Priest, Teacher, Pastor

The class went better than you expected. Not well, exactly — you talked too fast for the first ten minutes and lost your place once — but nobody looked bored, Harold said something helpful about the second verse, and you got to the end of what you had prepared with four minutes to spare.

Then everyone leaves except one man, who is folding a chair he does not need to fold.

He waits until the room is empty. Then he says: “Can I tell you something? I’ve never told anyone this.”

And in the next four seconds you have to know what you are.

You are not his pastor. You know that much. But you are also not nobody — he did not stay after the class to tell the janitor. He stayed because you spent an hour standing at the end of the table saying what God’s Word means, and something in that hour made him think you were safe. Which means whatever you are, it is not nothing, and you had better know its name before he says the next sentence.

That is the question this chapter answers, and the reason it comes second. Chapter one said the invitation to teach is real and that both fearful refusal and self-appointment are dead ends. Fine. But a man standing in an emptying fellowship hall does not need to know that he is permitted to teach. He needs to know what kind of thing he is doing, and where its edges are.

Three words sort it out, and the whole rest of this book depends on getting them in the right relation: priest, teacher, pastor. One of those you became at the font. One of them you were given six weeks ago. One of them you are not, and will not be by being useful.

What belongs to every baptized Christian

Start with the largest of the three, because it is the one most often either forgotten or abused.

Peter writes to ordinary scattered Christians — not to clergy, not to a spiritual elite — and calls them a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God. He has just told them they are living stones being built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

Notice the plural, and notice who is included. Every baptized person in that letter is a priest. Not like a priest. A priest.

The Greek word behind it is hiereus — the ordinary word for a sacrificing priest, the one who has access to the holy place. In the old covenant that access ran through a family and a building: one tribe, one tent, one man once a year behind the curtain. The New Testament takes the word and hands it to a congregation of tanners and tentmakers and slaves.

What does it get you?

Direct access. You do not need a mediator to reach God, because you already have one, and he is not in the room. You pray in your own name because you have been given his.

A sacrifice to offer. Not for sin — that one is finished. Your body, your work, your day, your patience with a difficult neighbor. The Christian’s offering is his life, given back.

A word to speak. This is the one that matters for this book. A baptized Christian may speak the gospel to another person. Not by permission of a committee. Not as a favor from the pastor. It is his by baptism: he may tell a dying friend that Christ died for him, and he may tell his own child that her sins are forgiven for Jesus’ sake, and neither of those is trespassing. It is the family business.

That is the priesthood, and it is enormous. It is also the thing most likely to be misused in the next two paragraphs, so here is the guardrail.

The priesthood of all believers does not mean everyone is a pastor. It means the opposite of what it is usually made to mean. The phrase was recovered at the Reformation to say that a milkmaid and a magistrate stand before God on the same footing as a bishop — that there are no two grades of Christian. It was never a claim that the office of preaching is unnecessary or that anyone may take it up who feels like it. A priesthood of all believers with no ministry in it is not a Reformation doctrine. It is a congregation with nobody to preach to it.

Hold both. You are a priest. You are not, by being one, a pastor.

What belongs to the called office

Now the second word, and the one this book will not blur.

The Augsburg Confession says that in order that we may obtain the faith that justifies, God instituted the ministry of teaching the gospel and administering the sacraments — and that through the Word and the sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Spirit is given, working faith where and when it pleases God in those who hear.

Three things are being said there, and they are worth separating.

The ministry is instituted. It is not a management solution the church arrived at once congregations got large. God set it up, for a purpose, and the purpose is that people would come to faith.

It works by means. Word and sacrament are the instruments. The Spirit does not arrive alongside them, as an extra; he comes through them. This is why the office cannot be reduced to leadership, or vision, or care. It exists to deliver specific things.

Its power is not the man’s. The Spirit works where and when it pleases God. A pastor cannot make anyone believe, and his own qualities are not the engine.

Paul asks the question that makes the office necessary, and he asks it as a chain: how shall they call on one they have not believed in, and how shall they believe in one they have not heard of, and how shall they hear without someone preaching — and how shall anyone preach unless he is sent? Then the conclusion: faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

Read that backward and you have the whole doctrine. Faith requires hearing. Hearing requires a preacher. A preacher requires sending. Nobody in that chain sends himself.

