more than 5000 preachers have taken the following pledge. will you?
“I will make the Bible my primary resource in sermon preparation and preaching.
I may use other resources such as commentaries and web sites to enhance, not replace, my personal interaction with Scripture.
As I study I will strive to accurately understand and honestly apply God’s Word, allowing Him to uniquely proclaim His truth in a relevant way through me.”
hat tip to Shepherd’s Fellowship.
Doesn’t this appeal to a large public on supposedly “the world’s most highly trafficked sermon website” seem a little like Pharisees praying publicly on street corners so that people will take notice? I’m sure that the Pharisees felt that they each had “good,” “justifiable” reasons for this practice as well, which is partly why they refused to accept the perfect criticism of GOD Incarnate who charged them with hypocrisy for it.
I imagine that every single pastor who made this pledge would probably say that they were already actively doing each one of these things, that all of them were benchmarks of their ministry, even if not to the degree that they would say was ideal. Obviously one would already have to possess at least a public or catechetically healthy respect for Scripture simply to pledge something like this openly.
So then, why would a pastor need to make this pledge very public? He’s either already privately devoted to Christ and to drinking deeply from the Word or he isn’t. Public proclamations aren’t going to make the difference.
Keeping all of this in mind, it seems to me that the purpose of this pledge is little more than marketing oneself… to get one’s name into a list of other “faithful” men whose churches you might wish to attend. Yet, I’ve met a horde of gentleman, pastors among them, who thought of themselves as among those who “strive to accurately understand and honestly apply God’s Word” and who advocated a greater yearning to “get into the Word” whose minds were nevertheless far from Biblical reality on a daily basis and who used Scripture as a platform to introduce their pet theories.
As a man called to be an elder in the Church, I am disappointed at the lack of historical awareness. Pledges of this nature have never changed the Church or made local assemblies more faithful. They are more about spreading the knowledge of the names affixed to the public listing than they are about the attributes of a true shepherd… among them a self-effacing character of diminishment, decreasing that Christ may increase.
Looking more closely at the list, I am quite sure that there are names published among them that will understand this pledge in a very personal way and not abide by it with spiritual integrity… I know this because they are the names of women pastors.