For Calvin, the call to be a Christian pastor was a high and holy calling — but it was also a most challenging vocation, not to be lived in isolation. Ministers of the gospel flourished as they experienced communion with Christ through his word, were empowered by the Holy Spirit, and enjoyed the precious gift of godly colleagues in ministry.

ABSTRACT: Many who know John Calvin as a brilliant Reformed theologian do not yet know him as a model of pastoral collegiality and accountability. Under his leadership, ministry in sixteenth-century Geneva often happened in plurality and community. In particular, four regular meetings fostered Calvin’s vision of collegial ministry: the weekly Company of Pastors, Congrégation, and Consistory, and the quarterly Ordinary Censure. Through these institutions, the city’s pastors prayed together, studied together, encouraged and exhorted one another, and labored for the advance of the gospel together. Their model of ministry offers an enduring case study for pastoral practice, especially in a day when many pastors feel discouraged, isolated, and perhaps on the verge of burnout.
In a New York Times article from August 2010, Paul Vitello describes the serious difficulties faced by many Christian ministers in the United States today.
Members of the clergy now suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at rates higher than most Americans. In the last decade, their use of antidepressants has risen, while their life expectancy has fallen. Many would change jobs if they could. Public health experts . . . caution that there is no simple explanation of why so many members of a profession once associated with rosy-cheeked longevity have become so unhealthy and unhappy.1
During the past decade, researchers have probed various factors contributing to the poor mental and physical health of America’s professional clergy.2 Some factors commonly identified include poor pastor-church alignment, lack of resilience, lack of self-awareness, unresolved conflicts, heavy workloads, unreasonable expectations, financial pressure, and loneliness or isolation. Though no single aspect is usually decisive, the cumulative effect of these tensions and troubles frequently produces high levels of stress that force pastors to question their vocation, or cause them to leave the ministry altogether. Pastoral work often becomes “death by a thousand paper cuts.”3
Thankfully, a variety of helpful resources are now available to support and encourage pastors who are burned out, bummed out, or burdened with congregational ministry.4 One important resource for pastoral health and flourishing that is frequently overlooked in contemporary discussions, however, is the history of the pastoral office — the practices, convictions, and institutions that Christians in the past have adopted to nourish and strengthen gospel ministers. As we shall see, a historical awareness of the pastoral office can provide a broader perspective and a refreshing draught of wisdom as modern-day Christian ministers live out their vocations in ways that are pleasing to God and sustainable for a lifetime of faithful and fruitful ministry. This present essay offers a case study of the model of ministry created by John Calvin in Geneva from 1536–1564. As we’ll see, Calvin recognized the unique challenges faced by faithful gospel ministers and created practices and institutions to promote pastoral collegiality, accountability, and spiritual vitality.5
Proclamation of the Word

