The debate between advocates of the Missions Church and the Missional Church (old conservative wing of the Emerging Church) continues:
The Missions Church emphasizes global missions and the Missional church emphasizes your local culture, i.e., your city.
The Missions Church stresses a special call to THE Ministry and the Missional church stresses a call to ministry.
The Missions church emphasizes a professional ministry and the Missional church a ministry for everyone.
The Missions church advocates an ordination for pastors and the Missional church does not.
Which is correct? Both.
In his book, So Beautiful, Leonard Sweet slams God-called pastors, ordinations, and any distinction between clergy and laity calling such ideas “heresy.”
Sweet writes: Presbyterian Robert T. Henderson and Southern Baptist Ed Stetzer are calling loudly for the de-clergification of the church. How “clergified” is your church? If the distinctions of “clergy” and “laity” are not biblical, where should our emphasis be—abolishing the clergy and making all of them ministers, or abolishing the laity and making all of us ministers?
The heresy of clerisy (only priests are ministers) is killing the church. I heard the story of a member of the church approaching their pastor and telling him that they had been called into full-time ministry. The pastor did not respond in the manner they were expecting when he said, “Oh, I thought you were a Christian.”
This set the member back a bit. He answered that of course he was a Christian. Then the pastor said, “Then, too late…” by which he meant that when we became disciples of Jesus, we accepted the call into full-time ministry.
So much of the time we write a check and think we have done our part. Or, if we are really trying to be spiritual, we may go on a mission project for a few days a year. In reality, Christ turns us into “Mission 365,” as my friend Tom Ingram calls it. We are in mission in the car, in mission at the grocery store, in mission at Starbucks, in mission on Twitter.
It is time to abolish the laity and make everyone clergy, “minister.” Or maybe we should abolish the clergy and make everyone laity, “ministers” (Leonard Sweet. SO BEAUTIFUL. Colorado Springs, David C. Cook, 2009, pages 5, 7).
Ed Stetzer defines clergification: This is the belief that the professionals carry out the real work of the church, and everyone else simply lends a hand here and there and says we should reject the “called to the ministry” for “called to ministry.”
This is a straw man argument!
I agree that there are abuses of vocational ministries as Stetzer rightly exposes. But that does not mean we abandon what is taught in Scripture. There is a special call of God to preach His Word. But, there is also a general call to all believers to serve (Ephesians 4:1). This attitude and view of Stetzer and Sweet is in stark contrast to some of the most influential preachers and teachers of preachers of the past and present.
Homilitican Lloyd Perry (Warren Wiersbe’s teacher): “The primary requirement for preaching is a divine call to preach” (A Manual for Biblical Preaching, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1965, page 4).
Pastor W.H. Griffith Thomas: “This is the Divine Call, and it is the foundation of all else” (Ministerial Life and Work, Chicago: The Institute Colportage Association, 1927, page 27).
Pastor and author on preaching Martin Lloyd-Jones: “Nothing but this overwhelming sense of being called and of compulsion should ever lead anyone to preach” (Preaching and Preachers, Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1972, page 107).
Homilitican John Broadus: “The preacher should be a person with a call from God. Ministers are called as professionals, but they should never be persons with just a profession” (On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, ed. Vernon C. Stanfield, 4th ed., rev. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1979, page 13).
Charles Spurgeon: “It is a fearful calamity to a man to miss his calling” (Lectures to My Students, Grand Rapids: Associate Publisher and Authors, n.d., page 22).
G. Campbell Morgan: “The only men who can really enter this ministry are those whom the Lord chooses, calls, and equips, by the bestowment of gifts according to the wisdom of His will” (The Ministry of the Word, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1919, page 127).
John R. W. Stott: Will Sangster, in his well-known book The Craft of the Sermon wrote, “Called to preach! . . . Commissioned of God to teach the word! A herald of the great King! A witness of the Eternal Gospel! (Between Two Worlds, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982, page 43).
John MacArthur: “The gospel is spread by men whom God calls to proclaim it” (Ephesians. Chicago: Moody Bible Institute, 1986, page 93).
Al Mohler: “No one should even contemplate such an endeavor without absolute confidence in a divine call to preach and in the unblemished authority of the Scriptures” (He is Not Silent, page 71).
John Piper said in his testimony: “The calling to preach and pastor had become irresistible.”
Warren Wiersbe: “The work of the ministry is too demanding and difficult for a man to enter it without a sense of divine calling. Men enter and the leave the ministry usually because they lack a sense of divine urgency. Nothing less than a definite call from God could ever give a man success in the ministry” (Howard F. Sugden and Warren W. Wiersbe, When Pastors Wonder How. Chicago: Moody, 1973, page 9).
