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Speaker: Jerry Cisar
In a book on pastoral ministry, Eugene Peterson writes, “American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationery and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.”[1]
Providentially, in our march through Matthew, we land on Matthew 10 this Sunday, the day of Peter Stonecipher’s ordination. A perfect text for an ordination charge. Giving heed to the instructions of Jesus to these twelve are designed to keep pastors and leaders from abandoning their post!
Christ’s instructions to the Twelve are to be obeyed every bit as the instruction to get into the boat in chapter 8 and the instructions of how to live out God’s will on earth as it is in heaven in the Sermon on the Mount (5—7). The intended effect of obedience to these commands is that the messengers of the gospel will embody the message of the gospel.
Join us for worship as we explore what it looks like when the messengers of the gospel apply the Sermon on the Mount to how they do mission.
[1] Eugene H. Peterson. Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity.