Earlier today, Steve Camp tweeted this question:
To some fellow pastors: do you think training men for pastoral ministry is a matter of indoctrination or faithful discipleship? Ty…@JoshBuice @tomascol @Ken_FiveSolas @PastorMike @PastorKenTCAPP
— PastorSteveCamp (@PastorSJCamp) December 16, 2022
To some fellow pastors: do you think training men for pastoral ministry is a matter of indoctrination or faithful discipleship? Ty…
To which I responded…and he replied to me…
A bit… yes. But I sincerely would like others opinions on this.
I do have a reason for asking though that isn’t personally directed to any of these other men I tagged here.
Ty for your reply!
— PastorSteveCamp (@PastorSJCamp) December 16, 2022
Is this a rhetorical question Steve?
If not, I can ask Paul and Timothy about it. 🙂
(As luck would have it, my Bible reading for today was 1 Timothy.)
A bit… yes. But I sincerely would like others opinions on this.
I do have a reason for asking though that isn’t personally directed to any of these other men I tagged here.
Ty for your reply!
My asking if it was a rhetorical question reveals my view: Training men for pastoral ministry is a matter of faithful discipleship.
Why? First, many issues in the world are not because of faith, they are because of blind faith (which also exists outside of religion). Atheists may equate faith with blind faith, but are wrong. It is unconvincing to unbelievers, but Christians have ample evidence for what we believe.
Indoctrination relies on a heavy dose of blind faith, because indoctrination is impossible when people are truly allowed (and encouraged) to question what they are being taught.
Scripturally (and Scripture is a huge part of the “ample evidence” we Christians have), the first verses that came to mind after Steve’s tweet were Isaiah 1:18 and Acts 17:10-11:
18 “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD:
though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red like crimson,
they shall become like wool (Isaiah 1:18, ESV).10 The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue. 11 Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so (Acts 17:10-11).
With the quote from Isaiah, a God that asks us to “reason together” with Him is not looking for indoctrination, He is looking for understanding. To use reason versus memorizing doctrines and rules.
As for the one from Acts, Paul was an Apostle. In our modern “trust the experts or you’re a conspiracy theorist” world, the Bereans would not have been commended for double-checking what Paul and Silas taught. However, the Holy Spirit led Luke to do exactly that to the “more noble” Bereans.
Even with trustworthy sources (to quote Ronald Reagan from another context), “Trust, but verify.”
Indoctrination demands you just trust.
Additionally, in the Bible we can see how indoctrination (versus discipleship) can lead to blindness…
39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life (John 5:39-40).
…and how the blind leading the blind (see Matthew 15:14) can have catastrophic, eternal effects:
15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves (Matthew 23:15).
Finally, the Scripture that stands out most for me about this subject is John 15:15, where Jesus tells His disciples:
15 No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.
We should all aspire to be servants of God, but this verse shows our Lord desires understanding, not blind faith. Yes, He wants us to do what we are told, but look at how Jesus trained His followers: He did not indoctrinate them, He faithfully discipled them by word and by action.
Thanks to that, the disciples grew from “Do you not yet understand?” (Mark 8:21b) to finally getting it, starting at the empty tomb:
8 Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9 for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead (John 20:8-9).
And then lighting the world on fire with the gospel!
P.S. The complete Twitter discussion as images:
P.P.S. One of the folks Steve wrote to replied, “I would say both! One without the other won’t do!” That made me realize that sometimes we have to settle on definitions before answering a question. My picture of “indoctrinate” is the non-archaic one here:
