Some New IVP Books on Ministry

I get regularly get books in the mail from publishers and I have a batch of two little gems from IVP.

Derek Tidball
Ministry by the Book: New Testament Patterns for Pastoral Leadership
(Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009).

Derek Tidball is the former principal of London School of Theology and currently visiting scholar at Spurgeon's College. Tidball's contention in this book is that biblical ministry is "multicoloured, not monochrome" and he advocates "that the New Testament writers set before us a number of models of ministry, each one of which is shaped by the needs of the church they were serving and, no doubt, by their own individual personalities and interests as well". Tidball believers that "An in-depth review of the books of the New Testament on ministry will lead to a far richer understanding of the mulvaried forms of ministry that is customary among most churches today. It can prove a very releasing exercise for many pastors who struggle to fit into a current ecclesiastical mould even when they know their gifts do not quite match it, helping them to play to their strenghts. It can prove a very salutary exercise for church authorities, whether national or local, who have attempted to compress the variety of God's gifts into a dull uniformity" (pp. 14-15). I know exactly what Tidball means. I've seen some seminaries that are in effect clone factories where the graduates end up believing all the same stuff, preaching with the same style, and more scarily even end up dressing the same! I'm very grateful for the college that I trained at, but if I had to make one criticism, it is that I got the feeling that our sole purpose was to try to become the next Rick Warren. Tidball gives a good survey of the patterns of ministry in the NT.

Darrel W. Johnson
The Glory of Preaching: Participating in God's Transformation of the World
(Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009).

This book is a book to encourage preachers. I've never been a pastor, but I know what it's like to stand in front of people Sunday after Sunday and wonder to myself "Is anybody really listening to this? Are they gonna remember any of this after lunch? Would they rather be watching football or shopping than listening to me?" Johnson wants to emphasize preaching as the transformative moment where we encounter God. He quotes the second Helvetic confession: "The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God". He believes that when God speaks, something happens. When the preacher speaks, God is speaking. When God speaks something happens like we get a clear vision of the living God in Jesus; a better understanding of the gospel; an alternative reading of reality; a new way of seeing things, feeling, and acting; and a new power to enable us to walk in this new reality. His book word is, hence, "participation". It's a book about "Dare to preach ... and see what happens". Most encouraging!

Slagging on the Church

Over at CT there is an article by Mark Galli on Pastors as Lovers [of the Church]. He notes the cynicism and sarcasm that many speakers of the National Pastors Convention had for the church. I think frustration and anger at trying to turn things around in a church and not being able to, can really suck the joy and wind out of some people. I once asked a pastor friend of mine what was the best thing about ministry. He said, "Christians!" I then asked him what was the worst thing about ministry. He said, "Christians!". Anyone who had know the frustrations of ministry can relate to that.

I'm more than willing to critique the excesses and errors of the Church (be it Western, American, Asian, African, Anglican, Baptist, or The Royal Society of Red-head Exegetical Ninja Storm Troopers of the Sacred Covenant of Holy Doctrine), but there is a danger that the rhetoric of our criticisms become excessive simply in order to validate our egos, propitiate our hurt, and parade our own vision for how it should be. For instance, imagine you went up to your best friend's fiance and called her a "a lazy, stupid, whore". No matter what she had done wrong, your best friend is probably gonna be pretty ticked off at you. What's that mean? Well, the Church is the Bride of Christ, hardly sinless and not yet perfect by any stretch, but remember, when you slag her off, you're insulting Jesus' fiance. Keep that in mind next time any of us say, "The Church is so ...".

Philip Towner on 1 Tim 2:11-15

I'm currently reading through Philip Towner, The Letters of Timothy and Titus (NICNT; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006) and here is a summary of what Towner has to say on 1 Tim 2:11-15.

Towner does not advocate the restriction of women from ministerial offices nor does he regard the text as a post-Pauline creation by a follower of Paul who did not share his teacher’s egalitarian view of women. He situates himself between “feminist” and “hierarchicalist” interpretations. His approach has the following characteristics and conclusions, first, Towner is highly dependent on Bruce Winter’s study about the “new Roman women” who asserted their independence with great flare even to the point of making their sexual status ambiguous by their dress and apparel. Given that Christian worship in the atrium of a Graeco-Roman house in Ephesus was a “public” space, Paul does not want the well-to-do Christian women to bring Christians into disrepute by exhibiting this new liberated femininity in public worship. Second, Towner also maintains that the heresy circulating in Ephesus does influence Paul’s restriction here, but he carefully notes the study of S.M. Baugh that has debunked the often repeated scenario that the women were influenced by the hyper-feminist Artemis cult in Ephesus, and Towner adds that there is no definite evidence that the women were even teaching the heresy. Nonetheless, Towner thinks that Paul’s need to provide instructions about marriage (2 Tim 4:3), his statement about the value of childbearing (2 Tim 2:15), the misreading of OT stories (2 Tim 1:4; 2:13-15; 4:1-5), coupled with the attraction of some wealthy women and young widows to the “new women” paradigm does connect the women to the Ephesian heresy. Thus: “Paul prohibits a group of wealthy women from teaching men. The factors leading to his prohibition are: (1) public presentation – outer adornment and apparel and arrogant demeanour give their teaching a shameful and disrespectful coloration; (2) association with false teaching – they may actually have been conveying or supporting heretical teaching” (200). Third, Towner is convinced that elsewhere women did play a public role in Paul’s churches and he detects an equality principle within the Pauline gospel (e.g. Gal 3:28). Fourth, regarding the two complementary infinitives of v. 12 (“to teach” and “to exercise/assume authority over”) he concurs with Andreas Köstenberger’s syntactical and grammatical analysis of the passage but disagrees with him that “to teach” has a positive force since the wider context suggests that the content of the women’s teaching contains heresy or the teaching itself is motivated to assert their dominance over men – in both cases “to teach” has negative connotations. Fifth, concerning the “saved through child-birth” remark in v. 15, Towner thinks that Paul “urges these Christian wives to re-engage fully in the respectable role of the mother, in rejection of heretical and secular trends, through which she may ‘work out her salvation’” (235).