What Tim Keller Learned from John Calvin's Pastoral Practices

Let me tell you what we're going to do um some of you may have actually already been in the second uh in in the in the second round of workshops you might have actually taken scott manage his he had a whole section on the calvin's company of pastors he wrote a book a couple years Ago that talks about how john calvin pat has pastoral practices not only how he um how he and the pastors turn geneva from a medieval catholic community into a reformed city and society but also how the the pastors themselves Are formed

and trained and so on and from what i understand scott told you about what happened historically and then did some practical application so why should i be talking about this the answer is i'm going to start with the practical application i'm very i read that book i also read a number of other books in the last 10 years on calvin's pastoral practices and i am very convinced that they are extremely important and Increasingly important for us today my thoughts on this are not as well formed in fact i'll come right out and say many of

the things i'm going to tell you today i have not done it's one of the things i'm looking forward to doing or at least trying to do by stepping out as a senior pastor of redeemer so i won't be preaching every week i Won't be leading the church and i actually in some ways feel like one of the things i'm about to do is try to see some of these ideas realized so let me tell you from the book scott manage calvin's company of pastors pastoral care and the emerging reform church 1536-1609 a great book

but also here's a couple others Bruce gordon's uh biography of calvin that he wrote in 2009 that kevin de young's already mentioned i mentioned it last night here's a book by matthew meyer bolton called life in god john calvin practical formation and the future of protestant theology by the way that's not he's not an evangelical still a really helpful book Elsie mckee wrote a book called john calvin colon writings on pastoral piety all these books tell you something about how john calvin formed christians as christians it's what we call discipleship today but boy oh boy

boy that's two week a word i'm going to use the term formative practices pastoral formative practices how did the pastors of geneva form people Into real christians now i'm going to give you three three ideas or three uh principles that i got out of the reading and trying to understand what calvin did and then i'll go back and try to give you some more ideas about how we could apply that ourselves uh and i am going to try i'm watching my clock because most of my ideas are rather unformed and because a lot of them

i have not Actually executed on i feel like rather than spending the entire time pontificating on this when i don't feel like a pontiff uh i'm going to try to see whether we have some time for questions so we do have a couple roving mics and if you want to ask me some questions i'd actually appreciate it but here's the three ideas the one thing you'll learn if you study um Calvin and his company of pastors and their formative practices in geneva one thing you're going to learn is that it takes a lot more than

preaching to form christians a lot more the second thing is that the monastic practices that calvin and luther both they both critiqued monasticism as a form of elitism but they didn't actually Critique the practices themselves and actually democratized those practices particularly calvin didn't want didn't believe in monasticism in the sense of an elite group of people go off and and do all these uh things they're the monks and we're just the lay people he didn't agree with that kind of clericalism but on the other hand he actually believed that the things the monks were doing

are things that all christians should do So he so in some ways john calvin democratized monastic practices and number three pastoral formation that is pastors need far more intense far more intense ongoing in-service lifetime training than they're getting right now there's the three ideas so let me go back and talk to you about each one of them And talk about some application possibilities so the first one is and this will be more brief but christian formation is much much much more than preaching it takes a lot more than preaching to form christians there is a

i would say that looking back on it when i was younger i actually did think that preaching could carry more of that freight of christian formation uh and i do think that there is a danger Today that people think great preaching is the key now here's a couple of reasons why we may over by the way i'm not saying that we should have any less emphasis on preaching or any lower standards for preaching but we ought to be having a lot higher standards for everything else we're doing so i'm not trying to bring preaching down

i'm trying to bring other things up but the reason we have a tendency to over emphasize preaching There's a number of reasons one is the fact is that the fastest way to draw a crowd is to be a great preacher so your church grows and you look out there and you feel like a success and almost anything else you do in ministry does not quickly give you the same aura of success uh we do live in a celebrity culture that's really true and because of that really the best Preachers are more lionized today than they've

ever been uh and i mean and also revivalism the background the evangelicals are very influenced by revivalism and so am i and i'm very much a uh a proponent in some ways of revivalism which is an emphasis on conversion and emphasis on christian experience but revivalism has a dark side that dark side is that experience matters more than the church a One-on-one experience between god and the individual is all the emphasis and the church is not very often just drops out of the picture whereas calvin i think shows us that no just having a great

experience under a great preacher as as dramatic as that can be and as life-changing as that can be that doesn't really form a person into a all by itself into a christian uh that person needs the whole church There's so there's and also by the way we live in a time of specialization and there's a tendency more and more in churches for um there to be a good preacher let that person just preach and then other people run programs uh i guess in my background i i started out in a church there was a small

church in a small town i had a the only staff person i had was A one-half time secretary and i was in a town in which there was not another single licensed cap psychiatrist counselor social worker of any sort so everyone in town if you had a problem you came to a pastor and in those days not only did i preach three different expository sermons a week because i did sunday morning sunday night wednesday Night there are three different ones but i did a wedding or a funeral or two every month and when someone died

you spent a week at the house meeting everybody else in their extended family before you did the funeral and when someone was married you spent long periods of time uh doing pastoral you know premarital counseling and you did lots of pastoral counseling and you did visit everybody In your church and you would go down to the hospital and visit everybody in the hospital whether you're part of your church or not uh and there was a it was a and you did catechism or communicants class with your young people coming up and trying to examine whether

or not they were believers or not and and calling them to christ in other words i actually in some ways had a few years almost 10 years In which i lived this idea that preaching is really not the main thing you do it might be the single most important thing to do maybe but basically it's everything else that you do along with the preaching that actually changes people's lives so i do see that i have seen that i actually think that in our modern culture the church has sort of lost track of that So it

takes a lot more than preaching to form a christian number two let's talk about the pastoral practices for a bit i mean the monastic practices what do i mean by that well let me give you six these are monastic practices that john calvin actually took and democratized he basically took things that the monks were doing and in various ways brought them in to Church practice so that everybody did them here they are number one was extensive bible exposition now you've already heard a little bit about this especially if you went to scott manages i'm sure

uh his workshop but you would have heard about this from from kevin too do you know that in the medieval christian church people didn't sit down during a worship service they they Milled around they often talked to each other while the priests were up there doing their thing and then they left john calvin put seats in and there was a lot of people saying this doesn't look like a church it looks like a schoolhouse because people were expected to sit and listen to the sermon you know a lot of this church discipline that happened in

Those days was that during the sermon people just kept on talking because in the medieval worship you kept on talking because you didn't you didn't go there to listen and learn calvin changed all that and not only did he make expository preaching the basis of the sunday service and you had to sit down to listen but actually there was a ministry there was a sermon pardon me there was a service of the word every single day Every day there was a service of the word that took you five to fifteen verses a day right through

huge books of the bible not only that calvin actually had three three nights a week or three days a week he did more detailed lecturing at the academy on you know uh passages of the bible where he went into greater detail more exegesis and so forth so everybody in town and these these daily Expository preaching services happened all over the town that you were just immersed in biblical teaching very much as if you were in a monastery you were immersed in biblical teaching and that's one practice here's the second practice was catechesis uh calvin's in

on sundays there were four services there was a dawn service at 5 pm 5 a.m There was a um where were they here there was a dawn service at 5 00 a.m there was a morning service at 8 a.m there was a catechism service at 12 noon and there was an afternoon service at 3 p.m and the way catechism worked was it was a requisite that you would catechize before you were admitted to the lord's supper and uh so the catechism service tended to be younger but not all it certainly Tended to have the children

and the catechism was something that john calvin wrote i had 55 i think parts to it i'm trying to remember 55 or so divisions and he worked through the apostles creed the ten commandments the lord's prayer and the church and sacraments there were four parts and you had to be catechized in order to uh receive the lord's supper and so you actually had a service for people who Were being catechized not everybody showed up at that that was the service for the people who were in catechism training and it was just an absolutely critical part

of uh christian formation so you had the exposition you know the constant emphasis on expository preaching you had catechesis thirdly you had immersion in the psalms now one of the main monastic practices Was that you were immersed in the psalms you may know that the benedictine rule included seven i think seven services a day in which the psalms were either read or recited or sung so you got through all 150 psalms every week how do you like that He got through it every week calvin came up with a brilliant idea and what calvin decided to

do was to make the hymnity of the church basically the psalms so what he did was he he killed two birds with one stone this is a quote here from one of the books i was talking about he killed two birds with one stone when he determined to put the entire salter into singable accessible but beautiful Metrical french and by putting it into a beautiful singable metrical french you not only made the psalms very memorizable but because you would sing through the psalter at least twice a year sometimes more you not only you killed two

birds with one stone you not only made sure that The hymnity that the people were singing was going to be in a sense catechizing them but you were also immersing them in the psalms and what calvin always said was the psalms are for the heart the psalms are the psalms are god's prayer book the psalms teach you how to pray teach you how to process every single possible human situation Before god in prayer do you realize that there's not a single kind of human condition or emotion or situation that you don't find in the psalter

and it doesn't just tell you about it it tells you here's how you process that in prayer here's how you handle it before god so you're singing them every year at least two or three times and in forms as You know you remember what you sing better than you remember what you say or what you read right you can remember what you read you remember what you say better than what you read and you remember what you sing better than what you say and especially if it's put in a beautiful metrical form and so calvin

knew that the monks were immersed in this in the psalms You know even thomas cramer we won't go there because we're just talking about calvin but thomas cranmer he knew that when he wrote his book of common prayer that unless people were immersed in the psalms and by the way thomas cramer really in many ways followed calvin in trying to democratize the monastic practices because he knew that there were ways of really forming people head and heart he has you go through the psalms every Month calvin had it every couple of you know two or

