The Pulpit But A Stage

The Public Square
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The pastors at our church are reading “The Reformed Pastor” by Richard Baxter. It’s a book that’s been very helpful to our church over the years and we thought it was time to re-read it together, taking it slow. This morning I read:

Blockquote They will give you leave to preach against their sins, and to talk as much as you will for godliness in the pulpit, if you will but let them alone afterwards, and be friendly and merry with them when you have done, and talk as they do, and live as they, and be indifferent with them in your conversation. For they take the pulpit to be but a stage; a place where preachers must show themselves, and play their parts; where you have liberty for an hour to say what you list; and what you say they regard not, if you show them not, by saying it personally to their faces, that you were in good earnest, and did indeed mean them (85).

My goodness does that bloody my nose and tear my guts. I am willing and have said “personally to their faces” what I’ve said in the pulpit but not as I should. I find that if I trust a man (or woman) and his love for me, I’m willing to rebuke. I find that I’m much more willing to do so in the context of a pre-arranged meeting where I’ve had time to prepare and know what I’m going to say beforehand.

I am often reluctant to do so with those I distrust, with those whose opinion I fear more than is right, or in situations where I see something in real time and so should say something but most often do not.

I thought this topic would be helpful. What has been helpful to you in overcoming your fear of man and so be more willing to make not the pulpit but a stage?

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Several thoughts float immediately to the surface of memory . . .

I remember the moment I perceived the pulpit as a stage and the congregation an audience full of critics with the power to applaud, or to nod off into disconnected reverie, or to throw turnips at me. I was appalled, outraged, and terrified all at once. Why did our Lord not strike us all down with ash-rendering bursts of fire? For this stupid charade proclaimed itself to be His worship!

This happened very early in my life as a pastor. After that moment I spent a long time sensing that the Sword of the Lord hung over me by the thinnest frayed thread. One wrong word would send it swiftly downward.

It’s not that I never spoke God’s Word before this. Rather that I participated in the charade Pr. Baxter speaks of here. In a visceral fear of the Lord, my pulpit ministry began to change. Punches previously pulled, or telegraphed beforehand, or softened with bales of cotton - I had to unlearn these things. It was not easy to do so. I was full of dread held at bay only the the express promises of our Lord in the Gospels. And, this same dread hectored me as I saw the effects of these changes in me in the flock of unruly sheep I had previously placated. With no resume, I found myself fired with a newborn baby at my wife’s breast. That, too, was a dreadful prospect.

But, if repentance brought such professional calamity, that too was in His hands, and this wholly understandable reaction by my flock was also in His hands.

The end result was very good - another story for another time. What has remained to this day is the preciousness of fearing the Lord, its power to strengthen a man full of folly, sins, and ignorance of the world’s ways and (even worse) ignorance of the scope of wreckage inflicted upon his own soul by the Fall, the Curse, and his heritage in Adam.

Secondly, this early experience set me firmly upon a path that led me inevitably to my Christian patrimony in the English Reformation. I will die with the words of that patrimony on my lips, its hymns reverberating in my mind, its prayers pouring from my heart.

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“Fear of man” can cut in all sorts of ways.

Many years ago, during the Todd Bentley trainwreck, I was preaching in the Vineyard Church I was then part of, and made some fairly critical comments about him. One woman took strong exception to what I’d said, but instead of tackling me on it (fair enough), she proceeded to turn on the pastor’s wife about what I’d said. I have never understood why.

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Here’s a bit longer version from a chapter of Church Reformed:

[The people say] “You are so precise and you keep talking about sin,
and duty, and make such a fuss about these things, while pastor so-and-
so, who is as great a scholar as you and as good a preacher, will be
merry and joke with us and leave us alone, and never trouble himself
or us with this sort of talk. You can never be quiet and you make more
commotion than needs to be made; you love to frighten men with talk
of damnation, when sober, well-educated, peaceable pastors are quiet,
and live with us like other men.”

They will give you leave to preach against their sins, and to talk as
much as you will for godliness in the pulpit, if you will but let them
alone afterwards, and be friendly and merry with them when you have
done, and talk as they do, and live as they, and be indifferent with them
in your conversation. For they take the pulpit to be but a stage; a place
where preachers must show themselves, and play their parts; where you
have liberty for an hour to say what you (desire); and what you say they
regard not, if you show them not, by saying it personally to their faces,
that you were in good earnest, and did indeed mean them. (fn 14)

  1. Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Banner of Truth, 1974), 85. Some edits were made in the first paragraph of this quote in order to reflect modern usage.
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The words of Chrysostom were instructive to me early on, particularly in an age in which aspiring preachers are taught that you have failed if your audience ever thinks ill of you:

“For if he be first carried away with the desire for indiscriminate praise, he will reap no advantage from his labors, or from his power in preaching, for the mind being unable to bear the senseless censures of the multitude is dispirited, and casts aside all earnestness about preaching. Therefore it is especially necessary to be trained to be indifferent to all kinds of praise.”

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Kipp, you made me think of this from Kierkegaard:

Folios and folios have been written to show again and again how one
is to recognize what true Christianity is. This can be done in a far simpler way.

Nature is…acoustic. Only heed what the echo answers, and thou shalt know at once what is what.

So when in this world one preaches Christianity in such a way that the echo answers: “Glorious, profound, serious-minded Christian, thou shouldst be exalted to princely rank,” etc., know then that this signifies his preaching of Christianity is, Christianly, a base lie. It is not absolutely certain that he who walks with fetters on his legs is a criminal, for there are instances when the civil magistrate has condemned an innocent man; but it is eternally certain that he who — by preaching Christianity! — wins all things earthly is a liar, a deceiver, who at one point or another has falsified the doctrine, which by God has been so designed, in such a militant relation to this world, that it is eternally impossible to preach what Christianity is in truth without having to suffer in this world, to be repudiated, hated, cursed.

When one preaches Christianity in such a way that the echo answers, “He is mad,” know then that this signifies that there are considerable elements of truth in his preaching, without its being, however, the Christianity of the New Testament. He may have hit the mark; but presumably he does not press hard enough, either by his oral preaching or by the preaching of his life, so that, Christianly speaking, he glides over too easily, his preaching after all is not the Christianity of the New Testament.

But when one preaches Christianity in such a way that the echo answers, “Away with that man from the earth, he does not deserve to live,” know then that this is the Christianity of the New Testament.

Without change since the time of our Lord Jesus Christ, capital punishment is the penalty for preaching Christianity as it truly is: hating oneself to love God; hating oneself to hate everything in which one’s life consists, everything to which one clings, for the sake of which one selfishly would desire to have God’s aid to get it, or to console one that one did not get it, console one for the loss of it — without any change capital punishment is the penalty for preaching this in character. -Attack upon Christendom

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I’ve been slowly making my way through this. I can’t say I’ve read anyone write on something so sobering with a smile. Really enjoying it.

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Understand your sentiment, dear brother. Could never take him in more than tapas doses. Love,