Audio Transcript
In life, big callings come upon us at various points. That’s how life works. The older we get, the more responsibilities we take on. We become students and church members and employees and then husbands and wives and then parents. Those new responsibilities call us to be stretched and to be humbled and to be trained. But how much training do you need before you can succeed at something? It’s a question with an autobiographical turn for you, Pastor John. Today on Ask Pastor John: Was Piper unprepared?
Unprepared for what? Unprepared for the pastorate. You became a pastor in 1980 at the age of 34. And when you took leadership at Bethlehem Baptist Church in downtown Minneapolis, you had what we might call some gaps in your résumé. You had zero elder experience, zero experience hiring and firing people, zero experience making a church budget, had done exactly zero baby dedications, made zero hospital visitations, and conducted zero funerals. You did have two weddings and fifteen sermons preached. But you also had thirteen or so years of academic training and experience in the Bible. This was all mentioned at a conference this spring in Justin Taylor’s interview with you about your early pastoring days.
In that delightful conversation, this point about your pastoral experience (or lack of it) raised further questions online that I wanted to collect and pitch to you here — namely, two questions I see. First, looking back now, were you unprepared for pastoral ministry? And second, what’s the right balance of academic and “real-life” pastoring experience a man needs before he becomes a pastor? Is either decisive?
Prepared to Pastor
Well, I’m really glad you asked these questions, because I knew after that interview the things that we were talking about there would raise questions like these. And so, I’m glad for the chance to clarify.
I think the answer to your first question, “Was I unprepared?” is no. I think I was prepared enough that, faced with the different challenges of pastoring, I had the resources in my Bible and in my life experience and in my church experience and in my God-given intuitive grasp of human nature and common sense that I could figure out most things sufficiently. So, that’s what I mean by no. I don’t think I was unprepared.
The second question raises another question. You say, “What’s the right balance of academic and real-life pastoring experience?” And the question it raises for me is whether real-life experience in every aspect of life — not just pastoring, per se — counts as “pastoring experience.” I think in one sense, at least, it does, and that certainly was the case for me. Let me try to illustrate from my own life, at least as best as I can figure out what God was doing in those years.
“Every day is an education if your eyes are open.”
You mentioned that I had never run an elder meeting, never hired or fired anyone, never overseen the formation of a church budget, right? All that’s true. So, what in the world do I mean when I say I was not unprepared? Here’s the reality as best I can remember it.
School of Life
When I came to Bethlehem, I was 34 years old. I was married, had three children, owned a home, held down a job for the past six years, had more or less kept my eyes open with a serious observation for about, say, sixteen years: from the year that I left home at age 18 until now (I’m 34). I didn’t walk around with my eyes closed for sixteen years. Hundreds of things were registering as wise or foolish, helpful or harmful, good or bad, efficient or inefficient. I was in the school of life every day of my life.
- I watched my teachers in college and felt, “That made an effective lecture. That didn’t make an effective lecture.”
- I watched the chaplain and how he visited me in the infirmary and what he said and what he looked like and how he had people over to his house.
- I watched the way the speakers in chapel spoke, and I just absorbed what was helpful and what was unhelpful in communication.
- In seminary, I watched David Hubbard, the president, lead a “faculty of stallions,” as he called them. I was on the Student Advisory Committee to sit in on some of the faculty meetings, and I marveled at his way of managing these free spirits.
- I watched Ray Ortlund lead his church with joy there in Pasadena in those crucial years.
- I watched the way Virgil Olson functioned as the dean at Bethel, and how his wife related to the faculty. I said, “I love this couple.”
- I watched the way Carl Lundquist, the president, dealt with controversy among the faculty and held them together when he was the president there.
- I watched the way Walt Westell led the Bible department and how he interviewed possible faculty members during those six years at Bethel.
And of course, all of that is the tiniest tip of the iceberg of thousands of observations about life and leadership and relationships and communication that were pouring into this brain of mine for sixteen years. Every day is an education if your eyes are open. If they’re registering — if you’re putting pieces together in your mind and building a vision of how you relate to people and how people function and what gets things done and what succeeds and what doesn’t — you’re fitting them into a pattern in your mind and in your heart about the wise way of doing things.
