Douglas Wilson - Mother Kirk: Essays on Church Life

DOUGLAS WILSON

Published by Canon Press

P.O. Box 8729, Moscow, ID 83843

800.488.2034 | www.canonpress.com

Douglas Wilson, Mother Kirk: Essays on Church Life

Copyright 2001 by Canon Press.

Cover design by Rachel Hoffmann.

ISBN-13: 978-1-885767-72-1

ISBN-10: 1-885767-72-2

Scripture quotations in this publication are taken from the Holy Bible: King James Version.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilson, Douglas

Mother kirk : essays on church life / Douglas Wilson.

p.cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 1885767722 (pbk.)

1. Church. I. Title.

BV600.2 .W565 2001

262dc21

00010090

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 10 9 8 7 6 5

For my mother,

Elizabeth Catherine Dodds Wilson,

who prayed with me when I first called on the Lord, and who throughout my life has faithfully modeled for me

what it means to be the Church.

R eformed theology, especially in its late twentieth-century American variety, emphasizes the comprehensiveness of Christian faith. The notion that Christianity offers a worldview embracing every area of life has never been more explicitly affirmed or more elaborately detailed. Related to this is the claim that every calling is good and noble, that all work can be devoted to the service of Christ, that all Christians are called to seek first the kingdom of God.

This good and necessary emphasis is often accompanied, however, by a corresponding denigration of pastoral ministry: All Christians, it is said, have a full-time ministry, so the pastor has no higher a calling than the plumber or homemaker. But this corollary does not follow. Though all callings can be equally devoted to Christs service, not all callings are equal. And Reformed Christians have always recognized that the pastoral office is the highest office not only of the church but in the world.

It is the highest calling in part because it is the broadest calling, a vocation to minister to everyone in every circumstance. Sickness strikes, and the doctor is called. Sued or indicted, I contact a lawyer. Fired from my job, I may apply with a placement agency. When labor pains begin, we call a midwife or a doctor, and when we have breathed our last, the undertaker has his say. For each stage of life, for each crisis, we have our specialist.

The pastor is no specialist. His field of activity embraces every known profession: The ideal pastor would combine the dialectical skills of the best attorney, the bedside manner of the most compassionate physician, the rhetorical passion of politicians from ages past, and a breadth of scholarship that befits a student and teacher of the Creators book.

The pastor is no specialist. He is called to represent Christ in every kind of situation of need or pain. He anoints and prays with the child suffering from leukemia, rebukes and guides the adulterer in the way of repentance, offers counsel and encouragement to the entrepreneur whose business has folded, rejoices with new parents and mourns with those bereft of friends and family. Beside the doctor, beside the financial consultant, beside the nursing home attendant, stands the pastor. In the maternity ward, in the jail cell, in the home tense with marital strife, stands the pastor. At the baptism, at the wedding reception, at the funeral, stands the pastor. He is a generalist in human crisis, a generalist in moments of passage, a generalist confronted with all of the infinite varieties of human suffering.

There is a sense in which the pastor is a specialist. For every situation, he has essentially one word, the word of the gospel of Jesus. Among the sick, the pastors concern is not only for healing but to indicate how suffering can be transformed into joyful witness. Among the poor, the pastors concern is not just how to pay next months bills, but to consider how poverty may strengthen faith in the goodness of the heavenly Father. At the bedside of the dying, the pastors concern is not just to ease pain but to hold forth the promise of resurrection life.

Mother Kirk can be read with profit by all Christians, but at its heart this book is an instruction manual for pastors and elders, and it breathes the kind of wisdom that emerges only from long pastoral experience experienced through diligent study of Scripture. Mother Kirk is written by a pastor who knows that pastoral work demands courage, determination, gentleness, vision, patience, self-restraint, insight, shrewdness, and, above all, faith working through love. It is written by a pastor who sees that pastoral ministry is mans work. Today, many avoid pastoral vocation because they think it beneath them. Mother Kirk will deter for exactly the opposite reason.

Mother Kirk highlights the importance of teaching and preaching as the center of pastoral ministry. That is hardly surprising, since this book comes from a classical Calvinist. Some Calvinists, however, leave the impression that the church would function much more smoothly if it were not for the people. Doug Wilson is not that sort of Calvinist. He understands that the church is people, and that people can be governed and led only by other people. He realizes that the ministry of the Word must be incarnated in the life of the pastor. He has observed that the biblical qualifications for elders focus on character. He knows there are no paper pastors.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about this book, and certainly one of the most impressive things about Doug Wilsons own very impressive ministry, is his realization that Jesus is the Head and Lord of His Church. Every Christian would agree, but few have grasped as profoundly as Wilson the flip side of this confession: If Jesus is the Head of His Church, that means Im not and youre not. And that means that there is no place in the churchs leadership for the domineering benefactor, the manipulative wheeler-dealer, the prima donna, the agenda-monger. There is room only for those willing to become servants to all, those willing to lay down their lives for (sometimes intractable) sheep, for those willing to bear the slave yoke of Christ with humility, grace, and gladness. Only such leaders will bring genuine reformation, because only such leaders labor in faith, confessing that the future of Mother Kirk is in the Lords hands and not their own.

Peter J. Leithart

Feast of St. Lawrence, 2000

Peniel Hall

W hat you are about to read is, as the subtitle describes it, a collection of essays on church life. Various portions of this book have different points of origin, and while we have applied some diligent sandpapering to keep this from annoying the reader, the ancestry of these sections will still show through here and there.

Some sections have previously appeared in Credenda , and others in Tabletalk . Many thanks to Ligonier for their permission to reprint these articles in modified form. Other portions were written in house for various issues that our church was confronting, and a sizable remainder was written for this book, trying in the process to make the transitions a little less like epistemic lurches and leaps. The average reader does not like being yanked around on the end of a rope.

I am very grateful to Peter Leithart for reviewing the manuscript and writing the foreword.

Thanks go to Douglas Jones down the hall at Canon. I am also most grateful for the practical help in production provided by Joost Nixon and Holly McCabe.