Everybody Wants To Be Whitefield But We Need Wesley
There is an oft-quoted management axiom that goes something like this:
“every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
In other words, it’s the system that produces the result.
A few weeks ago the Board of General Superintendents of the Church of the Nazarene reported to the General Board. Leaving aside whether statistics accurately measure a church’s faithfulness/fruitfulness/effectiveness (all of that is a conversation for another time) the report included some troubling trends summed up in this one chart (pay attention to the red):
Why is the Church of the Nazarene in USA/Canada getting the results it gets? Why is the system not producing?
The answer is probably a complex multiplicity of factors but can I suggest one factor that I don’t hear all that often? We’re producing the wrong kind of leaders.
Everybody wants to be Whitefield but what we really need is Wesley. The system prefers preachers. We need mobilizers who happen to preach.
It’s common for Nazarene pastors to be referred to as preacher. Ordination candidates are asked if they are called to preach. If not, we have an other category often viewed as secondary because the primary role of a pastor in the church of the Nazarene is that of preacher.
In 1928, 20 years after the Church of the Nazarene was officially founded, J.B. Chapman, the editor of the Herald of Holiness and the Preacher’s Magazine, published an editorial entitled “More Preachers and Better Preachers Are Needed.”
The young denomination was growing and needed ministerial leadership. What was his solution? More well-trained preachers.
In 1945, the Church of the Nazarene established their first seminary. JB Chapman spoke at the first convocation. He said:
“It is the obligation of any church to provide for the expert training of its ministers, and the Seminary is the Nazarene answer to this obligation for us . . . We have founded this Seminary in the hope that it will help us secure the type and caliber of preachers called for. We do not expect to find these (preachers) . . . ready-made. We know we shall have to make them, under God.”
The primary purpose of years of biblical study, theological education and practical experience was to make better preachers who preach better sermons. More preachers, better preachers.
At the time that strategy made sense. Because America had yet to move into a post-Christian cultural moment and was still somewhat familiar with Judeo-Christian underpinnings, focusing on preaching fit the context. This was, after all, the era of tent meeting revivals as a launching point for new churches in new communities.
It’s been 90 years since JB Chapman first made that statement. 90 years of more preachers, better preachers. 90 years of preaching as the dominant pastoral role. 90 years of preaching as the end result of biblical and theological education/preparation.
90 years later: preacher as the primary role of a pastor remains. The system produces preachers. 90 years later it is not enough. It never was.
Preaching is important. Very important. God, according to the biblical witness, spoke the world into existence. Today, as the gospel is proclaimed, God is also speaking. So, in many ways, God is using the preacher to evoke a new world in the midst of this old world. Preaching is essential work.
But really good preaching is not enough. It never was.
A few years ago I was reading through the journals of John Wesley (because I’m that level of nerd) when I noticed this:
To channel Wesley: how much preaching has there been all over the Church of the Nazarene but no regular societies, no discipline, no order of connection; and the consequence is that nine in ten of the once-awakened are now faster asleep than ever.
John Wesley was a great preacher. He valued preaching so highly that when he trained Methodist ministers how to preach he provided them with sample sermons. But preaching was just the beginning of Wesley’s ministry. The culmination of his week’s work was not a Sunday sermon. He preached on Sunday and then saddled up his horse and continued to join the God already at work in the coal mines, the fields, the societies and the bands. Wesley wanted to create disciples and he knew that preaching alone wasn’t enough.
George Whitefield, however, was an even better preacher. One of the best of all time. Wesley himself admitted it. Whitefield didn’t learn that preaching wasn’t enough until it was too late.
My brother Wesley acted wisely. The souls that were awakened under his ministry he joined to societies, and thus preserved the fruit of his labor. This I neglected, and my people are a rope of sand.
The aim of Whitefield’s ministry: converts. The aim of Wesley’s: disciples.
These days are no different. Good preaching attracts a crowd. Good preaching creates a Christian platform. But then the preacher moves (or dies) and what’s left? After all, there was never a Whitefieldian movement.
The power that created the Wesleyan movement was not just Wesley’s preaching nor was it just his theology. The Wesleyan movement is the result of a system that mobilized the people of God to join in the work of God.
Instead of theology, biblical study and practical ministry serving the purpose of preaching, preaching served Wesley’s larger purpose of discipleship.
The point of learning the book of Daniel is to preach it well AND it’s to be able to help people imagine what it looks like to remain faithful to God in the midst of cultural exile. The point of learning holiness theology is to inform the proclamation of the good news AND it is to lead people into understanding our broken world through the eyes of God’s love.
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
This is all too familiar for me. My pastoral imagination was most captured by the preaching moment. My most refined skill upon my graduation was preaching. For years of my ministry, I was way better on a platform than I was in a living room.
