301: Are We Ever Safe from False Shepherds?

Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your co-hosts are Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor, and Pastor Charles Roberts.

Thanks for joining us again. Charles, last week was our 300th episode, and I failed to recognize that fact or that milestone until I posted the recording online. Happy anniversary.

Well, thank you. I guess you didn’t get the bottle of champagne I sent all the way to California.

Oh, well. Oh, well. You can’t rely on the postal service. They probably knew what it was. All right. So enough of self congratulations.

Yes.

Megan Basham has written a book entitled Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. Now, Charles read the book first and encouraged me, as along with other people had encouraged me, that you need to read this book, and so I did so, and specifically so that we might discuss the issues the book deals with in this podcast. Now, as you might expect, there are those who love her book and swear by its authenticity and accuracy, and likewise, those who decry her as someone bought and paid for by conservative billionaires to demonize those she highlights in her book. Regardless of the number of her fans or critics, she has most definitely started a conversation. However, our subject today won’t be a synopsis of her book, as you can read or listen to it on your own if you wish, but to deal with a question that has arisen as a result of it. Here’s the question, are we ever safe from false shepherds? Now, Charles, another way I could phrase the question is this, are individual Christians responsible to evaluate the teachings of their pastors and elders?

Yes, absolutely they are. There’s plenty of biblical evidence that this goes back to the earliest days of the church. A couple of places in the Book of Acts, in particular, which is the history of the early church from God’s divine law word. Everybody, I think, is probably familiar with the Bereans who examined everything Paul says because they were more noble than They searched the scriptures daily to find out if the teachings they were hearing from Paul or anyone else were accurate. Paul himself even warns, especially the leadership of the churches, and the church at Ephesias, I believe it was the Ephesian elders he met with that’s recorded in Acts 20, and I’m just going to read directly what it says. He meets with them and bidding them a sourful farewell because he’s on his way to Rome. He will never see them again in this life. Among other things, he says this, I know that after my departure, fierce wolves, that’s how he describes it, will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and from among your own cells will arise men speaking twisted things to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years, et cetera.

He’s warning these men, even Within the first two or three years or decade or so after the resurrection of Jesus, this problem had arisen, and it has continued right down through the history of the church. It is especially the responsibility of the leadership of the covenant community of the church, of the assembly of the Lord. But also that means also the individual members. Now, I think that there are some caveats there. What exactly does that look like in terms of holding leadership accountable or being responsible for understanding what they say. But I’ll just leave it at that and say, yes, indeed, it is an important responsibility.

I realize I’m talking to a pastor. The word pastor could be translated as shepherd. Unfortunately, because we live in an age of formal institutions, when people think of mayor, governor, pastor, elder, whatever the circumstances, in some cases, even father or patriarch, depending on how it’s viewed, that there seems to be this idea that this is a person who’s in control, this is a person who has status. But that’s not what Jesus said nor identified himself as the good shepherd was all about. Let’s talk a little bit about a biblical view of shepherds.

Well, then that imagery, as you just indicated, is you used frequently in the scripture, Jesus compared himself to a shepherd. Depending on what commentaries and Bible analysis you’re reading, you may get different opinions about this, but shepherds were not high on the social scale in Old Covenant Community Society. They were largely uneducated and smelly guys who hung around sheep and all that. But they were a vital part of the community, and their job was to look over and keep after their flock day and night. That meant that they had to be on duty 24 hours a day, so to speak. They had to have certain skills in knowing how to herd sheep, how to protect them, how to be on the lookout, to be situationally aware, we might say, that might create danger, how to them to market, all these different aspects of being a shepherd. There were different things that would characterize somebody who was a good shepherd versus someone who was a bad one. A good shepherd would, as I just said, protect the flock. He knew what to do. He knew all the ins and outs. A bad shepherd. Typically, that would be referred to, and I think Jesus even uses this language in one or two of his parables, a hireling, someone who really is not the shepherd, but somebody who’s been brought in to just do this for a little bit, who really doesn’t that much concern.

The hireling who is not really the chief shepherd of the flock, the wolves show up to attack, he’s out of there. When the going gets tough, I’m gone. But the real shepherd, he’s there to protect them and keep them from danger.

It’s interesting. The subtitle of Megan Bascham’s book was how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda, and she said that they were for sale. In a lot of ways, if you know your scripture, she’s referring to them as hirelings who then don’t have the best interests of the sheep. Now, I’m glad you brought up the fact that being a shepherd wasn’t a high status job. It wasn’t a CEO of a tech company. It wasn’t a person who had lots of land holdings. But one of the things that a shepherd would have to know is how to get the sheep to follow him. Beating up on the sheep, well, yeah, I suppose you could do that. But since part and parcel of shepherds having to have lambs without blemish and that they could sell so that people could offer in the temple, beating up your sheep would not produce that. So they had to be, in a sense, a condescension to the sheep, not that he craw on all fours, but that what he was doing was getting the sheep’s agreement to follow him. That’s not something that we usually think of today, especially with mega churches and celebrity pastors and preachers, where a lot of people gain status by saying, This is my pastor or this is our church, and we have so many people.

