On paper, Henry Dunster (1609–1659) was the ideal choice to become the first president of America’s first college. As a “learned Orientalist,” he was fluent in several languages.1 Educated at Cambridge under English divines like John Preston and Thomas Goodwin, he was a Puritan of Puritans. When Dunster arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640 as the inaugural president of Harvard, he envisioned a “school of the prophets” in New England modeled after the Old.

His pastor Thomas Shepard, one of the leading voices against Anne Hutchinson in her heresy trial just two years earlier, called Dunster “a man pious, painful, and fit to teach, and very fit to lay the foundations of the domestic affairs of the College; whom God hath much honored and blessed.”2 Almost immediately after landing in the New World, Dunster began laying those foundations. The course requirements he established in rhetoric, divinity, and languages remained relatively unchanged for most of the seventeenth century.3 With such a pivotal role in the Puritan experiment, Dunster helped determine the future of America itself.

Therefore, when Dunster withheld his fourth child from baptism at Cambridge Church in the winter of 1653, it made news. The man entrusted with the theological education of New England’s ministers had deprived his own child of the sacred “seal of the covenant.” One of the most enlightened, influential figures in colonial America had become, in the words of Cotton Mather, “entangle[d] in the snares of Anabaptism.”4

In a so-called “godly commonwealth” where church and state were intertwined, Dunster’s decision was not just shocking; it was potentially cataclysmic. Withholding an infant from baptism was subversive to the public order. Such radical views might have been acceptable in Rhode Island or even in Plymouth Colony, but not in Massachusetts Bay. In the land of the Puritans, Dunster’s action was equivalent to the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary sprinkling his newborn — if credobaptism were state law.

Brave Affiliation

Indeed, to publicly affiliate with Baptists in seventeenth-century New England was a bold, even brave, endeavor. In 1635, Roger Williams had been banished to the colony of Rhode Island for espousing Baptist views. In 1651, just two years before Dunster decided to keep his child from baptism, a man named Obadiah Holmes from the town of Lynn was tied to a whipping post in Boston Common and lashed thirty times for baptizing several people. The imprisonment of Holmes and fellow Baptists John Clarke and John Crandall in Boston was a turning point for Dunster.

Although he had never been immersed himself, Dunster had always been somewhat skeptical about infant baptism. When he joined the church at Cambridge twelve years earlier, he confessed that he saw biblical evidence for immersion. Nevertheless, he told the church that as “there was something for sprinkling in the Scriptures, he should not be offended when [it] was used.”5 Dunster’s conscience was ultimately tied to the Bible. However, the Puritan treatment of Baptists opened his eyes anew to the ills of state-sponsored religion.

School officials rushed to quiet their beloved president. If Dunster could keep silent about his objections to infant baptism, Harvard would look the other way. However, as any Puritan worth his salt, Dunster could not approve of something he could not find in the Bible. Not long after withdrawing his child from baptism, the usually mild-mannered Dunster decided that he had been silent long enough. To declare his views, and to avoid the appearance that he had been muzzled with the threat of being fired, he chose the most public space in New England society: the church.

‘Paedobaptism Hath None’

According to Baptist Isaac Backus, Dunster “boldly preached against infant baptism, and for believers’ baptism, in the pulpit at Cambridge in 1653, the year after Messrs. Clarke, Holmes and Crandal were imprisoned at Boston[.]”6 In the sermon, Dunster took aim at any form of baptism predicated on someone else’s faith. In one of Dunster’s manuscripts written around the same time, he wrote,

If parents’ church-membership makes their children members, then John admitted makes his first-born a church member; excommunicated for 7 years makes suppose 4 children non-members, restored in ye 9th yeare makes his 6th child a member. Show me where Christ ever indented such a covenant.7

When Dunster was summoned before a conference of ministers and elders to defend his views, his thesis was very simple: Soli visibiliter fideles sunt baptizendi (“Only visible believers should be baptized”).

For Dunster, the question was about biblical authority. “All instituted gospel worship hath some express word of Scripture,” he insisted. “But paedobaptism hath none.” Drawing upon the Puritan understanding of salvation, he also noted, “If we be engrafted into Christ by personal faith, then not by parental.”8 Baptism was more than an issue of church polity; it had potentially eternal consequences. As Dunster later articulated in a letter, the true danger of infant baptism was its potential to deprive sinners of their “due consolation from Christ and dutiful obligation to Christ.”9

The conference was not moved. In their view, the president had fallen into a grave “mistake.” To make matters worse, Dunster was brought before the General Court of Massachusetts. Due to his significant influence over the youth of the colony, his views on baptism became a civil matter. He was deemed “unsound in the faith.” But Dunster would not change course. Evidently, he cared more about his faithfulness to the Bible than his job. He later wrote to the Middlesex County Court, “I conceived then, and so do still, that I spake the truth in the feare of God, and dare not deny the same or go from it untill the Lord otherwise teach me.”10

Humble Resignation

In fact, Dunster had one more “Here I Stand” moment. In a desperate attempt to retain their president, Harvard informed Dunster that he could remain at his post as long as he refrained from “imposing” his views upon others. However, this too was not enough to change his mind. Dunster officially submitted his resignation and once again preached at Cambridge Church against infant baptism! Of his five points, his chief point was that “the subjects of Baptisme were visible pennitent believers.” His last point was a warning and a foreshadowing of the so-called “Halfway Covenant” that would evoke the disdain of later Puritans like Jonathan Edwards: “That there were such corruptions stealing into the Church, which every faithful Christian ought to beare witnes against.”11

Dunster resigned his post at Harvard with such humility and dignity that some historians have marveled at the lack of “apparent controversy” in the entire episode.12 The disgraced clergyman did not instigate a debate in the public square, and Harvard did much to cover up the embarrassment. Ironically, for Dunster’s replacement, Harvard chose Charles Chauncy, another Congregationalist who believed in immersion. However, unlike Dunster, Chauncy agreed to keep tight-lipped about his views.

As a pariah in Puritan society and receiving little support from Harvard for his family, Dunster moved to the more tolerant neighbor colony of Plymouth, where he took up a ministry position at the Independent church in Scituate, only 28 miles from Boston. As his biographer (and Baptist president) Jeremiah Chaplin notes,

He probably never identified himself with a Baptist church, as indeed in his lifetime there was scarcely an opportunity of doing. We judge that he was content, under the circumstances, to remain in fellowship with his Independent brethren so long as they did not interfere with his liberty of conscience.13

Friend of the Baptists

Whether or not Dunster was a Baptist or simply baptistic is difficult to say.14 The evidence suggests that he was never immersed himself and was never excommunicated from the church in Cambridge.15 Nevertheless, Baptists on both sides of the Atlantic were fond of the man who had defied the Puritan establishment.

Thomas Gould, the first pastor of the First Baptist Church of Boston, called Dunster his friend, leading the historian Chaplin to speculate whether Dunster would have joined First Baptist if he had been alive when it was established in 1665 (Dunster passed away in 1659).16 In July of 1656, Dunster also received a letter from Irish Baptists inviting him to move his family to Ireland and “have free liberty of your conscience.”17 In the end, Dunster stayed in Plymouth, symbolizing his warm relations with Congregationalists and Baptists alike.

This combination of conviction and conciliatory ministry was his legacy. Even Cotton Mather, who had little affection for Roger Williams, extolled Dunster for bearing “his part in everlasting celestial hallelujahs.” “If,” Mather wrote, “unto the Christian, while singing of psalms on earth, Chrysostom could well say, ‘Those art in a consort with angels!’ how much more may that now be said of our Dunster.”18

Why would anyone exert the time and energy required to read Jonathan Edwards’s Concerning the End for Which God Created the World? This may be the most difficult and challenging text you will ever read. But after the Bible, it may be the most important piece of literature ever written. It really promises to change everything for you.

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was a pastor, theologian, and philosopher in Colonial America. In 1755, he completed his dissertation after 35 years of development, which was then published posthumously in 1765. Looking back over the more than forty years since I first read it, I can say that this short book has profoundly and permanently affected me for good. As a result of reading End of Creation, I changed careers, earned a PhD, and took up teaching Edwards as a profession. You might wonder why this book upended my life (in the best sense possible). Because the God who Edwards showed me is breathtaking.

So, I believe the wisdom of Proverbs 2 applies to Edwards. When you read End of Creation, study it, “making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding [because] if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God” (Proverbs 2:2–5). With a pencil in your hand and prayers in your heart, pay close attention to what Edwards says. The work is worth it when you see the God he saw. Finally, bear in mind that no one has ever fully comprehended End of Creation his first time through.

