How do I decide to be a full time Minister?

This transcript has been automatically generated

Thank you everybody for a good selection of questions. There are far too many here for us, I suspect, to answer all. I’ve tried to group them together. If your question isn’t answered, do pick up Philip and Chapo afterwards. Let’s begin with a whole clutch— Let’s begin with a whole— Are we on?

Let’s begin with a whole clutch of questions basically on the theme of how do I decide whether to be a full-time minister. Let me just read you one or two variants upon it so that you can see what sort of question people are asking. To what extent is the desire to do the job important? If anyone has Bible teaching gifts but doesn’t particularly want to do it full-time, should they do it anyway? Some people tell me that I should only consider full-time Christian work if I have a strong conviction that I should do it, can’t imagine doing anything else.

Others say that any of us who have well taught ourselves and free to go into full-time gospel work should do so unless there’s a good reason not to. Comments, please.

Okay, yeah, why don’t you start with those 2, Philip?

Um, I think it’s like the, uh, the answer that, uh, Chapo gave to the lady and the Sunday school teacher at Armidale that he mentioned to us this morning. That is If you don’t have a strong desire, then you have a spiritual problem and need to arrest it and address it. But that you can be a Christian and want to be like the Lord Jesus Christ and not want to lay down your life for the salvation of other people is illogical. There’s a basic problem there. See, what does it mean to be like Jesus?

What’s it mean to grow like Jesus? Well, it doesn’t mean grow long hair, beard, and walk around in dressing gown. It’s got to be that you live your life the way Jesus lived. How did Jesus— this is a true saying and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Fundamental to what Jesus is about is the salvation of other people.

So you cannot grow to be like Jesus and not live and die for the salvation of other people. That’s an impossibility. So if you want to be like Christ— like Jesus, which is what every Christian does, and yet you don’t want to give your life to the salvation of other people, you have a spiritual problem. So the question of, you know, I— the questions have an assumption, some of them as expressed, that you could be a Christian and not really be interested in kind of wanting to be in full-time ministry. And I’d say that’s— the question is not should I be, but why shouldn’t I be, as the one option gave me.

That’s the issue you’ve got to raise. Now, there can be another reason for not wanting to be in full-time ministry. That is, your knowledge of full-time ministry is twisted and perverted by the bad examples of it you’ve seen. I’m not talking about becoming a vicar in a country village. I’m talking about spending your time being paid to teach and preach the Word of God in season, out season, caring for people anywhere, everywhere.

It’s not necessarily to be locked into the structures that you may have seen. So I don’t want people to be locked away drinking cups of tea endlessly in vicarage garden parties. If that’s what you’re thinking I’m talking about, well, the problem is not the ministry, the problem is your perception of what ministry is about. I’m talking about giving your life to the proclamation of the Lord Jesus Christ, and I can’t work out how you can be like Christ and not want to do it. Doesn’t make sense.

Thank you. Let’s keep going on that theme with one or two of the others. If someone is exercising a ministry teaching the Bible as well as holding down a secular job, how does that someone decide to stop doing the job to enter full-time Christian work? What questions should such a person be asking themselves? I think you’ve begun to answer that, but could you take it further?

There’s 2 or 3 on that sort of theme. I grew up in a home which had a sign over the mantelpiece which my parents won at a golf competition. Which said, if golf interferes with your business, give up your business.

And being in paid Christian ministry is a bit that way. If your ministry as a, as a person who is occupying another job during the week, if your ministry is not growing and if there are not more people wanting to hear the Word of God taught by you, it’s most likely because you have not got those particular gifts that would make a financial ministry viable. But if you, by teaching the Word of God, have more and more people wanting to be in your Bible study group, if you have more and more Christian people saying you should be doing this full-time and we’re willing to finance you, then you should do it. I don’t think it’s then an option really much for you. If the Christian community is willing to put money into you, then take the money and give up your day job.

That’s— it’s an economic decision in the end, and the economics is economic rationalism, isn’t it? If the church and Christian people are not willing to pay for you to do it professionally, then they view that you haven’t got the gifts for doing it. They may be wrong, and we may need to challenge them. They most likely are right, and that you haven’t got the gifts for doing it, so you need to fund it yourself. But if they’re willing to fund it, then I can’t see why you shouldn’t be taking the money for it.

Philip, do you also think that the further you progress in your profession, the more time it takes? You can’t just stay static where you are in a profession because you do upgrades and you’re constantly doing things like that. And my experience was that I was frustrated because I didn’t have enough time to do both. And I’d reached the stage in my teaching profession where I really had to give it much more time. And what I was really doing was using it to fund me to do ministry, which didn’t seem to me proper in the end.

And I wasn’t prepared to give up the time that was needed to leave ministry to do more professional work. And I think at the beginning of your professional life, it doesn’t take up nearly as much time as it does as you progress along. And you might find that you’re managing quite happily, although if you’re any good at it, I can’t work out how you can be. It’s just beyond me if you’re any good at ministry, because if you are any good, more and more people ask you to do it till in the end you go, bar me.

Yeah, it’s, it’s reflected in middle age. You know, you look around, who are the middle-aged people who are as active in Christian ministry as the young? And there’s very few. It’s not just work, it’s also family, mortgages and therefore overdrafts, things like that, and therefore locked-in commitments to work so that you can’t just easily get off the train and go for a year off to do something. Once you hit the baby country and the career rise, you’ve got to take the promotions just to stay in the job.

If you’re unwilling to take the promotions, then you can’t stop. But if you take the promotions, then suddenly you’ve got to spend 6 months working in Germany, or you’ve got to do this, you know, travelling around, week here, week there, which means you then say, I can’t run a home group anymore because I’ll only be there once every 3 Thursday nights. And so the reason for work, namely to pay for your life and ministry, gets turned around. The reason you live is to work, and ministry just gets squeezed out. Now that is what most of our Christian friends have to go through.

Uh, it’s very sad when we live in this dreadful economic environment that we’re in, but, uh, when you’re 25 and you’ve got certain freedom even in your job, John’s point’s right. The job doesn’t stay still like this. It really pushes.

There’s a question here which I suspect several of us are asking at this very point in time, which is, if all the keenest, best-taught Christians become full-time Christian workers, who will witness in our cities, hospitals, schools, etc.?

The people that they train.

Exactly. Good, excellent.

We’re roughly there on that subject, so let’s just throw throw it open for a moment. Anybody want to come back to Chapel or Philip on anything of what they’ve said in the last 6 or 7 minutes?

Good, let’s move on to another subject. That last thing to encourage a question. Yes, yes, dear brother, it does really. Right, we have a clutch of questions here on the radical things that you’re talking about. Can you suggest some ways in which we can be in full-time Christian ministry work in the UK outside of the established church?

How do we provide support to encourage this?

Variation upon it, is it up to us or our churches to come up with new ways to preach the gospel to the community by getting away from the Anglican Church and our love of queues?

Why don’t you begin? That’s all right. No, it’s up to us. We are the church. You’ve got to stop thinking there is a church out there that’s somehow something different and separate from us.

We’re the ones, and it’s up to those who are going to be the leaders of the church— that is you, that’s what we’re talking to you about— to actually give leadership by bringing about the change. But if you wait for a committee to ask you to change the church, the Lord Jesus will return. It doesn’t happen. Committees never change anything except the agenda sheets and the time of meeting, but they never change anything. And if you wait for bishops to change something, they will never change anything because their whole exercise— a bishop is like all bureaucrats, the essence of their work is to keep peace, and the way to keep peace is to change nothing.

That’s why they always live dangling one foot either side of the fence. So you won’t get any change from them, you won’t get any change from committees, you won’t get any change from the Synod, and you can’t expect the sheep to lead the shepherd. So where are we going to get change from? It only comes from the shepherds. Who, being trained by the Word of God, know which way to take the sheep.