I’m not sure a shepherd could have handled a herd of 3,000 sheep. I don’t know. I’m not a shepherd. What do you think?

No, I think that’s an excellent point. As I was reading her book, I was reminded of something that I guess I implicitly had realized a long time ago, is that when you read about the things that she’s describing, the compromises of prominent, and they were all, as far as I remember, they were all mega church leaders. I guess I would say a mega church is a church of a thousand or more people. I guess it depends. I mean, there’s some communities where there are lots of thousand-member churches, and then you’ve got the really, really big ones with 10, 20, 30,000 members, multiple campuses, and all that. I realized that’s a relative definition. But it’s these big, big churches where these problems tend to be focused. It’s not to say that a church that has 100 people or less is morally superior on a scale to one that has 10,000 people. On the other hand, I don’t know of any small church where the pastor has been compromised along the areas of the ones that she’s mentioned in this book, and that’s created some major problem. Not saying it’s never happened, but simply by the fact that, and I think you’re implying this, that it is a reduced scale that reduces thereby the potential for these kinds of problems.

The central thing when you trace this in the history of the church as the Roman Empire became Christian, that’s when the problem started to crop up. I don’t know what the equivalent of a mega church would have been in the year AD300 or AD200. But you have moved from meeting in people’s homes to where all of a sudden the pagans have been routed and you’ve got a supposedly Christian of Rome, and he closes all the pagan temples or gives a lot of it to the Christians to use. That’s when we see things starting to go. I think there’s a reason why it is helpful for the flock of God to be a manageable one and the idea of having a pastoral staff, and God bless those who have this, we’re not saying that if you’re in a church that has a pastoral staff of 30 or 40 people, that’s a bad church. I’m just not sure that’s the biblical pattern or the model that we see given to to us in scripture.

I mentioned at the outset that this last week was our 300th episode. Well, I remembered as I was reading her book, that episode 181 of the Out of the Question podcast, where I interviewed Trevor Lauden, who had produced and stored in the documentary, Enemies Within the Church. The question we asked then is, what has made the church vulnerable to infiltration? I think, I don’t know, she never mentioned that documentary in her book, but sometimes you see that people come to the same conclusions coming from different angles. It behooves us to say, what does it mean to be an elder or a pastor in terms of your responsibility? Is it a status? Like, did the shepherds go around and say, Hey, I’m a shepherd, and people are supposed to go, Whoa, he’s a shepherd. Or was the idea of a shepherd, people immediately understood the function of a shepherd. It wasn’t like, wow, he’s a shepherd. It’s like he does a shepherd’s work. As I was going through, I’m currently reading through Rushduni’s Systematic Theology, and in his chapter on the Theology of Work, he makes a big point of saying that the word office that is translated many places in the New Testament, the office an elder, the office of a deacon, is more correctly translated as function.

This is what he has to say. The word translated is praxis, a deed, doing, or function. This word places a different meaning on the fact of hierarchy. Because the Bible is not against hierarchy, it’s against elitism, which made it very different than the Hellenic thought of its day. This is what he goes on to say, Hierarchy means that all authority comes from the Triune God and his word. On the various levels of a hierarchy, all positions or offices are derivative. They are functions, deeds, or works ordained by God, and they are legitimate only insofar as they are faithful to God. Then when I read this, and then in line with Megan Bayesham’s book, he says, Thus for an ecclesiastical authority, and he puts that word in quotes, to use the dignity of his function to advocate abortion, disarmament, or homosexuality means that he has denied his function by doing so. Aren’t those the areas that she brings up in this book?

Absolutely. That’s precisely the area she does. Yes.

So legitimacy comes from being obedient to God. And I would recommend that people read or listen to the book because she documents the fact that this is what prominent people have said, this is who funded them, et cetera. But it’s more a testimony to the fact that we have a function, even if we don’t bear the name or the title or the office of deacon, elder, or pastor, being a member of the church, being a saint, we have a function too. That’s really what I want to get into in this discussion. What’s the method by which a person who’s sitting in a church weekly, how does the person discern, am I being led astray or am I being led to orthodoxy?

Well, that’s certainly a challenging thing, especially in this day and time. I mentioned a few moments ago that there would be some caveats that I would throw out, having served in pastoral ministry for over 30 years, I’ve seen a lot of things come and go in terms of what we’re talking about. It’s certainly, I can tell you as a pastor, very helpful to have a congregation of people who are well-grounded in the basics of Christian doctrine and theology. Not that everybody has to have a Bible College degree in those things and be conversive with Greek and Hebrew. But if you have a majority of people who understand the authority of the Bible versus the authority of somebody’s presumed opinions, that’s certainly an important thing. I think that church members, members of any particular gathering who would consider themselves a flock of the Lord and have legitimate pastoral oversight, that they recognize that unless we’re all on the same page, we’re going to have problems. It’s like that old TV show, The Weakest Link. Wherever you’ve got that link, especially in church leadership, but even among the congregation, if you’ve got that one link where the person is marching to the voice of something other than God’s law word as a divine authority or a presumed authority, then when something comes up that must be dealt with according to God’s word, and they’re listening to a different voice, that’s where you’re going to have problems.