three times a year but the point was immersion in the psalms is the third monastic practice that everybody went through so there was expository preaching catechesis immersion in the psalms number four the lord's supper was very prominent not just in worship but in the way pastoral formation and christian Information was done some of you may know that calvin argued with as calvin got older he more and more came to believe that you should have the word supper every week and i do not want to be talking about that here don't ask me a question about

it either because i don't we don't want to open that uh that issue up it's an important issue but calvi you can see as as he's writing his Institutes and he went through several editions he got more and more to the place where he said you really ought to have the lord's supper each week but the the council never went there the the town council didn't believe it and uh partly as a result of that they had they had the lord's supper four times a year but but the lord's supper was never just something you

did in the worship service never um Because it happened four times a year there was all sorts of things that happened around that the communion season was a time in which uh that the pastors would get together and they would do self-examination they would look at each other they would talk to each other about how they were doing spiritually uh there would be more ex the people would be asked to get ready for the lord's supper by looking at themselves And the elders might be visiting the people more getting them ready in other words pastoral

care was linked to the lord's supper two ways one of course is catechism catechesis brought you to the place where you admitted the lord's supper so the lord's supper in a sense was the climax of your your period of catechism but also was a way for people to regularly re-examine themselves and renew their Commitment to the lord and examine themselves and make confession and grow in grace so pastoral practice and pastoral care was linked to the lord's supper what was happening in the worship service was linked to the way in which people were doing pastoral

care number five a daily office now this isn't very well known but john calvin in his catechism uh because the catechism was given to Families because the children very often were catechized by the parents john calvin also actually put in there a set of prayers to pray he believed that you should pray four or five times a day he believed you should pray when you woke up when you ate when your morning breakfast you should pray when you started work or study You should pray the midday you should pray at supper you should pray when

you went to bed and what he actually did was he wrote not so much prayers like thomas cranmer hears what you pray at those times but he actually gave you sample prayers but actually called for what we would call today a daily office and he also gave the families a brief liturgy for when they were worshiping And when they were catechizing their children and the liturgies had apostles creed lord's prayer scripture reading confession of sin and so he actually created in a sense a relatively informal especially compared to the anglican book of common prayer a

relatively informal daily office of prayer during the day and family religion in all those ways very much like the monastic practices and lastly Accountability uh kevin talked about kevin deyoung last night talked about what he called the consistory and on thursdays calvin and the elders met to essentially exhort people who have been brought before them who are having put it this way pastoral issues or difficulties they they talk to people who were Not coming to church they would be brought before the kids history people who were perhaps propagating doctrine that wasn't true or right he

would talk to people whose marriages were falling apart whose sexual practice and behavior needed exhortation they worked on interpersonal disputes especially between families between business colleagues when they had a falling out all these people were Brought before the king's history and a lot of you right away saying church discipline church discipline yeah they could do church discipline that was a little interesting since don't forget this was a state church and we'll get back to that in a second but generally they just exhorted them they just exhorted them they urged them to do this or do

that to repent to forgive and there was therefore there was real Pastoral accountability in all those ways it was like being in a monastery but they in a way turned the entire town into a place where the monastic practices were being practiced practiced let me just add one more or two more at least if you take these things the the uh huge emphasis on exposition so you're just immersing your people in scripture catechesis Where you are systematically training them in theology and and piety uh immersion in the psalms where you're where you're you're saturating not

just their heads but their hearts in the psalter getting them to pray the psalms getting them to sing the psalms if you if you look at the using the lord's supper not just as a an important part of worship but part of Pastoral care if you look at the uh i'm leaving out uh if you look at the the the daily office of prayers during the day so you pray more than once a day and you and you also have family religion and then if you look at the pastoral accountability in all these ways uh

our modern churches fall short way short A uh a discipleship program or a small group bible study a good expository sermon a good worship service comes far short of these things those things do not form people like all this does but we do have to keep a couple quick things in mind calvin was working in a state church do you know if you didn't go to church you were fined it was a state church And therefore um people said well how did calvin do evangelism how did how did they get non-christians to come to church

so you could preach the gospel to them it was very simple you just you know you threw them in jail until they went to church uh you could try that in your hometown but it might not work or they didn't actually do jail but they did find people that you know they could exhort people and that sort of thing Uh and therefore whatever else you do if you can't just read calvin's geneva into your situation today because you've got to add a lot of the practices that churches have done that we call evangelistic you have

to have evangelistic services you have to have ways of reaching out to non-believers you have to have ways of following up and discipling brand new christians And so forth so you have to add that to all the practices and this leads me to ask you these questions do you have if you look at those those men those formerly monastic practices democratized by the reformers do you have uh an equivalent is there anything in your own church's life that has an equivalent i mean we obviously can adapt things these are not things that the bible necessarily

says Is exactly what you have to do in church uh so you can adapt you can accommodate you can you you know can innovate but my question is do you have anything like these things in each of these cases do you do you have a way of uniting people in common prayer in their daily life do you have a way of immersing people in the psalms so they're so their prayer life and their heart is actually being Given a vocabulary to approach god uh are you exposing people to expository uh study of the word of

