How do you prioritize health? How do you stay sharp? Can you be friends with church members? How do you care for your wife? When’s a time you were wrong? How do you choose what to preach? And many, many more questions pastors may be asking.
In this special episode of The Everyday Pastor, Matt Smethurst and Ligon Duncan answer listener-submitted questions, recorded live at TGC’s 2025 National Conference.
Transcript
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Ligon Duncan
You want their consciences to be convinced by the Scripture, not by you. I tell pastors, if your people do things because you want them to do it when you’re gone, they’ll go back to doing it the way they were doing it before. But if they believe that, it’s because the Bible teaches it, the change will last you.
Matt Smethurst
Matt, welcome to the everyday pastor, a podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt Smethurst. I’m a pastor in Richmond, Virginia, and I’m
Ligon Duncan
LIG Duncan, the Chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary and
Matt Smethurst
a former pastor for many years, especially at first pres Jackson, and this is a special episode. This is a live recording at the gospel coalition 2025, national conference in Indianapolis, and we’re going to be answering listener submitted questions. So let this episode be a reminder that we welcome your questions and feedback. At any time, you can send those to us by visiting tgc.org/everyday pastor, we’ve been so encouraged by the feedback and suggestions we’ve already received. So please listeners, come and help us even serve you better by coming to tgc.org/everyday pastor. LIG, let’s start out with a question that makes both of us feel deeply committed to mediocrity in our lives. Someone asked, how do you prioritize personal health and ministry? For instance, how can you find enough time to sleep with the varying demands of ministry.
Ligon Duncan
Yeah, you do much better on this than I do, Matt, I think sleep, I’m doing okay on except I’m at the age where I wake up in the middle of the night. And some of that is age, and some of that is worry. Some of that worry is sinful. But I’ve been awful in terms of, I used to be in pretty good shape. I was probably in decent shape until about 20 years ago, and it is just gone downhill. It used to be an athlete. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t tell it now, but
Matt Smethurst
I mean, don’t be too hot on yourself. You could be drinking regular Coke with lime. That’s
Ligon Duncan
true. That’s true. It’s Coke Zero with lime that I do, that’s my contribution. He
Matt Smethurst
turned John Piper onto, it’s true, and has turned me on two guys. I’m telling you, the sweet sour juxtaposition is good Coke Zero. I’ve never felt so old. I know I’m supposed to be the younger guy on this podcast, but here it’s clear I’m in my 40s. What really excites me every day is having Coke Zero with lime, thanks to this guy,
Ligon Duncan
but yeah, I mean, do take care of yourselves. I mean that, you know, I need to figure out how to get at that. I used to just do regular things like walking, and I’m not even walking right now. And I need to build that back into my schedule. And it gets harder and harder to take care of yourself as you get older and your health can it can impact your mood, it can impact your relationships, and so it’s that’s worth investing in. And again, I did a better job of that, probably while I was in local church than I’ve done at RTS. And Matt, you’re in good shape. You’ve got. What are the things you do to try and make sure that you’re taking care of yourself?
Matt Smethurst
Try not to have twins when I’m 40 years Oh, I failed there. So I have two wonderful sons who just turned one. So this question does induce a little laughter in me, because when it comes to sleep, the past year has not been normal. It’s been a blur. But you mentioned walking. I do think that, as a pastor, you’re taking meetings with people, if the if the weather is agreeable, try to try to walk and talk. That’s that’s a great thing. Yeah.
Ligon Duncan
Mark Jeffer, our friend, does that a lot. He’ll walk people around the block, Capitol Hill, you know? And
Matt Smethurst
he has tired me out before. Yes, he loves to walk at a brisk pace. Everything they do there is quite brisk. I do think, though, just to spiritualize the question a little bit, Don Carson, in one of his books, said that sometimes the most godly thing you can do is not stay up and pray all night, but get a good night’s sleep. We are embodied creatures. And I think one of the temptations from the evil one in ministry, especially in a social not just social media age, I should say a digital age, when we have endless information at our fingertips, is to think we have to be omnicompetent, omnipresent, all things to all people, at all times, in all ways. In other words, that we need to be God and we’re not. And it’s good for our people to be reminded we’re not God, and that’s another way of saying you. Need to Be okay with disappointing people. God is the only one who gets his to do list done every day, and we have to be okay with letting people realize that we have good boundaries, not just because we are finite and we’re creatures, but also because we’re husbands and fathers and we need to be faithful at home. If we’re going to be qualified, it’s true to serve the Church of God. We sleep for 1/3 of our lives. That’s how impressive we are. We need to lean into our limitations. Don’t
Ligon Duncan
let your smartphone ruin your your sleep. And one of the nice mechanisms on mine now is the sleep function, and about 45 minutes or an hour before my scheduled bedtime, it shuts off notifications, and that keeps me from being wound up when I’m trying to go to sleep at night. It also keeps pings from coming through. My wife can get through. My children can get through, but everything else is phased out, and that actually helps me, because waking up to a notification suddenly you can be two hours Doom scrolling in the middle of the night, and so don’t let your smartphone mess you up. Yeah,
Matt Smethurst
just a pub a brand new book scrolling ourselves to death, produced by the gospel coalition, multiple contributors, it’s real medicine for the moment in a hyper online age. All right. Next question, can you be genuine friends with members in your church as their pastor? And then we got a similar question, how do you approach friendship with members of your church? Is it possible to be totally transparent with them?