Two Aims of the Essay

What makes this work so difficult? Edwards penned End of Creation with three goals in mind. Edwards’s first goal was to know God experientially because he saw that kind of knowledge described and promised in the Bible. As a pastor, this concern drove him to understand, explain, promote, guide, and defend a view of authentic Christian experience as a work of God. He connects that experience to God’s ultimate end in creation, and shows how God is ultimately motivated by his own “supreme self-regard.”

What does Edwards mean by “supreme self-regard”? God loves God with all his heart and soul and mind and strength. Far from making God supremely selfish, this self-regard flows from God’s intra-Trinitarian love. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father, through the Holy Spirit. The triune God of the Bible is eternally and fully satisfied, possessing in himself alone all existence, beauty, power, knowledge, truth, goodness, and happiness (not a lighthearted cheerfulness, but a deep fulfillment and complete well-being).

“The triune God of the Bible is eternally and fully satisfied.”

Grasping this truth makes a big difference in understanding Edwards’s first goal of showing that genuine Christian experience is a gracious and free work of God. God delights in his own fullness and shares that fullness with his people. That reality affects how we understand faith and fuels our motivation to seek to know God.

Edwards’s second goal was to undermine the influence of a destructive and contrary view of religious experience by refuting the views of God’s end and motivation it presupposed and promoted. Edwards demonstrates that God’s ultimate end in creation cannot be something God lacks, nor can it be more valuable to God than God’s initial state without creation. To state the issue succinctly: if God creates for an ultimate end, which by definition implies that the person acting does not now possess what he seeks, how can God be absolutely self-sufficient (needing nothing)? Edwards tackled this problem head-on, claiming in his finished work,

[I]t has been particularly shewn already, that God’s making himself his end, in the manner that has been spoken of, argues no dependence; but is consistent with absolute independence and self-sufficience. (God’s Passion for His Glory, 180)

If you can keep these goals in mind, the exercise required to grasp Edwards’s tight reasoning becomes significantly easier.

Why Not Begin with Scripture?

Edwards’s dissertation comprises an introduction and two chapters. In chapter 1, Edwards considers “what Reason teaches” using deductive arguments that build on the assumptions and concepts developed in the Introduction. To readers today, this may seem like a strange way to begin a book. However, the expression “what Reason teaches” signifies a mindset and a way of discovering truth and settling disputes that had swept through Europe and America by mid-eighteenth century.

Beginning around 1594 and ending in 1734, a process occurred that altered the entire background against which Christian theologians, pastors, and philosophers debated about what to believe and how to live. The struggle during this process was over what would serve as the final arbiter or authority in matters of faith. Would it be tradition and authority, personal inspiration, Scripture, or reason?

“The heart of God’s purpose in creation lies in the heart of God himself as Trinity.”

It’s safe to say that by the mid-eighteenth century, reason had become the dictator of truth. It’s crucial to appreciate how thorough and widespread this reliance of reason was in the mid-eighteenth century. Reason was the battleground where the wars were being waged, and so, to achieve his goals, Edwards adopted two parallel — and complementary — ways of arguing: (1) from what reason teaches and (2) from what Scripture teaches.

Edwards continues in chapter 2 with an exposition of relevant Scripture because he believed that God’s word is “the surest guide” on these matters. And while both methods converge on the same answers regarding the end for which God created the world, the method of Scripture followed in chapter 2 yields more truth — truth inaccessible to reason alone. Thus, while he begins his argument in the rationalist discourse of the age, Edwards culminates his argument with Scripture, demonstrating his unwavering commitment to the rule of faith. Edwards believed what he wrote about reason’s “dictates,” but he insists that what reason dictates on the matter is at best incomplete.

Why Would God Create Anything?

A fair interpretation of Edwards, therefore, requires us to trace the steps in his argument according to reason and understand the harmony between God’s self-sufficiency and his acting for ends. However, since we can’t trace the full argument here, I’ll just whet your appetite with where Edwards ends. We might summarize his argument like this:

God’s “original ultimate end” in creating and sustaining the world is God’s Holy Spirit indwelling the redeemed, thereby enabling and empowering their experience of God’s own knowledge, love, and joy, so that their words, deeds, and emotions redound to the praise of his glory.

In short, Edwards argues that God created to share his Trinitarian fullness with creatures.

Edwards insists, “That which God had primarily in view in creating” — namely, God’s ultimate end — “must be constantly kept in view, and have a governing influence in all God’s works, or with respect to everything he does towards his creatures” (God’s Passion, 134). If, as Edwards claims, God’s end in creation determines all of his works toward his creatures, then this dissertation is among his most important works (if not the most important). In End of Creation, we not only have the proverbial “Big Picture”; we have the biggest picture. It applies to everything.

