Jonathan Leeman of 9Marks Ministries conducted an interview with Mark Dever, who is the pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church and the author of Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (Crossway, 2001).

THE CHURCH’S RESPONSIBILITY

9Marks: Why do you think raising up the next generation of pastors is the local church’s responsibility?

Mark Dever: To begin with, we see this in Scripture. In the book of Acts, Paul and Barnabas were sent out by the local church. Paul tells Timothy, the pastor at Ephesus, to entrust gospel truths to other faithful men who will teach others (2 Tim. 2:2). Jesus gives the church the keys of the kingdom, and he promises that the church will prevail (Matt. 16:18-20). At no point does he make the church’s victory contingent upon financially viable and doctrinally faithful seminaries (and I hope they are viable and faithful!).

I’m not opposed to seminaries, although they are unknown among Protestants before the eighteenth or nineteenth century. I’m simply saying that in the Bible, the local church—a community where people are known, their conversion is testified to, and their gifts are witnessed—is the appropriate place to make that kind of heavy statement about God’s gifting and calling in somebody’s life. Raising up leaders is part of the church’s commission.

9M: What resources does a local church have that a seminary doesn’t have for the purposes of equipping ministers?

Dever: A 360-degree view of somebody’s life. Friendships. Multiple people who relate to a person differently, as opposed to being one of 62 people in a class for a professor to know. The local church has been the place where God has committed the clarity of his Gospel, both in the preaching and those who are admitted to the Lord’s Supper and removed from it. Schools have no such ability and no such commission.
Also, you have in the local church a whole series of lives that affect the person in question. So he’s seen the examples—as it says in Hebrews 13:7—of the elders or leaders. He’s been able to consider them and they him. So there’s a natural life-on-life experience of learning.

9M: Are a pastor and a church being irresponsible by not taking measures for equipping future pastors?

Dever: Well, my basic answer is “Yes.” I want to be gracious and realize that there are some churches that are too small or are not equipped. But basically, yes, you should realize that raising up future ministers is an opportunity the Lord has set before you; and you should aspire and pray toward this work.

9M: When you talk about the importance of a church having a 360 degree view of person’s life, you are relying on a certain philosophy of ministry. What assumptions are you making about how ministry and Christian growth work? Why not just train me in Greek and homiletics and put me behind a pulpit, like a seminary can do?

Dever: That’s a great question. I’m assuming that ministry is more than simple proclamation. Simple proclamation is essential to ministry—it’s a non-negotiable. But then that proclamation takes place in the context of a community of people who know each other. They’re geographically in the same place; they assemble regularly together; and, as a consequence, they know each other.
There seems to be the presumption in the New Testament of pastoral authority accompanying pastoral relationships, as in Hebrews 13, where the members are told to consider the lives of the leaders (in verse 7) before they are told to obey those leaders (in verse 17).

The importance of knowing one another also fits with what we hear the Lord say in John 13 about our witness: that the world will know we are his disciples by the love we have for one another.
I in no way want to denigrate the centrality of preaching the word. But if we just preach the Word without having this relational web or context for ministry, which is the local church, then we don’t know how to do membership, how to do discipline, how to disciple; we’re not going to be a very good witness either (or if we are, it’s accidental).

The fruits of the Spirit that Paul talks about in Galatians are virtues expressed to other people. There’s a relational context in the reality of the church which is absolutely perfect for identifying who is gifted to be a minister, for challenging such individuals, and for raising them up. So, if I can be personal for a minute, listening to you teach a Sunday School class taught me some things about your ability to be a pastor. Watching you disciple other people, watching you inconvenience yourself, watching you take your Bible study down to Helen’s room when she was recovering from her stroke—that lets me know more things about you and commends you to me as a pastor in a way I would never know if you were merely a student in a class I was teaching.
ON THE UTILITY OF SEMINARIES

9M: It would be interesting to consider the implications of what you just said for multi-service and multi-site churches. Anyhow, how then are seminaries best used?
Dever: Seminaries are great gifts of God to us to for transfering specific content-heavy information about language study, systematic theology, and the history of Christianity concerning which the average local congregation probably won’t have sufficient expertise.