Ligon Duncan
Well, I mean, yes, you can be friends and should be friends with members of your congregation. You do have to watch out for favoritism, and it’s gonna be different everywhere you go, because different congregations have different habits and expectations of their pastors, and you’ve gotta learn what their habits and expectations have been, and then figure out how to work into that. I had genuine friends, especially amongst my elders and deacons, and really involved members, but I also really worked hard not to look like I was playing favorites with people in the congregation and my elders wanted me to have friends, and so there was no resentment, but we just had to be careful about that. How about have you done that at River City?
Matt Smethurst
Well, it can be tough. The answer is yes. I not only is it possible to be friends with members of your church, I think it’s healthy and ideal, but we also have to be realistic and know that you want to strike a balance of being open and also restrained. And here’s the thing about being restrained, it’s not because you’re high and lifted up above them, and that you’re better than them or aloof? No, it’s actually to serve them, because so much of the stuff you’re carrying as a pastor, if they knew, would make fellow church members look worse in their eyes. And you don’t ever want to do something. You don’t ever want to say something to a church member that’s going to make it harder for them that coming Sunday, to see the best, assume the best of someone that’s exactly and so you just it’s a tough balance to strike, but it’s something to prayerfully pursue. Because even if you can’t be completely transparent with everyone. You should pray that the Lord would give you, I think, a small group, and sometimes that’s going to be your elders. I kind of think it starts there, but even others with whom you can let your hair down and really be able to process without feeling like your job is on the line. Yep,
Ligon Duncan
I had a fellow pastor, Derek Thomas. He and I went out to eat every week for 12 years. And Derek were Derek and I were in one another’s lives. I knew what was going on with his kids. He knew what was going on with my kids, and I could be completely transparent in that context. Wise word from you, Matt, you you’ve got to be careful about what you share, not just about your family, but about others, because you do want to build up the whole flock. And there’s some people that can handle hearing certain things, and there are other people that can’t handle hearing certain things, even even not from the standpoint of sharing things inappropriately, but sometimes just discouraging them if they knew what certain people were going through, it’s some people that would just overwhelm them. And so I feel like I have to protect them from some of the things that are there, not not because they would share it, but because they’d be discouraged by it.
Matt Smethurst
Yeah, that’s well said. Like the next question is not really a question. It just says importance of covenant membership, and this is something I think we’ve tried to touch on in episodes. But why is church membership something biblical that should be a part of every church
Ligon Duncan
number one, when we are united to Christ, we become a part of his body, and that that’s that’s at the essence of who we are, and that means that the way we relate to his body in the context of a local church is massively important for the Christian life. In fact, if you look at the New Testament, most of the exhortations about sanctification are congregational. That is, they can’t be done. Like, how can you love one another alone? How can you forgive one another alone? How can you submit to one another alone? I mean, just start the one another commands in the New Testament. All demand this kind of relationship in a local congregation. Now, Matt, I’ve heard you speak eloquently about membership and where you would take people to in the scriptures to explain why this is important. What? What would you say?
Matt Smethurst
Well, I’ve grabbed ligs Bible, and I’ve opened up here so I can see, like the stuff he underlines. And guys, I’m not making this up. I So I turned to Hebrews, 1317, obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls, as those who will give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with grief, for this would be unprofitable to you. And he underlined the word three words, obey your leaders. That was probably in a discouraging season of ministry, those first three words just really stood out. You know, the rest is inspired too,
Ligon Duncan
just like a Presbyterian, huh,
Matt Smethurst
exactly. But this verse, Tim Keller said you cannot obey. Hebrews 1317, apart from church membership. Just think about it logically, obey your leaders. Well, if you’re an average Christian who is the Bible calling you to obey, it’s calling you to obey your pastors. It’s not calling you to obey every self anointed Prophet, spiritual leader, guru. No, you are. The assumption is that you’re in a real, meaningful covenant relationship with someone over you. And then the second half of the verse, which like didn’t care for just kidding. The second half is saying, do it because it’s going to profit you. And it challenges the leaders by saying, Hey, you’re gonna give an account to God on the final day for these souls. So as a as a pastor, I want to know who I’m going to be spiritually responsible for before the God of the universe. Is it everyone who ever wanders into my church? Is it everyone who attends for a season? No, it’s those who have stepped into that official, formal covenant relationship. It’s like the difference. I can’t remember if I’ve shared this on a previous episode, but it’s like the difference between your wedding ring and your finger. My wedding ring is a faithful attender of my body. I actually said this on Sunday, Easter Sunday, to someone at the door after the service who has been coming for a while, and was kind of expressing a little bit of hesitation about joining. And the first thing I said is you don’t have to join our church. If you decide this is not the right church home for you, let me know, and I want to help you find another gospel preaching church in Richmond where you’ll land on your feet, but you have to be a member of a church somewhere. And what I said is the difference between attending and joining is like the difference between a wedding ring and a finger in the sense that a wedding ring, my wedding ring, has been a faithful attender of my body ever since the day I got married. But if I lost my wedding ring, we would say it disappeared. If I lost my finger, there’s a word in English for that. We would say it was dismembered. And Jesus Christ did not live and die and rise for you to be a mere piece of jewelry on his body, but for you to be a living, vital body part, which is the image Paul himself gives us. Church membership is where it’s, none of your business goes to die. It’s where we say, I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper, and they are mine. So we could do a whole episode on that, but let’s, let’s move on to the next question. How can normal size churches who have only operated under a one pastor model wisely lead their churches to accept a multiple pastor, elder led model. So we did an episode on how to work with fellow elders, actually two part episodes, and we talked about how the first. To Know About elders in the New Testament is that they’re plural, but there are a lot of churches where you don’t have a plurality of elders. Like, how can a pastor help move a church in that direction?