When John Calvin (1509–1564) first arrived in Geneva in the summer of 1536, the city republic had been Protestant for barely two months and faced an uncertain future. As Calvin later recalled, “When I first arrived in this church there was almost nothing. They were preaching and that is all. They were good at seeking out idols and burning them, but there was no Reformation. Everything was in turmoil.”6 Over the next 28 years (with a three-year hiatus from 1538–1541), Calvin emerged as the chief human architect responsible for building a new religious order in Geneva that prioritized the preaching of God’s word, the fourfold ministry (pastor, elder, deacon, professor), church discipline, and intensive pastoral care and visitation. Calvin’s vision for a church reformed in doctrine and practice was articulated in Geneva’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances (1541), in the city’s catechism and liturgy (1542), and in Calvin’s expansive biblical commentaries and sermons. For the Genevan Reformer, the faithful exposition and proclamation of God’s word was one of the marks of a true church, standing at the center of gospel ministry. As he once noted, the word is the “means of our salvation, it is all our life, it is all our riches, it is the seed whereby we are begotten as God’s children; it is the nourishment of our souls.”7
One of the first steps Calvin took upon arriving in Geneva was to restructure parish boundaries in order to give priority to the preaching of the word of God. He and his colleague Guillaume Farel consolidated nearly a dozen Catholic churches and chapels into three parish churches within the city’s walls — St. Pierre, la Madeleine, and St. Gervais — and recruited six or seven Reformed ministers to serve these three urban congregations. Calvin also consolidated Geneva’s countryside parishes and appointed around a dozen pastors to serve these rural churches.
The proclamation of God’s word stood at the center of religious life in Calvin’s Geneva. In the city, preaching services included weekday sermons at 8:00 a.m., early morning sermons at 4:00 a.m. for domestic servants, Sunday sermons at 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., and a catechetical sermon on Sundays at noon for children. By 1561, there were 33 sermons preached within Geneva’s city walls each week. Calvin and his pastoral colleagues shared the preaching load and rotated between the city’s pulpits. “The preacher was not the proprietor of a pulpit or the captain of his congregation: it was Christ who presided over his Church through the Word.”8 Even so, a disproportionate responsibility for preaching fell on Calvin and his more gifted colleagues such as Theodore Beza and Michel Cop, who regularly preached more than 150 sermons per year.
Calvin and Geneva’s ministers prioritized God’s word in other ways as well. The Genevan liturgy, written by Calvin in 1542, was filled with scriptural allusions and rich biblical language. The singing of the Huguenot Psalter was a standard feature of both public and private worship in Geneva. Children were required to attend catechism classes where they learned the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer — a basic primer for Christian faith, conduct, and worship. In 1555, the ministers, along with the church’s elders, also began conducting annual household visitations to ensure that all of Geneva’s residents had a knowledge of basic biblical doctrine as articulated in the catechism and were living in accordance with God’s word. Finally, during the sixteenth century, Geneva became a center for Protestant publishing, with the city’s presses printing no fewer than eighty editions of the French Bible as well as translations of the Scripture into English, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. For Calvin and Geneva’s ministers, reading, hearing, and obeying God’s word was essential for the life of the church and the spiritual health of God’s people.
Pastoral Collegiality and Accountability

In addition to prioritizing the proclamation of God’s word, Calvin also created pastoral institutions in Geneva to encourage the collegiality, accountability, and spiritual health of the Protestant ministers who served the city’s churches. These institutions included the Company of Pastors, the Congrégation, the Ordinary Censure, and the Consistory — four pastoral bodies that profoundly shaped religious culture in Geneva and preserved Calvin’s theological legacy for generations to come.
Company of Pastors

In the mid-1540s, Calvin began to convene the ministers of the city and countryside every Friday morning to discuss the business of the church. This institution, known as the Company of Pastors, became a fixture of religious life in Geneva thereafter. The Company, whose membership consisted of around fifteen to eighteen pastors and several professors, was responsible to monitor public worship in the city, recruit and examine new pastors, supervise theological education at the Academy, oversee the work of the deacons and public benevolence, and offer godly advice to the city magistrates. Owing to the theological stature of Calvin and several of his colleagues, the Company of Pastors soon developed a vast correspondence with Reformed churches throughout Europe, becoming a kind of hub of international Calvinism. As such, the Company served as an advisory board to foreign churches on doctrinal and practical issues, solicited financial and political support for embattled Protestants, and supplied student-pastors to foreign churches. Moreover, the Company of Pastors began in 1555 a top-secret program where it recruited and trained Reformed ministers and sent them as missionary pastors to Catholic France.
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Written by M.D. Perkins |
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
You may think Revoice is a distant concern or that the Nashville Statement is not the best or most robust response to the issues facing the church in the 21st century. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees—there is something sinister at work here that Christians need to see.

On August 29, 2022, Nate Collins, the founder and president of Revoice, decided to attack the Nashville Statement. His Twitter thread, posted on the five-year anniversary of the Statement’s release, called on all evangelical leaders who signed it to repent for having done so. He called the Statement a “form of spiritual abuse” against “sexual and gender minorities who adhere to the historic, biblical sexual ethic.” According to Collins, it was bullying, it was coercive, it robbed people of language, and, ultimately, it harmed “the least of these.”
Here is Nate Collins’ tweet thread in its entirety, posted at 9:27 AM on August 29, 2022:
The Nashville Statement is 5 years old today. Here’s how to repent from signing it.
Today is the 5th anniversary of the release of the joint @CBMW [Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood] and @ERLC [Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention] #NashvilleStatement. Many sexual and gender minorities who adhere to the historic, biblical sexual ethic experienced the NS as a form of spiritual abuse.
We felt bullied into compliance by evangelical leaders who were our spiritual heroes. The NS reduced us to pawns in a culture war and coerced us to fight a battle that we did not believe was biblical.
It also robbed us of language that we believe has enabled us to be faithful to scripture, as well as honest about our experience.
If you signed the Nashville Statement, but now see how it has harmed those whom our Savior has described as “the least of these”, here are some suggested steps you can take to repent:

Contact CBMW and ask to have your name removed.
Share with your friends and co-signers your decision and why you chose to remove your name.
For those you know personally who were negatively impacted by your participation, reach out and apologize.
For those who were harmed that you do not know personally, share publicly about your change of mind. (Post, tweet, or hey, even reach out to Christianity Today and see if they would be interested to do a piece. I suspect it would rate as newsworthy.)

