📖 Pastoral & Christian Ethics — Unit 6: Ethics in Preaching, Leadership & Speech

Section 6.1 — The Ethics of the Pulpit: Faithful Exposition and Honest Speech

A pulpit is a position of enormous trust, and like every position of trust it can be abused. We have already learned, in Unit 2, how to handle the Word honestly — reading each text in its context and submitting to what the author actually meant. Here we press that into a matter of ethics, for to twist the Scriptures to say what we want them to say, to make a text serve our agenda rather than God's, is not merely poor exegesis; it is a kind of lying in God's name, and there is scarcely a graver sin a preacher can commit. The man in the pulpit speaks as though he speaks the words of God. If he bends those words to his own purposes, he has made the Almighty the endorser of his private opinions, and the people, trusting him, will never know the difference.

From this flows a whole cluster of pulpit sins to be named and shunned. There is manipulation — the working of the congregation's emotions for effect, the engineered tears, the pressure tactics that bypass the mind and the conscience to extract a response the truth itself did not produce. There is the use of the pulpit as a weapon, the preacher who, too cowardly to confront a man privately, instead aims his sermon at him from the safety of the platform where the target cannot answer. And there is plagiarism, which our age has made easy and common: the preaching of another man's labor as though it were your own. To stand and deliver a sermon you did not study, prayed over by someone else, and let your people believe it came from your own communion with God, is theft and deceit braided together. Use the labors of other men, by all means — no preacher is an island — but use them honestly, and let your preaching be the overflow of your own walk with God and your own wrestling with the text.

Behind all of this stands a conviction I have taught for many years: you do not give a sermon, you preach from the soul. Preaching is not a performance to be admired but a man set on fire by the truth, occupying the space God has given him and speaking what he himself has first been gripped by. The pulpit is not a stage, and the preacher who learns to play it as one — preaching for the applause, the reputation, the effect — has traded a holy calling for a cheap one.

Section 6.2 — Servant Leadership: Authority, Submission, and Impartiality

The pastor genuinely holds authority in the church; Scripture does not pretend otherwise, and the congregation is called to submit to its faithful leaders. But the manner in which that authority is held is everything, and here our Lord drew the sharpest possible line. "You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them... Yet it shall not be so among you" (Mark 10:42–43). Not so among you. The world's pattern of leadership — the strong commanding, the great being served — is precisely the pattern Christ forbids to His undershepherds. Peter echoes it exactly: elders are to lead "not as being lords over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock" (1 Peter 5:3). The model is the towel and the basin, the King who knelt to wash the feet of men He could have commanded.

Let me put it in a homely picture. I have a big metal yardstick in my shop. When I am working on a large project I do not reach for a retractable tape or a cloth measure; I lay that yardstick down and I know at once what size a thing is. The trouble is that my yardstick reads in feet and inches. I lived years in Canada and now in Mexico, where everything is measured in meters, but my mind is still stuck in the measure I grew up with. We all carry a measuring stick for success, and most of us inherited the world’s. We say a man has done well if he is clever, or good-looking, or a leader, or makes a great deal of money, or is known. We would not likely brag, “My son has become a wonderful servant.” But God’s ruler is a different ruler altogether. On the night before His death, with His disciples still arguing over which of them was greatest, the Lord of glory rose from supper, wrapped a towel around His waist, took a basin, and washed their feet — the task of the lowest servant in the house. Then He said, "If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet" (John 13:14). That is the measure. The world asks, “How many people work for you?” The Lord asks, “For how many people do you work?” A man called to lead in Christ’s church is called first to kneel in it.

So the pastor's authority is real but inverted from the world's: it is the authority of a servant, exercised for the good of those served and never for the comfort or aggrandizement of the one who holds it. And the submission Scripture asks of the congregation is the glad following of a shepherd who plainly loves them and points them to Christ — not the cowed obedience extracted by a domineering man who has confused his own will with the will of God. A leader who must demand submission has usually already forfeited the right to it.

One more mark belongs to godly leadership: impartiality. The church is the one place on earth where the distinctions the world lives by are to mean nothing. "My brethren, do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with partiality" (James 2:1). The pastor who fawns over the wealthy donor and overlooks the poor widow, who bends the rules for his friends and applies them strictly to those he dislikes, has betrayed the gospel of a God who shows no favoritism. Justice in the church must be blind to wealth, to status, to friendship, and to the leader's own preferences. The same standard, the same patience, and the same grace must reach the influential man and the inconvenient one alike.