Ligon Duncan
Again, you want to know what the history of it is in that church. You know there are some churches that are proudly committed to unbiblical ideals and and you need to know that going in. I mean, honestly, I, when I went to first pres Jackson, which is a wonderful evangelical Bible believing church, there was some history and some practices that were deeply ingrained in the congregation that I felt were contrary to the New Testament. And I I literally prayed, Lord, I’m gonna keep my mouth shut about this for seven years. And in each case, elders in the church brought up those issues within the first two years of my ministry, and we dealt with them scripturally. Praise God, but I knew that those were issues. So you do need to know the congregation, what’s their history? Why haven’t they gotten a plurality of leadership. Once you know that, then you want to start teaching the leaders. You want to start teaching the leaders what the New Testament teaches about the plurality of leadership and why that’s important. You want their consciences to be convinced by the Scripture, not by you. I tell pastors, if your people do things because you want them to do it when you’re gone, they’ll go back to doing it the way they were doing it before. But if they believe that, it’s because the Bible teaches it, the change will last. And so as much as we want for godly reasons to get our way, we need to make sure we’re not just getting our way because, Oh, I love the pastor and I want to do what he wants, but because they really are convicted that the Bible teaches this. Mark dever does this so well, trains so many young men to make sure they’re getting their people into what the Bible says about how the church is organized. So Matt, what? What was that already there when you went to River City? Well, that
Matt Smethurst
is the nice, the nice thing about church planting, yeah, there are unique challenges with planting, but there’s also a more of a blank whiteboard. So yes, we, I was able to start with two other founding elders, which I’m really grateful for.
Ligon Duncan
And we just not always the case with church planters. It’s sometimes they’re on their own, exactly,
Matt Smethurst
and, and you can’t force it. Yeah, if the Lord, you know, Ephesians four, talks about pastors as gifts that God gives to the church, and if he’s not yet given you the gift of that, then you need to work to disciple, raise up qualified men. But the verse that comes to mind for me is in Paul’s final words, really the final chapter he wrote Second Timothy chapter four. He says, I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ, Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His Kingdom, preach the Word. Be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort. And here’s, I think, the answer to the question, with great patience and instruction, there have been untold stories of guys who have rightly become convinced from scripture that you need a plurality of elders, but have moved so quickly that, like you said, they’ve enacted the change because they wanted it, but they haven’t shepherded the people along to see, not only is it biblical, but it’s also great. You have to, I think, I mean, it’s a marketing term, but you have to sell the congregation on how this is going to benefit them. You actually your pastor doesn’t have all the tools in his toolkit. He’s not omnicompetent. He has weaknesses. So bringing on others is actually going to help multiply the shepherding care, the counseling care, the discipling care. It’s going to be better for your soul if you’re led not by a dictatorship, but by an eldership.
