Professional Ministers
Now, we’re not against professional ministers. Some of our best friends are professional ministers (well, one or two, anyway – at least, they were).
We appreciate professional ministers for looking at the background to the Bible and helping us to understand its context. We can thereby apply it consistently to our lives.
Professional ministers can help us by doing the reading we do not have time to do (“work to do and bills to pay”). Heck, they can even tell us how Judas died. If they’re really good they can explain why some people think it’s important that the two accounts can be harmonised and also explain why others think it doesn’t matter.
However, we mustn’t let professional ministers be our main source for advice in jobs, careers, workplace minstry, family life and personal finance. We need them to teach us Biblical principles that should undergird our thinking, but in these areas their advice is worth no more (and possibly less) than the godly layperson.
I once went to a Spring Harvest seminar about trusting God for finance. It was given by a single woman in her late
20s who worked for Youth With A Mission or similar. Her life was so different from most of her hearers, most of whom married with children in a secular world, yet her talk was peppered with many personal illustrations. How mad is that?