The heart of God’s purpose in creation lies in the heart of God himself as Trinity. As the apostle John reveals, the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father (John 17:23–26). This love that characterizes the Trinity is what God “communicates” to the redeemed in sending them the promised Holy Spirit. Edwards delights in the fact that God’s inclination to create and sustain the world derives from the pleasure God takes in his “internal glory” — that is, God’s self-knowledge, holiness, and happiness — eternally increasing in “a society of created beings” (149). Thus, “God in seeking his glory, therein seeks the good of his creatures,” and “God in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself” (176).

Rewards of Climbing the Mountain

Over decades of teaching, I have had the privilege of walking through End of Creation with hundreds of students. We worked our way line by line through this most difficult work of philosophical and biblical theology.

After that arduous journey, some students have reported that now they grasp just how safe they are in Christ. “He is faithful, not for anything I do, but because of God’s faithfulness to himself.” Some have found a liberating sense of personal value. “I see now that I am a product of God’s creational, providential, and redeeming action. My identity is a reflection of the attributes of God that are involved in God’s works. I really honor him and accentuate his role by taking refuge in him to be for us as he promises to be in his names.”

Others have gained a new appreciation for nature, seeing that all of it reflects who God is, like a divine performance. As works of performance art, each instance of God’s works of creation, providence, and redemption is valuable and valued by God solely in virtue of the value of God’s attributes that are jointly responsible for their coming to be. They often report how this heightened awareness has brought them to reframe all of life’s ambitions and questions in terms of God’s purposes for them. Not every student is affected in these ways. Some students are provoked (even shocked) into fully grasping the present-tense reality that God is acting. Some love the fact; others, as we would expect, reject the idea altogether.

Yet, even with the occasional outliers, I’ve seen the positive effects over and over again. Through studying Edwards by the illuminating grace of the Holy Spirit, most thoughtful readers come to a new and deeper sense of God’s greatness and gladly join the eternal choir singing, “Worthy is the Lamb” (Revelation 5:12).

The Way of Allurement

Finally, reading Edwards is an exercise in opposites. On the one hand, every time I read End of Creation, I feel a new anticipation for fresh vistas onto the greatness and love of God. On the other hand, his writing style and rational arguments can feel like wading through wet concrete. At times, his language begins to sound as if he is saying the same thing over and over again. To follow each step in the path of his thought is relentlessly demanding. And yet, like no other book (besides the Bible), all the hard work is worth it when the God whom Edwards loved gives you a glimpse of the God whom Edwards saw.

Elsewhere Edwards charges us, “Endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement. We are to avoid being in the way of temptation with respect to our carnal appetites. But we ought to take all opportunities to lay ourselves in the way of enticement with respect to our gracious inclinations” (Sermon on Canticles 5:1).

Working your way carefully through Concerning the End for Which God Created the World is certainly one way of laying ourselves in the way of allurement.

Forty-four years ago, on October 14, 1979, John Piper felt himself irretrievably called to pastoral ministry. He was on sabbatical after teaching six years at Bethel College. He was studying Romans 9. Reflecting on that season, he would say later, in 2002,

As I studied Romans 9 day after day, I began to see a God so majestic and so free and so absolutely sovereign that my analysis merged into worship, and the Lord said, in effect, “I will not simply be analyzed — I will be adored. I will not simply be pondered — I will be proclaimed. My sovereignty is not simply to be scrutinized — it is to be heralded. It is not grist for the mill of controversy — it is gospel for sinners who know that their only hope is the sovereign triumph of God’s grace over their rebellious will.”

In 2019, on the fortieth anniversary of John’s call to the pastorate, Justin Taylor published an article at Desiring God called “This Word Must Be Preached,” which quotes extensively from John’s 1800-word journal he wrote longhand that night he first felt called — and very much relates to our second session here today.

First, Justin comments, “It is remarkable how realistic [John] was that night. He knew himself well.” Then a quote from John’s journal:

I know, really know, I would despair as a pastor. I would despair that my people are not where I want them to be, I would despair at ruptured study and writing goals, I would despair at barren administrative details. [But he asked himself:] “Who shall shepherd the flock of God? People who love barrenness? People who feel no flame to study God and write it out? People who weep not over the tares and the choking wheat? Is the criterion for judging one’s fitness for the ministry that one feels no pain in the mechanics of ‘running a church’? Is the calling so managerial in our day that the Word burning to be spoken and lived and applied is no qualification?”