Ligon Duncan
And don’t, don’t think it’s necessarily going to be easy. You know, a lot of things that are worth doing are not easy. And we look at Capitol Hill Baptist church right now and say that church is so well ordered, but let me tell you when, when Mark went there, there, there were not elders in the church and and he spent a long time carefully teaching from the Word of God why there needed to be a plurality of leadership. And then when they brought the first elders forward to be elected by the congregation, the congregation didn’t elect them. So you can imagine how crushing that was for Mark. But Mark patiently, you know, picked up these pieces again and kept teaching, and then he brought back the same, same slate of elders later on to the congregation, he said, Now if, if you don’t elect elders, you will be saying to me that you don’t want me to be your pastor, and I’ll accept that. Now let’s vote, and the elders were a. Collected that time, but it was not easy for Mark to get there, and that, that was a that’s been a healthy evangelical church, you know, for like, its whole history, you know, and yet, there were a lot of things that needed to be put in order. So don’t be discouraged. If it’s hard. You do need to be patient, but you also have a little, have a little endurance in there. Too good. Good changes can sometimes be hard, and that’s worth it,
Matt Smethurst
yeah, when have you blown it? Essentially, is the question,
Ligon Duncan
yeah, too many. How much time you got? You know, let me tell you a real quick story I had been at first prayers for, I don’t know, maybe seven to 10 years, somewhere in that stretch, at a really good church staff and some members of my church staff had done something that was offensive to some other members of my church staff, and I felt like I need to take up for the offended church staff members, and I responded in a way that was demoralizing and discouraging to those members of the church staff that I thought were the offenders. And the next day, one of my elders called me up and said, Hey, can I pop by and just chat with you for a few minutes? And I knew exactly why he was coming by, and my attitude was like this, yeah, yeah, come on in, you know, and you’re not going to convince me. And he just very gently said, you know, you may want to rethink how you did that, because I think you might lose some folks, and I think actually, you really need to go apologize to him. And I was still kind of in the nobody’s going to tell me what to do, kind of mode. And I mean, repentance does not come easy to me. I hate having to repent. I mean, I just hate it. And but I knew by the time he walked out of the office that he was right, but it took me sleeping on it that night and waking up the next morning to think he’s totally right, and so I went to that group of staff members and apologized to them and explained to them why I had been so overly reactive to it, and we processed it. They forgave me, and we got we got straight on that I am so thankful that that elder came. If he had not, I would not have paid enough attention to what impact my words had had on that portion of the staff well.
Matt Smethurst
And there’s a lesson in that too. Your elder felt like he could come to you and speak a word of challenge. If your elders don’t feel like they could do that without somehow losing trust, losing capital in your eyes, then you have a problem. You have a plurality of leaders in name only. It’s a symbolic plurality, but there’s no teeth to it. You have to be able to receive correction, I would say, not just receive it, but to invite it, to foster a culture in which you’re modeling how to be adjusted, and frankly, it’s what you are preaching every Sunday that we’re all works in progress. None of us has arrived. We’re all helping each other toward heaven. So as pastors, we actually need to take the lead in inviting others in.
Ligon Duncan
That’s right, and it look it helps. This, this, this man was a really good elder. He was a really good leader. He’s a really good husband and father, a guy that just has had a profound effect in our congregation, and so thankful for those kind of relationships. So look to cultivate those kind of relationships with elders, because the closer you are, chances are, the more likely those brothers are going to be willing to tell you when they see a blind spot pop up
Matt Smethurst
absolutely and when I think of things I used to think were really important and have come to see are not as important. It’s it. For me, it’s more along the lines of a certain expectation for outcomes in ministry, reconciliation in relationships, restoration of marriages, people being trained up on a certain timeline, a mat imposed timeline, systems and structures that in a church plant, I naively and frankly pridefully thought needed to be built out and up and running before they really had to be. And I think the thing that God is teaching me, I’m only three years in, is that those goals, those outcomes, are fine in an. Themselves, but what he actually cares more about is my attitude and my faithfulness and my godliness along the way. It’s not just about what my church can produce, what it can be. He’s also doing something in me, and he’s teaching me to play the longest good
Ligon Duncan
man. We’ve said this on the on the podcast before, but Jim Boyce used to tell folks younger ministers tend to overestimate what they’re going to accomplish in five years and underestimate what they’re going to accomplish in 20 and so you can have a list I have, and I man, I had them too. I want us to get here. I want us to get here. I want to do this. Want to do that. And, you know, the Holy Spirit is not on my timeline, and he’s going to do what he wants to do, when he wants to do it, how he wants to do it, and I’ve got to be faithful. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a plan and that I have don’t have biblical aspirations, but you just like, you can’t put people on a sanctification time clock. You can’t put a congregation on the sanctification time clock, you know. So just don’t be look, be patient with yourself. I want you to, I want you to want to go. I want you to want to work. I want you to want to see transformation. But don’t beat yourself up when it doesn’t happen overnight, the long, steady slog, that’s why longer pastorates, I think, yield so many things that you just can’t get to in a few years.
Matt Smethurst
And it’s not dissimilar from parenting. It’s easy to go into parenting having read all the books and thinking you have all the answers, but five years, 10 years, 2030, years later, as a parent, actually realizing how little you control. And thankfully, success as a parent is not based on producing results. It’s based on being faithful. And as pastors, we’re also playing that
Ligon Duncan
long game, and as you’re a pastor encouraging anybody in your congregation, whether it’s a volunteer or whether it’s a staff person working with young people, youth, junior high, Senior High, or young adults into college and just out of college, you’ve got to preach to them. You don’t get your report card this year. You know that’s going to be 2030, years down the line that you’re going to see the impact of what you’ve done in these young people’s lives, because there’s so much growing going on, and it can be that can be really discouraging work sometimes, or you can get amped up about a change that doesn’t turn out or pan out in the long run. So I do think pastors have to keep an eye, especially on those ministries in the church that don’t really yield until way down the road, and encourage people to keep on being faithful.