At a minimum, congregational members should take it upon themselves to be basically conversant with the teachings of scripture, the theological orientation of their church, and recognize also, well, the church I’m in, do we have elders and deacons? Is it just the pastor? Whatever the church government, the policy, what is required of those men to serve in those functions? I’ll start to say offices, I’ll say functions.

Okay, no, but the Bible will use that in certain translations. It’s just good to know what it means.

Okay, well, this guy that might… Let me just back up. A lot of people in reformed and evangelical type churches where there is a structure of having three offices or three functions, the pastor, elder, and deacons. A lot of them are not really aware of the fact that I served in this in a Presbyterian context for several decades before. I recognize this. Somebody actually pointed it out that in the early church setting, and I mean, say, the first five or six centuries, where you had a gradual growth of the centrality of the bishop of a local area, and that’s another term for elder or leader or chief shepherd, Then the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Orthodox Church, they call the diocese, the diocese or the diocese and structure, the bishop is the chief pastor of a whole conglomeration of churches. Then under him are priests who function in these various parishes. Well, that’s essentially the same structure we have in the reform church. The pastor is the chief shepherd, but he can’t be at everybody’s house and ministering to everybody all at the same time if you have even just 100 people or less.

The elders who make up the board of elders or the session in our context, they are the priests of the diocese, so to speak, if you can compare it that way. In a lot of churches, the congregation will be divided up into family units, and that may be one person or maybe 10 or 12 people in one family, depending on how it’s decided. Each of those family units will be assigned an elder, an overseer. It’s the responsibility of that elder to take responsibility for those under him in terms being available to give counsel, to be aware. If, say, they don’t show up for three or four weeks, or he hears that one person in that family is sick in the hospital, then there’s this interaction. These are some of the responsibilities. The deacons also function that way in the early church to some extent. But it’s interesting that when we read scripture, the types of things that are the big ticket issues that keep coming up in these letters of Paul and others have to do with false teachers and false doctrine. I just I want to read a passage from the Book of Jude that actually Megan Bascham includes in the preface to the conclusion of her book.

She quotes Charles Spurgeon, then she quotes Jude from this passage. Jude writes, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s people. These false teachers are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm, shepher who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind, autumn trees without fruit and uprooted, twice dead. ‘ That’s a pretty searing indictment. I thought that was a very interesting language. I’m not sure what translation she used there. These men are shepher who feed only themselves. I think it’s not an accident that she used that passage because it very much describes the type of people that she wrote about in the book. None of us are immune to our fallen natures, and we have to continually rely on the Holy spirit for guidance and help. But it can be, I’m sure, a mighty temptation if you’re, we call in my context, a big steeple church pastor, and all of a sudden here comes some foundation, and we want to give you a couple of million dollars to help you out. By the way, would you mind just mentioning this in your next sermon?

I can imagine. Or not mentioning something in your next sermon.

Exactly, yes.

There’s a couple of points on what you said, but let me first unpack the idea of church government. Because we are all in the midst of humanistic statism on a civil realm, it’s easy to look at government as a heavy hand. Most of us know if you don’t pay your taxes, you’re going to be in trouble. Most of us know that Big Brother is watching. And so there’s this certain idea that you don’t want to be on the wrong side of your government. But that’s not what the government of the church is supposed to be. Yet, I hear people telling me things from different parts of the country, sometimes even in the Bible Belt, on how the whole idea of being a member of a church isn’t so much that will bear one another’s burdens, that I have an issue, you’ll help me, you have an issue, I’ll help you. One person I was talking to pointed out that although she has been attending a church for well over two years or so, she hasn’t joined the church. They will let her help out. She shows hospitality. I think she donates regularly, but she can’t take communion with them.

The reason she can’t take communion is that she hasn’t signed up as a member of that church. So first and foremost, she’s not viewed as someone who is the member of the body of Christ, the Church of God. She’s not a member of their church, so they won’t take communion with her, but they will go to the potluck and eat with her, but they won’t take communion with her. When asked, Why do they want you to join? The response was that if you something wrong, then we can excommunicate you. Now, that’s a big lure. Wouldn’t you want to join an organization, a country club, Charles, to know that when you join, this gives the leadership the ability to kick you out?

Well, I think that was an unfortunate way to have phrased that to someone. On the other hand, I think that there is some reason to consider that… I’ll use an example of my church. When we have people who come and visit, maybe even frequently. We don’t say this every Sunday. We do have communion every Sunday, every Lord’s Day. But we generally say, if you have been baptized and you are a member of this or some other Bible-believing church, and you are not living in known sin, you’re not under discipline from a church, you’re welcome at this communion table. Maybe let’s think of it in terms of a marriage. I’ll spend the rest of my life with you, but I’m not going to go be…