While the public ministry of preaching is vital, most salvation and spiritual growth happens in the context of private ministry.  Baxter noted that it is this private ministry that lends credence and trustworthiness to preaching.[2]  This private ministry is so important that Baxter spends more than a third of the book discussing it.  It is no less important today.  In numerous parables, Jesus described the Kingdom of Heaven as starting small then growing slowly and gradually.  If that is the way Christ will built His Church, then that is what all Christians—especially pastors—must focus on.

So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory.
-1 Peter 5:1-4, ESV
Recently, we have addressed the subject of church conflict.  First, we saw that stirring up division in the church demonstrates a lack of love for the church and therefore a lack of love for Jesus Christ.  Then, we looked at ways to approach conflict in the church, including circumstances in which church leaders are either straying from sound doctrine or committing sins that make them no longer qualified biblically to hold their office.  Therein, I repeatedly referred to our obligation to honor our pastors, even when we must rebuke them for serious sins or doctrinal errors.  I believe a major reason that we struggle with this is that we do not understand what the job of a pastor actually entails.  If we truly understood this, we would have no trouble honoring our pastors as Scripture commands. A better understanding of their calling would also help us to discern when they are straying from that calling to the point where rebuke becomes necessary. My aim here is to help us all understand both the duty and high calling of the pastoral ministry so that we know how to strengthen and encourage them in this work as well as how to spot significant deviations from it. 
The Job of the Pastor
What is the job of the pastor?  Many people see the pastor’s role as little more than preaching on Sunday morning.  This is very important, but it is only one small part of the pastor’s job.  In simplest terms, the pastor’s job is to lead and care for the church.  As I noted in my leadership paper, Scripture often uses the metaphor of the shepherd to describe what leadership should look like.  Jesus then uses this metaphor by calling Himself the Good Shepherd in John 10 and then charging Peter to feed His sheep in John 21.  Peter then extends this charge to all pastors: “shepherd the flock of God that is among you” (1 Peter 5:2a).  He goes on to describe the manner in which pastors must do this.  They must be willing and eager to serve in this capacity rather than being compelled to it.  They must not do it out of greed for personal gain or in a domineering way, setting an example for everyone around them.  We will discuss these more later, but it is important to note that all of this is prefaced by “exercising oversight”.  In other words, the pastor must exercise oversight in the church.  That oversight must be willing, eager, and neither greedy nor domineering, but it must be present. 
What does it mean for pastors to be shepherds exercising oversight?  In rebuking the Jewish leaders for their failure in this area, God lays out what a good shepherd looks like in Ezekiel 34.  Based on this passage, second-generation reformer Martin Bucer divided the responsibilities of the pastor into five categories: lead lost souls to Christ, restore those who are straying, assist saints who are in sin, strengthen the spiritually weak, and protect all saints from sin and error—all of which generally fall into the category of soul care.[1]  In other words, to properly shepherd the flock is to care for each individual soul in the church in a way that ministers to each person in his or her particular context.  This means that in addition to preaching and public evangelism, the responsibilities of the pastor include counseling and private evangelism, meeting with people in their homes, visiting the sick, and church discipline.  This requires really knowing people and meeting them where they are in their lives, which cannot happen without pastors descending from the pulpit and entering into the messy lives of those in the congregation…all of them.  Puritan Richard Baxter says this:
“To this end it is necessary, that we should know every person that belongeth to our charge; for how can we take heed of them, if we do not know them?  We must labour to be acquainted, not only with the persons, but with the state of all our people, with their inclinations and conversations; what are the sins of which they are most in danger, and what duties they are most apt to neglect, and what temptations they are most liable to; for if we know not their temperament or disease, we are not likely to prove successful physicians.”
-Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth Trust: 2020 (orig. 1656): 65.