Second, another quote from John’s journal, contrasting himself with his father, who was a traveling evangelist: “My heart is not in one-time shots or one-week shots. I am not a gifted evangelist. My heart leans hard to regularity of feeding [that’s the work of pastor-elders]. I believe little in the injection method to health. I believe in the long, steady diet of rich food in surroundings of love.”

Third, Justin comments about John that “he had a hunger to be the direct instrument of the Word.” For John, that meant being a local-church pastor, not a seminary professor. He wanted to be “a vessel of [God’s] Word” in the church. So he left the academy for the pastorate. He became a preacher, but he emphatically did not cease to be a teacher. Because pastors are teachers.

In our second session, we turn to the two qualifications for eldership that correspond most directly with the two main tasks of the elders. The two tasks are feeding and leading. Pastors feed the flock and lead the flock. The two qualifications, then, are “able to teach” and “sober-minded.” And we’ll end with how all of us, young and old (and perhaps especially young, and those aspiring to the work), might grow in these two central qualifications.

1. Feeding the Flock (Able to Teach)

Perhaps you can imagine a scenario in which a man is being considered for eldership, and the question “Is he ‘able to teach’?” comes up. Let’s say the man is not a known teacher, but the one who is advocating for his candidacy responds, “Teaching is not his strength. He’s rarely willing to do public speaking. But if you put a gun to his head . . .”

Stop. Such a minimalistic understanding is not what Paul means by “able to teach.” Rather, what he’s after, and what we should be after, is the more maximalist assertion: “He’s the kind of man who will hardly stop teaching — even if you put a gun to his head.”

Pastors and elders, paid and unpaid, full-time and lay, are to be teachers. “Able to teach” (one word in the Greek, didaktikos) is the most central of the elder qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 (listed eighth of the fifteen) and also the most distinctive. The single qualification that most plainly sets the pastor-elders apart from the deacons is “able to teach” — or perhaps even better, “apt or prone to teach.”

Such teaching bent and ability in pastors is not to be minimal, but maximal. We want the kind of man who will hardly stop teaching, even if you put a gun to his head. As he learns, he wants to teach. As he studies, he thinks about teaching. He breathes teaching. We might say he’s a teacher at heart. He loves to teach, with all the planning and discipline and patience and energy and exposure to criticism that good teaching requires.

A pastor who is didaktikos, “able to teach,” is not just “able to teach if necessary,” but rather “eager to teach when possible.” He’s bent to teach — not only able in terms of skill but also eager in terms of proclivity.

In English, we have the word “didactic,” built on the Greek didachē for “teaching.” But we don’t have an easy equivalent for the Greek adjective didaktikos. Maybe we need something like “didactive” or “teachative.” If “talkative” refers to someone who is “fond of or given to talking,” “teachative” would mean someone “fond of or given to teaching.”

The point is that New Testament local leaders — the pastor-elders — are teachers. Christianity is a teaching movement. Jesus was the consummate teacher. He chose and discipled his men to be teachers who discipled others also (Matthew 28:19; 2 Timothy 2:2). After his ascension, the apostles spoke on Christ’s behalf and led the early church through teaching — and when their living voices died, their writings became the church’s ongoing polestar, along with Old Testament Scripture (but surpassing it), for teaching the churches.

And so, fitting with the very nature of the Christian faith, Christ appoints men who are “teachative,” didaktikos, which entails at least three important realities we would be wise to keep in mind today: we look for men who are equipped to teach, effective at teaching, and eager to teach.

Equipped to Teach

First of all, a man may be off-the-charts teachative, and be little more than a liability if he has not been sufficiently equipped in sound doctrine. The miracle of new birth does not include instantaneous miracles of equipping for leadership. Now, we might grant a kind of miracle status to any sinner coming, in time, to have genuinely sound theology, but this would be a long-range miracle worked out through diligent training over time, not the endowment of a mere moment.

As Walter Henrichsen wrote fifty years ago (in 1974), disciples are made, not born. And so teachers. Jesus spoke about a righteous scribe being “trained for the kingdom of heaven.” He “brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matthew 13:52). “A disciple is not above his teacher,” he says, “but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40).

To become a Christian requires no training, just faith: “To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Romans 4:5). But one does not become a teacher (nor practically holy) by faith alone. Rather, grace trains us, in life, over time, “to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions” (Titus 2:12). And those whom Christ gives to his church as pastor-teachers, he sees to their “being trained in the words of the faith” (1 Timothy 4:6).