So this is where the change has to happen from. But of course, changing things means unpopularity. Now, the question is also, does it have to be in the Anglican Church, the Church of England? Of course not. There are other churches, FIEC churches, there’s independent churches, any number of churches, and there’s also independent Anglican churches.

There’s no reason why you don’t get ordained as an Anglican minister and then immediately you’re ordained leave and found an independent church. You’re still an Anglican minister. The Anglo-Catholics are stupid enough to believe that once a priest, always a priest. So if they believe in indelibility of orders, that’s their problem, isn’t it, that they indelibly ordered you?

So there are any number of ways to change and to start ministries and to start churches, and you do not need the organisation to change you. And you mustn’t wait for the organisation to change because the whole essence of them is a death wish of constitutional queue sitting. Remember in Yes Minister how every time Sir Humphrey wanted to send Hacker almost insane, he’d say, oh Minister, that is very courageous. And I think you can do exactly the same with bishops. You want to say, oh Bishop, how courageous.

It’ll send them into a total tizz straight away. They won’t change anything.

As a variation upon that, When you’re saying that the sheep can’t change it, it has to be the shepherds, most of us here are not yet in full-time Christian work. We’re still members of the congregation. Are you saying that we should wait for our rectors and vicars at least to take the initiative? Oh, you can always be praying for your rector to be taking the initiative, but yes, if the congregation is to hold together, it will need to do it through the ministries. If you’re going to do it without the, uh, without the ministers, then you really just need to set up separate congregation and then you become the minister.

But when the sheep start trying to change things in defiance of the minister, that’s when you really are starting new churches and getting nowhere otherwise.

Philip, one of the things I think too is that more than anything else, you’ve taught me to try and think about the possibility that Christian people could actually start another thing. And it’s been interesting to me at the Bible college where I am that, that some of the students there are actually sponsored by their Christian friends, and they are accountable to their Christian friends. I said to one of the lads— I was, I was doing some evangelism at a dinner, and I asked him if he’d like to come with me, and he said, I’m meeting with my supporters tonight. And I said, oh, that’ll be a happy time. Well, he said, it wasn’t all that happy last time.

I said, I’m sorry to hear that. Why is that, Sean? He said, well, I’d failed in Greek and they asked me if I was working hard or wasting my time. And was I indeed giving them good value for their money or wasting their money? And I thought, well, you see, nobody ever does that to anybody at Moore College.

They just get funded by a totally different area. Now it wouldn’t at all surprise me if that group of people doesn’t see him to be a possible starter of a congregation. And I think we are so bound in always thinking about how we’ll always do it the way we’ve always done it that no one ever does any lateral thinking. You don’t need all that many people to come with you to support you in ministry. And all over the city of Sydney where I am, there are enormous black holes waiting for somebody to start a ministry.

More than you can poke your stick at. I reckon, and if I can see them, they must be there. Uh, yes, I think in my earlier answer I made a mistake too, because when I say it’s the shepherd leads the sheep, not the sheep leading, I guess, uh, there’s a danger that you’ll think of ordained ministers and you wait till an ordained minister somewhere will do it. I don’t mean that. I mean the home group leader.

If you’re going to work together, then you need somebody, and the sheep can turn into a shepherd anytime they care to stand up and start leading. That’s the difference. And so I’m not wanting to institutionalise change, or especially in terms of waiting for the clergy to do it. A dozen people get a good idea, go for it. And whoever’s leading the group, that’s the clergy.

I think you’ve begun to answer this one, but let’s push it a little bit further because there’ll be interest in this. In what ways are denominations important or unimportant And can I enter ministry in a denomination whose doctrinal position I do not endorse completely, even if it’s on a secondary issue like baptism? There are no such things as secondary issues. Any issue can become a gospel issue depending on what people make of it. So circumcision is neither here nor there, so you’d think it’s a secondary issue, but when people insist upon it, then it becomes a gospel issue, and you get the Epistle of Galatians written about it.

So anything’s a gospel issue depends on what people are making of it, including baptism. The London Church of Christ make baptism a gospel issue, don’t they? So anything can be. To go back to the more fundamental question though is the role of denominations. Denominations are just associations of congregations.

Those congregations are entitled to say, well, this is the theological basis of our association. If I can’t agree with the association, well then I really— and if I’m asked to subscribe to association principles, then I really shouldn’t join it because it’s dishonest. Or I should say to them, I agree with it except for Clause 37. Will you still have me recognising I don’t believe Clause 37? Um, the Presbyterians have— what do they call it— a declaratory something, or there’s some Presbyterian thing whereby you don’t have to sign every part of the Westminster Confession.

You’re allowed 2 or 3 exemption clauses which can let you out of the Westminster, which is why the Free Presbyterians— no, no, Anglicans, you must make sure you don’t believe any of the 39 Articles.

So I think, I think it’s dishonest to sign things that you don’t actually believe or don’t declare your degree of disbelief in, and so you should go find something else if you can’t agree with this particular association. You’re only creating problems for yourself down the track. However, you do need to make sure clearly what the association rules actually are and the undertakings actually are and differentiate that with what the association officials claim they are, which are nearly always 2 different things. So bishops nearly always claim that there are rules and regulations which are not actually rules and regulations. They’re just bishops throwing their weight around.

And so they talk about you signing your canonical obedience to the bishop, which does not mean you obey the bishop in everything, but only in those commands which are legal. In other words, only those areas where the bishop has been given legal power to command you, which when you cheque out the law is almost nothing, um, other than that you believe the 39 Articles, which thing the bishop doesn’t himself believe. He won’t ask you to. But what they actually have power to do is very, very little. Yet they don’t want you to know that, so they pretend they’ve got lots and lots.

Most associations are the same. I use the Anglican one because most of us here come from that background and because it’s the one I know, but it’s the same in every organisation. So you’ve got to cheque out what the actual wording is and whether you believe that. If you don’t, then I think it’s unrighteous. To sign that you do.

Do you want to add to that? No, I want to be positive. Sorry. Yes, I do. I want to say that while denominations can offer you great drawbacks, they do also offer you platforms from which to preach, and they do train people for ministry.

And so far as I’m concerned, the Anglican Church gave me every platform from which I moved. Or they gave me the freedom to keep moving from one preaching platform to the next. So I’m ambivalent about them. When they’re helpful, they’re very helpful, like the girl with the curl in the middle of their forehead. And when they’re not helpful, they’re horrid.

That’s all. To pursue that further, platforms are an important aspect. That is, Christian ministry is one thing. The platform on which you exercise that ministry is another thing. And you cannot minister without a platform.

Now you’ve got to choose your platform.

Um, the more the platform is provided for you, the more it requires you to do it their way. The more you have to build your own platform, the greater freedom you have to do whatever you want, but the higher you’ll have to pay platform fees. But there’s always platform fees. So if you say, okay, I’m just going to go out and I’ll be a tent maker, I’ll start my own ministry. As more and more people come, they’ll pay more and more money.

I’ll give up doing the tent making in the end. So I’ve created the platform the way I want to. Yes, but your platform fees are that for the first 5 years you’ve had to make tents, and then you had to write a constitution, and then you’ve had to Whereas if you got ordained with a denominational church, you wouldn’t have had to make the tent. Mind you, then you would have had to wear certain funny clothing, and then you’d have to do this. Everybody pays platform costs.

You just gotta work out what are the costs for this particular platform and what does this platform do for me in reaching the people I want to reach. So some platforms are really good in giving you free access to the people you’re trying to reach. Others are dreadful. The illustration I think I came to in the middle of a talk one time here in England was that the Church of England believes in fishing inside the boat because most of the people inside the boat aren’t converted, and so they keep on catching the same fish. You don’t put your fish in the line out in the ocean, you just keep fishing inside the Church of England, catching them and then throwing them back in the bottom of the boat and catching them again.

