Carl Trueman: Some Questions and Thoughts on Ministerial Calls

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/06/some-questions-and-thoughts-on.php

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/06/some-questions-and-thoughts-on-1.php

Driscoll used to say that this reflects the mentality of calling those who are trained where as he advocates training the called. What this distinction still fails to establish is on what basis a calling may be considered legitimate among those who claim, without training, to be called.

If any ambitious 20-something guy declares God told him to plant a church then on what basis does one make certain the Lord, and not the man's own ego, has brought this about? The answer is that there isn't much of an answer, is there? Arguably no man in his 20s is even fit to be a pastor but it's certainly too late for Driscoll to go back and re-live his life. He can't go back and choose to be the breadwinner and sacrifice his church plant so that Grace isn't the breadwinner. He can't go back and apprentice with older pastors in a church setting or submit in membership to other elders.

By the same measure, it becomes impossible to say of a pastor present or former that the person is qualified to be a pastor simply due to an internal call. A man could be elevated to a pastoral position because, official reasoning goes, he is "humble" and therefore gets exalted. But what if "humble" simply means "agrees with the executive leadership?" I'm not saying real humility wouldn't be involved on the part of the candidate, just that it would be immaterial to the decision of a leadership team that define humility in terms of agreement. There are some parents who consider "honor your father and mother" to mean total agreement with them on any given subject of conversation. A pastor might say this is an abuse of parental authority and then blithely turn around and say that due to God's appointment of him as an authority in one's life ... . Thus the pastor who criticizes the perceived abuses of the parental relationship and parental authority ends up doing precisely what he criticized. And here we are back at Romans 2 all over again, aren't we?

Of course I have written elsewhere about the conundrum as it applies to a specific church, if a church trains the called and the called are self-appointed then of necessity the self-appointeds all agree on their self-appointment. What becomes the methodological basis upon which one's self-defined internal calling becomes questioned by others who have been called in precisely, for the sake of argument, the same way? If God told pastor X to be a pastor and God laid it on pastor Y's heart does pastor X get to pull rank on pastor Y because pastor Y used more passive language about the nature of God's calling? I don't have answers and I'm not so post-modernist as to do that stupid thing where "just asking some questions" is rhetorically considered to be answering the questions by reflexively asking them. I may not be at Mars Hill anymore but I've never been into that other Mars Hill.