Then the next article names the door. No one should teach publicly in the church or administer the sacraments without a proper call. The Latin is rite vocatus — rightly called.

Read that article carefully, because it is routinely stretched in both directions.

It does not say that only pastors may open the Bible in a church building. It is not a rule about who may lead a study. Publicly teach, here, means the public office: preaching and administering the sacraments. That is what the article is protecting, and it is the reading that governs this book.

Nor does it say that the call is a formality laid over a gift the man already had. The call is how a man gets the office. Not sincerity, not evident ability, not a burden he cannot shake. Someone outside him — a congregation, acting in good order — puts him there.

Three things are worth saying about that call, because it is the hinge of the whole arrangement and most people have never had it explained.

It comes from outside. This is the entire point. A man does not receive the office by concluding that he has it. He receives it when a congregation, which has the authority to call, calls him. That externality is not bureaucracy; it is the same shape as everything else in this book. God works from outside us — water and a word, bread and a word, a called man and a word. A ministry that began inside a man’s own conviction would be the one thing in the Christian life that did.

It is not a judgment about his soul. The call does not certify that this man is holier than the men who did not receive it, or that his experience of God is deeper. It certifies that the church has examined him, found him fit for a particular work, and put him to it. That is why an unworthy pastor’s absolution is still valid: the office is Christ’s and the word is Christ’s, and neither depends on the man delivering them.

And it is genuinely his until the church removes it. A pastor does not have to re-earn the office weekly by performance. This matters for the class in front of you, because a congregation that treats the call as provisional — good until the sermons stop being interesting — has already stopped believing what the call is.

What makes a call rite, rightly done, will vary in its procedure from congregation to congregation, and that variation is not a defect. What does not vary is the direction. It comes from outside the man.

The Confession is also frank that the authority attaching to that office is real, that it belongs to Christ rather than to the man, and that it is exercised for the church rather than over it.

So what is actually reserved? Strip away everything a lay Christian may plainly do, and what remains is short and specific:

• Public preaching in the assembly of the congregation.
• Administering the sacraments — baptizing and presiding at the Supper.
• Private absolution, spoken as from God to a person confessing.
• Public doctrinal adjudication — saying, on the congregation’s behalf, that this teaching is right and that one is not.

That is a short list. Notice what is not on it: teaching a class, answering a question, comforting the grieving, praying with a neighbor, telling somebody the gospel. Those are not clergy prerogatives graciously extended to laymen. They belonged to you at the font.

What belongs to the teacher

Now the middle word, and the reason this book exists.

Between the priesthood every Christian has and the office no Christian may seize, there is a third thing, and it does not have a tidy name in most people’s vocabulary. That is exactly why teachers get into trouble: they have two categories and three realities, so the third keeps getting sorted into one of the wrong boxes.

Here is the third thing, plainly.

A lay teacher is a baptized priest, entrusted by the congregation with a specific, limited, public-facing work under the oversight of the office.

Take that apart.

A baptized priest. Everything from the first section is already yours. You may speak the gospel because you are a Christian, not because you are teaching.

Entrusted by the congregation. This is the part the priesthood alone does not give you, and it is what separates the teacher from the man who simply has opinions about the Bible. Someone asked. That entrustment is not ordination and it does not make you a small pastor. It is more like a delegation of a churchly task — the congregation, which has real responsibility for what gets taught in its rooms, has handed part of that responsibility to you.

Specific and limited. You were given a class, a text, a term. Not a pulpit and not a flock. The limits are not an insult; they are the shape of the assignment.

Public-facing. This is why it is not merely private conversation. You are speaking to a group, in a church building, with the congregation’s implicit endorsement, and the people in front of you will reasonably assume that what you say is what this church teaches. That is a real weight, and it is why the work is answerable.

Under the oversight of the office. You are not freelance. There is someone whose job includes what is taught in that room, and the relationship to him is not a limitation placed on you but the thing that makes the assignment safe.

Notice that the entrustment has the same direction as the call, on a smaller scale. You did not conclude that you should teach and then proceed. Someone asked. That is not a lesser way of arriving at the work than an inward certainty would have been — it is the more reliable one, and it is the only one you can point to afterward when you wonder what you are doing at the end of that table. A man who was asked can answer the question. A man who appointed himself has only his own memory of feeling sure.

Now the practical payoff, and it is the whole point of the three-column distinction: the teacher’s authority is derived and delimited, which means it is also real.

Derived: you did not generate it. Delimited: it has edges. Real: within those edges, you are actually doing the church’s work, and you may do it with confidence rather than apology. A man who understands this does not preface every sentence with I’m not a pastor, but. He knows what he is. He says what the text says.

The same work, different settings

One more thing belongs in this column, and it is stated here rather than argued.

The same baptismal vocation is exercised in different settings. In this congregation, women teach women and children; mixed adult classes are taught by men; the line between a children’s class and an adult class is confirmation. That is the order under which a teacher here serves, and this book will not relitigate it. The reasoning behind it — what it rests on, and how far it reaches — belongs in chapter ten, where church order is the subject.

What does belong here is the shape of the thing, because it is routinely described backward.

Women teaching women and children is not a leftover — not a residual permission that survives after the restrictive texts have been applied. It is commanded work with apostolic warrant. Paul tells Titus that older women are to teach what is good and train the younger women. He reminds Timothy of the sincere faith that lived first in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, and that from infancy Timothy had known the sacred writings. A boy who would spend his life in the ministry was catechized by two women before he could read, and the apostle names them.

That is not a concession. It is a mandate, and the church has never had enough people obeying it.

Why the distinction is a mercy

It is easy to hear all this as a fence, so let me put it the other way around, because that is how it actually functions.

The distinction protects the hearers. People in a Bible class are not in a position to check you. They will believe what a teacher says with more trust than he probably deserves. The order — a called man responsible for doctrine, a teacher working within an assignment, both accountable to a congregation — is how a class is kept from being at the mercy of whoever happens to be standing at the end of the table.

It protects the teacher. This is the part nobody expects. A teacher who knows what he is not is free in a way that a teacher who has quietly promoted himself never is. He does not have to have an answer. He does not have to carry what he was never given to carry. When the class exceeds him, he has somewhere to hand it, and handing it over is faithfulness rather than failure.

And it protects the pastor from being either useless or everything. A congregation where only the pastor may teach has buried its gifts. A congregation where the office has quietly dissolved into a general fog of ministry has lost the thing God instituted to give it Christ.

Which brings us back to the man folding the chair.

Consider a composite. A teacher — six weeks into his first class, still nervous — is asked to stay after by a man who says he has never told anyone this. What follows is a real confession of a real sin, said out loud in an empty fellowship hall.

What is the teacher?

He is a priest. So he may say — should say, must say — the thing he actually knows: Christ died for that. He died for that specific thing, and he is not surprised by it, and he does not love you less than he did an hour ago. That is the gospel and it is his to speak. He does not need a call to say it and he must not withhold it.

He is a teacher. So he is not surprised that the hour produced this; teaching the Word tends to open people. He handles it as part of the work rather than as an interruption of it.

He is not the pastor. So there is something he does not do. He does not hear this as confession and pronounce absolution as one holding the office. He does not begin managing this man’s life. He does not become the person this man comes to instead of coming to the church. What he does instead is simple and it takes one sentence: I want you to say that to Pastor, and I’ll go with you if that helps.

Nothing was withheld. The man got the gospel from a Christian who had it to give, and he got a route to the office that has more to give him. The teacher stayed inside his assignment and it cost the man nothing.

That is the three-column distinction doing its work in about ninety seconds, in an empty room, with the chairs still out.

The next faithful step

If you keep one sentence from this chapter, keep this one: you are a priest by baptism, a teacher by entrustment, and not a pastor at all — and all three of those are good news.

The priesthood means you are not a spectator, and you already have the only thing the man in the fellowship hall actually needed to hear. The entrustment means your class is not a hobby; it is the congregation’s work, handed to you, and it deserves preparation. And not being the pastor means the weight has a limit — that there are things which are genuinely not yours, and you may stop trying to carry them at eleven o’clock at night.

So: find out who carries oversight of teaching in your congregation. Not in a crisis. This week, before you need to know. In some congregations it is the pastor alone; in others he shares it with a board of deacons or elders. Ask, and write the answer down, because the whole arrangement described in this chapter only works if you know the name and number of the person on the other end of it.

Then go back to the text. Because knowing what you are does not yet tell you how to read — and a teacher who has his categories straight and his Bible closed has not been helped much.

Which is the next question. You stand under this book when you teach it, not over it. What does it actually mean to read that way?