Whereas the actual average Free Church, their fishing platform is built on a high cliff so high that your line doesn’t actually reach the water. That is, the Anglican Church is so full of compromises, it’s in a leaky boat that’s full of water, that’s drowning in worldliness. Some of the Free Churches are so pure that they’re not anymore in touch with the world, and so you could never actually bring a non-Christian into such an environment because it’s so weird. Now, they’re the 2 platforms at their worst. You gotta work out, well, what’s the platform I’m in?

How much does it cost? How really helpful is it going to be? And the answers differ for different people as to what you’re trying to do.

Thank you. We are going to explore, I think, this issue a little bit more just because there’s so much to it. But here’s a variation upon it: how much should where we minister be a factor? For instance, should we go to unreached countries?

The Regions Beyond the Missionary Union— they’ve changed their name now. There aren’t too many be-yonds, are there? No, I guess not. The ones close at hand that turned out to be so bad. Yeah, I think where is an almost irrelevance.

People are people everywhere. People everywhere need the gospel, so you don’t have to go anywhere. I think a lot of missionary endeavour has come from 19th century British Empire thinking. And some of it in the 20th century has come from guilt for the 19th century British Empire. And so there has been masses of missionary endeavours into the old empire, which is good and great, and we’re gaining the benefits of it in seeing lots of these countries expressing tremendous Christian faith today.

Africa is a great centre of Christianity today thanks to that, which is fantastic. But Europe is the place that needs the missionaries, and if you guys are so stupid as to want to get into the European Common Community, etc., at least have the wit to see that it has gospel advantages in terms of you being able to go and preach the gospel all over Europe. And so, Britain must now take on Europe like Hong Kong must take on China with the gospel. That’s the great opportunity you’ve got. For you to be still running around like in the Raj days trying to evangelise the world of the empire seems to me to be a bit daft, frankly.

But people are people. It doesn’t matter where you preach the gospel. And to spend hours and days and months trying to work out which gospel, which mission field God wants you to go to It’s a waste of good gospel preaching time. I know a man who for 12 months, I think it was 6 to 12 months, lived off his parents. He’d graduated from Bible college waiting for God to tell him which mission field to go to.

Flip a coin, put a pin in a map, catch the first plane out to wherever. It would have been better than sitting there living off his parents. I mean, it’s a stupid idea. Anywhere is a good place to preach the gospel, so everywhere is a good place to preach the gospel, so start where you are. Cross-cultural work requires certain giftedness.

Sometimes you have it because you already have the language. Friends of ours, she spoke Spanish and came from Uruguay. He had a love of going to India. It’s pretty stupid to go to India if your wife speaks Spanish, so they went back to Uruguay. Language gives a help.

That gives you some indication. Some of us are good at cross-cultural communication. Some of us are very bad. That’s an issue of it. But you don’t have to go anywhere to do cross-cultural communication.

Just— there are parts of England that are fairly cross-cultural, aren’t they? And if you want to find out if you’re any good at it or not, go and live there for a while and find out whether you’re any good at it and have a go. But the where is a silly question, by and large. Just do it. The Matthew Great Commission one is like that, isn’t it?

It’s got that business of wherever you go, make disciples. It’s the making disciples that matters, not where. Yeah, so it’s as you go, make disciples of all the nations, baptising them, etc., etc., etc. I think the word missionary is an unhelpful word. Cross-cultural worker is a better word.

You, you can just go to another part of the same city and be a cross-cultural worker and need as much prayerful support as someone who goes to the other side of the world and works with expats and actually never speaks to anybody in a different culture, but he’s a missionary because they’ve caught a plane to get there. I mean, that’s daft, you know, but the word mission as a category, we’ve outworn it. There’s one over here on the side. Hey, follow-up. Is there not a sense of compulsion though if you go to, say, an area of the world where there is zero gospel witness, where people cannot even walk into a church and hear the gospel, there’s no one doing anything.

Should we not consider that? I’m not sure there’s a compulsion that I should go to it because it is there, otherwise we all should go to it. Or— but there may be a compulsion that we as a Christian community need to think out a strategy how we can best get to there, which I’m not sure is being done. Our tendency is to send rich people to very poor areas. We tend to send people to villages rather than to cities.

Even though cities are the place from which cultures emanate rather than villages.

We find sending people to middle-class suburbs in cities of the Third World is really not missionary work, but down amongst some village people, especially cannibals, now that’s real missionary work. We have this kind of, what is it, a history of missionary work which is just disfigured what the whole exercise is about. Most of our missionaries, when they go to third world countries, have to come home after a few years because of their children’s education, or choose to. Whether they have to or not, they choose to. I’m not judging, which has made me wary of seeing that as the best strategy.

I wonder whether we’re not better seeking out places like London and Paris and so on where lots of people from the third world come to do postgraduate study and seek to reach them with the gospel and then help them and encourage them in the reintegration back into their home cultures to be the gospel bearers. So there’s other strategies than just every one of us going where the gospel isn’t. Especially because all of those who’ve come over to do postgraduate work will be leadership material at home. Yeah, every one of them. I think we’ve been bad at thinking out our strategies anywhere.

We tend to be need-driven. And, and often I think— but I’m not saying your question was— but often I think we have acted to calm our conscience more than to have said what will cause the gospel to spread further. And, and I feel often when, when you react to your guilt, it— my first reaction is hardly ever in the right direction unless I’ve got to repent of something. Even then it isn’t. The missionary cause has also been severely perverted by the camera.

Christianity is not a visual religion, and always be wary of the visualities. What does the camera photograph? It photographs impoverished people, dirty people, sick people, dying people, people with weird religious practises, but it never photographs someone going to help. Can’t photograph that. And so our missionary motivation, driven from the photos that we have seen, gets shifted away from preaching the gospel to the lost and upholding the Lord Jesus over the nations into reaching the needy of the world, which is again why we don’t preach to rich people in the Third World.

Why we preach— we’ve got to preach to poor people. And so you go to ghettos, you don’t go to suburbs. Because we’re driven by the camera instead of driven by the Bible. And we do this thing— you guys are really big at doing it, and so it’s stupid— this 6-month, 12-month, go out and be a missionary enterprise. You don’t do anything in cross-cultural communication in 6, 12-month exercises.

So go to town, earn money, and put some money into a Christian worker who’s going to go out and do it for 50 years. It’s long-term work that we need, not people floating in rationalising their overseas gap experience by doing Christian work. If you’re going to do— if you’re going to go for a gap year to enjoy yourself, go and enjoy yourself. If you’re going to go out in the mission field, well, do the job properly and stop flitting in and out thinking you’re making some progress speaking to people in a language you don’t understand, doing— it really is basically an unhelpful Christian rationalisation of holidays. You can sometimes paint a building They can paint buildings, but I— in the States, I had a conversation with somebody there who pointed out that the Mexicans that the Americans are going down painting buildings for are quite able to paint the building themselves.

At a third of the cost. At a third of the cost. And what they’re doing is they’re getting youth fellowships to go down and paint the buildings because they’re trying to evangelise the youth fellowship. And so there are all these Christian buildings badly painted by teenagers all over this— all over Mexico that really could be helped by other activities than what we’re doing. Otherwise, is it all right?

There are follow-up questions. I saw at least one hand over there, and I think this whole idea of mission and platforms and radical ways of doing things is worth just exploring. So any follow-up questions? I think— is there not a responsibility for the Christian community to respond to needy situations in the world though, other than, you know, sort of physically needy situations in the world? It’s one of the gospels.

Yes, but if we do it Christianly, we do it by preaching the gospel. That is, as citizens of a state that has still got a certain degree of conscience about it, not much but a little, we can appeal to our government and to the non-Christian members of the state to try and send relief aid to those who are caught in fire, famine, earthquake, or whatever it is. But if we want to make real change to the Third World, we need to change their mindset, and we change their mindset by the preaching of the gospel. That is, India produces enough food to feed itself, but India refuses to kill the rats and the cows. It refuses to— now, as long as Hinduism reigns in India, India will always be in economic difficulty.

