Followup on Kuyper: where the rubber meets the road for many of us

Posted on December 23, 2009 by dsnoke |1 Comment

Since first writing my essay on Kuyperianism, I have gotten a lot of feedback from various people. One line of feedback has been that my characterizations of Kuperianism do not so much fit for Kuyper himself as for later people who called themselves Kuyperian. There is some truth in that, but I have also gone back and read a fair amount more of Kuyper, and I still stand by my main characterizations.

But in this essay I want to focus on the second main theme of the feedback I have gotten. This is that, regardless of whether Kuyper said it or not, or whether it influenced churches and movements in the past, we still have a rubber-meets-the-road issue before us. This is the question that every young, well-educated Christian must ask: is going into “ministry,” specifically church work such as preaching and evangelism, a higher calling than work in a “secular” field such as science, art, or humanities? Essentially, you can boil down the two schools of thought that I described as “fundamentalist” and “Kuyperian” by their answers to this question. The fundamentalist says “yes” and the Kuyperian says no.

I note that when this question is asked, it is always “high” secular callings that the person has in mind: being a famous (or at least, excellent) scientist, or an excellent artist or musician, historian, etc. The career question is rarely asked in regard to beoming a garbage man, or a checkout clerk, or a daycare worker. I’m sure that most Kuyperians would affirm all of these as callings from God, but in practice, the young person struggling with church ministry vs. secular calling is not struggling with whether that secular calling is to be a garbage man. It therefore is worth asking whether you really believe that all callings are really equal, or if what is really going on in your heart is that you feel you can be excellent in a field that the world respects quite a bit, and you feel slighted by being told that it is not as high a calling as a church ministry.

I have given this question a lot of thought and prayer over the past year, and I have concluded that on this main question, the answer is yes, preaching and evangelistic ministries are higher callings (in one very important sense) than other ministries. In saying this, I do not mean that no one should pursue any other callings, and in a grand rush, Christians should drop all secular occupations and all become preachers and evangelists. What I do mean is that we should all see ourselves as aiding the going out of the word of God as much as possible. I believe strongly that this is the focus of Scripture. “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel.” (1 Corinthians 9:22-23)

Let me draw an analogy. In an army, there are thousands of people doing all kinds of work. There are cooks, bureaucrats, computer programmers, design engineers, stockroom clerks, etc. All of these jobs are essential for the army to succeed—if not, the army would not create these jobs. If the army succeeds, all of these people rightly share credit in the victory as colaborers. Yet would anyone argue that the people working in the stockroom are doing just as crucial a task as the people doing the hand-to-hand combat in the trenches, the fighter pilots, and the behind-the-lines special forces? We give credit to all the army, but we recognize as heroes those who played a direct role in the combat.

The key aspect of the analogy is that the heroes of the battle are those who directly contributed to the direct aim of the army, which is to inflict damage on the enemy, with the implicit understanding that such people will also be the most direct targets of the enemy’s attacks. In the same way, the preacher and the evangelist are doing most directly the main task of the church, which is to fight spiritual warfare by destroying arguments and taking every thought captive for the glory of Christ (2 Corinithians 10:4-5), what I called “expanding the kingdom” in my previous essay. Such people are on the front lines and will take many more of the darts of the enemy.

If you don’t agree with me, ask the following questions. 1) Why is it that when a new church is organized, or when it has a limited budget to only hire a few people, the first person to be hired is a preacher, not a plumber, or a mathematician, etc.? We might all agree that plumbers and mathematicians might be employed to good ends by churches, but we would, I think, agree that the church is not the church without a preacher. In the same way, an army needs supply clerks, but if it only has supply clerks and no actual fighters, it is not an army. 2) Who makes more news headlines when they succumb to the darts of the enemy? If a pastor falls into sexual sin, we all know that headlines are made. When was the last time a Christian plumber or Christian mathematician made headlines by a fall into sin? Are not such people under more attack?

The natural question which then will come to many people’s minds is then, does that mean that I should drop what I am doing in my secular training and go into church ministry? If I don’t, does that mean I am being a compromiser, settling for something less than the best?

To this I emphatically answer no, not in the least. I do not think that all people who are intelligent enough to complete training in preaching or evangelism ought to go into those ministries. In the same way, I do not think that all people joining the army ought to become Green Berets or fighter pilots, or else they must be compromisers or failures.

To say that if preaching is the highest calling then I must go into it, actually can mask a self-centered pride that says I must be in the most important profession there is, or else all professions must be equal. I allow no other profession to be more important, more strategic to the kingdom of God, than my own. If you are honest with yourself, is there part of you that thinks that way? Conversely, there can be a sort of humility expressed by those who are in ministry, that does not want to tell others their jobs are less front-line in the kingdom of God. It sounds very humble to say “I am not doing work any more important than you.” But it is a false humility. How would you feel if you were on ship with only one pilot, and that person said, “I am no more important than you on this boat.” It would ring false. You all know that without that person you are lost, and in mortal danger. The ship could get to safety if the chef failed to do his job, or if the beds were not made, or if the orchestra refused to play, or if the passengers all got grumpy. But without someone who knows how to steer the ship, it is lost. In the same way, without someone to rightly divide the Word of God and bring it to the people, the church is lost at sea. Of course, we should also say at the same time, “I am no more valuable than you as a person.” But it is simply not true that all jobs are equally critical in the grand strategy of things.