So I don’t at all mean to suggest that seminaries therefore are bad or worthless. It’s just seminaries are often used for the wrong purpose. I would even say they are “usually” used for the wrong purposes. When a young man evidences gifts for the pastoral ministry, many churches simply send him off to seminary to make him a minister. And, well, God help the seminaries that that happens to, which is I think just about all of them. They’re not made to make pastors. Churches make pastors.

9M: In a contemporary urban context, is the seminary “necessary,” “advisable,” or something else for a young man who feels called to the ministry?
Dever: It is certainly not necessary. And it is not necessarily advisable. So I’d have to say something else. It is sometimes advisable.
We’ve sent brothers from this congregation out to pastor churches who do not have the benefit of an M.Div. from a seminary, but who themselves know the Lord, know his Word, evidence it in godly lives and families, and are wise about the world as well.

Now, I think a seminary education would have benefited any of these men. But there are lots of practical questions that come in view: the person’s age, the opportunities for ministry that come up, and so forth. So I would say it’s a case-by-case call.

Generally speaking, if you’re younger, go to seminary. I’m more likely to say to a 22-year-old than a 32-year-old, “Go get your M.Div.” But even then, you might be better served in your particular case by hanging around your congregation longer, developing deeper relationships there, and spending more time ministering among them.

THE CHBC INTERNSHIP

9M: When I compare it to other pastoral internships, the Capitol Hill Baptist Church internship is fairly unique. You don’t even give guys opportunities to preach or teach! What are you trying to accomplish in the CHBC internship? What are you not trying to accomplish?

Dever: I’m trying to accomplish what we call a “boot camp” in ecclesiology: introducing young ministers to a history of Christian reflection on what the Bible says about the church.

Today in North America, we tend to be very pragmatically oriented. We have visible, immediate success in mind. Yet when we begin talking with Christians who lived in previous ages and who lived elsewhere, we find centuries’ worth of reflection on what a church should be and do that doesn’t conform to leading a church by what’s immediately and outwardly successful.

So we want to fundamentally affect ministers in their understanding of what a church should be, and teach them from the Word that God cares about things that they might not realize he cares about. Christians in the past have largely recognized this; ours is a comparatively recent amnesia—maybe the last century.

What are we not trying to do? We’re not trying to single-handedly create pastors. As you said, we don’t give brothers the opportunity to preach during this time (though we as a church do this for our members who are here longer than a few months).

Rather, we formally play with their brains by giving them all of this stuff to read and make them write a lot of papers. And, we give them a taste of the church: by sitting in the elders’ meetings and by experiencing being a member for five months.

9M: Could I sum that up by saying you are attempting to give aspiring pastors a “church-centric” or a “congregationally-shaped” view of the Christian life? That you’re trying to accomplish that worldview or paradigm shift in their thinking?

Dever: Precisely. And we intend to do it cognitively, by the reading and discussions, but also experientially, as they join such a church for a few months.

WHERE TO BEGIN

9Marks: Starting with day one of your pastorate at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, you didn’t have an internship program. What little things did you start doing to help equip future pastors?

Mark Dever: Taking my sermon preparation very seriously; praying for evangelism and discipling; trying to model that by befriending non-Christians; sharing the gospel with them; befriending members of the church and trying to help them grow in Christ; watching who responds to my work, who picks up on the pattern, and who begins to reduplicate what I do with others; praying in particular for those brothers. That’s a sign that that person should be an elder—whether or not they’re paid.

Also, I took our inductive Bible study on Wednesday nights seriously. As soon as I got here, every Sunday night and Wednesday night I would try to give out a book—a good book—which slowly but surely seasons the congregation with good books. And some of those books, at least, get read. If nothing else, I’m familiarizing the whole congregation with names of authors that are trustworthy and that I think will help them; and they’ll notice other names are absent.