The only way you can actually improve the state of India is by bringing the gospel to bear. We sent a friend over to Tanzania to preach the gospel, to work in agricultural work in Tanzania in a place called Behemba, and he ran the agricultural college there for his first 3 or 4 years. He came back at the end of his first term and he says, I’m not going back to do that, I’m going back to turn the agriculture college into a Bible college. And we said, why? And he said, well, because the people in Behemba know perfectly well how to feed themselves, how to grow crops and how to look after their cattle.

The reason— and the climate and weather conditions and the soils are perfectly adequate. The reason why people are in poverty and hunger there is because in their tribal immoralities and warfares, they never let each other’s crops grow to full development. They keep on stealing each other’s cattle. They keep on— it has absolutely nothing to do with lack of agricultural knowledge. It has everything to do with sin.

And so he returned and turned the agriculture college into a Bible college to try and change the hearts of the people, which was necessary to bring about the help. Most peoples of the world have sufficient technology. We also send, of course, the wrong technology. We keep sending out doctors when we need to send out sewage workers. Clean water, good sewage is what changes the health of a community.

And again, that’s got to do with education as much as anything else, and it’s got to do with the heart that wants to look after the peoples of the world. So yes, Christian conscience will appeal, will be touched by people’s plight, but the answer is not missionaries. The answer is— sorry, the answer is not to just put money into helping their immediate needs, nor is it to send out workers for relief. It’s to send to the government the message that we as Christian citizens want our government to put taxes into this. We as Christian citizens want our government to relieve the Third World of unfair debt, which is massive.

We, you know, those are the kinds of things that I as a Christian can do which would make a real economic difference. But the change really that requires is the change of heart which comes from the gospel. And so I need to send missionaries who are going to preach the gospel, not missionaries who are going to build dams.

Any other follow-up questions in this whole area? So, but we ourselves as Christians shouldn’t necessarily be getting our hands dirty in those kinds of situations? There’s nothing wrong with a Christian doing an honest day’s work in the Third World or doing an honest day’s work in the First World. But the church shouldn’t be supporting them? I don’t see any reason why the church should be doing it.

I don’t think that Jesus Christ sent his disciples out to build dams or to take financial responsibility for the economic disasters of the Roman Empire. I can’t get any whiff of that from the scriptures at all. Inasmuch as you have opportunity, do good to all men, especially the household of faith. But it’s not, inasmuch as you’re a Christian, you must take responsibility for the welfare of all humanity. That’s not what the Bible is saying, and I don’t see why Christians should.

It’s a, it’s a hangover of the British Empire. Look guys, you did the wrong thing. You really did. The British Empire was a dreadful mistake. Make no mistake about it, it was a dreadful mistake.

You did Awful things. I am part of that empire and I share the guilt with you. What we did to Australian Aborigines is appalling in the extreme. There is no justification and there is no way we could ever rationalise what we did to the Australian Aborigines. We practised genocide.

That is what we Brits have done. Now face it. Confess it, repent of it, and move on. Don’t keep on going on the guilt trip about it. It’s over.

There’s not much you can do about it now. You can’t help the Aborigines of Tasmania. They don’t exist anymore. So there’s no point going around planting trees in their memory or something or other. It’s gone.

It was a terrible mistake. It was all wrong. We should never have done it, but we have. There’s no way of fixing it, so we’re going to just ask God to forgive us and move on. But this, this guilt trip we’re on has really affected terribly the whole idea of Christian missions because we Christians feel the guilt more than our nations feel the guilt.

So our Prime Minister won’t say sorry because he might get sued and then the Australian government would have to pay the money for all the things we’ve done wrong and reparations would be too much. So we don’t say sorry. So the Christian, the Christian feels that the non-Christian won’t cope with it. But Christians feeling it have now allowed it to run the agenda instead of allowing the gospel to run the agenda. That’s really what should be.

Could you possibly say something about, um, a few years ago in England, um, there’s another big article written on talking about 2 commissions, Matthew 28, but also looking back to Genesis 1 and ruling over the fish of the sea. And there’s a common idea that preaching the gospel is important, but there’s also a responsibility to be ruling over creation. Every human being has a responsibility to be ruling over the nations, over the creation, right? So that is what I pay my tax government money for, and that is what I write to my government and my local member to do for us. Any pagan can do that.

Only Christians can preach the gospel. So there’s no reason for me as a Christian to go out and do what my pagan neighbour can do quite adequately. And so my way is to get the pagans out looking after the world while I do the thing the pagan can’t do, although we keep on electing them as bishops to try to, that is preach the gospel. So you’ve got to try and see the perspective on that. As I go around the world, I care for the world, and so I don’t rip it off, I don’t plunder it, I do recycle things and so on because I care for the world.

But that is not what my life’s work is about. My life’s work as the one who rules the world finds its fulfilment in the person of Jesus Christ. So Genesis 1:26-27 finds its fulfilment in Jesus. He is the image of the invisible God, and he brings mankind to the glory to which we were created, for which we are created, through his death and resurrection as he tastes death for everyone. So Genesis 1:26 is picked up in Psalm 8 and is picked up in Hebrews 2, and it’s in Jesus Christ that we come to it, not in the ecological balancing of the impossible world, because we live in a fallen world now.

You’ll never balance it, this ecological system. So I’m for getting the pagans to do it. I’m for doing it as a human being, but my life’s work is not that, and humanity will not do it through ecology. It is in the gospel that it is done, that we should be. So I don’t think it’s 2 commissions.

I think that’s just again rationalising why we shouldn’t be spending our lifetime preaching the gospel. And you can’t think that Jesus sent the disciples out to care for the fairy penguins. Well, that is my basic problem. My basic problem is, if this is in fact what Jesus wants us to do, why is it that the apostles seem not to be preoccupied with it? And they, you don’t get it, you don’t get from them the idea that anything except getting the gospel out is what matters.

And there seem to me times when Jesus gets past the ball and he puts it down on the ground on this matter and walks away.

Paul, um, concerned to preach the gospel where it had never been heard before, in a way in which he could say he’s preached the gospel— I can’t remember. Yes, from Lyricum to everywhere else. Of course, there are loads of places where he hasn’t preached. Yes. But he’s saying that that particular area, in a sense, has now got a Christian community.

Now, my burden as an apostle is to preach where it’s never been heard before. Now, is there a sense in which— I mean, I take very much take your point about guilt and all this sort of thing, but is there a sense in which there should be some of us concerned perhaps as a church to reach the people who’ve never been reached before? Um, if you’re asking me that question, there are a couple of things that I think I want to say about that. Good. Will you hold the microphone like that?

All right. Repeat the question for the sake of people who didn’t come to the conference. Oh, for the people who didn’t come to the conference? Oh, I think, Philip, they ought to pay some price for not being here. I, I, I don’t think they ought to know what the question is.

They’ve got to try and piece the question together from the answer. Absolutely, press on. All right, well, although I’m not going to repeat the question, if I understood it correctly, it was that the Apostle Paul, uh, was anxious to get the gospel out everywhere and that he pressed on to where it wasn’t been— hadn’t been preached before. And what’s more, he says he was anxious to get it where there was no other foundation that had been laid. Um, I want to say I warm to the idea, but is this not part of being apostle to the Gentiles?

He’s got to get that gospel out everywhere because that’s his prime commission. And the others, they don’t have that prime commission, do they? And they don’t seem to be driven with the same sort of drive. I— my own view on the You know that bizo about doing good to all men and especially to the household of faith? I think if you know an area where there’s no gospel to them, that ought to be in the forefront of your prayers.

You see, the good you can do always begins with the prayer. It might finish because you mightn’t be able to do much more than that. If you don’t pray about peace in Northern Ireland, there’s something wrong with you, I reckon. But I can’t do much more than that. Do you know what I mean?