Is Baxter really saying that pastors need to know every person in the church?  Yes.  In our day, this may seem impossible, but perhaps that is because our view of the pastorate has deviated substantially from Scripture.  We often think of a church having as single lead pastor, but if that pastor should know everyone in the congregation, that will severely limit the size of the church.  Certainly it is impossible for megachurch pastors to know every person in the church, but it is just as difficult for a pastor to do this in medium sized churches.  This drives home the point that with the exception of very small churches, a single pastor cannot adequately shepherd the flock God has entrusted to him.  The biblical model instead calls for a plurality of pastors who can share this load between them.  Whether this takes the form of a lead pastor with associate pastors or a combination of full-time and bi-vocational elders, it is absolutely essential.  Just as Moses was unable to lead the nation of Israel alone (Exodus 18), so pastors should not expect (nor be expected) to lead their churches alone.  When discussing tithing, I suggested that an adequately tithing church should be able to support a full-time staff member for every fifteen households or so.  Coincidentally—or rather providentially—this is similar to most conventional secular wisdom on the appropriate scope of oversight that any one leader is capable of.  Such a high pastor-to-household ratio may seem like a pipe dream, but the closer we get to it, the healthier our churches will be.
Even in churches that understand this, there can be a split between preaching and other responsibilities such that there is one main pastor who preaches while all of the other pastors or elders are charged with everything else.  This is not the biblical model.  It is true that Peter, Paul, and the other apostles focused on preaching the Gospel, but they also visited the sick and ministered to families in their homes.  Furthermore, the personal references in of Paul’s letters indicates that he had a close relationship with various people in those churches.  So while some pastors may focus on preaching while others focus on the other aspects of ministry, all pastors are charged to labor in all aspects of ministry.
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We can’t allow an unbiblical culture of the church to exist unchecked, rather we should actively seek to redirect our church members back to a truly biblical perspective. Therefore, we need to address the idolization of marriage within our church.

Every individual church has its own culture. Biblical mandates, denominational beliefs, and traditions make up our church cultures. Of course, as followers of Christ, we should desire to have a strictly biblical culture, but yet in many churches, including the one in which I grew up, unbiblical concepts are accepted as truth. Some issues may be emphasized and followed with great intentionality, yet they are not always biblical.
And something that was always a mystery to me in years past was the emphasis within my church on being married. This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in marriage. After all, I’ve been married for fifty years. The problem for me was the way my single brothers and sisters thought of themselves. There were those who thought they had missed God’s best for them or that they were not good enough for someone to love. Some even felt their singleness disqualified them from full participation within the church community. It didn’t seem right to me to have different classes of citizens in the church—married and single.
I needed a biblical answer to this dilemma, and while wrestling with this issue, I attended a reformed conference with a friend. As we sat in the women’s conference, the speaker began to teach about the creation of man and woman and how they were both made with a purpose. My mind began to reel from this simple truth, which I hadn’t seen before this event. I was so excited that I caught up with one of the elders of our church, who was also at the conference, during lunch to share with him. It felt especially important to speak with him as he was single, and I desired his input.
Here’s what hit me that morning: God created man and woman, not husband and wife. I know what you’re thinking, “But they were husband and wife!” Yes, that’s true. God called Adam and Eve to fulfill the roles of husband and wife in order to fill the earth. He created marriage. However, the church culture I grew up in taught creation as if it were the creation of husband and wife, not man and woman. This teaching was not unique to that church, and I have since seen how this overemphasis on marriage has had and still has an effect on the singles within churches.
Contrary to what some church cultures have implied, marriage is not the goal of life. If marriage is the goal, then idolization of marriage will follow. Marriage can become more important than God at that point. However, our goal should be to please God (2 Cor. 5:9) and to bring him glory (1 Cor. 10:31). Yes, marriage is a good thing. We are even told by Paul that it is a picture of Christ and the church, which will one day be fully realized when we are united with the Bridegroom (Eph. 5:22–32). What a wonderful day that will be!
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Deeper is a rare book. It is applied theology. It is doctrine pressed on the heart. It is a book that enacts an approach to change rather than simply arguing for that approach. 

Dane C. Ortlund. Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners. Crossway, 2021. 192 pages, hardback. $21.99.
Dane C. Ortlund is the author of the widely-acclaimed book Gentle & Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners & Sufferers (Crossway, 2020), which has won awards, drawn the ire of certain readers, and was given away for free to every church who wanted it.
Ortlund’s new book is titled Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners. The book is also published by Crossway and is the second installment in a series edited by Michael Reeves titled Union (the first installment was Rejoice & Tremble: The Surprising Good News of the Fear of the Lord by Michael Reeves). One thing this means is that Ortlund’s book comes with a companion “concise” volume (How Does God Change Us?), which attempts to convey the same subject matter in a 96-page booklet.
Summary
Deeper is a book about sanctification (85), or how Christians grow. (15) While that seems pretty straightforward, Ortlund wants to distinguish his approach in this book from that of others. He groups other approaches to growth into three models—those who think change happens through outward improvement, through intellectual addition, or through felt experience. Elsewhere he tags those competing approaches as purer behavior, sharper doctrine, or richer emotions. (17) In contrast, his “argument is that all three of these elements are included in healthy Christian development…” but “growing in Christ is not centrally improving or adding or experiencing but deepening.” (16) He further explains how his view differs from others: “Implicit in the notion of deepening is that you already have what you need. Christian growth is bringing what you do and say and even feel into line with what, in fact, you already are.” (16)
I will admit that I read over that distinction without much thought. It wasn’t until the conclusion of the book that I realized how profound Ortlund’s point was. Almost nothing in the book is about adding. There is no “sanctification by addition” to be found in these pages. Instead, Ortlund continually brings us back to what is already true of us and presses it upon us more firmly. As he says in the introduction:
We’re not after behavior modification in this book. I’m not going to talk to you about setting your alarm earlier or cutting carbs. We’re not even going to reflect on tithing or church attendance or journaling or small groups or taking the sacraments or reading the Puritans. All of that can be done out of rottenness of heart. (18, my emphasis).
Rather than another book telling us what else we should do (after we read the book), Deeper is a book that actually does something to us. The only two chapters that tell us to do something (“Honesty” and “Breathing”) actually spend most of their words shaping the heart posture of someone who would want to do those things. Deeper is a book about heart change (i.e., “real change” in the subtitle). And rather than spending 192 pages arguing for a specific heart-change approach to sanctification, Ortlund spends 192 pages trying to bring a heart-change in the reader.
The outline of the book is as follows with a quote that I think sums up the point of each chapter:
Chapter 1, Jesus: “One common reason we fail to leave sin behind is that we have a domesticated view of Jesus.” (21)
Chapter 2, Despair: “If you are not growing in Christ, one reason may be that you have drifted out of the salutary and healthy discipline of self-despair.” (38)
Chapter 3, Union: “Only in the relaxed safety of your eternally secured union with Christ can true growth blossom.” (57)
Chapter 4, Embrace: “The love of God is not something to see once and believe and then move beyond to other truths or strategies for growing in Christ. The love of God is what we feed on our whole lives long, wading ever more deeply into this endless ocean. And that feeding, that wading, is itself what fosters growth. We grow in Christ no further than we enjoy his embrace of us.” (70)
Chapter 5, Acquittal: “If we long to grow in Christ, we dare not do what comes so naturally—namely, say we believe that the verdict over our lives is decisively settled in our justified status before God but then move on to other ideas and strategies when it comes to our emotional lives and daily pressures.” (98-99)
Chapter 6, Honesty: “You are restricting your growth if you do not move through life doing the painful, humiliating, liberating work of cheerfully bringing your failures out from the darkness of secrecy into the light of acknowledgement before a Christian brother or sister.” (114)
Chapter 7, Pain: “Our natural instincts tell us that the way forward in the Christian life is by avoiding pain so that, undistracted, we can get down to the business at hand of growing in Christ. The New Testament tells us again and again, however, that pain is a means, not an obstacle, to deepening in Christian maturity.” (125)
Chapter 8, Breathing: “You wouldn’t try to go through life holding your breath. So don’t go through life without Bible reading and praying. Let your soul breath. Oxygenate with the Bible; and breathe out the CO2 of prayer as you speak back to God your wonder, your worry, and your waiting. He is not a force, not an ideal, not a machine. He is a person.” (156)
Chapter 9, Supernaturalized: “We don’t need the Spirit to be different on the outside; we do need the Spirit to be different on the inside. Yet again: we don’t need the Spirit to obey God; we do need the Spirit to enjoy obeying God.” (164-65)
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