Training is necessary for maturity (Hebrews 5:14), and training requires the discipline of persisting in momentary discomfort, even pain, for the reward set before us (Hebrews 12:11). So when we emphasize in pastors the necessity of a proclivity and ability to teach, we do not overlook a critical component of Christian teachers: training. Pastors must be equipped in sound doctrine to teach sound doctrine. It doesn’t happen without work.

Effective at Teaching

Second, the pastor-elders of the church must also be effective teachers. That is, they must be skillful — able in the sense of good. It’s not enough if they want to teach, and have been trained in sound doctrine, but they’re not any good at teaching. Then the church becomes a sitting duck, or unprotected flock. If the pastors aren’t effective teachers, it’s only a matter of time until wolves carry the day and feast on the lambs.

And so Paul says, as his culminating qualification in the Titus 1 list, the pastor-elder “must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9). That is, he must know “the trustworthy word,” and be trained in it, and genuinely “hold firm” to it.

But then begins the work of teaching in its twofold sense: feeding the flock (“give instruction in sound doctrine”) and defending the flock (“rebuke those who contradict it”). And if the pastors and elders are poor or ineffective teachers, the sheep go hungry — or get eaten.

So pastors and elders, as a team, must be effective teachers — that is, effective in the context of the particular local church where they are called. They need not compete with the world’s best orators on popular podcasts or television. But they must be effective teachers of their people, in their context. When push comes to shove, the pastors-teachers must get the job done, or the wolves take the sheep.

Eager to Teach

Third, we come back to where we started and the heart of the teaching qualification — that is, the heart of a teacher. We need men who are eager to teach — not just willing to have their arm bent once in a while to fill a slot, not with a gun to their heads. But men who are teachers, the pastor-teachers.

“Remember your leaders,” says Hebrews 13:7, “those who spoke to you the word of God.” Hebrews could assume that their leaders were those who spoke God’s word to them, because their leaders were teachers.

Christianity is a word-critical, teaching-critical faith. The leaders teach. And good teachers, in time and with sufficient maturation, come to lead. The pastor-elders, then, are called not only to lead or govern, but first and foremost to labor in word and teaching. And since the work, at its heart, is the work of teaching, we want men who want to teach. They are eager to do it. (And brothers, this too can be cultivated.)

Such didactive men think like teachers, not judges. Their orientation toward the church is not mainly as those rendering verdicts but envisioning possibilities, providing fresh perspective and information, faithfully teaching the Scriptures, making persuasive arguments, patiently reviewing and restating and illustrating, and praying for God’s miraculous work in life change.

Is it not amazing that when Paul speaks into how Timothy should carry himself in the midst of the conflict with false teachers in the Ephesian church, he says, “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness” (2 Timothy 2:24–25)? Look at what company “able to teach” keeps: not quarrelsome but kind, patient, gentle — not apart from correction, but gentle in “correcting his opponents.”

“Able to teach” is not minimal competence but a kind of virtue — a magnanimity — arising from the heart and proper training.

2. Leading the Sheep (Able to Govern)

Now, pastors are not only teachers. As overseers, they “watch over” the flock. As elders, they counsel and guide the people. As shepherds, they muster the collective forethought to envision where to go next for green pastures and still waters, lead the sheep in that direction, and wield the “comfort” of their rod to crack the skulls of wolves to protect the sheep.

So, not only does Christ gift his church with leaders who have such a proclivity, being teachative, but he also — strange as it may seem to us — puts these teachers in charge as the church’s lead officers. The elders feed and lead. Teaching and oversight are paired in 1 Thessalonians 5:12 and 1 Timothy 5:17, and 1 Timothy 2:12 provides that particularly memorable coupling of the elders’ teaching with their exercising authority in the local church, particularly in the gathered assembly: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man.” (Then, three verses later, come the qualifications for those who exercise authority through teaching: the elders.)

Amazingly, the risen Christ, in building his church on his terms, not the world’s, is so audacious as to appoint teachers to lead, which is both surprising (because teachers, as a group, can be so idealistic and inefficient) and fitting (because Christianity is a teaching movement). That Christ made teachers to be pastors (and pastors, teachers) confirms what a few sharp souls might have suspected all along: that Jesus really is more interested in the church’s effectiveness than its efficiency.