Making mistakes—even big ones—does not have to be the end of the story, unless you let it be so. Just ask Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Peter, or Paul.[1]
These are quite strong—and striking—accusations to lay at the feet of evangelical leaders. It is expected from the godless world that “does not accept the things of God for they are folly to him” (1 Corinthians 2:14) but from someone who claims to hold to the “historic, biblical sexual ethic,” it is both sad and deeply concerning. After all, the Nashville Statement was intended to be a consensus statement articulating that historic, biblical sexual ethic that Nate Collins claims to believe. Yet he calls those who signed it perpetrators of “spiritual abuse.”
This is why I was compelled to respond to Collins’ tweets with an extensive rebuttal of my own.
Nate Collins represents a position that has been alternately labeled Side B, gay celibate theology, or the Revoice movement (named after the Side B focused conference and organization Collins founded in 2018). It is a more conservative form of “gay Christianity” that believes homosexual behavior is forbidden but that the experience of “sexual minorities” must be recognized by the church. I address the full spectrum of this position in the paper, A Little Leaven: Confronting the Ideology of the Revoice Movement.
So, why should Christians be concerned that the Nashville Statement is under attack by a major Revoice leader? You may think Revoice is a distant concern or that the Nashville Statement is not the best or most robust response to the issues facing the church in the 21st century. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees—there is something sinister at work here that Christians need to see.
Let me give three main reasons why Christians should be concerned by this most recent attack on the Nashville Statement and its signatories:

The nature of the attack
The charge of spiritual abuse
The hidden allegiance with LGBT activists and the “Affirming Church”

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What Charnock does that is so impressive is that he does not simply argue for an uncaused cause, designer, or moral governor, but he argues for God the Creator. He gives us a full definition of God and then uses individual arguments to prove each attribute. Charnock shows us that God is a Spirit. He argues for the incommunicable attributes of God (infinite, eternal, and unchangeable) and also that God is good, just, merciful, etc. His definition of God is like what is given in the Westminster Shorter Catechism Q4.

