Senkbeil - The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor’s Heart

The Care of Souls

CULTIVATING A PASTORS HEART

HAROLD L. SENKBEIL

Foreword by Michael Horton

The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastors Heart

Copyright 2019 Harold L. Senkbeil

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Contents

B ooks on preaching, church leadership, vision, and strategy continue to flow from numerous presses. Pastors conferences abound for those who want to learn how to reach particular niche demographics. And all the while, pastors are dropping out of ministry in droves and parishioners often feel that they must look elsewhere for real spiritual support.

What is going on? Why have so many who entered the ministry precisely in order to cure souls found it an intolerable burden? Why is there so much technique and so little help to aid those who aspire to be, more than anything else, shepherds of Christs flock? Harold Senkbeil offers here not only the best explanation of this problem but the best alternative that I have seen in many years. A friend of many years, Harold has impressed me as one of the few real guides for how the gospel is applied in pastoral ministry. His first book of interest to me personally was Dying to Live: The Power of Forgiveness (1994) . Sanctificationthe theme of that bookis not our part in salvation; rather, it is Christs work by his Spirit (always through the gospel). Driven by forgiveness and justification, the Christian life is true freedom. Growing in the grace, knowledge, and obedience of Christ is the result of being united to Christ himselfhis person and his work.

The Care of Souls is of the same spirit, but it is written for pastors and it is a more thorough treatment of what the gospel means not just for others, but for the pastor as well. If the shepherd is not gospel-driven in his own life, it should not be surprising that the sheep experience a disconnect between justification and sanctification. Christ becomes the center of the one, but not of the other.

Yet this book is much more than a pastoral theology deduced from a central dogma. Besides being theologically-informed, anchored in the Reformation heritage, the insights of this volume are the fruit of a half-century of pastoral ministry, including many years of pastoring shepherds as well as sheep. Just as we can lose the joy of our salvation, we as ministers can lose the joy of our vocation.

Among younger evangelicals there has been a great renaissance of interest in the Reformation and its theology. This is very exciting. Yet it is remarkably thin. Justification, election and other truths of Gods free grace in Christ are often lifted out of their wider gospel context. When it comes to actual pastoral ministry, however, many Young, Restless and Reformed pastors dont know where to turn and simply fall back on seminary courses or resources that are grounded in a quite different orientation. They may have learned a new doctrine. However, Reformation piety is not just a doctrine; it is a new way of conceiving God, humanity, salvation, vocations in the world, and the hope of resurrection. It is a new way of being a pastor, of leading Gods people. Just as one cannot patch up an old wineskin, one cannot simply tack on a few Christ-centered doctrines to an essentially human-centered approach to pastoral ministry. The Reformation was not just about doctrinal correctness; it was about salvation, which can only be found in Christeven for lifelong believers. Consequently, both Lutheran and Reformed traditions produced a large literature on the cure of souls. This legacy is largely unknown today. It is easy to tack on the Five Points of Calvinism or Justification to approaches to ministry that are fundamentally at odds with the basic insights of the Reformers. Many seem to assume that while the Reformation recovered a few important doctrines, one must turn elsewhere for rich expositions of biblical piety and pastoral ministry. This is to ignore the vast resources that can provide deeply-needed evangelical wisdom in our own day. There are many overlapping emphases between Lutheran and Reformed traditions, but each is a system with its own integrity. Their respective approaches to ministry, pastoral care and discipline are essential links in a broader interpretation of Christian faith and practice.

As a Reformed minister reading this volume, I could not help but think of Martin Bucers Concerning the True Care of Souls . Martin Luthers contemporary and a mentor of John Calvin, Bucer prefaced his remarks with the recognition, For there are not a few who, as soon as anything is said about church discipline and order, are always crying out that we want to bring back the traditions and bondage of men. The Reformation did not cast off sixteen centuries of pastoral theology; instead, it returned the focus of the ministry to the public and private application of the word to the lives of Gods people. Lutheran and Reformed confessions are next of kin, especially in comparison with the trajectories of pietism and revivalism that have infected Anglo-American evangelicalism. Both focus on Christ alone through faith alone as the source of justification, sanctification, and glorification. Both insist that sanctification is driven by the gospel. For both confessions the ministry of word and sacrament is central, the fountain of Gods favor to sinners throughout their course in this life.

Nevertheless, the two confessions are different. And it is precisely in this difference that I find encouragement as well as fraternal correction and admonition. Evangelicals rarely encounter confessional Lutheran sources and this is a pity. This book constitutes persuasive evidence of the richness of distinct Lutheran emphases in relation to pastoral ministry. All of us need this wisdom.

Harold Senkbeil does not offer yet another how-to book. But it is also not mere theory. Instead, he focuses on the old theological concept of habitus : a disposition to one thing or another. One may have a propensity to become an artist, for example, without ever making an artistic product. The best soul doctors have recognized that their primary concern is less external practices and behaviors than the shape of the soul: its direction, purpose, course, and desires. Perhaps the maxim, What is old is new again, applies here. Drawing on classic Lutheran sources, Harolds insights are remarkably relevant in our chaotic context today.

How does the formation of the pastor affect that of the sheep? How does joyful, confident ministry in Jesus name infuse the whole body of Christ with a similar confidence? Can we recover the classic view of the pastor as a physician of the soul, providing diagnosis and treatment of issues that are at their core bound up with sin and grace? Harold not only provides the needed arguments; drawing on his five decades of pastoring shepherds as well as sheep, he offers candid anecdotes and illustrations. This is a very practical book in the best sense, touching on concrete issues of pastoral ministry.