Matt Smethurst
And I’m reminded of that story of a man who was converted in his 80s, maybe on his deathbed, by something he recalled hearing in a sermon when he was a child, right? And he said something like, the seed may lie in the ground till you do and then spring up. Yes, that Pastor never knew absolutely that that sermon he preached on that Sunday would bear fruit seven decades later. Yeah, a couple questions here. LIG related to pastors wives. One of them is coming from a pastor’s wife. The other is coming from a husband on her behalf. Let’s start with the one from the wife. As a pastor’s wife, how should I view my role in relation to older women in the church?
Ligon Duncan
Again, I think you have to understand expectations. When Anne and I were being interviewed by the pulpit committee of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, one of the people, one of the persons, said to Anne, well, how do you view your role as the First Lady of the church? And that is such a southern traditional big steeple kind of question to ask. And my wife said, Well, my job is to take care of your pastor and his children for them. That came out of the fact that they had had two really amazing pastor’s wives previous to us, one who was amazing in hospitality. She She cross stitched a pillow for every child that was born in the congregation and delivered it to the hospital room, and was a big congregation, so she was doing a lot of pillows every year. And then the one previous to that, an amazing Bible teacher, Jean Patterson, she had a women’s Bible study that probably had 678, 100 women from all over the region coming weekly to study the Bible. And my wife was trained to seminary degrees, had worked into churches, but at that stage in her life, we had a little child, and we were about to have another little child. And her main job was to give our family some sort of stability and rhythm in the midst of my crazy schedule. And so you do have to kind of know what people expect. Let me certainly compliment first pres first let her take the roles that she thought that she was able to take and never pressured her to be Jean Patterson or be Jane Bayard, or, you know, be somebody else. They let her. I think she feels right now, probably more appreciated than ever before in the congregation. She’s still in the in the choir. She’s still working in the women’s, women’s ministry, she’s still involved in the bereavement ministry at the church, and she feels really appreciated and enfolded and a part of the congregation. They let her be what God had equipped her to be and what she could do at that particular stage of life. And that’s a real gift. Not every congregation is that understanding with a pastor’s wife. So you do that’s another thing you need to train your leaders in what’s you know, the pastor’s wife is not necessarily a free staff worker. Some pastors wives want to do women’s ministry, or want to be involved in Bible teaching or want to do certain things in the church. And other other pastor’s wives are more introverted and more focused on the family. The more the church allows the pastor’s wife to be a member, and like any other member, serve in the area where God has gifted and drawn her to the better it’s gonna be, and they just have no set in stone expectation for what every
Matt Smethurst
pastor’s wife is going to be. And I think if you’re candidating at a church, if which is just a fancy verb for if you’re being interviewed by a church, you do have to be very clear. You’re not getting a it’s not a two for one deal. Here you will scan First Timothy three and Titus one in vain to find the office of pastor’s wife. And so what is she going to be? She’s going to be a faithful wife, a faithful Mom, if you have kids, and a faithful church member. And even that is going to look different in different seasons, the capacity, the ability, and it’s going to be based not just on personality, temperament, gifting, passion, but also just on life circumstances. And the question, you know, specifically said, How do I view my role as a pastor’s wife in relation to older women in the church? I would say they’re your sisters in Christ. And there’s two ditches I would say, to avoid. On the one hand, avoid the ditch of thinking that because you’re the pastor’s wife, you don’t have anything to learn from older women in the church, you do, and so you should be taking relational initiative with older women in the church and seeking to learn from them, at least one of them in your church that you respect, as a mom, as a Christian, but on the other hand, here’s the other ditch. Just because they’re older doesn’t mean they’re more mature. It’s possible to age without maturing, and so you actually may be positioned spiritually to speak into and encourage and build up someone who’s been a Christian for longer but hasn’t been discipled as well. And then the related question leg is, how can I, as a pastor, protect my wife from the emotional and spiritual weight that I face with being in ministry?
