History and ministry

Church history is part of that larger view. We study how theologians have dealt with truth and error in the past, and we can learn about Scripture, theology, and pastoral practice from those who have gone before us. We can see how they thought through the issues, the options they explored, and the decisions they came to. We can also see some of the mistakes they made.

Some people love history; others hate it. History contains a lot of facts, but history is not just a collection of random facts. Rather, history should be an analysis of how facts connect with one another, how one fact led to another. That is what we need to look for when we read about the church in centuries past. We can learn from them, and in some ways this is just one more angle by which we may study theology and the Bible.

Church history can give us some useful sermon illustrations to illustrate points that we wish to make  for a modern audience, but in a larger view, history provides us with case studies of how the Holy Spirit has led believers. This is sometimes inspiring, and often sobering. We realize that the church has often gone astray, and we realize that we are just as fallible as those people were. They were limited by their culture and time, and so are we. So we do our best to learn what we can from them.

Pastoral studies is sometimes call applied theology. We might also describe it as the meeting of social science and theology. This is where we discuss organizational leadership, public speaking, counseling, and how to interact with various groups in the church. Some of these topics can be approached from a secular perspective, and we can learn much by doing so.

But ideally, we bring our theological convictions with us to our work. In public speaking, for example, our goal is not to learn how to manipulate the audience through clever rhetoric. Rather, we approach the task with humility, because we worship a God who is humble enough to become a human and die for us. God will forever be humble, and in his kingdom we will be humble, and we need humility now. So when we speak to a group of people, we are not trying to show them how clever or educated we are – our role is to point them to Christ.

When we give spiritual counsel (sometimes called pastoral counseling, but it is by no means restricted to pastors), we may use some techniques discovered by psychologists, but we also bring theology into the purpose of our counsel. We are not doing this to help people discover self-sufficiency and independence from God. Rather, we want to help people see that their true identity is in Christ, and they will find their true humanity only in him.

When we study organizational management, we may learn useful ways to help large bodies of people get things done. But more importantly, we need to learn why those things need to be done in the first place. We need to learn something about what kind of leader Jesus was, and how leadership is supposed to work in his realm. We also need to learn something about ourselves, so we better understand our motives, our strengths, our weaknesses, and how we can best use those gifts to serve Christ and to help his people.

All four areas of a standard pastoral education interact with one another, and it would be good if we knew history before we studied theology, and vice versa. But we have to start somewhere, and we could start with any of these four, depending on what we are most interested in. But we have to study all four areas for the overview that we need. Today, we are focusing on Scripture, and that is the foundation for all the others.

As I said before, there is no formula that is guaranteed to give us 100 percent correct answers, and even people using the same approach to the Bible can sometimes come up with different conclusions.