But I ought not to think of that as being a nothing. I mean, there’s no doubt in my mind that South Africa has existed as long as it has in answer to the prayers of Christian people. Now, God might do something more in answer to our prayers. And certainly if you say there’s a group, a group of people who never heard the gospel there, Well, there are groups of people in Europe who could say they’ve never heard the gospel. There are groups of people in churches in Britain for whom the gospel is a total mystery.

This is one of the problems, brother, isn’t it? It’s so hard. I had a mate who went out to Kenya because he saw an advertisement and said there were 6 million people who’d never heard the gospel. He said, for the 5 years I was there, I couldn’t find one of them. He said, we went on safari once and we were in the remotest village and we came across a nomad and we got to him through 4 different languages and he told us the gospel back again.

And you know, it’s, it’s, you don’t know where are they. And the church I grew up in, you, you really, you could have stayed there all your life and never really understood. That salvation came through the death of Jesus only. And yet you’d have said this place is well evangelised. It’s so hard to really— you know, you can see what I’m making.

I don’t need to go on, I’ve only said the same thing. But let’s pick it up on Romans 15. It is a distinctive of Paul that his task was to preach the gospel where it had not been known before, because he was the suffering servant of of Isaiah 49 and 52, and he takes it back to the suffering. Now, we think of Jesus as the suffering servant, whom he is, but Paul several times quotes the suffering servant as being his task and his mission, because it was not sufficient for the servant to just reach the, uh, the nation Israel. He had to reach the Gentiles as well.

So Paul has a very clear understanding of his own place in salvation history, which uniquely takes him to reaching the people who have never been heard before. There is also, of course, a practical outworking on this one. If everybody only evangelises people who have never been reached before, then none of us are going to continue ministering in this country, are we? So we just empty this country out, and then a generation later we all come back again because the next generation has never heard it here before because all the people who— so Christians are on the constant movement. It’s one of those ones like the rich young ruler.

If what’s meant by that is if you have money when the Lord returns, you’re going to be damned because because you’ve got to give all your money away. Then we give the money to the poor who now are damned because they’ve got the money. So they give it back to you because they don’t want to be damned. And then whoever is holding the money when Jesus returns— At this point there is a short gap of just a few seconds in the original recording.

On the question of choosing platforms, if we see that a platform, for example, exists and has been taken over by non-Gospel preachers, such as say so many parishes across this country. Is it right to think, you know, if you’re in a position of thinking about ministry, to prioritise those parishes or those places in order to win those platforms back for Christ rather than just ignoring them and letting people preach heresy? I cannot work out how to answer this question in my life. At what point do you say this platform is now dysfunctional, forget it, let’s start another one? And at what point do you say this one is recapturable, let’s move in and capture it again.

I never have the slightest moral qualm about asset stripping of an organisation that was set up by evangelical forefathers. If I could get my hands on Harvard University, I would. If there’s some mechanism by which I could strip the assets and turn it to the gospel, I would, because it was founded by the Puritans out of Emmanuel College in, in Cambridge for the training of men in the ministry of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s where the money came from for the establishment of Harvard University. Now, lots of other money has come from lots of other sources over the years, but if it fell into my hands and I could sell it all up and then use it for gospel preaching, I would without the slightest whim of conscience on the matter.

So I’m for recapturing whatever can be recaptured, but sometimes you’ve got to look and say the effort of recapturing that organisation is going to take me a lifetime and I will do no gospel ministry in the meantime. And by the time I’ve recaptured it, leave it to my son he slips up and he sells it off to them again. So what have I done in a lifetime? Sometimes it’s best to say, ah, forget it, let’s start again. But that’s a judgement that different people call different ones different ways.

AFES has been— no, turn the tape off please. I can chuckle you into AFES. No, no. Well, all I was going to say was I think that’s also got to do with almost like a temperament thing. Some people can put up with it and make old platforms work, and other people are so driven up the wall by it that the amount of nervous energy that goes into it strips them of the ability to do anything.

And some of my Christian friends have picked up old platforms, and I simply say, I don’t know how they can put up with it. I honestly don’t. But in the end, they’re moving the barrow along. It’s not going at a great gait, but it’s moving in the right direction. And I say, well, thank God for them, and I might pick it up one day after they’ve moved it far enough.

But it’s just not what I can do.

Thank you. Let’s move on from there because we have a whole clutch of questions. Let’s move on to another area where there’s a clutch of questions— women’s ministry. Let me just read a couple of them out to you, Philip, because I think this is one which will concern a lot of us. In England, there seems to be many opportunities and options for men to go into full-time paid ministry.

For women, these are far more limited. What advice would you give to those of us presumably women, thinking through how to go forward from here? And as well, for Philip, can you tell us a bit about how women’s ministry at St. Matthias is carried out and how you came to that position?

Dear women, dear sisters, you go for as much ministry as you can get and keep pressing the door for more opportunities to open up for you to minister the Gospel. The majority of you will not wind up, I take it, in full-time Christian ministry, but in the great ministry of being wife and mother. But you do not know which ones of that will be, and so you may as well push for Christian ministry until you make that decision to turn to the man who has proposed to you and say yes for a change.

And then that will modify everything else that’s happening. But if you spend your life waiting around to know whether you are going to marry or not, you’re wasting years. Get on with ministry in the meantime, get on with training in ministry in the meantime. It’s the best way of training to be a wife and mother, and given the economics and circumstances of the life that lie ahead, when the children are off your hands, you move back into that kind of ministry. And even anyway, if you don’t move back into that kind of work, you’ll find that a wife and mother has opportunities for ministry in family church and to the community around about her which are unparalleled.

So many churches have been held together by the women working, because so many churches are family churches and women are the centre of the family. And so family churches, family women’s ministries is endless. So spending a few years in full-time Christian ministry before you become wife and mother is one of the best possible things you could do in preparing yourself for a life of useful ministry as a wife and mother. And if that doesn’t come about, well then you’re on the right track anyway. So do not let the number of jobs available in any way affect your decision-making in this process.

You just press on in there and try and get them. They need and are increasing, and we certainly— having keen Christian sisters who want to teach the Word of God in godliness and holiness and don’t want to be men actually find lots of jobs around Australia. The ones that find difficulty getting jobs are the ones who want to be men. They find it very hard to get jobs and then claim victimisation. By and large, if they were men, they wouldn’t get jobs, but you’re not allowed to say that, it’s politically incorrect.

But there are certain people who would never get jobs except for the fact that they’re women, and at the moment we’ve got this kind of guilt complex about whether we should or shouldn’t give them jobs. So be a woman, enjoy being a woman, and serve God that way. Now let me think now about the questions you were making. What are we doing at St. Matthias? We’re employing lots of women, always have.

First assistant minister I had working with us here was a woman. And I would still make that choice, same choice. That is because a lot of our people are single, working with students and with young graduates, and I think in that context it’s very important to have women ministers who are full-time. In a family church, it’s much simpler. The husbands are the pastors of every wife, each husband of his own wife.

1 Corinthians 14, remember, you’re to go home and ask your own husband. The Greek word there is idiot. Um, you go and ask your own idiot, um, well, that’s a bit of your own, uh, if you have questions, because each man is to be the pastor of his wife. If the man is not someone whom you could look to as to be your pastor, don’t marry him. Uh, that is very clear, isn’t it?

It’s not just that you’ve got to marry a Christian, you’ve got to marry a man who’s going to pastor you. If he can’t pastor you, then don’t marry him. If he’s not interested in pastoring, don’t marry him. If he is interested in pastoring you, then what a wonderful man that may be. You still may not marry him if you don’t want to, but if you want to, at least you’re getting in the right ballpark this time.