In short, raising up future pastors is done through faithfully pastoring and discipling your church. For a lot of men, this may mean recovering what it simply means to pastor and disciple biblically. Internships programs and the like can be useful for equipping future leaders, but they are not necessary. And if you don’t start with faithful pastoring and discipling, neither internships nor seminaries amount to much.

9M: At the risk of repetition, then, give me a bullet list for the pastor whose church is a long way from being able to offer some fancy internship program. Very practically, what should he start doing right now for equipping future leaders?

Dever: One: Pray that God will honor your congregation by raising up elders for you.

Two: Pray that those future elders could be identified and trained.

Three: Prepare to set aside part of your income and part of your church’s budget to facilitate this goal. Maybe that means helping a young man from a poor family get a good education, maybe even just at a bachelor’s level.

Four: Prepare to set aside your time and your church’s time for this purpose. For example, from my fifth or sixth month at this church, I would have laymen who were leaders in the church preach on Sunday night. And then I would take personal time to give them reviews. This gave them a taste and taught them about preaching.

Five: Read Robert Coleman’s old 1963 classic Master Plan of Evangelism. It’s really not much of a book on evangelism, but it’s a great book on discipling. It simply calls us to follow Jesus by pouring our lives into a few men—three, twelve—and realizing the power of doing that. We tend to think that addressing meetings of several hundred people is always the best way forward. And there are certainly times to do that. Our Lord addressed large meetings. But that’s not all he did, and probably not the main thing he did.

BLOKES WORTH WATCHING

9M: How do you discern between a guy worth spending and pouring your life into and one who is not?

Dever: What Phillip Jensen calls “blokes worth watching”! I would say the main way is to observe the difference between the men who don’t respond to initiative and consistently show little interest and the men who do respond and show consistent interest. These are not always the men who are gifted for ministry, but often they are.

9M: I have known guys who enjoyed hanging out with me, but who weren’t finally teachable. Is there something more that’s necessary than simply being “available”?

Dever: You make a good point there. There can be people who simply like the personal relationship but don’t show themselves responsive. You can still love them, but you don’t pour into them in the same way. You’re trying to—particularly if you’re a pastor, you’re an elder—you’re trying to multiply, not just add. You should be attempting to find the multipliers, and multiply them and through them.

TAKING “THE LONG VIEW”

9M: I remember you once said to me, “You will never be a successful Christian father, husband, or pastor if you don’t know how to take the ‘long view.’” Do pastors today struggle with taking the short view as opposed to a long view of things?

Dever: I don’t know about pastors everywhere, but certainly in affluent, immediate-satiation culture like the West, yes, because we can have gratification so quickly whenever we choose it.

9M: What do you mean when you advise pastors to “take the long view”?

Dever: You can’t get wrongly encouraged or discouraged by what you see in yourself right now, or in what you see God doing with you right now. God’s not trapped in time; he takes the long view. And if we’re going to be his servants, we have to do that, too.

You know with your own children that you don’t get immediate response. You know in your own marriage you don’t necessarily get immediate response. What we’re to do in our husbanding and parenting is the same thing we’re to do in our pastoring. We know where we want to go, and so now we just move in that direction. Whether or not others immediately respond like we want isn’t up to us. We just keep moving in the right direction and try to lay down tracks for that.

9M: What is the relationship between equipping future pastors and taking the long view?

Dever: Future pastors aren’t built in a day. They’re not necessarily identified correctly at first; once you do identify them correctly all the fruit’s not there. There’s some people who you don’t think will go anywhere who do; others who you think will, don’t. But you have to slowly but surely, patiently and encouragingly, push along. And you’ll find that you can’t literally “make” pastors; only the Lord will give growth. I’m not always right about who will and won’t be a good pastor. Nevertheless, the Lord allows me to pour in as I can. So I push ahead and the Lord blesses.