god like that uh do you have anything like catechesis where you really are getting people into theology and giving it to most of your people or in in calvin's case all of your people nobody was admitted to the lord's supper unless you've been through catechesis do you have anything like this Have you got pathways have you have you worked out how a person moves from first getting into the church right through all those practices have you got ways of doing that we need to find ways of doing it ask me about this please ask me

to ask my i'm i'm obviously exhorting you and i'm actually saying that in our own situation at redeemer we're realizing that we've Fallen pretty short in a lot of these areas now let me talk to you a little bit about the last thing i'm looking at my um i think i'm going to allow you enough time remember the third principle was calvin shows us that pastors need far more intense in-service ongoing lifetime training Than they're getting we load all that into seminary and then we get out there and you're very fortunate if you occasionally come

to a conference like this you're very fortunate if you might have some kind of local ministerial association or a network that you get together with but let me tell you what calvin did maybe now if you were again if you were at scott's Workshop you would have heard about this but i'll just take two minutes on it every friday calvin called together what he called the venerable company of pastors these were all the pastors not only in the city of geneva but actually even in the environ so it was really geneva and the environment but

we would call the suburbs that Wouldn't be fair because that's not what those things were but anyway all the pastors in an area probably 20 30 pastors and every friday this is what happened from 8 o'clock in the morning to 9 30 they had what was called their public conference i have no idea what the french term was but i'm not even going to try the public conference and what you did for that hour and a Half was some pastor basically did an exposition it wasn't so much a full sermon it was a little bit

more like an exposition [Music] the basis for a future sermon so what they did was they worked through whole books of the bible each week a new pastor would come and give an exposition they did their exegesis and they presented their Exposition it was kind of like a sermon but it was more like the the the bones of a sermon without a whole lot of the other accounts you'd put in and um there would be one person who preached for maybe 30 minutes and then there would be one pastor who was designated to respond uh

to add to correct to make suggestions to maybe challenge The the interpretation of that passage or to affirm it and then other pastors would would uh would chime in and usually calvin would get up at the very end and give his thoughts on the text and this was open to the public so the pastors got together and they in a sense did practice preaching what was the purpose of this because maybe a year from now or two years from now They would all work through that book but they were working through the book now making

sure they were on the same page and the way in which they interpreted the book uh learning how to do preaching in a sense it was practice preaching and it was open to the public so generally the most oh how do you say the more the more you know there's Always christians who are the most interested in growing and so probably more of the eager and more mature lay people would show up so on friday mornings from eight to nine thirty all the pastors got together and took turns preaching through parts of the bible and

then responding to one another and doing critique and calvin would get up and everybody would be there then at the end of the conference from 9 30 to noon they went into private in the private sometimes they did a little bit more sharp correction or critique of the sermon than they might have done in public but then secondly in the in the the 9 30 to 12 noon they did many many other things they did pastoral cases where they would take a case study of some pastoral problem and they would work through it Sometimes they

actually did have people do some teaching on some area of theology that they were working through trying to figure out well what do we believe about this they also did brotherly critique in uh which was not formal discipline but they called it sharpening they regularly got together and talked to each other about how they thought one another were doing as preachers as pastors as christians And they did examine new pastors in order to discern determine whether or not they should be ordained ministers and they there was just general mutual theological and ethical um encouragement plus

four times a year i already mentioned this along with the um the communion season they did uh they did particular Self-evaluation where they looked at each other uh you might today we'd call it peer review today we'd call it a 360. but what it really was was pastors sitting down with each other and telling each other very frankly how they thought they were doing in the pastoral office this happened every week and of course those particular times of peer review happened four times a year Does anybody any pastors in this room experience anything like that

no you can if you're a presbyterian you can actually see and what what calvin did this is the historic uh this is the headwaters of the presbytery meeting this is where the presbytery meeting came from but everybody knows even in The best presbyterian churches that this is not what presbyterian presbytery meetings look like anymore all we do is the business part partly because we don't meet every friday from eight until noon and if you're not in a presbyterian situation if you're in a a baptist situation congregational independent churches things like that uh those of us

who are in more Connectional traditional denominations when we do get together it's all formal with nothing like this we don't work on our preaching we don't preach through books of the bible together we don't work on our unity of doctrine and our purity of doctrine and the quality of our preaching we don't do that we don't we don't sit around and do brotherly critique we don't do that we don't know each other that well frankly And we're too busy with all the logistics but those of you who are not in traditional connections you don't get

anything like this either and i would say going forward i'm not sure how we are going to survive as the culture gets more hostile we're going to see more and more people who look like their ministry is doing well go down Just walk away or fall into doctrinal error or come under the pressure of the culture to change traditional biblical doctrine or people who are going to succumb to various sorts of temptations because we don't do anything like this last thing i'll say if you actually do read these books i'm talking about which you should

you will wince at times At the uh the overreach very often uh even even within you let's just say you know even at the time and you have to remember we're talking hundreds of years ago in europe even for their time very often calvin and his company of pastors were were authoritarian uh they could get upset by the way Here's a good example one of the things in the scott manish book i remember it was uh um one of the things they discouraged was giving giving uh your baby when your baby was coming for to

be baptized you uh you would name the child and they they discouraged they wanted you to give people uh biblical names give the kids biblical Names you know uh instead of the names of the catholic saints because it was traditional to give your kids the name of the saints and uh so that the company of pastors are saying no give your kids biblical names not not the names of the saints and it was one guy that was a little on the authoritarian side and he was up there conducting the baptism and his parents came forth

and they said what is the Name of this child and i think i think um they said his name is claude which is one of the one of the catholic saints and so the guy picked the kid up in his arms and said no no his name is abraham and baptized him and changed the name right on the spot or something like that i forget what the name was but he changed the name he just refused and during that friday company of pastors meeting some people Said to him you know that might have just been

a little over the top uh so they could be pretty authoritarian and yet um and we're we're independent we you know even those of us who think of ourselves as strong evangelicals we are creatures of our culture our culture has taught us that we should be independent we should Be free uh we should be able to you know we we resent and truth in the intrusiveness of a tight community and accountability nevertheless there are abuses i'm trying to tell you that there is authoritarianism and we have to be very very wary of that because people

people receive this worse than they ever have if people Back in those days sometimes felt the the the company of pastors was overbearing they we really are going to have to be very careful and sensitive and gracious which in the way which we do it now but i don't know going forward that we can do well unless we do what calvin did which would say was to democratize the monastic practices and to create an extremely tight company of pastors who got lifelong Intense training and i'm not sure that we're going to be able to make

it unless we do something along those lines that's all you're going to say well we'll lay it out no i'm not my time's up at least if i'm going to get some questions i would rather you ask me some questions and pro you know push me where i should be going next with this Or where you should be going next with us so who's where the mike guys okay kenny's got a mic okay somebody sure let's go we got time okay um my question as i as i reflect through what you said breaking from the

point about over authoritarian uh it sounds a little top-heavy and i'm thinking about the layman i'm thinking about churches that I've been in that are really dynamic the laymen are strong and i wonder if you have any comment on that is there something that went over my head no by the way for example in the consistory remember i've talked about the consistory that was on friday uh john calvin met and it was really with the other with other elders they were Lay people so generally the people who came before the consistory for exhortation it was

really elders the elders were over various uh wards of the city and the elders are extremely involved in pastoral care so yeah it's top heavy i was trying to the company of pastors was the pastors but you're right thank you if you read the books you'd see that it Wasn't all pastor but you know what uh by i would i wonder whether or not calvin was as uh sensitive to what the bible says about lay ministries he should have been so i think that's fair to question i'm not trying to idealize him i'm just trying

to say i was i was smitten by um the paltry nature of the way in which we formed christians reading that book but i'm not just i don't want to just pick It up and just put it down so it's a great question somebody else over here i'm a southern baptist and the idea of catechism is a pretty new idea to me just i do it with my children but as far as teaching it at a church could you maybe just go through what that would look like and how you would implement that to a

church that's not currently doing it Sure um well big subject if you if you anybody who's done a little uh study of church history realizes that everybody wrote their own catechism uh i've had some people say why do we need a new catechism and that's that's a little crazy because Basically catechism was the way in which you'd in the way in which you instructed people so if you're a pastor you tended to write your own catechism anyway you didn't rely on other catechisms actually um heidelberg westminster those are great catechisms and you can't ignore them

they're just they're too good and too time-tested but there's really no reason why you couldn't write your own what's Great about it is catechisms unlike modern um how do i say it modern evangelicals do bible study which is great i think i mentioned this yesterday when i was being interviewed with colin john calvin as much as as important as it was for him to get right through the bible right he just read you know he just studied right through biblical books But he wrote the institutes which was originally essentially a catechism in which he was

summarizing christian doctrine so all i'm saying is that you've got to find two things i'm glad you asked the question about catechism two things is you've got to find a way if you want to adopt somebody else's catechism great if you want to write your own every maybe better in some ways where you are summarizing The body of christian doctrine make sure you hit doctrine like apostles creed or whatever uh make sure you hit piety lord's prayer or whatever uh make sure you hit ethics which is ten commandments sermon on the mount or whatever and

you hit church what does it mean to be in the church what is the church about and those four things and make sure you immerse people in that have something For little kids have something for teenagers have something for adults i'm just saying we don't we we tend in the eventual church to let people study the bible but we stay away from doctrine we stay away from from summaries of what the bible teaches here's the other thing to say about catechism boy you're all ready to come look at you i'll never get to all of