Now, because the family churches have these husbands who are pastoring their wives, there isn’t the same urgency for having women workers as in single churches full of single people where there are no husbands to be doing the pastoring of the women. Well, that’s the kind of church we’re in, and that’s why we’ve always had women working on our staff. We have 3, 4 full women working full-time on the staff at the moment, and And I rejoice in their fellowship. But whereas we’ve been able to retain our staff men for years— 2 of our men have been working with us since 1980. In fact, no pastor, no long-term pastor of our church has ever resigned.

That’s right, isn’t it? We’ve not lost one. So we started employing them from 1980 onwards and everyone has stuck with us, and we have about 15 of them and none of them have ever resigned. We have at the same time gone through lots and lots of women and we’ve been really— the longest that any have served is 10 years and that is because they’ve all married and moved into domesticity and had children and made that choice and we’re very sad. I curse any man who comes near any of our women staff but I rejoice for the women because that’s what they want and because they want it I’m glad, kind of.

And would like it to be so. So there’s a very big difference between men and women that we respect. Now, the way in which women minister is different to the way in which men minister, and therefore we have a completely different programme for their training and different strategies in their deployment and the way in which we use. For example, our women staff all have one extra week’s holiday a year. We work harder at them taking their days off and their time off, and we make sure that they get more free time than the men.

That is because we’ve seen women’s ministry is more strenuous than men’s ministry. It is much more emotionally draining, and there is a much higher burnout rate amongst women in full-time ministry than there is amongst men. Now, if you want to say men and women exactly the same, you’re being cruel to women. You’ve got to recognise there’s a very big difference. Women approach the ministry context always relationally, men always task-wise, and that difference is huge.

So I’ve— we now see that women can look after about half to two-thirds of the number of people that a man could look after because men do it by groups and by tasks. Women do it by relationships and individually. That makes a huge difference. When I get the women to go and sort out a problem, say coming to a house party, I say, well, we’ve got to chase these 20 people, 10 men, 10 women, to come to the house party this weekend. I can give the 10 names to a man and give him an hour and he’ll have rung them all up and he’ll tell me who’s coming, who’s not coming, I can give the same 10 to a woman and it’ll take about 5 or 6 hours before she’ll be able to tell me who’s coming and not coming.

Because when the men ring up, they say, hey Fred, you coming to the house party? Great, thanks. Bang. Phil, you coming to the house party? Thanks.

Bang. When the women ring up, they’ve got to say, hello Mary, how are you? How’s the cat? How’s Mum? How’s Dad?

Have you heard from Betty? By the way, you coming to the house party? Oh, that’s really good. And so there’s a whole other conversation takes place. Now what I’ve also discovered is that the men frequently have to go back and make the phone calls again because they got it all wrong.

The women never have to ring back again because they get it right. That is because they do enough relationship work to understand what the answer actually meant. They really communicate very accurately and very well, whereas the men, they just are ticking squares on boxes and not dealing with humans, and so they frequently get it wrong. So although it takes the women longer, they do a much better job than the men do. It’s an understanding of this.

In our training, we try and train the women to be more functional in their relationships and we try and train the men to be more relational in their functions. It’s approaching things differently. The women often do not have a turn-off button. You might think the way I answer questions, I don’t either, but the women don’t have a turn-off button. When a person comes and shares with me massive problems in their life, huge, horrendous, problems of their child abuse, their sexual abuse as children, etc.

They share it with me. I’m sympathetic, I’m kind, I’m caring, I feel for them. They walk out the door. By the time they’ve reached the gate at the footpath, I’ve already watched the cricket on television and have totally forgotten what they talked to me about. I just have within me what is normal for most men, a switch-off button, and it’s as if they haven’t been there.

But a woman having gone through the same experience will be worried about that person for the next 3 days, will be lying awake at night sobbing about the storey that has taken place and so on. And that is why women are so good at caring for others, but it’s also why they get so heavily burnt out because they don’t have this switch-off button. So we try and help women to see their task in Bible teaching rather than being cheap psychiatrists. But they’ve got— we keep pushing. Now remember, I’m doing men and women as if they’re 2 totally different communities.

There’s a continuum, isn’t there? There are some fairly masculinely minded women and there are some fairly feminine men. And so there’s a continuum, but there is a fair difference in the way in which we handle ministry, which is complementary and very valuable. And that’s why I’m very keen on having women on our staff, because they really do help the quality of the ministry on our staff. But I recognise that the ministry of family life is one of the few things that would ever have precedence over gospel ministry.

And when women choose to minister in in their family rather than minister publicly, they are doing a right thing, and I encourage them to it, though I hate it.

I just want to say, Philip, only just briefly, that the, the women’s worker at our church, although we are by and large a family-oriented church as you know, does a lot of helping the women in our church in evangelism. She sees herself to be a trainer of them in evangelism. As much more than somebody who is ministering to them at the level of teaching them the Bible. And she’s good at it too. Yeah, yeah.

I find some of the single women have to reach a certain age before the married women and the mothers will accept them. There’s a kind of graduation that takes place when you get married, and a double graduation when you have the baby. That means the single woman is excluded until they reach a certain kind of age, wherever it is, or have a certain confidence in themselves to be able to do it. I think that confidence in themselves might be a thing which younger people can have. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you.

Any follow-up on this important area?

Right, let’s move on. I can’t— right, sorry. Could you say something about training for women, given that it is generally the case that women aren’t going to be spending the whole of their lives Is it reasonable to expect denominations to pay to train us in a way that they might pay to train men? And if not, what sort of training should we be looking for instead? Um, the training issue is an important one.

See, people know 1 Timothy 2 as the passage which says that women are not to teach and have authority over men. But that’s not what the passage says. What the passage says is a woman should learn.

That’s what the passage says. The key verb and principal idea of the verse is that women should learn. And I am all for women learning. Now, the manner in which they learn is in quietness and full submission, but then a godly person, man, should learn in godly— in trembling and fear too. But learning is the women.

So I am not for this kind of view of ministry that doesn’t treat the intellectual ability of women with full integrity. So I’m for women learning as much as they can learn and for teaching them in theology as much as we have the opportunity and possibilities of teaching them theology. However, I think we do need to recognise the limited resources we have in Sydney. You may have unlimited resources here, but I suspect not. The limited resources of the Christian community and the realities of life.

That is, in there, men have to choose gospel over one career. Women have to choose the gospel over 2 careers. For men, the choice is, I will be a banker or I’ll be a missionary. For women, it is, I’ll be a banker or I’ll be a wife and mother or I’ll be a missionary. Now I know you can be a missionary banker and you can be a missionary mother, but there’s that kind of choice, right?

That difference, I think, makes it a little harder for them to make the choice at 21 than it does for men. And so it is easier for men to make the choice early and to move into full-time education and make the investment. A 4-year theological education, and anything less than that’s not worth doing, the 4-year theological education you’ve got to see as, well, how many years of ministry am I going to be engaged in then? So if I’m 55 and I’m looking at doing 4 years of training, well, that’s no longer economical. Now if I’m 21 and a woman and I’m hoping to marry, then to spend 4 years in theological education to be trained to be a professional Bible teacher when in fact at 27 I’m marrying doesn’t seem to be a particularly good use of those 4 years.

I may as well have just gone and ministered for the 5 years and be done with it. Um, and so I’d postpone the theological training element of women just as a matter of practicality. Until we see that the likelihood of marriage is diminished. But it’s impossible to pick it. So several women we’ve brought into ministry in their 30s and they’ve gone off and got married on us.

No sooner than we train them and they went and did it. Whereas, whereas one of the— just to— Hooray! Any follow-up questions? I don’t see any hands. Let’s move on because there are a whole clutch of questions here.

What factors should govern my choice of a church at which to serve as lay assistant or 938 apprentice, and what do you consider to be their relative importance? I think, and you see, for many of us who are thinking of going and doing a 1 or 2-year MTS-type placement. If you were asking me, I’d be wanting to look to a place where I could learn as much as I could as fast as I could. And I think I’d be looking to work with people whose ministry I’d hope to replicate rather than where I’ve got to be pushing on in the initiative at the point where I am at the present moment. So I’d be looking to work with people whose ministry I’m saying, that’s exactly the sort of ministry I’d like to learn to do.

