Written by Samuel D. James |
Friday, March 4, 2022
What we want are extraordinary fixes to ordinary problems. In this desire we miss the reality that there’s always something else to fix, there’s always something else to do, and there’s always something we’ll miss. Looking for extraordinary means is a roadmap to variously intense levels of personal frustration.

I’m suspicious that one reason older generations of Christians tended to be skeptical toward ambition—even calling it a sin on occasion—is that they were able to see something more clearly than we moderns can. Life in the 21st century West is by definition fast, mobile, and wandering. If you want to do something else, you can. If you want to be something else, you can. For most people alive right now there’s never been another reality except this one. Like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous illustration, we don’t really see this, we simply live within it.
Older saints, on the other hand, were more likely to see freedom and upward mobility as a singular thing, something that stood out when someone you knew claimed it surrounded by family and friends and community that were more or less resigned to their lot in life. For moderns ambition is ambient, but for them it was a condition with a definable list of attributes and consequences.
My point is this: When you’re removed from something in this way, removed enough to recognize it as something other and not just swim in it, you probably have a better angle of vision on it than others. And I think one thing that these older Christians saw within ambition was a rule of diminishing return with spiritual side effects. It’s what I’m learning right now in my own life and thinking:
There’s always something else.

The problem with most species of ambition is not that they seek good change or more success or greater mastery. The problem is that most species of ambition are self-referential. Ambitious people don’t generally say they want to make a million dollars or start 3 companies or earn 2 doctorates. They don’t put numbers to their ambition. They simply say, “I’m ambitious,” by which they mean, “I’m always moving.” The constancy and restlessness shift from the means to the end. Spiritually speaking, continual dissatisfaction—a resilient inability to say, “Ok, I’m good now”—has almost always been flagged as dangerous.
But it’s not just material ambition. What about spiritual ambition? Recently in my reading I came across this sentence from a theologian and it stopped me in my tracks: “There are no extraordinary means of grace in the Christian life.” I lingered over that line for a while as it delivered a broadside to most of my Christian walk. How many years have I spent as a believer earnestly, diligently, even tirelessly, seeking an extraordinary means by which I would finally feel the intimacy with Christ I desire and the temptations that beset me just fall off like sawdust? The matter-of-factness of that sentence pummeled me. That one book, that one sermon, that one conference or that one conversation I’m looking for to put all the jagged parts of my spiritual life into an incandescent whole…it does not exist. There’s always something else to do, but there are no extraordinary means of grace.
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Written by Coleman M. Ford and Shawn J. Wilhite |
Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Early Christian pastors dug a deep well of theology to bring forth water for the care of souls, and we can glean many insights from this tradition that will help us deepen our ministry, enrich our theological reflection, and vivify our spiritual communion with God.

The Role of a Pastor
Early in ministry, Shawn and I often heard, “The pastor is supposed to do such and such” regarding various extrabiblical tasks. Several people had expectations that were not rooted in a biblical vision of the pastoral office. It certainly took time for us to learn (and continue to learn) how to remain teachable to some and lead others toward a biblical vision of the pastoral office. But, in general, too many items have been added to the pastor’s job description. According to Scripture, the pastor first and foremost prays (Acts 6), shepherds his people (1 Pet. 5), lives a virtuous life in the Spirit, and upholds sound teaching in local settings.
While writing, I (Coleman) overheard two women describing their church experiences over the last few years. One heard a feel-good message and was then herded out of the sanctuary; she did not feel known or seen. The other said she wanted to be in a church that was more rooted in the community. Both were expressing the desire to attend church in the town where they live, be integrated with others in the community, and be known by their church family and its leaders. This casual conversation in a suburban coffee shop in north Texas over iced lattes perfectly represents why we wrote a book about a biblical vision of ministry. While we don’t want to idolize a specific vision of church life, we do want to bring the ancient voices of the church fathers to bear on this topic. We offer a simple vision of a pastor who prays, tends to people’s souls, and preaches the life-giving word of God. This kind of pastor pursues virtue, contemplation, and slowness. He equips the church and shepherds people’s souls. He cultivates communal and individual liturgies. He leads a local church that, though unknown to the rest of the world, is vital to the surrounding neighborhoods. Overall, the classical pastor is the quiet pastor who displays a peaceful temperament and ministers to souls in his local setting.1
In order to do this, the classical pastor contemplates and proclaims the beauties of the triune God, the gospel, and the Scriptures, using this to walk with people through their current life into the next. He takes these beauties and shows people how to find joy and happiness in God during this life. In a single day, he may walk with someone who shared the gospel for the first time, someone who criticizes his last sermon, someone whose marriage he officiated but who is now on the verge of divorce, and someone expressing an interest in missions work. Such pastors administer the riches of God to address the complexities of various situations in his congregants’ lives, model godly living, and equip others for ministry. Navigating this pastoral life is, as the fathers said, the “art of arts.”2
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We should pray for the quick coming of things agreeable to God’s will because we strongly desire them. At the same time, we should patiently submit to the wisdom of God’s timing in answering our prayers. We should sincerely pray for the Lord Jesus to come quickly even if we have reason to believe that His coming will not occur in our lifetime. We have many reasons to desire the second coming because our redemption will not be fully applied until that time.