Every day brings another observation that has to be fit into your growing understanding of human nature and what makes people tick and what motivates people and what offends people. A whole approach to life and leadership is being built day by day for sixteen years. I call that preparation.
Daily Bible Meditation
And then you add the most important, crucial fact for the Christian — namely, all that life experience is being filtered through the grid of a biblical worldview that is being refined every day by daily Bible reading and meditation. That’s what meditation is. How does what I’m reading right now relate to what I experienced yesterday or a year ago or what’s coming up tomorrow?
This is explosive when you think about it. Every day we are going to school by observing our own souls — “Soul, how are you feeling today? Are you going to deal with these feelings?” and on and on — our own temptations, our own habits, our motivations, and by observing other people, and in all the ways that those people intersect with our lives (whether on the street or in a novel, for example).
So, what I’m saying is that I came at age 34 to the pastorate with, let’s just say, at least sixteen years — and I’m not even counting the first eighteen, which are really formative also — of intensive schooling in the seminary of life, and sixteen years of intensive Bible reflection on all that experience, and an ever-growing, intuitive sense of what makes people tick and how they’re motivated and what their body language says about what they’re feeling and what their longings are and what would offend them and what would make them happy and what their deepest needs are. All these things emerge from my Bible-saturated life of learning and learning and learning from daily experience about human beings and the way the world works and the way God thinks about the way the world works.
“Be in the Bible every day, analyzing it carefully and synthesizing a vision from it that relates to all of life.”
So, I did not feel adrift when I walked into my first board meeting with 24 men. We called them deacons, not elders. I’d never sat in a room like that in my life when I was in charge, and I felt like I had a good handle on what biblical leadership looks like just because I thought about it a lot from the Bible. I had an intuitive sense of how to deal with real human beings, a Holy Spirit love for these men, a Holy Spirit confidence that he would work in them and for them, and then some clear biblical guidelines and instincts about what the church needs from these leaders.
And when it came to budget and money, I had developed — through extended biblical reflection, from marriage experience, personal budgeting, and being a part of another church — a theology of money, a theology of how to raise money from 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, because I had hit head-on in Germany the Kirchensteuer. That’s the German word for church tax. And I just had this big conversation with people about, “What? You support your church by taxing everybody in the world?” A certain percentage of their income tax goes to the Lutheran Church or the Catholic Church. And I thought, How does that fit in with 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, where everything is so completely non-coerced and non-required and out of love and overflowing with joy in God?
So, I had thought a lot about money, and I’d thought about how to spend it, not just raise it, because of the way Jesus talked about it and the way 1 Timothy 6 talks about it.
All-Encompassing Worldview
At every point, it seems, whether it was a baby dedication or a hospital visitation or a funeral, I had my Bible. I had a heart of compassion for parents and for grieving people. I had intuitions about human nature, all of which were informed by years of real life, dealing with people so that my confidence that I could create a baby dedication or a funeral meditation or a flow of service on Sunday morning or encourage somebody’s faith in the hospital — I could do this, because I had deep confidence in my Bible, and I knew what the Bible was doing for me in all those circumstances.
So, I suppose what I want to plead for in pastoral preparation is to say to young men at age eighteen, or whatever age they will listen to me: Be in the Bible every day, analyzing it carefully and synthesizing a vision from it that relates to all of life. Build an all-encompassing worldview from what you’re seeing in the Bible so that you feel its guidance in virtually every area of your life.
Second, open your eyes and go to school every day in the real world, analyzing what you see carefully, synthesizing it into a coherent vision of human nature and how to live wisely in this world with all that the world gives you by way of experience and information — and all of it informed by the Bible.
And third, pray, pray, pray that God would take all that Bible experience and all that life experience and form in you relational and leadership instincts and intuitions that will serve you in every dimension of pastoral life.