Thank you. Let’s move on. James 3:1 and 1 Corinthians 3:10-13 talk about the full-time Christian worker having to accept greater responsibility and will be judged the more severely. Would you like to comment upon that and why therefore we should go into it if we’re accepting the greater responsibility and will be judged more severely? Well, I assume that you are judged more severely because you’ve got the knowledge to be able to do it.

Now if you’re saying, oh well, so I won’t be judged more severely, I’ll just have the knowledge and put it in a bag and hide it. I think there is a word for you in that parable. Okay, but it’s simply saying if you set yourself up as a teacher, we assume you understand what you’re teaching. Now if you’re saying, well, I really do understand what’s got to be taught, but I’m not going to be the teacher in case I get dealt with severely. I think you’re already being dealt with.

What if you say, I’m not going to learn because then I won’t have to be judged? Well, I’m saying you’re a slug.

And I think, I think you’ll have to meet your own Master and give an account of your stewardship. I’m expecting every Christian everywhere to be going flat out as hard as they can. And if you start to say, oh well, I’m tired of working now, I’m saying, you know, it’s not the kingdom you’re thinking about. So what is the importance then of gaining knowledge in order to be a teacher? The importance of gaining knowledge is so you yourself grow more like Christ because you know and you understand more, and you have the great joy of leading the flock to grow like Christ.

But Take care because it’s very serious. The flock is a very important body to Christ. They’re his, purchased them with his own blood. But do you answer the question? I don’t say much.

Man, a few words. Are we going to let him get away with that?

Just this, this verse is something that I think a lot about. It does say that not many of you should presume to be teachers. Which seems, you know, quite a, quite a strong warning, as opposed to the one that comes up tomorrow morning where if you want to do it, it’s a good thing. Yeah, I think they’re addressing different situations, aren’t they? And, and I tremble when I look around and see the people who’ve set themselves up as teachers, brother.

I tremble to think what the Day of Judgement will be like when God will correctly where true blame lies. I mean, it really is terrifying. And it’s why I work as carefully as I can. I don’t have the raw material that other people have got, but I work as hard as I can because I take seriously people growing up into Christ. But it’s a good thing.

And I think it— if you say, well, it’s better for me not to do it than to muck it up, I’m saying that is correct. But could you study to show yourself approved unto God? Could you do that? And if you could, wouldn’t that be the better way? Have a go, mate.

I would like to emphasise the word presume. Not many of you should presume to be teachers, except the word presume is not in the Greek.

It would suit me, it’d be very helpful. Just, it’s one of those NIV kind of additions to make it easy for people who don’t like what it’s saying. It’s saying not many of you should be teachers. It’s actually what the text is saying, which makes therefore much harder to answer your question. Um, I’ll take that up with James when I meet him.

You see, the problem in 1 Timothy 1 where people are teaching who do not know what they are teaching a man. I command, command certain men not to be false teachers any longer, not to devote themselves to myths. These promote endless good, etc. These people don’t know what they’re talking about. Now, we shouldn’t be teachers because we’ll be judged with greater strictness, and we know that’s what teachers will be.

But you must be a teacher of the Word of God to your own children. Yeah, and yourself. And therefore, the NIV is right in its inkling about the text, but the text is not saying it. And it’s got to do with people, oh, I’d like to be a teacher, and there is a kudos, a status in being a teacher. We have people volunteering to go in ministry in Sydney who want it as a way of getting spiritual status.

There is no— that is not the case. There is no higher spiritual status by being a teacher of the Word of God. Many will come unto me on the last day and say, Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name, work out many— and I’ll say, depart from me, I never knew you evildoers. Those who are in the kingdom of heaven are not those who teach the Bible. Those who are in the kingdom of heaven are those who do the will of the Father who is in heaven.

And it’s a great danger to think because a person has preached to thousands and is a, you know, eloquent preacher, that somehow that makes him spiritual. Now, don’t think about being a teacher as the way to godliness. That’s not the way to godliness at all. Teachers know enough to know they’re actually going to be judged with greater strictness. But that doesn’t mean don’t be a teacher or don’t teach.

It cannot mean that for whatever else the Scriptures are saying in encouraging us to teaching. So therefore, if you’re going to be a teacher, go to the right Bible college and get taught properly and trained fully. This Mickey Mouse idea that Brits have, which is somewhere between total personal arrogance and complete inane stupidity, whereby I can be trained to be a professional Bible teacher the rest of my life by doing a 3-month Mickey Mouse course at some little Bible institute somewhere, because I’m clever enough to be able to train myself for the rest of my life just on snippets of information, or that, that somehow what you need to be taught in the Bible is so simple that you only need a few months and you can get it all sorted. It’s absolutely ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.

The, the length and rigour of theological training that we’re doing in Sydney is basic, and it’s 4 years, and it’s hard grind, and it was considerably more difficult than my basic degree that I did. It is hard and strenuous, and all that does for you is it creates a platform whereby you can self-educate properly for the rest of your adult life. And the people who think, well, I’ve got my degree in theology now, I don’t need to look at the books, Well, their degree is not worth having. Most degrees in theology aren’t anyway, but that certainly is not worth having. All it did for the 4 years of hard rigour was give me the equipment from which to be able to educate myself ever since.

And if I hadn’t done the full course, I would not have enough equipment to keep me going for the full course of my ministry. Why are old ministers so boring in the pulpits and failing in their teaching. Why you go to church after church, you find these old middle-aged men saying nothing anymore? It’s because they weren’t trained properly in the first place. And when they were trained properly in the early years, they were everybody’s dream because they said all kinds of stuff because they were just regurgitating the information they got in college.

But 10, 15 years down the track, they’ve got nothing to say. And the continuous education programme needs the boost at the beginning, and the bigger the boost, the bigger the work you put in the beginning, the greater the opportunities you have down the track. But there is an English disease that, you know, I’ve got an MA from Oxford in maths, therefore 6 months in a Bible college will enable me to kind of cope, because once you’ve got an MA from Oxford, you can learn anything, can’t you? It’s caught between either the human arrogance and hubris or the failure to understand the intensity of theological reflection necessary for ministry, or both.

Let’s move on just because time is running away with us. There’s a clutch of questions here on holiness. If there’s a particular sin with which we struggle, how can we know if it’s appropriate for us to go into full-time Christian ministry? And is someone who’s gone through a period of backsliding then ineligible from paid public Christian ministry?

Sorry, Mark, can you repeat the question? Sorry, yes, I will. He’s done that on the mic already once.

If there’s a particular sin with which we struggle, how can we know if it’s appropriate or not appropriate to go into full-time Christian work? And if someone who has gone through a period of backsliding excluded from paid public Christian ministry?

Uh, there are certain things which, if you see evidenced in the life of the person, you ought not to make him a leader of God’s people.

If it is, if it is perfectly clear that he cannot bring up his family Christianly then I think that excludes him. I don’t think it necessarily disqualifies him when he’s moved into it, but I think you might think a second time before you put him into it. Now I think that’s what, uh, 1 Timothy 3 is saying.

Um, um, I want time to think about that. All sin is sin, and any sin is just an expression, any sin is a symptom, an expression of the disease of our sinfulness. However, some sins are more serious than other sins, and there is a— it is an absurdity of the Pharisees not to notice that justice and fairness is important and tithing your mint and your cumin is unimportant. Um, you should look after justice and tithe your mint and cumin, but you’ve got to recognise justice is far more, and mercy are far more important than tithing, mint, and cummin. So what are the kinds of big things that really make the Christian gospel, uh, that make the person unsuited for public ministry?

