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.
Read More

We have unfortunately been so influenced in our churches today by the singing of pop music, which is breathy and unsupported—the very opposite of lustily and with good courage. Christians today have been taught by pop culture that if you really mean it, you’ll close your eyes, scrunch your face, sway a little, and sing in a light sensual manner. Don’t sing like that. That’s not how God created us to sing. That way of singing comes from the sensuality of pop music, it is a kind of singing that embodies the passions of the flesh, not from a robust love for God’s truth. Worldly culture is attacking the church and the family, worldly music has weakened congregational singing. Sing aloud to God our strength. Sing heartily!

God commands us to teach and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, not as something optional, extra, or somehow disconnected from our mission to make disciples. No, as is clear from the broader context of Colossians 3, God commands us to sing, because singing is essential to discipleship.
On that basis, let us consider a few direct applications for your home and church.
1. Sing as Much as You Can
Singing is not optional. You can’t just say, well, singing is just not my thing. No, God commanded us to to sing because it is essential to our discipleship.
So sing as much as you can. In your home, sing before meals and after meals, make singing an emphasis in your times of family worship, sing before bed, sing in the car. Sing, sing sing. And our churches should be filled with congregational singing.
Be discerning in what you sing. Make sure that what you are singing accomplishes the goals of forming the kind of mature disciples mentioned here in Colossians 3 and all through the Scripture.
But once you have discerned what will help with the discipleship of your family or your church best, then sing! Singing ought to be a normal, regular occurrence in our homes and in our churches.
You might say, but I don’t know how to sing. I didn’t grow up singing, and I just don’t know how.
That leads to the next application.
2. Learn to Sing, and Teach Your Children to Sing
Singing is a skill, but it is a skill anyone can learn if you put a little effort into it.
What would you say if you were encouraging another Christian to faithfully read his Bible, and he said, “Well, I don’t know how to read. I didn’t grow up reading, so i just can’t read.” What would you say? Oh, OK. Well if you didn’t grow up reading, I guess we’ll just give you a pass on reading your Bible.
No! We would say, “Brother, that’s really too bad. I’m so sorry for you. So, now you need to learn how to read. God has commanded you to read his Word, so you need to do whatever it takes to learn the skills necessary to obey God’s command and feed your soul.”
The same is true for singing. Not having grown up singing is no excuse to disobey the command of the Lord. If you don’t know how to sing, then do whatever it takes to learn the skills necessary to obey God’s command and disciple your soul. Find another Christian who sings well and get help. There are all sorts of resources today to help you sing. Anyone can learn to sing, it just takes effort like any other skill.
And don’t make the same mistake for your own children.
Can you imagine a parent who said, “I’ll teach my children to read if they show an affinity for it”? Then why do we do the same with singing? God commanded his disciples to read the Word, and God commanded his disciples to sing the Word. Parents, make sure your children learn music. Get them into piano lessons. Enroll them in a good children’s choir. Raise up your children to be singers.
3. Get a Good Hymnal
I can’t stress this enough. There are certainly benefits to singing lyrics off of a screen, and I would never say it is wrong to do that.
But singing off a screen can never replace the benefits of a good hymnal. Much of the music illiteracy that plagues the church today is due to the decline of hymnals, where you can see the actual musical score.
You say, but I can’t read the musical score.
Read More
Related Posts:

What makes this challenge odd is that it presumes the pro-life community is doing nothing to meet the needs of women (pregnant or not) and their children. The reality is that there are more pregnancy resource centers in the United States than there are abortion clinics. These centers and their staff provide counseling, pregnancy testing, maternity supplies, ultrasounds, housing, and even financial assistance for women and their unborn and born babies.

The Planned Parenthood employee thought she had me with her question: “How many unwanted children have you adopted?” “None,” I replied. She probably thought, Checkmate, I got him. The pro-life view results in more babies being born. So it follows, according to this lady’s thinking, that if I don’t adopt any of them, I’m disqualified from arguing against abortion. Though this question is rhetorically powerful, it’s not a compelling case against pro-lifers.
Let me be clear: Adoption is beautiful. That’s for certain. It’s a noble and praiseworthy act when a loving couple sees a child in need and adopts him as their own.
But if you’ve never adopted a child, does this disqualify you from speaking out against abortion? Although this is a common challenge raised by abortion-choice advocates, there are (at least) five problems with this thinking.
First, there is no logical connection between a person’s unwillingness to adopt a child and their moral claim that abortion is wrong. Just because both are related to the subject of abortion, that doesn’t mean they are contradictory. How does a pro-lifer’s unwillingness to adopt a baby give another person justification to kill that baby? In logic, this is called a red herring. It’s a distraction from the main point. The question illegitimately shifts the attention from the morality of abortion to the pro-life person. It’s clever sophistry but bad logic.
Second, the misstep becomes more obvious with two morally comparable illustrations. Imagine you’re arguing in 19th-century America that slavery is immoral, and a slavery advocate retorts, “How many ex-slaves have you employed in your company?” Your argument against slavery is dismissed because, if it succeeds, it results in freed slaves who are “unemployed.” If you don’t employ them, it’s alleged you can’t argue against slavery. That doesn’t make sense, though. The question of whether or not slavery should be abolished should be decided based on the merits of the argument against slavery and not on your willingness to hire freed slaves.
Or imagine you argue to criminalize sleeping on a city’s sidewalks, thereby displacing the homeless population. Someone responds by asking, “How many homeless people are you willing to house in your home?”
Read More