Ligon Duncan
Part of part of your job is as a husband. There is to know what your wife can handle. And every wife is different there. And I think most pastors wives are going to be protective of those pastors, and so you want to protect them from their protectiveness. You know, you I don’t want to tell you something about so and so that’s going to make you so mad at so and so for how they’ve treated your husband that you can’t be nice to him in the hall at the church. So as a pastor, I’m not trying to hide something from my wife. I’m trying to not make it harder for her to be a loving church member to other people. And so stuff that happened in session meeting where, you know, we kind of got angsty with one another. I did not talk about that with Anne, because I wanted her to be able to relate to anybody with with no baggage, with not what I wonder, what he said to her, and I let the elders know I’m what. What happens in here. We can talk to one another, how we need to talk. I am not taking this outside of the room, and I think really, all of us did a pretty good job of that as elders, so that the people in our families weren’t affected by hard decisions that we had to make, significant disagreements that we had interpersonal. Stuff that was going on, and Jim Baird did the same thing my predecessor. He just told the congregation, my wife is not going to know about whatever controversy I have with you or whatever controversy is going on, because I want her to be able to relate to you without you wondering. What does she think about me? Is she mad at me because I’ve done this. So that’s not the only way to do it, Matt, I’d love to hear how you handle that, but I do think pastors need to think a little bit about, how can I serve the heart of my wife in her relationship to people in the church? Because we’re going to have disagreements amongst leadership in a church. Yeah, my
Matt Smethurst
answer is the same. I mean, I do consult with lean on Megan a lot, because she has uncommon wisdom. I mean, she has the gift of discernment, and especially if there’s a pastoral issue involving some sisters in the church, I will get her input to help me Pastor better. But it’s, it’s such a needle to thread, because, as you said, I don’t want her when she shows up at the Women’s fellowship event or when she shows up on Sundays to be distracted. And Paul says in Second Corinthians that we are not unaware of the devil’s schemes. It is one of the devil’s schemes to slither into the mind and heart of church members, as I alluded to earlier, and pastors wives, and just distract them with all these all the drama going on in the church. So I want both to draw from and benefit from the wisdom that the Lord has given Megan, but also set her up for success on Sundays, so that she can worship God without distraction and believe all things hope all things endure, all things in the easiest way possible. All right, how to be a pastor scholar or a pastor theologian. How can we prioritize deep study and still make time for ministry?
Ligon Duncan
You know, I think that there are more resources to help us do that than ever before. And let me say one word about the word scholar or theologian. Don’t try and view that as some high academic aspiration. All we’re wanting to do is we’re wanting to grow in the knowledge of God. We’re wanting to grow in the knowledge of Scripture so that we can know and love and serve and worship God better, so that we can help our congregation know and love and serve and worship God better. So, you have to think that in a real academic kind of way. But there are tons of resources available to us. Seminaries are doing it. Southern Seminary does it. RTS has a mobile app, by the way, little ad the RTS mobile app, you can get on any phone platform. It costs absolutely nothing. It’s completely free. Download it. There are over 45 courses that are brand new that you can listen to. I listened to them walking in the neighborhood when we had dogs, until a couple of years ago, and when I was walking my dogs, I was usually listening to a course. There’s so many what you can go audit courses if you’re close to a seminary, close to southeastern in Wake Forest, or you’re close to southern in Louisville, or you’re close to Southwestern in Fort Worth, or you’re close to one of the RTS campuses, you can go audit a course. Some pastors will take a study break and go take a course or a seminar or something like that. I think we need to weave that in to the rhythms of our life, not just sermon prep. I mean, sermon prep dominated my world for 17 years, and I loved it. It was good for me spiritually, but I had to find outlets for things other than sermon prep during those 17 years. And it was good. Coming to conferences like this was a part of it, hearing other people preach through a Bible book was a part of it. John Stott would take one day out of a month and go somewhere and study something and pray and be by himself. My elders deliberately wanted me to do something at least two weeks a year when I was just taking in, not not going and doing a conference somewhere, but taking in because we need to get filled up too, and it is true. Sermon prep did a lot of that for me. I mean, it was personally nourishing. A lot of times I was learning with the congregation as I was preparing those sermons. But it’s also something that you are doing professionally and vocationally to feed others. And pastors need to figure out how their own souls and minds can be fed. So I think that’s a lifelong thing. I think most seminaries now have the attitude, hey, we not only want to resource you for ministry while you’re in seminary, we want to continue to provide resources for you in the long run. That’s a good thing.