I believe strongly in the Reformed idea of “calling,” and believe that there are many callings, all of which are honorable. Deciding our calling is not just a matter of deciding what is the most strategic calling in the kingdom of God. It should also involve deciding what I am in fact gifted at, what opportunities I have, and where the needs of the kingdom are. For example, if I am going to be a pastor I need to not just ask whether I am smart enough to pass courses in Greek and Hebrew. I also need to ask whether I love people, enough to have them call me in the middle of the night, enough to bear the burdens of all kinds of things told to me in secret, enough to seek out and befriend people with very few social graces and attractiveness. A pastor is a “shepherd” who tends for the sheep and seeks out the lost ones. In addition, I need to ask whether I have a certain degree of control over my sins, so as not to bring scandal on the church when the inevitable temptations come.

Another thing to ask is whether it is better to be an extremely gifted person in a secular or support role, as opposed to an average pastor. Again in the army analogy, if a person is a gifted chef and a weak fighter, would we not want this person making food and not on the front lines? Would we not want our best administators doing the army supply lines? If you are gifted in one area but think you might be an adequate but not gifted pastor, go where the gifts are. Unless you see a need for a pastor or evangelist that no one is filling. In a pinch, an army might press into the battlefield those who are gifted in other things. I firmly believe that calling is never decided in the abstract; it is decided in the context of needs. If there are plenty of lawyers and few pastors, or plenty of Christian rock bands and few missionaries, I should consider going where the need is, unless I am extremely gifted in one of these other areas. Sometimes a burning passion for a certain group of people can be more evidence of a calling than a gift for a particular type of work. In that case I need to do whatever gets me to those people.

An error of the fundamentalists, perhaps their most important error, has been to fail to recognize this need for “calling.” Thus, on one hand, many young men may go into preaching who have none of the gifts other than a good speaking voice, leading to lots of churches with burned out pastors and divided congregations. On the other hand, those not in the pastorate may have little sense of calling to excellence in their work, and only a sense of calling to make money to support the pastor and missionaries, leading to shoddy work with “Christian” labels.

The opposite danger of the Kuyperian view, however, is that those who are not pastors or evangelists can begin to see their work as ends in themselves, and ultimately not work strategically for the kingdom of God at all. It is as if the army started to focus on winning awards for cooking, or winning football games against the navy, or getting promotions for themselves. We would say that when this happens, that the army has lost sight of its purpose, its mission, and will soon lose its effectiveness. When the church fails to see that its overall mission is to “go into the world and make disciples, teaching them to observe everything Christ has commanded” (Matthew 28:19-20), it becomes inward and indistinguishable from just another ethnic group.

Some people I have talked to have agreed with much of this, but still say, “If I felt that winning souls to heaven was the only eternally lasting thing, and the main mission of the church, I could not have any joy in doing music, or science. I want to believe that my works have eternal value in and of themselves.” Here I see a main problem as the “I”. Such people are saying that what is most important to them is their own individual work, not the advance of the kingdom, the universal church, as a whole. Imagine an army supply clerk saying, “If we don’t view supply rooms as ends in themselves, I cannot be happy.” If the army wins the war, the supply clerk will rightly share in the credit of the whole. But the point is not to create supply rooms, it is to disable the enemy. In the same way, a happy army can use artists and musicians to relieve stress and lift up spirits, and scientists to find new ways to win, but the point of an army is not art or science. If those doing art and science lose sight of the goal and fail to think strategically, at best they become dead weights of useless activity, and at worse actually compete with those on the battle lines for resources.

The Bible has a category of things I call “good vanities,” following the book of Ecclesiastes. There are many things that we are told are good, but will not last forever. Should we not do these things? Should the farmer not make food because people will eat it and turn it into excrement which is gone the day after tomorrow? Should the artist not sing because people will forget his song? In a large kingdom, all the elements of what it means to be human in this world should be going on. Yet in a kingdom that has a mandate to advance and conquer enemies, as the kingdom of God does (by the preaching of the Word), all these people cannot forget to ask how their activities affect that main mission. It may not be simple. Maybe learning art and science will help “take every thought captive” in ways that a pastor would not see. Maybe excellent garbage collecting will cause visitors to ask what is so different about this land that it is so clean and neat. (If you have traveled to lands supposedly affected by the Gospel but with terrible problems of uncleanness, e.g. nominally Catholic countries in South America or Southeast Asia, you know how this lack can undermine the claim of being Christian lands.) We can rejoice in a “good vanity” even while submitting it to the overall mission of the church, in whatever that may entail.

In summary, I am not calling for a return to fundamentalism or pietism, as defined in my previous essay. I am calling for a new way that wholeheartedly values callings other than preaching and evangelism, but nevertheless submits these callings to an overall strategic way of thinking about the advance of the kingdom of God. We do not need to believe that works of art and culture, or discoveries of the scientific laws of this present universe, will last forever in order for us to enjoy them and pursue them, if that is our calling. Human souls last forever, and the church must not lose sight of the high calling of influencing souls for good.

---