message and the anxiety about its preparation begins to build. Even those of us who enjoy the process of sermon development recognize the ongoing mental and physical demands of preparing and preaching weekly messages (and sometimes more).

The sacred trust of delivering God’s word is a sobering honor that we celebrate with gratitude and embrace with reverence. But if we’re honest, the most difficult challenge related to preaching is not the never-ending process of sermon preparation or the unique blend of exhilaration and exhaustion that comes with delivering a message. It’s the overwhelming disappointment we feel as we watch our people seemingly disregard the truth of God’s word that we so desperately strive to communicate to them. Their lives continue to exhibit the same broken pieces and patterns, and the church body feels unmoved and unmotivated. Our initial misguided feelings of betrayal eventually give way to frustration and discouragement as we begin to struggle with doubts related to our preaching or with questions concerning our calling and our church. Preaching, as enjoyable as it is, can become a real struggle.

If leadership and preaching aren’t difficult enough, the daily grind of pastoring can make ministry feel impossible and, on some days, miserable. The strain on our families, barrage of unrealistic expectations, constant demands on our time, spiritual weight of empathy for our people, and apparent lack of appreciation can absolutely debilitate even the most gifted pastor. Indeed, apart from God’s sustaining grace and his supernatural strength, pastoral ministry is unbearable and unmanageable. As we struggle to persevere, we long to see God work in our congregants’ lives and desperately pray for his fresh work in our own. These earnest desires, along with the constant demands, make pastoring both a humbling privilege and a heavy burden.

Overall, these three core components of our ministries—leadership, preaching, and pastoring—are all essential aspects of our calling. Although most of us recognize the inherent challenges that come with each of them (and certainly don’t need a book to remind us), it’s easy to overlook how interrelated and mutually dependent they are on one another. As a result, we can also fail to see how addressing them collectively can simplify their individual challenges. Most importantly, if we fail to recognize how Scripture weds leadership, preaching, and pastoring together, we may find ourselves attempting to fulfill each of their related responsibilities without actually accomplishing any of them.

Surveying the Landscape

The unhealthy differentiation between leadership, preaching, and pastoring is also reflected in the broader landscape of contemporary ministry. In the same way that we compartmentalize these three core components of our calling, ministry resources typically address them separately as well. For example, leadership books often focus on principles and processes but rarely address practical aspects of pastoring. Similarly, pastoral resources provide helpful insights for our various roles and responsibilities but give little to no attention to preaching. And homiletics resources are designed to enhance our interpretation and communication skills, but they are largely silent on pastoral and leadership matters. While each of these subjects certainly warrant dedicated volumes, their artificial isolation and borderline exclusion of one another ignores the mutual dependence they share. This is one reason why expositional leadership is so important—it helps us integrate these foundational concepts.

But our segregation of these essential ministry components is not just theoretical—it’s practical. In each of our ministries we all have responsibilities that require us to allocate time for sermon preparation, pastoral care and counseling, and organizational leadership (strategic scheduling is a must for every faithful pastor). Yet, some pastors may recognize preaching as a ministry strength and devote an unhealthy portion of their time to sermon development while they neglect pastoral care for the flock. Others may be gifted in the area of leadership and overemphasize vision and strategy to a point that it devalues people and sees them as an obstacle to overcome or a necessary evil to be put up with. Still others may not see themselves as gifted communicators and thus dedicate themselves to caring for the flock but minimize the amount of time spent in sermon preparation.

While we all have areas of strengths and weaknesses, and each of us has different passions and preferences, we must avoid concentrating on one core component of ministry at the expense of another. However, this is not simply a balance problem; it’s also a blending problem. This is another reason why expositional leadership is crucial—it helps us determine how these core components of ministry overlap and how we can synthesize them together for maximum ministry impact.

Sadly, this unhealthy segregation of duties is not only obvious in our ministry approach and the related resources but is even more apparent in many ministry failures that occur. Pastors typically don’t lose their churches because they suddenly adopt some errant doctrine or stumble into a moral failure. To be sure, these are not uncommon, but they are not the most frequent source of ministry collapse. Rather, pastors are dismissed and churches split over unwise and unhealthy leadership. Further, pastors often resign because churches can become riddled with internal turmoil due to a lack of spiritual maturity, which ultimately reflects an anemic preaching ministry. Likewise, when the people don’t feel cared for and the sermons seem detached from their lives (no matter how exegetically accurate they are), a pastor can lose the trust and confidence of the congregation, forcing him to eventually leave.

When these types of situations begin to unravel, we find ourselves focusing on the symptoms instead of identifying and resolving the source of the problems. In other words, we point the hose at the smoke instead of the fire, which leaves the ministry in ashes, the people with scars, and the pastors severely burned. In each of these common scenarios, the failure in one core component leads to struggles in the others. But the opposite can also be true, and this is yet another reason why expositional leadership is critical. It helps us to leverage each component for the strength and success of the others, thereby solidifying and safeguarding our ministry.

Establishing the Boundaries

As we explore the concept of expositional leadership it is important to establish some doctrinal and philosophical boundaries. These theological guardrails can keep us out of doctrinal ditches and also serve as guides that will steer our conversation in the right direction. There are several theological convictions and commitments that undergird our perspective and ultimately guide our approach. Each of these foundational truths feed and fuel the nature and necessity of expositional leadership.1

God, Salvation, and the Church

We believe that the Creator of the universe is the one true, living, triune God who exists eternally in three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. He uniquely created people in his image (Gen. 1:26–27), but all of humanity was separated from him and condemned through Adam’s original sin (Rom. 5:12). God’s eternal plan of redemption was promised and pictured throughout the Old Testament (Gen. 3:15), and it was accomplished according to the Scriptures in the person and work of Christ the Son through his virgin birth, sinless life, substitutionary death on the cross, and bodily resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3–4). By faith, all those who repent and trust Christ as their Lord and Savior are personally and eternally saved (Rom. 10:9–10), adopted into God’s family (1 John 3:1; Gal. 4:4–7), and established as new covenant members of Christ’s body and bride, the church (Eph. 5:25–33). Believers are called to live and serve within a local community of faith that is conforming them, individually and collectively, into the likeness of the Son (Rom. 8:29; Eph. 4:12–16). Ultimately, as the fulfillment of God’s redemptive plan, this life transformation is the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.12.2023
• Verlagsort: Wheaton
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Pastoraltheologie
• Schlagworte: Bible study • Biblical • body Christ • Christian theology • Church • congregation • Discipleship • Faith • Gospel • lead • membership • ministry • Mission • Pastoral Resources • Prayer • Preaching • Sermon • Shepherd • Small group books • Sunday school • Tim Keller • wisdom
• ISBN-10: 1-4335-8805-6 / 1433588056
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4335-8805-1 / 9781433588051