This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #106, on the subject of The Teacher Music Ministry.
This continues our miniseries on what it is to be “called” to “music ministry”. Our first installment was #95: Music Ministry Disconnect, making the point that most Christians are not what we call “ministers” and most musicians are “entertainers”. In #97: Ministry Calling we examined how to know whether you are “called” to be a “minister”, based largely on who you are, what motivates you and how you relate to others with needs. Following this we identified five specific “ministries” in #98: What is a Minister?, and began looking at individual ministries with #99: Music Ministry of an Apostle followed by #101: Prophetic Music Ministry and #102: Music and the Evangelist Ministry. Last time we considered #103: Music Ministry of the Pastor, including worship leading. We previously established that pastor and teacher are not the same ministry, but jointly important in the local church.
The fact that I am a teacher both simplifies and complicates the effort to explain the ministry–simplifies because I know it intimately, complicates it because first it is always difficult to see what makes yourself different from others, and second because it is easy to confuse personal experience with that which is generally true of a group. I was a Boy Scout, but I did many things as a Boy Scout that probably most other Scouts did not do, and there are many things that were done by many Scouts which I never did. My experience as a teacher is in some ways unique, and in some ways general, and so the difficulty arises in identifying that which characterizes all teachers, as distinct from that which is specific to me.
Where the pastor is most concerned with people and relationships, the teacher is most concerned with knowledge and understanding. Our theology and doctrine is laced with the concerns of teachers, and contains a lot of trivial minutiae that is, in ultimate terms, inconsequential. To pick on one of the biggest issues, questions of the nature of God as three persons but one God, the doctrine of the Trinity, are not essential to salvation: even most seminary graduates have trouble with the concepts, and one of the details is one of the major points of disagreement between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox denominations. People are saved and go to heaven every day with no clue as to how there can be only one God but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all that one God and are in some sense also distinct persons. It is better to understand aright than to misunderstand, but what we call the Apostles Creed is not found in the writings of the Apostles. It is an effort by teachers to make sense of what we know, which is valuable but not essential. Understanding what you do not believe is worthless; believing what you do not fully understand is sufficient, although understanding helps undergird belief. Developmentally handicapped and autisic persons who understand almost nothing but trust God through Jesus Christ go to heaven; seminary graduates who do not believe the God about whom they learned exists do not.
Yet the teacher explains things. It was probably Paul’s calling as a teacher that was behind much that was in his letters. We see how he takes the facts he knows–that Jesus has come to save not the people who were working hardest at keeping the law as perfectly as possible, but ordinary sinful commoners, and recognizes from this that keeping the law has nothing to do with pleasing God, but trusting God is what really matters. His application of reason to build significant explanations of soteriology, ecclesiology, sanctification, eschatology, and more, are all efforts to enable us to understand–because understanding is the foundation for both believing and acting.
A teacher is thus someone who is always explaining, always instructing, always trying to help others understand what it is that he has learned. It is most valuable when he is explaining scripture, doctrine, Christian life and conduct; it expresses itself through his character in that he is always explaining everything. Just as we cited Tom Skinner’s comment that he would have been a great used car salesman had he not been an evangelist because he is that kind of person, so, too, the teacher is marked by a seemingly irresistible urge to teach, to explain and clarify and help others understand. Others often find this annoying because they don’t really want to understand, certainly not at the depth and level that the teacher does–because the teacher is driven to learn, to study, to contemplate, to grasp everything as completely, thoroughly, and deeply as possible, and (because we all suppose that everyone is more like us than otherwise) assumes that the student has the same hunger. Teachers thus want to know, and try to explain, everything in much greater depth and detail than anyone really “needs” to know.
Yet that depth and breadth of knowledge is important within the church. It is easy for congregations to wander into error simply from failure to understand simple truths–the basic understanding of how the gospel frees us from the law without making us immoral scoflaws; the importance of the concepts of tithing and Sabbath-keeping as they point us to God’s total ownership of all our money and time; the types of ministry within the church, what each accomplishes and how they work together. What teachers bring to the church is essential.
As mentioned, teachers are focused on truths and facts and explanations, not on people. We can seem a very uncaring bunch, not because we don’t care but because our concerns are more about whether you understand than anything else. A teacher presented with someone with a problem will answer with teaching, answers to theological questions, expositions of scripture. If he remembers to pray with the person, his prayer will probably reflect a belief that understanding these truths will solve the problem. That is sometimes the case–the prayers in Paul’s letters are nearly always on the order of “God, may my readers understand the truths I am about to explain to them”–and there is a degree to which God brings people to that minister best able to help them. Such explanations are often the answer to difficult problems, particularly when someone is hearing questionable claims or struggling with challenging issues. At the same time, such teaching does not replace pastoral ministry: learning about God and the message is important, but learning to live in relationship with God is not gained by absorbing facts and doctrines, even when such teaching is pointing in the right direction. One of the truths I had to learn very early in my ministry was that the closeness to God and divine warmth I observed in some of my fellow students was not the result of some truth they had learned, but of time spent in prayer and meditation, communing with God. Teaching is of great value to the students, but we confuse knowledge with relationship, and we teachers are partly to blame for that.
I observe with my own music that I am often incorporating lessons into the songs, from apologetics to instruction in Christian life and truth. Songs which answer the questions about being Christian are the heart of the teaching music ministry. They can be used as introductions to spoken lessons, but can also take advantage of that aspect of music we noted for both the evangelist and the pastor, that people will learn the songs and sing them, reinforcing the lesson long after the concert has ended. If you leave one of my concerts singing “Lord, you’ve got me convinced”, or “Passing through the portal to the new world”, or “And I’ll trust Him again”, or “How can they hear if we don’t tell them?”, you’ve carried the lesson with you. That’s the objective.
That completes our consideration of the five ministries identified in Ephesians 4. The series will continue with some consideration of other ways of serving God that may use music but do not seem to fit these categories.
Last entry in the series: Miscellaneous Music Ministries