What Does the Church Need? Willard's Surprising Answer
I was at Dallas’ house before he died, interviewing him for the book The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb. My friend Jamin and I spent a good portion of the day with Dallas talking about the nature of power, and what it really meant that God’s power was made perfect in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9).
In the ebb and flow of our conversation, we talked through questions about leadership in the kingdom of God, pastoring, and the worldly expectations often put on pastors today. It was at this point in the conversation that Dallas said something I hadn’t expected to hear from him, but that also made perfect sense.
Dallas said, “We need more pastors like John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards in our pulpits today.
This took me by surprise, but the more we talked about it the more sense it made. The church is a place - probably the only place - where you find a cross-section of all society. You find high school drop-outs and PhDs, conservatives and liberals, wealthy and poor, etc. Admittedly, this is less true than it once was, but compared with most institutions, churches do bring together a shocking diversity of life situations within one space.
Furthermore, Willard’s vision was that we have people, who he likened to Wesley and Edwards, who had the intellectual vision and knowledge to see reality for what it was. This is important, and it is something many folks who love Willard totally miss. Willard’s vision for the church and spiritual formation was never anything less than an intellectual vision. It wasn’t solely that, but that was always necessary.
What the church needs, he thought, were shepherds who could pull the curtain back on reality, exposing the truth and the lies for what they were. This is a person, or people, who could speak the truth of the soul to a congregation while also, simultaneously, naming the reality of what is going on in culture today. This was a person not tossed by the waves of the world, but grounded in the truth.
The vision that Dallas had was an ancient one. It was the standard Protestant vision of the pastorate, where someone would take up a way of life that was a rational way of life. We, however, easily forget that rationality includes affection within it, and therefore is not synonymous with what we often think of as intellectual. You can be seen as an intellectual today and not be fully rational in the historic sense.
But just think about someone telling you that their pastor was an intellectual, or had a rational ministry! Those wouldn’t probably be complements!
The vision that Dallas offered was a holistically formed person in wisdom. I have been addressing, in the past couple of articles, the nature and reality of seminary education today. This is what I think is often missing. We need a vision of the seminary that is holistic training in wisdom and love for the sake of a certain kind of rational ministry (i.e., loving God with our hearts, minds, souls, and strength).
Dallas was right. Now we just have to support the seminaries who have caught this vision and are trying to advance it.