So, pastors teach. They are, at heart, teachers. The plurality of elders is, in an important sense, a team of teachers who also govern. The call to pastoral ministry is not for specialized administrators of large departments. Nor is it a call for brawlers and pugilists, more apt to quarrel than to teach (as we’ll see in the final session). Pastors teach, and are the kind of men who will graciously hardly cease — even if you put a gun to their heads.

Now, what are we to say about their governing? If “able to teach” (didaktikos), as we’ve said, is the most central and most distinctive of the elder qualifications, “sober-minded” might be the most underrated or underappreciated.

I remember on several occasions, sitting as an elder among elders, brainstorming names for future additions to the council. By God’s grace, the voicing of some names elicited words of praise. Sometimes there was largely enthusiasm, with some minor misgivings. On occasion, it seemed as if many of us intuited that “something’s not right” or “doesn’t resonate” when thinking of this man as an elder. Over time, I came to learn that often the language we were groping for was right here in the eldership qualifications: sober-minded.

It is a remarkable turn of events that Jesus appoints a team of teachers, in essence, to lead his local churches. However — this is where we come especially to “sober-minded” — Jesus does not call these pastor-teachers to teaching alone. He calls the pastor-elders, under the gathered assembly of saints, to lead the people — leadership that requires they be, both individually and collectively, sober-minded.

Levelheaded, Not Imbalanced

As I said, of the fifteen pastor-elder qualifications in 1 Timothy 3, sober-mindedness might be the most underrated. Not only is teaching (with preaching) central to the pastors’ work, but also vital is “exercising oversight” (1 Peter 5:2). Pastor-elders not only “labor among you” as teachers but “are over you in the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 5:12). They both feed and lead. The elder “must manage his own household well” because, as a team, the elders are charged with caring for God’s household, the church (1 Timothy 3:4–5, 15).

Not only are pastors who preach and teach well worthy of honor — and “double honor” (remuneration) when laboring at the work as a breadwinning vocation — but also as governors, that is, “the elders who rule well” (1 Timothy 5:17). The pastor-elders teach and rule — that is, lead or govern — and to do so requires a kind of spiritual acuity the New Testament calls “sober-mindedness.”

Men who are sober-minded are levelheaded and balanced. They are responsive without being reactive. They are not given to extremes, not suckers for myths and speculation and conspiracy theories, and not dragged into silly controversies. They are able to discern what emphases and preoccupations would compromise the stewardship at the heart of their work (1 Timothy 1:4), and they stay grounded in what’s most important and enduring. Keeping the gospel “of first importance” (1 Corinthians 15:3), as their center, they are able (like increasingly few modern adults) to “keep [their] head in all situations” (2 Timothy 4:5 NIV).

Together, the team of sober-minded elders is able to navigate complicated challenges, like church-size dynamics and generational dynamics and digital-versus-analog dynamics and, perhaps above all, issues of timing in the life of the local church. Many, young and old, are able to see various problems and feel various tensions in church life, but the pastor-elders are those with the sober-mindedness, and the accompanying “superpower of patience” (as Dan Miller calls it), to know how and when to address the challenges.

Sober-minded pastor-elders, together as a group, keep the church on mission (Matthew 28:19), keep the gospel central, and demonstrate that the essence of leadership is not personal privilege and preference but self-giving, self-humbling, and self-sacrifice for the church’s good.

Such sober-mindedness, without doubt, is also critical for teaching — for determining what to teach and when and how — but such spiritual acuity especially maps on to the call to govern or lead, and the untiring vigilance it requires. “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers” (Acts 20:28). The pastor-elders are those who “are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account” (Hebrews 13:17). So they must be sober-minded (1 Timothy 3:2) — in fact, “always . . . sober-minded” (2 Timothy 4:5).

How to Get a Sober Mind

In Acts 6, we are not yet dealing with pastors and deacons, per se, but apostles and “the seven.” But we can see a kind of analog here for what was to come in local congregations. As “the seven” were appointed to “serve tables” that the apostles might not “give up preaching the word of God” (Acts 6:2), so local-church pastor-elders have a particular calling to lead and spiritually feed the flock — that is, to “devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4). Word and prayer.

We teach and preach the word to feed the church. And sober-minded men pray to God, and take counsel with each other, to lead the church in the ups and downs on the raging seas of real life. It will not be enough to have balanced thinkers who do not pray. (Besides, prayerlessness would betray their imbalance.) Nor would it be enough to have prayerful men without sober minds. We need both prayer and prudence, even as we need both teaching and leading. And Christ appoints that his local-church leaders be such prayerful, sober-minded teachers.