If you only read one book about God’s existence, it must be Charnock’s The Existence and Attributes of God. There is renewed interest in a Reformed Scholastic like Stephen Charnock due to a new two-volume edition of that work edited by Mark Jones. This is an important contribution because Charnock interacts with previous thinkers like Plato and Aquinas and critically appropriates their philosophical or theological insights when strategic. And yet, Charnock makes his own valuable contributions to our knowledge of God, further reforming the Scholastic tradition utilized by the Reformed Orthodox of his day. A look at his footnotes shows that he was familiar with the critical contributions to this subject and that he made his own contributions and corrections to previous thinkers. I believe this is the most important book about God’s existence and needs to be read by every Christian.
At a personal level, I was pleased to see this renewed interest in Reformed Scholastics like Charnock. I relied on Charnock in my Ph.D. dissertation and for what became my book, The Clarity of God’s Existence. I cherish an older copy from Baker from those student days. When a skeptical professor asked me who gives arguments to show it is clear that God exists, Charnock was at the top of my list. I began with him and then moved on to the challenges of theistic arguments from thinkers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Although living before them, Charnock provided the seeds of what grow into answers to their attacks on reason and the knowledge of God.
What Charnock does that is so impressive is that he does not simply argue for an uncaused cause, designer, or moral governor, but he argues for God the Creator. He gives us a full definition of God and then uses individual arguments to prove each attribute. Charnock shows us that God is a Spirit. He argues for the incommunicable attributes of God (infinite, eternal, and unchangeable) and also that God is good, just, merciful, etc. His definition of God is like what is given in the Westminster Shorter Catechism Q4.
His method corrects mistakes of previous theistic arguments. Rather than giving one argument and then concluding, “this is God,” Charnock gives us arguments for each part of the definition of “God.” He demonstrates that God is Spirit, he demonstrates the incommunicable attributes, and he demonstrates the moral attributes of God. In each case, he has given us an argument we can evaluate for soundness.
Atheism
Charnock begins with Psalm 14:1. Throughout the book, we find his reliance on the Psalms, and this is a reminder to us of how precious they are and the many arguments they give us to know God. The fool says in his heart there is no God. No one seeks God, no one understands, and no one does what is right. Atheism is without excuse. It is not an intellectually or morally defensible position. And yet it is at the core of the human condition. “None seek” means “noneseek.” Although humans might view themselves as doing their best in pursuing God, the truth is that in their postlapsarian natural condition, they are not doing so. No one understands or knows God as they should. Charnock makes the problem of God’s existence an existential problem for all of us. It cannot simply be a fun puzzle or challenge. Each of us must answer before God for our own failure to seek and understand.
Charnock defines three kinds of atheism. He says:
There is a threefold denial of God. 1. Quoad existentiam; this is absolute atheism. 2. Quoad Providentiam, or his inspection into, or care of the things of the world, bounding him in the heavens. 3. Quoad naturam, in regard of one or other of the perfections due to his nature (24).
Today, when we say “atheist,” we usually mean a materialist. We mean a person who says that only matter exists and that matter has always existed. There were ancient materialists like Democritus and there are very obvious contemporary atheists like Richard Dawkins. But this also means those who deny the existence of God, the Creator, who brought the universe into existence rather than existing alongside it from eternity, as Plato and Aristotle taught. It also includes the pantheist who denies the existence of God the Creator by saying that “all is God.” We can call these the dualists (both God and the universe exist without a beginning) and the monists.
His second definition of atheism makes this a much larger group and is more like what I call Biblical Atheism. This is the atheist who denies the providence of God. We find such a one described in Psalm 73:11 or Psalm 94:7. Here, too, we find Aristotle. Although Charnock will use vocabulary and insights from Aristotle in his theology proper, he is willing to criticize the philosopher for not using reason to understand the providence of God. He, like those in the Psalms just mentioned, posited a God that does not see and does not rule. For this, he was without excuse. This is also the Absolute of theologians like Tillich and being itself in Heidegger. Just like it is clear to reason that God exists, so too it is clear to reason that God rules and is sovereign.
His third definition pertains to the denial of particular parts of the definition of God. For instance, the open theist denies that God is unchangeable. Or the anthropomorphite denies that God is infinite. Both of these are usually the outcome of a failure to understand the so-called problem of evil. Here, Charnock points us to that highest and ultimate end: the knowledge of the glory of God. God rules over all things for the revelation of His glory. And our highest end is to see this glory revealed in all of His works. This both provides a solution to the problem of evil and also a teleology for all of the events of our lives.
He also discusses practical atheism, which brings atheism home to each of us. Practical atheism means living as if there is no God. It is living as if God is not real. Charnock tells us it is ungrateful contempt of God. Such a person could say the right words and claim to hold to the right theories but live as if there is no God. In fact, the way it normally works is that a person is living this way, and when called to give an account of their lives, it is then that their mind casts about looking for an intellectual defense. This is the condition of self-deception that then gets shared with others as self-justification. Atheism is an attempt at just such self-justification.
Charnock tells us the biblical solution, also knowable from general revelation, for practical atheism: the fear of the Lord. All understanding begins here. We are not able to get away with intellectualizing our belief about God and not having it affect our lives. Such a condition exhibits a lack of the fear of God. Even in the prelapsarian state, we would have a fear of God as the reverence and awe due to the sovereign Creator. But postlapsarian, when we come to understand our condition in unbelief, not understanding God as we should have, we are aware of our sin and the holiness of God. We know our just condemnation. Atheism is an attempt to solve this burden by denying it is real. It is a false remedy that, in the end, brings ruin.
He says, “Let us labor to be sensible of the atheism in our nature, and be humbled for it.” It is contrary to reason. “The unreasonableness of it concerns God. It is the high contempt of God. It is inverting the order of things; a making God the highest to become the lowest; and self the lowest to become the highest.” We attempt to make ourselves god and deny the true God. It is the original sin and it is the sin that each person commits. The atheist exalts himself and calls God a liar by saying he is seeking, but there is not enough evidence of God.
Practical atheism is the denial of the law of God. That law begins by commanding us to love God.  This law is written on our hearts, meaning it is the very nature of things.
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