Matt Smethurst
I have an associate pastor, COVID. And I’ve told him that I want him to spend 30 minutes every working day whenever he wants. But this is, this is, you know, office hour type stuff, 30 minutes reading some kind of book on theology or counseling or something that’s going to help his ministry. But I know the way he’s wired, he’s so relationally oriented that he could just be meeting with people and serving people all the time and not slow down enough to actually be better serving those people over the long term, because he’s feeding himself. So I’ve just, you don’t have to do that with every staff member, but I’ve, I’ve wanted to give him the freedom to be able to do that. You know, there’s a lot of angles to this question. So one of the things seminary uniquely provides for a pastor is learning the original languages. And a lot of pastors are maybe low key, embarrassed or ashamed at how much they’ve forgotten how little they use Greek or especially Hebrew. I want to just give a plug for a little ministry that Rob Plummer, a professor of the original languages at Southern Seminary, has called daily dose of Greek and Daily Dose of Hebrew five days a week. It’s a two minute video that can be emailed directly to your inbox, where he just helps to refresh you on one little aspect of Greek or Hebrew. You can sign up. It’s a podcast. You
Ligon Duncan
can kind of follow him on X, kind of a video I follow his two things on X, yeah, and it’s
Matt Smethurst
just daily dose of greek.com daily dose of hebrew.com if you feel like you’ve grown rusty, check those resources out. We’ll move on to the next question, because we actually have an episode on this topic, how to stay sharp as a pastor that I think we’ll be releasing sometime in the fall. You mentioned preaching, how that dominated your life in many ways for 17 years. What was your process? Someone asked for deciding what to preach,
Ligon Duncan
our rhythm for preaching at first Pres. When I went there as the pastor in 1996 and I had nothing in my bag. I had been an assistant pastor. I had been an interim pastor. I just didn’t have sermon series ready to go or reheat, and so I was, I was prepping from scratch. They had not had expositional sermons on Bible books for some time. And so I did Colossians because I thought, Okay, that’s a it’s a fairly short book. It won’t scare them to death. And we can do 1213, weeks in Colossians and do a pretty decent job of really paying attention to the flow of argument in the book. And they can feel like, wow, you work through a Bible book and do that. And then we went from Colossians to Matthew and people as people joined the church, they were not asking when they joined the church. So what chapter of Matthew were you in when we joined the church? So I took two and a half years through Matthew. When did you join Matthew 10? When did you join Matthew 14? You know? So that may have been, that may have been a little long, but that’s, that’s what we did. Are we doing a good job of balancing Old Testament, New Testament, gospel, et cetera. So we’re making sure that we’re talking about Jesus a lot every week to our people, and at the same time, we’re also giving them a good overview of the whole Bible. I tried to do the mark dever thing and do the survey of the Bible, I’m just not as good as Mark. Is that Mark’s able to do a Bible book survey and do a good job of it, by the way, pastors get his message of the Old Testament, message of the New Testament. It’s a cross way. Two volume set, promises made, promises kept. 66 sermons, 68 because he does an introduction of the Oh, you’re right. Okay. You test Yes, and
Matt Smethurst
then, and then a sermon, which is an overview of every book of the Bible. Yeah,
Ligon Duncan
you know. So if you’re getting ready to jump into an exposition of book, read it, because he’ll hit the high points for you. I’m always looking for things like that, yeah, those, that’s kind of how we did it. Matt, how do you do it at River City? Well,
Matt Smethurst
you mentioned trying to vary up genres, which I think, I think is, is great. So I’ve preached through so far. Mark Ruth, Philippians, judges, which was a wild ride, yeah. And, and then after judges in the fall, I thought, I’m gonna do first Peter. That’ll be a walk in the park. There is a string of successive difficult texts in Peter, chapters two and three, right? Slaves submit to masters. Wives submit to husbands. Jesus went and preached to the spirits in hell and oh, by the way, everyone baptism. Him saves you. And that goes back to the last question, staying sharp as a pastor, theologian, when I’m thinking about, okay, Jesus went and preached to the spirits. This is the great thing about expositional preaching. If you’re primarily a topical preacher, your ceiling and the ceiling of your congregation will be your own current knowledge and your own best ideas. But when you’re an expositional preacher, you’re forced to reckon with things that either you’ve never studied before or you, once upon a time, did, and you have to go back and figure out what you believe about it. So I was consulting Matthew Emerson’s book he descended to the dead, a theology of Holy Saturday, as I was thinking about how to make sense of that. That portion good First Peter three, and in my Tim Keller on the Christian life book, the very first end note of chapter one is Keller’s it’s a distill, distillation of his case for expositional preaching. At one point, editor was like, let’s take this out. It’s kind of a long end note. Long end note, but I was like, No, I want that in, because it’s so important. I think I’m gonna hopefully do a topical sermon series sometime in the coming months. It’s okay to do from time to time, but the main diet in your church should be exposing the Word of God to the people of God and the people of God to the Word of God, essentially holding a microphone up to the mouth of God and letting him speak. We did an episode on how to prepare sermons. We did one on how to deliver sermons. You can go back and listen to those and down the road. We should probably even do more on preaching. Time wise, I think we have time for maybe one more question. What leg are some potential hang ups or warnings you would give to young aspiring pastors? So think Gen Z types that are stepping into or aspiring to ministry,
Ligon Duncan
that’s really good. And I actually think there are generationally different challenges. I mean, I’ve definitely seen this in the attitudes of my staff. And Tim and I even talked about this as he as he got a younger generation of ministers coming onto his church staff, he said, man, like decision making has become a lot longer process now, because the guys want to process everything. And Tim was I want to make a decision. Let’s make a decision here. And his younger guys wanted to really hash stuff through so I think old guys like me need to be aware of kind of how the younger staff look at things. One thing I would just say is insecurity is a killer in leadership and in ministry, and so if you’re if you’re struggling with personal insecurity, you need to fight the battle against that, because it will, it will play into how you relate to other people and how you and how you lead one level. It’s easy for me to say that because I joke with people that I suffer from an almost terminal lack of insecurity and a lot of that. That’s my mom, that’s my dad, that’s godly men that have fed into my life. So I have a okay, I know who I am, I know what I can do, I know what I can’t do, and I’m gonna do the best with what I’ve got to work with.
