It’s simple: pastors are primarily teachers, and the goal of our teaching is the salvation of souls — a supernatural goal we can’t produce. This understanding leads us, naturally, to prayer. We ask God to do what only he can do, and this accompanies the task of preaching (and the whole of our work) with a heartfelt dependence on Jesus. And that’s where the power’s at.

For some, a single sentence has changed the trajectory of their ministry. For me, it was a paragraph from Richard Baxter’s classic book The Reformed Pastor.

Our whole work must be carried on under a deep sense of our own insufficiency, and of our entire dependence on Christ. We must go for light, and life, and strength to him who sends us on the work. And when we feel our own faith weak, and our hearts dull, and unsuitable to so great a work as we have to do, we must have recourse to him, and say, “Lord, wilt thou send me with such an unbelieving heart to persuade others to believe? Must I daily plead with sinners about everlasting life and everlasting death, and have no more belief or feeling of these weighty things myself? O, send me not naked and unprovided to the work; but as thou commandest me to do it, furnish me with a spirit suitable thereto.” Prayer must carry on our work as well as preaching; he preacheth not heartily to his people, that prayeth not earnestly for them. If we prevail not with God to give them faith and repentance we shall never prevail with them to believe and repent. (The Reformed Pastor, 105)

Richard Baxter has taught me at least three lessons that clarify the pastoral vocation and bring more of God’s power into the task of preaching. They’re summed up in the above passage, but I present them to pastors as a cascade, each point flowing from the one before it, starting with the fact that pastors are primarily teachers.

Pastors Are Primarily Teachers

Baxter (1615–1691), as the late J.I. Packer has described him, “usually called himself his people’s teacher, and teaching was to his mind the minister’s main task.” Baxter wrote his most famous book, The Reformed Pastor, to make this case, because he was convinced that unless pastors themselves understood their calling, there was little chance parishioners would. During Baxter’s day, and in ours, the question comes down to this: What are pastors for?

The New Testament makes it clear that pastors — the office of elder (presbyteros) or overseer (episkopos) — serve the church with official authority through teaching the apostolic gospel as handed down to us and preserved in the Bible. This is our chief task — a task that was widely understood in the early church and recovered during the Reformation, but that too often gets downplayed in our modern thinking.

To be sure, this downplaying is seen not so much in the church’s activity, but in the pastor’s own vocational clarity. When it comes to the church’s activity, most evangelical churches still feature the preaching moment as the high point of its weekly gatherings. Teaching has certainly not been abandoned, but I still doubt we appreciate its central place in how we conceive of our calling. I’m referring to the level of our basic self-understanding.

For example, imagine, pastor, that you meet a new neighbor and they ask you what you do for a living. You respond by saying, “I’m a pastor.” Now, doubtless, your neighbor has a category for that. They hear you say “pastor,” and they immediately picture something. At the bare minimum, especially if they’re secular, they hear you saying that you’re religious. Now what they think hardly matters, but what does matter, and what I’m most concerned about, is what you and I picture in our minds.

What are we thinking when we hear ourselves say, “I’m a pastor”? Do we think, as the New Testament would lead us, that we’re teachers? We should think that. Baxter would certainly say so.

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