All well and good, you might say, but what about the gaffs in my own sober-mindedness that I’m aware of — not to mention the many of which I do not even know? Whether already a pastor-elder, or aspiring to the office, or not, How might I become more sober-minded?

The good news is that sobering our minds is part of the work the Holy Spirit is doing on all those who are in Christ. And in particular, this is work he does over time, through the word of God. However naturally balanced and levelheaded you might be, the word of God is critical in giving us real balance in a destabilizing world and sobering us up to what really matters in God’s economy. Sober-mindedness is not a miracle God does in just a moment, but the effect of thousands of quiet early-morning miracles over his word day after day, for years.

In the days to come, as in the last two thousand years, the church needs men who keep their heads under pressure, in conflict and controversy. And in just the normal, steady-state life of the church, we need levelheaded, wise, spiritually and emotionally intelligent leaders rather than those who are impulsive, imbalanced, rash, and reactive, because pastor-elders are not just God-appointed teachers but God-appointed governors.

Such men the Spirit loves to produce through years of quiet Scripture meditation and real-life accountability in the local church. And such men, years in the making, the risen Christ then loves to give to his church to feed it through faithful, effective teaching and guide it through patient, composed, reasonable team leadership.

Which leads to our concluding focus on how a young or aspiring pastor-elder might go about pursuing growth and development in his teaching.

How to Grow as a Pastor-Teacher

With this short list, I’m assuming eagerness. Without some initial aspiration or eagerness, there would not be interest in growth. So assuming some measure of eagerness, here are six avenues to consider in seeking to develop yourself as a teacher.

1. Know the Word himself, that is, Jesus.

How? In the word itself, the gospel. How? Through the word itself, Scripture. So, know the Word (Jesus) in the word (gospel) through the word (Scripture).

Read, study, and meditate on the Bible — and all the Bible. Those who lead and aspire to lead the church would be wise to have all the biblical text pass before their eyes every calendar year. Obviously, there will be (many) passages you not only read but study and meditate on and teach on, perhaps multiple times in a year, but reading through the Bible with some plan each year at least lets each biblical text pass before you each year. As you do, you’re increasingly understanding Scripture as a whole — and most of all, knowing and enjoying Jesus in it.

2. Self-educate in the information age.

This is a step in equipping. Leverage the amazing availability of books, messages, and essays (meaty articles). Perhaps some limited social media exposure would help you to be aware of new books, essays, and articles, but I would highly caution you against any more than a pretty modest, controlled portion of social media. (Make the web serve your interests, rather than letting the algorithms harvest you for their interests.)

Beware the radicalizing effects of social media. Algorithms are no friend to the pursuit of sober-mindedness.

3. Pursue some formal program of training.

This is a distinct step in equipping that goes beyond self-educating. I’m talking about some curriculum and course of study, designed by someone other than yourself, to develop in knowledge and skill, and fill in areas you’ve never gravitated toward studying on your own.

4. Take what at bats you can and make them count.

Now we’re moving to effectiveness, which grows, over time, with the Spirit’s help and hard work. You need hundreds of at bats, not dozens. Teaching, like singing (not like athletics), is a life skill. Work to peak in your sixties (or seventies!), not twenties.

5. Always keep learning and be ready.

After Paul says to “preach the word” in 2 Timothy 4:2, the very next charge is this: “Be ready in season and out of season.” Then again in verse 5: “Always be sober-minded.”

And this is for those who continue to learn and grow. In 1 Timothy 4, after just telling Timothy to “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching,” Paul says, “Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress” (1 Timothy 4:13–15). Our people ought to see our progress, our growth — in all areas, but particularly in our teaching. Which means — this should be encouraging — you grow in teaching. It is not fundamentally a gift you have or do not.

6. Rejoice more in being saved than in being a fruitful teacher.

I love the words of Jesus in Luke 10:20, and I often go back there to steady my soul in ministry: “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you [as your teaching ability and effectiveness improves and matures], but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” The language is stark, but I think Jesus means to provoke, not speak absolutely, as if there is not any holy joy to be had in faithful, fruitful teaching. But we dare not let the joy of teaching the faith eclipse the joy of the faith itself.

Brothers, rejoice most that your names are written in heaven. Being a Christian is ten thousand times more important, and sweeter, than being a pastor-teacher.