8/27/2025

Sometimes I miss my days in seminary. Sometimes not. I started out at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, KY, but transferred to a smaller seminary in central Indiana affiliated with the church tradition I was raised in. There, in Anderson, Indiana, I had a great little attic apartment . . . right across the street from both the seminary and a cemetery! 

You can draw your own conclusions from that! 

I had some wonderful professors who taught me things I put into practice on a weekly if not not daily basis. I was introduced to wonderful authors who in turn led me to other wonderful authors whose books have made me into the pastor/teacher/person I am today. 

But I remember being in seminary with guys (a few, not by any means the majority) who weren’t interested in the least in what was being taught. All they wanted was the degree, which would be a spring–board for whatever else they were after. 

Over the years I’ve known people who filled the role of Pastor (notice the generous way I put that?), whose goals were advancement, or an easy paycheck, or wanting to be a “big shot” in their circles, or a chance to be the Boss (I think these are the worst of all). As Henri Nouwen writes of pastors, “Most are used to thinking in terms of large scale organization, getting people together in churches, schools and hospitals and running the show as a circus director.” 

Too often, pastoring is shaped today by theories of business leaders instead of what I’ve been taught and what I sincerely believe to be the Biblical model of pastoring. 

Have you ever wondered what my goal is as a pastor? I’d expect, if you were to sit down and think about it a little, you’d figure it out. I’d like to think my goals line up with what I read in the Bible and I hope I’ve conveyed them, even if I’ve never explicitly stated them. 

If you look at the Apostle Paul’s writings to the churches he established, his concern, his goal for ministry, was for his congregations to be like Christ. 

That’s it. There it is.

It wasn’t about programs or plans or anything else. They were to be like Christ. A goal I’ll be sharing tonight in Bible study (and I’ll be honest – I don’t remember where I got this) is “to know Jesus Christ, learn how to be like him and how to do all the things he said to do.”  
And this goal isn’t just about us as individual believers. That is the downside of a lot of discipleship material I’ve seen throughout the years, and why I haven’t gone the typical “discipleship” route. Spiritual formation is understood as “me and God” and “intimacy with God” and “how to pray.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of these. In fact, all those things are a by–product of the congregation being in the image of God. 

Because that’s not where Paul starts. Spiritual formation – growing in the likeness of Christ – begins with the congregation, as a Church, as a fellowship. The congregations Paul established were to be like Christ, and if the congregations were like Christ, then the individual members of the congregations would be like Christ. 

And guess how it happens! Go ahead. Guess. 

It happens through our “Loving God . . . Loving Others.” The primary New Testament virtue is love. And love is never alone – in the New Testament, there’s always the “other” who experiences our love.   

Of course, that love is first experienced in God’s love for us. As John writes in I John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us.” The way God loves us spills over (or should spill over) into the way we love others, beginning with the way we love one another. James Thompson writing on becoming like Christ says: “For the [Christians in Paul’s churches], the test of their progress will be their capacity to exist as a family within the community of faith.” 

If we’re going to be like Christ we’ve got to begin loving like Christ,and it starts in the local congregation. 

Think about it: those congregations in Paul’s day were a completely new and unprecedented experience for free men, women, slaves, children, Jews and non–Jews . . . all people who, according to society’s standards for that day, should never have mixed, all experiencing life together for the first time, as a family. 

I can see how that would be called a “test”!

Through Christ, the barriers of race, gender, social status, and religion are torn down, and they are all living together as one big family. Happy? In Paul’s favorite congregation, Ephesus, they probably were. In Paul’s most problematic congregation, Corinth, decidedly not! But if they were going to be Christ–like, they were going to have to get, as the old gospel song says, “on the happy side of living.” 

Pastoring, then, is nurturing the image of Christ in the local congregation, first, and then in the individual members of the congregation. 

I have a lot more to say about this, which I’ll save for next week’s newsletter. 

Blessings,
Pastor Terry