you so i'll try i'll try to not be so you know verbose but You cat right now the culture is catechizing your kids so for example let's just say a 14 year old kid uh raised in your church and by the way they're out there now raising your church went to sunday school went to youth group whatever one day the kid says to your his mother or father you know if two gay people love each other i'm not sure what's wrong with that And the parents melt down oh my goodness what happened here didn't you

go to church and you might actually take the kid to what the bible says the kids eyes are going to glaze over i'll tell you why here's three catechism here here's three statements that that the world is getting to your kid through social media through almost every tv sitcom through almost every Movie through almost every piece of music and here are the three number one is you've got to be true to yourself you got to be true to yourself number two in the end you've got to do what makes you happy you just have to

and number three nobody has the right to tell anybody else what's right or wrong for them okay that sound familiar You re i mean it's it's at the heart of the last movie you've watched is probably it's probably in there or behind it and so the kids being catechized by these things and so whatever your catechism is it has got to deconstruct that so our catechism has got to deconstruct the world's catechism therefore that's the reason why i'm okay with re with writing New ones because the older catechisms were written to counteract the narratives that

the non-believing narrators of a different world doesn't mean that they're not great they are terrific and wonderful but that's the reason why it's okay to write new catechisms people always used to okay let's go back and forth and i'll try to be less verbose yes over here hi dr keller i'm in the pca i just wanted To see any advice or how you would encourage us to pursue the community that the company of pastors had amongst the presbyterian like how would you go about starting that well i think good i think the answer is that

the that the members it depends on how geographically spread out your presbytery is that's the whole thing uh but generally the people who are within easy and easy access to each other not too Far away you ought to just simply form the company just do it go go look what calvin did and adapt it and just start doing it you might not be able to do it every start at least every month but generally the real problem is uh most most of our denominations or presbyterian are not uh you know we don't have enough people

so that our presbyterians are small And so there's you know there's plenty of presbyterians where people fly to presbytery because they're that far away so find at find at least four or five other pastors within the uh and then by the way you could for this sort of thing you probably could add somebody uh maybe from another domination or two as long as they were really really aligned with you and and just and try it out Let's go back and forth over here i'm wondering if you had an experience of a pastor taking you in

and maybe a story why that was significant or meaningful to you but you were we could glean from it thanks no wait so you're asking me if i had an experience of someone someone pastoring me like this did someone take you in no that's a nice easy thing i mean you know it's a sad answer but at least it's Short no no um let me honest be honest us baby boomers didn't look for it there's an arrogance about us that we we felt and i have to say the difference between my parents and myself culturally

is far greater than this between myself and my children they would say the same thing i mean i'm Still obviously another generation but there was there was some enormous gulf that happened uh in the 60s there wasn't a huge change in the culture and most of us my age didn't look for mentors because we didn't think anybody had anybody anything to teach us it was just arrogant so it's not i'm not saying it's not really sad but the answer is no i didn't i was much more of a loner and a lot of baby boomer

Pastors learn to be loners and the ones that survive look they look you know they look admirable but it's not necessarily true over here dr keller we've been hearing a lot about the benedictine option as well as what you've been talking about just today yeah and i'm sensing is there a way that our churches can we kind of change them To be more of that fortress or maybe not fortress but uh counter-cultural part of the world okay i was wondering when somebody was going to bring up the book the benedict option because i've been talking

about and i do know this is true that the reformers um did think that there was that monasticism had some good things and was trying to say Our churches are too porous the people in them are too much like the rest of the world if we're really going to inform them to be different than the world we're going to have to use these practices because they're they create thicker communities and they're more formative okay now i have not read the benedict option i got the book the day i ordered the day came out i got

it i haven't read it so i can't Speak to it i would say from what i can tell from all the controversy about it that rod drayer is certainly right about saying we need to democratize these these practices and bring them into our churches now what i can't tell because i haven't read the book is does that mean withdrawal or not see i in know i would agree probably with anything he Says about thickening the formative practices of our churches enormously i'm not sure what he says about what does that mean about our political involvement

evangelistic involvement you know what does that mean about how we engage the world i don't know until i read the book i have no idea so i'm not pro or or auntie the benedict option until i read his book and find out exactly what he's saying but at least the formative Part my guess is what i said that's the reason why you asked me the question is i'd be very much agreement to say our churches are not really changing our people they're inspiring them but they're not forming them they're not that different and that's what

rod i think is saying over here uh how do we protect ourselves uh when putting these and democratizing these Monastic practices without falling back into the idea of a works-based salvation yes legalism how do you do that well um no you're right well when you're preaching the gospel you you always have to say you know martin luther said and he actually did say this somewhere i finally found it he says we're justified by faith alone but not by faith which is Alone or remains alone so he says you have to say that though the practices

in no way contribute to your salvation the practices will be something you will want to pick up and do because you'll want to be like the one who saved you by grace you're going to want to be like jesus if you don't want to be like jesus i don't make sure you were saved by grace I mean that's a hard dialectic to get across to most people because if you if you push grace some people say well then you know why should i work that hard at all this stuff and if you push the work

