Andy Rowell

Category: Pastoral Care

  • Tim Keller on Willow Creek, ecclesiology, and preaching

    I highly recommend New York City pastor Tim Keller's first two blog posts:

    The "Kingly" Willow Creek Conference

    He describes Willow Creek as "kingly", Reformed as "prophetic", and emerging as "priestly."  I agreed with him–giving a couple lengthy comments–trying to show that the "kingly" has particular strength with regard to evangelism. 

    I had previously interacted with Keller about large church vs. small church ecclesiology in the comments of David Fitch's blog in December THREE QUESTIONS FOR THE ATTRACTIONAL PRACTICIONERS WHO QUESTION THE FRUIT OF MISSIONAL: A Response to Dan Kimball

    His second post encourages pastors to be involved doing pastoral care and not just preaching. 

    Preacher-Onlys Aren't Good Preachers

    He writes

    I pastor a church with a large staff and so I give 15+ hours
    a week to preparing the sermon. I would not advise younger ministers to spend
    so much time, however. When I was a pastor without a staff I put in 6-8 hours
    on a sermon. If you put in too much time in your study on your sermon you put
    in too little time being out with people as a shepherd and a leader. Ironically,
    this will make you a poorer preacher. 

    I also thoroughly enjoyed Keller's thoughts on preaching at

    Gordon Conwell's PulpitTalk – Volume 5.  Spring 2007 – Preaching to the Heart.

    There he talked about how he plans sermons far ahead of time, reads lots of newspapers and books, and believes it takes 3,000 sermons to become a good preacher.  He says he did less preparation in his early years of preaching.  He only decided to make his preparation more tight after he had to preach multiple times the same sermon.  He talked about liking:

    Product Details

    Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon by Bryan Chapell (Hardcover – Mar 1, 2005)

    but likes to put the theological aspect at the end of the sermon after the application. 

    They have also just recently announced that 150 Keller sermons are now available on the Redeemer website for free.  Free Sermon Resource. 

    The June cover story of Christianity Today profiled Keller: How Tim Keller Found Manhattan
    The pastor of Redeemer Church is becoming an international figure
    because he's a local one. By Tim Stafford | posted 6/05/2009 09:47AM

    He has three books:

    Product Details

    The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith by Timothy Keller (Hardcover – Oct 30, 2008)

    Product Details

    The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller (Hardcover – Feb 14, 2008)

    Product Details
    Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters by Timothy Keller (Hardcover – Oct 20, 2009)

  • How much emphasis should we place on healing?

    I have decide to remove this post.  I wanted to provide some resources for people to think more about this issue.  But this issue is complex and it is difficult to cover it carefully and briefly. 

    I will leave one resource because it gives you an idea of the complexity of the issue. 

    Are
    Miraculous Gifts for Today?
    by Stanley N. Gundry (Series Editor), Robert Saucy (Contributor), Richard B. Gaffin (Contributor), Sam Storms (Contributor), Doug Oss (Author), Wayne Grudem (Editor)
    Zondervan (October 10, 1996)

  • How does a pastor respond to a family who has an intersex child?

    I am a better pastor for having read tonight the following article in the New York Times Magazine:

    What if It’s (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?

    By ELIZABETH WEIL
    Published today: September 24, 2006

    It is the fourth most emailed article tonight on nytimes.com.   

    Most recent articles on the nytimes.com are free to view.  It is really quite amazing that way.  You may have to create a free login account to view some of them.   

    The article describes the dilemma parents have when a baby is born with genitals which are difficult to identify as either male or female.  Additional testing is needed and often surgery is recommended to make the genitals either "more male" or "more female" in appearance.  The article appropriately asks doctors and families to carefully consider whether surgery has more benefits or pitfalls. 

    "Reports on the frequency of intersex births vary widely: Chase claims
    1 in 2,000; more conservative estimates from experts put it at 1 in
    4,500. Whatever the case, intersex is roughly as common as cystic
    fibrosis."

    Just being aware that this occurs regularly will help all pastors to be prepared mentally, emotionally and spiritually to meet families or individuals who find themselves coping with this situation.  Pastors should counsel families that this issue is somewhat common and can encourage them to consider it thoughtfully.  Most importantly they can encourage the family to begin to love the child deeply.  I would also of course urge pastors to respect the confidentiality of families regarding the privacy of this matter.   

    Here are the first couple paragraphs of the article which give one example of this dilemma. 

    When Brian Sullivan — the baby who would before age 2 become Bonnie Sullivan
    and 36 years later become Cheryl Chase — was born in New Jersey on Aug. 14,
    1956, doctors kept his mother, a Catholic housewife, sedated for three days
    until they could decide what to tell her. Sullivan was born with ambiguous
    genitals, or as Chase now describes them, with genitals that looked “like a
    little parkerhouse roll with a cleft in the middle and a little nubbin forward.”
    Sullivan lived as a boy for 18 months, until doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian
    Medical Center     in Manhattan performed exploratory surgery, found a uterus
    and ovotestes (gonads containing both ovarian and testicular tissue) and told
    the Sullivans they’d made a mistake: Brian, a true hermaphrodite in the medical
    terminology of the day, was actually a girl. Brian was renamed Bonnie, her
    “nubbin” (which was either a small penis or a large clitoris) was entirely
    removed and doctors counseled the family to throw away all pictures of Brian,
    move to a new town and get on with their lives. The Sullivans did that as best
    they could. They eventually relocated, had three more children and didn’t speak
    of the circumstances around their eldest child’s birth for many years. As Chase
    told me recently, “The doctors promised my parents if they did that” — shielded
    her from her medical history — “that I’d grow up normal, happy, heterosexual and
    give them grandchildren.”

    The article continues at nytimes.com

    Later comment:

    Todd Rhoades noticed this post and referred to it here at his blog "Monday Morning Insights."  The comments there are well worth reading.  While you are there, check out the rest of his blog.  From what I have seen in five minutes of checking it out, if you like my blog, you will love his.