Section 6.3 — Biblical Church Discipline — and Its Misuse

Few subjects are more neglected, and few more easily mishandled, than the discipline of the church. Our Lord laid out the process Himself with great care. "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone" (Matthew 18:15). That is the first step and the one most often skipped: a private word, between the two, aimed at winning the brother. If he will not hear, the second step is to take one or two others, that every word may be established by witnesses. If he still refuses, the matter comes before the church. And only if he will not hear even the church is he finally to be treated as one outside it. Note the patient escalation, each stage giving room for repentance, each stage widening the circle only as far as the brother's hardness requires and no farther.

Alongside Matthew 18 stands the graver case of 1 Corinthians 5, where a notorious, unrepented, public sin in the church demanded decisive action for the sake of the whole body. From these passages we draw the three purposes of all discipline, and they must be held in this order: first, the restoration of the sinning brother, which is always the goal; second, the purity of the church, that a little leaven not corrupt the whole lump; and third, the honor of Christ's name before a watching world. A useful distinction governs the process: private sins are dealt with privately and need never become public if repentance comes early, while sins that are public or that harden into open defiance may require the wider steps.

Now I must speak plainly about something the manuals too often leave unsaid, because nothing in pastoral ministry is more easily turned into a weapon than discipline. The same process our Lord gave for healing can be perverted into an instrument of control, and a great deal of spiritual abuse has been committed under its banner. Discipline is misused when a leader skips the patient private steps and escalates straight to public exposure, satisfying his anger rather than seeking the brother. It is misused when its true engine is the leader's wounded pride and not the sinner's good. It is misused when it becomes a tool for silencing those who question the leadership, or for crushing rather than restoring. Hear me on this: a discipline that has lost the goal of restoration has ceased to be biblical discipline and has become something else, something cruel. Paul fixes the spirit forever: "if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, considering yourself lest you also be tempted" (Galatians 6:1). Restore — not destroy. In gentleness — not in fury. And considering yourself — for the man who corrects another while forgetting his own capacity for the very same sin is the likeliest of all to become a tyrant in God's name. Discipline must always sharpen the leader's own self-examination at least as much as it confronts the offender.

Section 6.4 — The Tongue: Gossip, Destructive Speech, and a Vital Distinction

If the pulpit can be abused and authority can be abused, so above all can the simple human tongue, and Scripture treats it with a seriousness we rarely match. James calls it a fire, "a world of iniquity" set among our members (James 3:6). Solomon warns that "a whisperer separates the best of friends" (Proverbs 16:28). And Paul, listing the sins he feared to find festering in a church, names alongside the grosser vices the quieter killers: "backbitings, whisperings" (2 Corinthians 12:20). We are slow to see gossip as the church-destroyer it is, precisely because it feels so small, so natural, so easily disguised as concern or prayer request. But it is among the chief solvents of Christian unity, and a congregation given to it will be eaten hollow from within while everyone professes love.

The pastor bears a double responsibility here. He must refuse to traffic in it himself — never repeating what he need not repeat, never being the source or the eager hearer of a tale — and he must have the courage to confront it in the flock, gently stopping the whisper at his own door and teaching his people to do the same. A man cannot lead a pure-tongued church while indulging an impure tongue in private.

And now the distinction this unit has been building toward, because it is the one most often abused in both directions. What separates sinful gossip from the legitimate confrontation of sin? Not the subject matter, for both may concern another person's fault. The difference lies in direction, motive, and goal. Gossip talks about a person to those who are neither part of the problem nor part of the solution; biblical confrontation goes to the person, through the very channels our Lord laid out in Matthew 18. Gossip aims to wound, to vent, or to elevate the teller by lowering the subject; discipline aims at the offender's restoration. To carry a brother's sin privately to him, or through the proper steps to those charged with helping, is not gossip — it is obedience. To carry that same sin sideways, into idle conversation with those who can do nothing but think less of him, is gossip however piously it is framed. Learn to tell the two apart, and teach your people to, and you will have done much to guard both the holiness and the unity of the church at once.