Well, they are public things. Now that’s what the 1 Timothy 3 and the Titus 1 list is about. And those things, it seems to me, centre on a few matters. One are related to the activities you’re engaged in. So if you’re going to be managing the household of God, you should be able to manage your own household.

If you can’t manage your own household, prima facie, you haven’t got the abilities to manage anybody’s household, let alone God’s. But some of them have got to do with public notoriety. You mustn’t allow— do anything that if it were to be known and published by Rupert Murdoch, who’s not an Australian, who has resigned his Australian citizenship, then it would be a matter of discredit to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Amongst these things in particular are matters that are important for the modelling of the church. And it seems to me that there are certain things that are constantly referred to, and these are the things that tip people out of ministry to this day: sexual immorality, financial immorality, and addiction such as alcoholic addiction are the things that move people out of Christian ministry even to today. And so it’s interesting that they’re the things that Paul lists in, in the lists. So they’re the ones I’d be concerned about. There is a piece of godly Christian wisdom that I cannot find in the Bible, but it’s in Steve Farrar’s book Point Man, which is a good book full of godly wisdom and not much Bible, that the thing I do when I’m 20 is not the same as the thing I do when I’m 45.

So if I’m 20, I’m caught by the police hooning up and down the main strip of the town Uh, at 80 miles an hour, um, well, that’s a bad thing, that’s a wrong thing, that’s something I need to repent of and change, that’s inconsistent with my Christian profession. But 20-year-olds are stupid, and so it’s not to be surprising. But if at 45 I’m hooning up and down the main strip, you’ve got to say this man has got major personal problems and is totally unsuited for ever being in the ministry of the gospel. So there is a certain situationalism in the decisions that are being made about suitabilities for public and Christian ministry as well. And that is affecting the backsliding one that is mentioned.

So in the early years of Christian life, I mean, every sin is backsliding, but there’s early periods of Christian life that people go through where there can be serious lapses and, and turnings away from Christ, where repentance comes and it picks up. I wouldn’t want to race the person straight into Christian ministry after that. I’d want to be kind of making sure that the Christian life has continued for as long as the backsliding had continued, to make sure that this is not just a backslide into Christianity before they backslide to their true state of non-Christianity. But I wouldn’t have thought it excluded the person permanently or officially. There are some sins though, of course, which leave you in an unconstitutional state.

And that is particularly the issues of marriage, remarriage, and several families and so on. That would just make it impossible to be in Christian ministry. And so the divorce remarriage one is a particularly difficult one because it’s something that you continue to bear. And so the sexual immorality ones can be as well, though needn’t be. Um, it’s, it’s a difficulty.

I have several friends of mine who are in Christian ministry who have had abortions. Um, you see, there’s a, there’s a very private sin in one sense, isn’t it? I mean, most people don’t know they’ve had abortions, but they’ve come and talked to me about it as to whether having had abortions they could now not have, not enter into Christian ministry. Now, I think abortion is fairly serious, as they do, and I think the abortions they’re talking about were murder. I think those women have actually committed murder, and they think they have committed murder.

They’ve brought it to the Lord Jesus Christ. They’re forgiven of it. And it is part of their past. But you see, the Apostle Paul was a murderer and he was chosen to be an apostle. It doesn’t necessarily disqualify you.

And it’s strange, isn’t it, that if they hadn’t committed murder and retained their children and lived, uh, then in some ways they may not have been able to continue in ministry. So it’s not even the seriousness of the sin, it’s the consequences and the social standing and the modelling that is involved in the sin. So it’s a tricky issue. One of the keys to it is tell. Be honest.

Whoever is the platform holder, you must be completely frank about it with them. I almost don’t mind what it is that the prospective staff member is going to tell me is in their past but I am always unsympathetic and hostile and take draconian actions if I find out about it later because of some exposure. That, that is something that you, your church cannot cope with, is the secrecy. So if you have done things, that’s why these women have come and talked to me about it, different women over the years that have been employed in our staff, and they’ve come and said to me, well, you need to know that, you know, before I was a Christian, I was living with a man and had several abortions, and does this disqualify me? And I don’t think it does and have continued with them in Christian ministry and fellowship and know that they bear the pain and hurt within themselves as well as the knowledge of the forgiveness of God within themselves.

That was what you were going to say? That was the answer? No, no, I wasn’t going to make any answer at all. I was just going to make it— I will make an observation though. A friend of mine who was in ministry and was exercising a great ministry went away and lived with another woman.

And by a miracle, both of God and of his lady wife, they’ve come back together again. And I think he has got a Sunday school class now, and I think he might in time get back to where he was. He may not. It’s been a terrible, terrible time, but he’s certainly not excluded from the fellowship of God’s people. And some ministers have actually just held on to him and held on to him until there’s been that sort of restoration, which I consider to be miraculous beyond all belief, that they’ve come that far.

But I think he might yet in time prove himself in such a position to be able to come back. Um, I, I think it’s hard though, Chappell, isn’t it? Because it’s terribly hard. People have enormous trust in their ministers. Yes.

And it’s not even so much as what the person has done that is wrong, it is the lies to the congregation. Yeah. That go on, which always then niggle away at the congregation in the future. So you say Yes, but he preached to us like this before. Yeah, and he was carrying on.

Yep, yep, yep. It’s difficult. That’s the difficult one. It is difficult. It is difficult indeed.

Yep. The last question— if the last question, because of time, is directed to Chapo, it’s on the same sort of line. What should a gospel worker do when they’re consistently plagued by the same personal struggles in their walk with God? The eejits are particularly prayerlessness, lack of discipline, but we can generalise. But they also mean pornography.

Well, if they mean pornography, my advice is don’t buy it and don’t read it. Okay? And if you find that you’re in a position where you can’t do that, you need to take, I think, into some fellowship of closer friends who will scrutinise in some way for you. But if in fact you’re just talking about why do I find it hard to say my prayers, I just want to say join the club. Whoever said it was going to be easy?

And I don’t know, there’s no doubt in my mind the point that Philip spoke about, that he, the point that he made from Point Man, the temptations which come to me to sin keep moving their ground as I get older. But I encounter new temptations which if you’d told me when I was 40 I was going to engage, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind. And I’m saying that’s the Christian life, isn’t it? I’m committed to repentance and faith. That’s how I started and that’s how I begin and that’s how I’ll finish.

When I get to glory, mercifully, there’ll be no more repentance.

Will there? Will I be repenting in glory? I’ve never thought about that, but that’s one of the good things of this world that we won’t have in heaven. Well, I certainly won’t. I don’t know, Philip, but just sin is a pest really, isn’t it?

It just is. And, and, and if you think you’ve got it under your belt, well, what a big surprise you’re in for. You know, just keep at it. Are you going to talk about progress tomorrow? Progress?

1 Timothy chapter 4, verse 15 has a wonderful word to us, which is awful, awful word. Be diligent in these matters, that is your life and doctrine. Be diligent in these matters so that everyone may see your progress. It does not say see your arrival. If you have to wait till you’ve arrived before you can minister the gospel, then we’ll have no ministers of the gospel.

But arrival doesn’t even help the congregation always. What a congregation needs to see is not that you’re a person who’s got it all together, but that you’re a person who is themselves making progress. And that makes it much easier for them to take you as a model because they keep on following you in making progress. So as you repent and change, mature and develop and grow in your understanding, So you will— why is Dick Lucas one of the great preachers of all time? And he is, he really is.

It’s because he’s still making progress. You know how Dick says, oh, I didn’t have that right before, but I’ve got it now. His mind has not stopped. His growth and understanding has not stopped. And so here is a man in his 70s whom 20-year-olds like to hear because he’s still making progress.

Now, it’s not that I know everything and my life is wholly complete. But that I am still in the fight and I’m still growing. That’s what I’ve got to be to be in ministry. So don’t make your ungodliness prevent you from being in ministry as if perfection was just around the corner and then you could get in, because it’s not around the corner unless you drive very recklessly.