I remember being in a class decades ago listening to Dr. Charles Ryrie explain the difference between the words imminent, immanent and eminent. The word eminent means having a superior position, the word immanent contrasts with the word transcendent, and the word imminent means happening soon. A particular view of imminency was an important part of the dispensationalism that Dr. Ryrie was teaching. He didn’t want us to embarrass ourselves by getting these similar sounding words confused.
The doctrine of imminency states that Jesus is returning soon. Classical dispensationalism and the pre-tribulation rapture doctrine were devised in the early nineteenth century to be consistent with a particular view of imminency. At that time, the prevailing Protestant eschatology had a historicist understanding of prophecy fulfillment in the church age. The key to this was the identification of the Anti-Christ with the Roman papacy. At the time of the Reformation, Protestants tended to consider the fall of the Anti-Christ as then imminent. The power and reach of the papacy, however, rebounded through the Counter-Reformation and the religious wars. Protestant hope for the fall of the Anti-Christ was revived in 1798 when French troops under Napoleon occupied Rome and exiled the pope to France, where he died the next year. A new pope was elected in about six months, and he returned to Rome. Napoleon again invaded Rome in 1809, and the new pope was exiled to France. This pope was able to return to Rome after the defeat of Napoleon in the Battle of Paris in 1814.
After this roller coaster series of events regarding the papacy, some Protestants were ready for a view of prophecy that was not so closely tied to current events. The English Plymouth Brethren offered such a view in their newly devised pre-tribulation rapture doctrine based on a combination of innovations. One innovation was the separation of the rapture of the saints from the second coming. The rapture was no longer a part of the cluster of events that constitute the second coming. The rapture became an event preceding the second coming whose purpose was to remove all the Christians from earth so that the former Jewish age could resume. A second innovation was the assertion that the church age is an unforeseen parenthesis in a prophesied Jewish program. This parenthetical church age began at the Pentecost of Acts chapter two and will end with the rapture. The church age is placed between the sixty-ninth and seventieth of the seventy weeks prophesied in Daniel chapter nine. A third innovation was the claim that all unfulfilled prophecy must be fulfilled in a literal Jewish context after the rapture. No prophecy whatsoever is fulfilled during the parenthetical church age.
This new dispensational doctrine acknowledged that there are unfulfilled prophecies that need to be fulfilled before the second coming. Yet it placed the fulfillment of all these prophecies after the rapture. By associating imminency solely with the rapture as they had defined it, they were able to say with consistency that the rapture could happen at any moment. In their system, there is no event in the church age prophesied to occur before the rapture.
I discuss elsewhere the deficiencies of the pre-tribulation rapture doctrine. If that modern doctrine is in error, then one has to reconcile the doctrine of imminency with the existence of unfulfilled prophecies that will be fulfilled in the church age. As long as there are prophesied events in the church age that are yet to be fulfilled, the second coming must still be sometime in the future. Taking that into account, the second coming can still be defined as chronologically near because we are living in the last days.
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