Matt Smethurst
You know how you’re gonna dress every single day, every single day,
Ligon Duncan
Matt, it’s true, but it also means that I don’t have to be the guy for everything. So I knew when Derek Thomas came on staff that there were going to be a lot of people that liked his preaching more than me. I did not care. I wanted them to be spoiled rotten with expositional preaching. So you know, you’ve got to, you’ve got to care so much about the souls of your people and about the mission of Christ in the church and in the world that you do not care whether you know, just like the Corinthians didn’t think Paul was a very good preacher, which that blows my people around you that can do stuff that you can’t do, and insecure people have a hard time putting those kind of people in place, and it ends up hurting them, and it hurts the congregation. As
Matt Smethurst
a minister, cannot this gets to the insecurity thing you can’t feel threatened by other people succeeding and preaching better sermons than you, or that should make you rejoice, because what we’re trying to do as pastors is we’re trying to just raise up the next guy. Essentially, if we were to die, we would like to think that our churches would not only survive, they would be able to move forward with in health, because we’ve invested in the next generation. So if I’m talking to a Gen Z brother, I’m gonna I’m gonna tell him, Hey, man, you don’t have to change the world. You just have to be faithful. You just have to take it one day at a time, one week at a time. And as Luther said, there are two great days on my calendar this day and. Day, this day in the last day, and we should live this day in light of the last day. And that gets back to Hebrews 1317, you’re going to give an account for these souls, which leads to the other thing, I would say, young guy in a highly digitized, highly online age, don’t preach for the internet. Don’t tailor your ministry and your sound bites and this and that to what people on the Internet, whether fans or critics might want to or not want to hear, realize that God has called you to pastor not your followers, but your flock and and they are the ones, and not the church you wish you had, but the church you do have. And that’s going to be more than enough for you to give your heart, your life to trusting that you got to be like as Jesus talks about the farmer who just goes to sleep, rests his head on the sovereignty of God and trusts that God will give the increase in accordance with His good, pleasing and perfect will.
Ligon Duncan
Yeah, just Amen to all of those points, Matt, and especially preaching to your congregation and not being too caught up with whatever the hot thing is going on in the culture right now, so many messages are going to become utterly irrelevant in a really short period of time because they are overly preoccupied with whatever. The thing is that everybody’s out there talking about you when we get up into the pulpit to preach the Bible, we get to preach about things that are going to last forever, and the latest thing is not going to last very long. And I’m struck, you know, Calvin had all the kind of turmoil that we have around us today, but you read his sermons and you have a hard time figuring out what’s going on in the city of Geneva. Famously, he gets fired. He leaves and he goes to Strasbourg. He’s in, he’s in the Gospel of Matthew. He gets fired, he comes back, and the next sermon he preaches is the next text in the Gospel of Matthew. No comment about what’s going on the latest controversy in the city. Let’s open up to and I remember Mike Campbell, who’s a wonderful pastor in Miami now, was was a pastor in Jackson, and during a time of great conflict, a young man came to him and said, Now are you going to preach about such and such, which was a big cultural thing that had just happened a few years ago. And he said, Now I’m going to be preaching in John six on Sunday. And the young man said, Well, why? And he said, because I was preaching on John five last Sunday, you know. And that was such a wise answer from Mike to that young that young man wanted him to preach about the cultural thing that was going on. And he was preaching about something that was going to last ever to people who are going to last forever, and the only question is, where are they going to last forever? And I just that is, you, we have got blinders on right now, Matt, because we’ve got people from the left and from the right pulling us away from the gospel, from the Bible, from God, to talk about things that are utterly unimportant in comparison to God and the gospel.
Matt Smethurst
And I’d like to end by quoting something that just came to mind. So there is a book that crossway put out in 1993 that they’ve recently reprinted by da Carson and John Woodbridge called Letters along the way, they’re functioning kind of like a Paul, an older brother in ministry, writing to a fictional younger Timothy, and at one point they write, always remember that what endures After various movements come and go, is the local church at this stage in your life and ministry. Do not worry too much about what is happening at the national level. Simply build the people to whom God has called you. Feed people the Word of God. Pray for them, love them, convey the reality of God’s presence to them by word and deed. What is important at the end of the day is the church, ordinary churches trying to live faithfully in a rapidly changing society, ordinary churches pastored by ordinary people like you and me, knowing that we cannot do everything, but trying to do what we can and seeking God’s face for his presence and blessing so that his dear son might be honored and his people strengthened. Thank you for joining us for this live recording of the everyday pastor. We hope it’s been encouraging to you. We would appreciate it if you leave a rating or review or let us know how we can serve you you can go again to. Tgc.org/everyday, pastor, and please share this episode with a friend in ministry so we can help other pastors find fresh joy in this blessed work.
