I love my seminary. I love the time that I spent there. I believe that the classes I took and the experiences I had there with students and professors was incredibly valuable to me as I tried to learn what I needed to know to faithfully handle the word of God.
In seminary, ,many of the professors also served as pastors or had done so in the past. And many of those men offered more than book knowledge. Many of those men talked to us plainly about the practical side of ministry. They talked to us about pastoral care, about administration, about hospital visits, and about much more.
But as a student, it is, I am coming to believe, impossible to understand with your heart and not just your head the things that are required to be a truly faithful pastor of a church. Seminary can give us tools. But seminary cannot help us to see the significance of the truths that we are learning. Like reading a book on marriage or parenting, you might learn some things that you acknowledge are true and necessary, but none of that sticks and clicks with you until you actually live it.
With all that in mind, I can say that I now see a particular passage of Scripture today in a way that I simply could not have seen it twenty years ago. This is not to say that I see the meaning differently, as I do not. But I have a grasp of the heart and significance today in a way that my heart simply could not have grasped while I was a student.
Look at how Paul describes his heart for the people of the church at Thessalonica.
1 Thessalonians 2:7-8, 11-12 – 7 But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. 8 So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.
11 For you know how, like a father with his children, 12 we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.
How did Paul emotionally feel toward this church? He says with clarity that they had become dear to him. He describes his care for them in parental terms.
That love, that tender affection, that parental-styled emotional attachment is something that no classroom can teach. The professors tells us that we are supposed to care for our people in that way, but they cannot show us what it is like. But let me say, without qualification, that love for the local body is a biblical mandate for a godly pastor. WE have to learn to not only do the word work of the ministry, but we must also learn to do the heart work of loving the people like a caring parent.
I would also suggest that this kind of emotional attachment to the people comes only over time. We never finish learning this lesson. It is only after growth in Christian maturity, after walking with people through the joys and pains of real life, after performing weddings and funerals, after sitting in hospital rooms and living rooms and all the rest, only after all these things do we learn to love the body with the affection that Paul here describes. A classroom cannot simulate this. A lecture cannot bring it about. A Facebook post cannot make you see it if you are not there in your spiritual maturity.
But, dear Christian friends, may we learn to love as family just as Paul showed us. May we learn to have a tenderness and compassion for each other that is beyond what the world has to offer. May we not be so devoted to systems and organizational things that we do not care. May we not be so devoted to academia that we have no love. May we be what Scripture shows us that a good pastor does. May we love like family, good, healthy, non-dysfunctional family.
Pastor Travis Peterson 