Erwin Lutzer: I don’t see how anyone could survive in the ministry if he felt it was just his own choice. Some ministers scarcely have two good days back to back. They are sustained by the knowledge that God has placed them where they are. Ministers without such a conviction often lack courage and carry their resignation letter in their coat pocket. At the slightest hint of difficulty, they’re gone” (Erwin W. Lutzer. “Still Called to the Ministry” Moody Monthly 83, no. 7 March 1983: 133).
Tony Merida in Faithful Preaching quotes Old Testament scholar C. Hassell Bullock, “We cannot ignore the basic fact that the prophets found their legitimacy and valid credentials first of all in Yahweh’s call” (Merida, Tony. Faithful Preaching (p. 2). B&H Publishing. Kindle Edition).
What are the Evidences of God’s Call to the Ministry?
1. A God-given desire to preach.
“The primary way this intuitive understanding of the call is manifested according to the New Testament is a desire (the Greek word [ὀρέγω orego] is used only three times in the NT: 1 Tim 3:1; 6:10; Hebrews 11:16) for the ministry (I Timothy 3:1), caused by God (Philippians 2:12-13), and growing into a virtually irresistible constraint (1 Corinthians 9:16)” (Stephen J. Hankins. The Call to the Christian Ministry. Biblical Viewpoint: Unusual Press: Bob Jones University, n.d., page 88).
When men would come to Spurgeon who were struggling with the call to the ministry of preaching and pastoring he is credited with saying, “If you can do anything else and be happy, then do it” (Lectures, page 23).
God uses desires to lead all believers into His will as Psalm 37:4 indicates: “Delight yourself in the LORD; and he shall give you the desires of your heart.” Again, it is not either/or but both/and. God calls some men specifically to preach through a desire for His will and God leads other believers through desire into other ministries.
2. A God-given ability.
“God never calls without equipping, and the very fact of equipment proves the call (Ephesians 4:11)” wrote W. H. Griffith Thomas (page 94). Paul refers to this reality in his life in Ephesians 3:6-8. Paul was made a minister by God to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ, in other words, the ministry of preaching for Paul was not a career choice. In the same verse, Paul informs us that the God who called him equipped him with “the effectual working of His power.”
Spurgeon elaborated: “I should not complete this point if I did not add, that mere ability to edify and aptness to teach is not enough; there must be other talents to complete the pastoral character. Sound judgment and solid experience must instruct you; gentle manners and loving affections must sway you; firmness and courage must be manifest and tenderness and sympathy must not be lacking. Gifts administrative in ruling well will be as requisite as gifts instructive in teaching well” (Lectures, page 28).
I would like to add one more quote from Spurgeon. Spurgeon wrote of God-made preachers when he said, “God certainly has not created behemoth to fly; and should leviathan have a strong desire to ascend with the lark, it would evidently be an unwise aspiration, since he is not furnished with wings. If a man be called to preach, he will be endowed with a degree of speaking ability, which he will cultivate and increase. If the gift of utterance be not there in a measure at the first, it is not likely that it will ever be developed” (Lectures, page 25. quoted by Richard Caldwell in Pastoral Preaching: Expository Preaching for Pastoral Work (p. 155). Rainer Publishing. Kindle Edition).
3. A God given recognition.
“The man who thinks he is called to the ministry must also meet, to a blameless degree, the qualifications presented by Paul in formal lists in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:6-9… A man cannot lead people who refuse to follow him, nor can he provide spiritual food and protection for those who do not accept him as a shepherd” (Hankins, page 89).
“The Bible says more about what a leader is to be than what a leader is to do. Phillip Brooks, a prominent clergyman during the nineteenth century, says of this important subject: ’What the minister is far more important than what he is able to do, for what he is gives force to what he does. In the long run, ministry is what we are as much as what we do” (“The Call to Pastoral Ministry”, page 114 in MacArthur’s Rediscovering Pastoral Ministry).
The local church at Antioch recognized that the Holy Spirit had called Barnabas and Paul to plant churches, laid hands on them, and sent them out as the church’s first missionaries (Acts 13:1-3).
Spurgeon added, “Whether you value the verdict of the church or no, one thing is certain, that none of you can be pastors without the loving consent of the flock; and therefore this will be to you a practical indicator if not a correct one” (Lectures, page 29).
“The procedure of ordination, which is the step of publicly recognizing one set apart for the ministry” (James M. George. “The Call to Pastoral Ministry. Rediscovering Pastoral Ministry, page 107).