then people say well you're not saved by grace um but some of you know this because i've used it all when i was evangelizing a woman who Eventually became a christian but she wasn't a christian at the time and she was saying she'd gone to church and she'd always been told you're saved by being a good person and she said but in your church you're saying you're saved by complete grace great so nothing to do with anything i do it doesn't matter how much i pray it doesn't matter how good i am no matter what

i do i'm i'm i can't save i'm saved by grace And she says i don't know why more churches don't preach that and i said well why do you think they don't preach it and she says i'll tell you why she says if i'm saved by my works then then god can't demand anything from me it's like i'm a taxpayer i have my rights you know i've put in my you know i've paid my dues so you can't just ask anything of me she said but if i was really believed i was saved by Grace

well there'd be nothing he couldn't ask of me i have to be completely completely given to him i have to do everything for him and i would want to and people are threatened by that and i looked at her and i said and you're not a christian yet i said she says no she was scared of it but you know a lot of people would say well if i'm saved by grace You know what incentive do i have to be holy and and her answer was if when you say if i'm saved by grace what

incentive do i have by to be holy it means the only incentive you can imagine is fear and the only imagine the only the only uh incentive for holiness is fear it's that shouldn't be it so you do always have to preach the Gospel in such a way that people say tell me what to do and i really want to do it but but it's motivated by grace so that's always a problem no doubt about it you're gonna have to do that all the time otherwise they're a pride and works righteousness comes in and say

look look at where i'm getting through i'm doing all this stuff so you're right it's a problem i just you just have to tackle it like that preach the gospel more deeply or at least more extensively So good good point though yes i i grew up in a dutch reform culture where we still sing the genevan tunes we still do a lot of the monastic processes that you've brought out of calvin we've appealed to geneva for that but a lot of our people don't want it anymore they struggle to see why we should do it

my question to you is how are you going to convince your people That they should do this and what would i say we're americans you know i mean some of us are but uh um and americans just always want to do the new thing so it won't i won't have that much trouble because they haven't done it before since they haven't done it before they'll say oh this is new And and of course for americans it's new so it's great and your problem is it's not new so it's terrible see so there may be dutch

but they're dutch americans so it's terrible uh you're gonna have to you're actually gonna have to say um first of all you ought to say that we're probably more formed by these form you We have probably been more formed by this than you think that other places that don't use this that there's a tendency to just pick up the spirit of the age you have to make the case for why it continues to be a good thing uh but the other thing is to do is to add a couple things that they haven't seen before

that are new then they'll they'll feel like oh this is cool i i know that's you don't want to pander to that But you do have to uh try to make some use so you uh by the way this is also you know james k.a smith who's always talking about the importance of liturgical worship for form formation right all of his books are saying uh and he's right about this in general that you're not changed simply by teaching people things but by the the imagination being captured and the affections of the heart being changed And

he's right so he says liturgical worship uh but the same thing people are always saying to me you know i was raised in a liturgical church and it's not it's not a magic bullet and there are people in the liturgical church that say i want something new i've got one of my wife's siblings Um partly because she was raised in a more traditional church just doesn't want traditional worship at all just really she feels much more liberated by more contemporary worship so oh i think you have to uh be careful i don't think the formative

practices are tied to one way of doing worship even though i do think you have to take great Care like i said the lord's supper is very important but you notice i didn't quite go with jamie smith on this i didn't say it's got to be liturgical because it depends on how liturgical i would say change things up and make good in some way so people do feel like we're moving forward and make a good case for the parts that you're Keeping that's always good leadership good leadership says here's what we're going to change here's

what we're going to keep here's why we're going to keep it here's why we're going to make a change you have to make the case so let's keep going here just to get a couple more that's a great question too over here tim i'm an anglican pastor saint stephen's church in swickley Pennsylvania yeah i know it oh great we uh we have a small group community along the lines of what you've described with daily office accountability group spiritual direction and so on there's been a lot of fruit from that but there have been two counter

challenges okay one is it can breed a clericalism of the laity where you have the super spiritual Lay people who sign up for this small group program and so that's one issue the other is a time issue of how much people are committing to these kinds of practices which actually eats away at their missional commitment to the outward emphasis in the community well you know i don't i'd have to sit down and look at exactly how much time it took but the first part the super spirit this is what calvin was trying to get away

from He didn't really want it to be optional he wanted to everybody do it and that gets rid of the feeling that some people are elite i mean that's the whole problem with monasticism is you have a bunch of elite people who are really being religious for the rest of us and so i it's difficult because i know in america you Can't reg and it's very hard to be people don't want to be regimented they want to have options and so the people who opt for this will end up maybe developing some pride it's a

problem i mean listen i've told you i want to learn from your questions rather than i'm not there there are some places where i could give you a lot of answers in subjects i think i know more about i Don't feel like i know as much about this uh the second thing though about the time uh you do have to make the case that mission is is a formative practice and so you have to make time for it and if you don't have time for mission uh you need to make sure that whatever your formative

practices are it's if they're well balanced you for example you can't have someone Who says i get through all the psalms every day uh you know so i'm not we're i'm not going to work and i'm you know not spending time with my children i mean that's ridiculous but i'm saying you wouldn't want to just take one practice and drill down on it and leave all the others go so you do have to make the case and i tried to say something at the very end that calvin didn't do the the mission thing Because it

was a state church sort of situation but mission is one of the formative practices so you just have to go back and say if you don't have time for mission then you you're giving too much time to these practices and not enough time to this that's how i would start to argue i get time for a couple more but i'm learning as much as you are by the way which maybe isn't what you wanted maybe You wanted the expert i could have kept talking until the time was up and made it made you think i

was smarter than i am about this subject but now i'm revealed to be what i am yes given that calvin operated within a state-run context yes he could find people in order to have them engage in these number of things it did happen without in the absence of that Today which i am sad for based on spiritual hunger and we want more engagement my question is as a minister as a pastor how do you deal with spiritual apathy and then you know move people to spiritual hunger so they want to engage right in these variety

of things well now i think it'd be fair to say that calvin didn't they didn't do the fining and they didn't do the civil the civil uh penalties very often that's What the consistory was for if you read the the minutes of the consistory it's it's some of it's pretty hilarious but they uh they were constantly bringing people before it who clearly just weren't they just weren't engaging so it i even though i was just saying to the brother over here that they required everyone to do the practices so that there wasn't an elite The

fact was there was always there was always a percentage of people who just did not they just didn't do it they just wouldn't do it and so they were constantly being brought up in front of the elders but most of mostly what they got were exhortations they did not get you know they really didn't get fined or slammed and uh you they it wasn't as totalitarian as it Sounds there was always the danger of that if you were really flagrant but by and large there's people there they're constantly exhorting and they're coming back all the

time and they're not getting to church they're not doing this they're not doing that so there was apathy and it was met with loving exhortation and and and a recognition that a certain percentage of people will just Not uh you know you just have to pray that god lights a fire under them yes over here yeah thank you um regarding some of the things you mentioned today someday a daily office of prayers and catechism how could they develop or contribute to our thought of family worship and what could that look like together yeah well the

family worship You know i want you to know my sons completely rebelled against family worship and we stopped and today they're all in their 30s now if you ask them since they're all professing christians people say you know what did your parents do right that helped you embrace the faith they'll usually say they stopped family worship i've heard them say that because they Hated it and they were uh and this is where you do have to be sensitive to people's different for different uh capacities and aptitudes they just couldn't stand it now in their case

now think about this these are pastors kids and they go there they go to church a lot and they go to a lot of christian activities and they felt like one more And so we sat there and we said okay you know in a way they are being formed in in ways that other kids were not being they were exposed to teaching they were exposed to the gospel they were exposed to we felt like we realized that we were being a little wooden about it and so we did allow we just we stopped it however

um calvin would say the catechism was a lot Of fun to do frankly with kids uh the psalms are a lot of fun to do with kids it should be that to me the uh the key is brevity the key is brevity in fact when kathy and i finally broke through and started praying with each other every night which we have now for years and never missed we also found the key was brevity that every time we tried to do it before We kind of made it a little too officious a little too you know

rigorous and you know we we we took it too seriously we just did it quickly and i think that was that was a big part of it um but don't forget by the way i'm not saying how you get people into the psalms i mean you know kathy and i wrote a book called songs of jesus which is through the psalms every single verse in one year And that was i i do know some people that are actually they did this once and they love it but now they're going to use it every year but

they're not going to make the main thing they do because you know if you you can do it in like 10 minutes and so i know some people say that's how i'm getting through this psalm i'm getting through psalms once a year and and uh there's a lot of different ways Of doing it that's what i'm trying to say and you you do need to be flexible and now i frank think i need to say time's up let me close in prayer and as soon as we're done i'm going to dinner and you're going to

dinner too let me pray thank you father for giving us a chance to talk about we in a digital culture in a post-christian culture can form people into christ's likeness We do know that in the early church we do know in during the reformation that you did work always through very imperfect people and very imperfect practices uh it was they never worked perfectly at all and yet grapefruit was born in those ages of the of the of church history we pray that you would find us ways To uh to do that now because we really

are we we have for many years been blessed with an awful lot of uh christian influence in our society and that's going away uh in your providence we ask that you would show us how we can continue to raise up uh sons and daughters and our and men and women who are are not conformed to the world but are transformed through the renewal of their minds by the gospel So help us i hope that this hour we spent together was provocative in some small but important ways in everyone's life everyone who heard and i pray

that you would work with what little we came up with here today but that you would work with that and it would be a seed that we planted and bear much fruit in our lives and in the lives of the church we pray this in jesus name amen you