A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom from the Book of Nehemiah
Jim Packer (1995) Hodder & Stoughton
Reviewed by Lee Gatiss, Church Society
Recently, I re-read Jim Packer’s excellent book Knowing God. It’s definitely the kind of book that one can re-read with profit, and it seemed not to have lost its power since I first read it, back in what historians like to call “the last century.”
It left me with a bit of an appetite for more Packer. So I pulled down from the shelf a book by Uncle Jim that I had bought a while ago but not read yet. It’s his exposition of the book of Nehemiah, called A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom from the Book of Nehemiah (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995). Here are some of the lessons I particularly learned from that book.
1. Parachurch organisations are not the central focus
Professor Packer points out that people who work in network or parachurch organisations (as I do) are sometimes tempted to a certain kind of false focus. He writes,
“We have all had a greater share in the church’s shortcomings and unfaithfulnesses than we know, and we may not therefore treat such sense as we have of its failures as excusing us from the need to confess that we shared in the process of its failing. Nor is it for us turn our back on the church in impatience, as “parachurch” workers, so-called, sometimes do, but to pray and work for its renewal, keeping that as the prime focus of our concern at all times.”
So we mustn’t simply attack “the church,” as unfit for purpose, as falling short. We must confess that as part of the church we are part of the problem, before we try to be part of the solution. So our prime focus must not be on making Church Society or New Wine or CEEC (or whatever) more central and important. Rather, in prayerful dependence on God, we try to make our organisations and networks more effective instruments in God’s hands for the reformation and renewal of the Church.
2. God doesn’t bless goofiness!
Some people see no value in thinking ahead. But as Jim Packer says when talking about Nehemiah’s reforms:
“Faith and planning must go together. When zealous Christians with strong faith allow themselves to go goofy when it comes to orchestrating a cherished enterprise, failure regularly results — not because God is not responsive to faith, but because it is not his way to applaud and bless goofiness. The realism of Nehemiah’s careful preparation is the true model for us to follow when we are called to make things happen for God.”
We shouldn’t just ask God to bless our dreams, but look to him to guide us. He does guide, as we put our thinking caps on. Psalm 32 is reassuring in its promise of guidance: "I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.” But it immediately adds “be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you” (Psalm 32:8-9). God promises to guide us, but prohibits us from acting like brute beasts without the gift of intelligence and foresight.
Some may have been taught (or we may have heard it said) that the way to grow a church is to “just preach the word!” This has led many of us into dead ends, not to mention relational difficulties with the people we are called to actually pastor. But especially in terms of planning, Jim Packer is right that, “The preaching pastors who have left behind them the most virile and mature churches have been those whose pulpit work was linked with good organizing, done by others if not by themselves.”
Be positive!
There is lots to get depressed about in church life today. “Prophets of woe” are doing a roaring trade. But too many people always see the glass as a quarter full and emptying fast. As Dr Packer explains:
“Pastors and spiritual leaders today whose concerns extend beyond maintenance to mission, and who seek a genuine extending of God’s kingdom, find themselves faced again and again with what has to be classed as attitudinal rubble — laziness, unbelief procrastination, cynicism, self-absorption, in-fighting and fence-sitting among the Lord’s people, and many similar factors that hinder and obstruct spiritual advance. These make the task of leadership twice as hard as it would otherwise be, and the going twice as slow.”
Many say that there is no hope, and we face overwhelming odds. There were lots of doomsayers in Nehemiah’s day. They were not Jeremiahs with a prophetic word from God about imminent judgment, but deadweights.
“Their gloomy gossiping was well calculated to disrupt the work by spreading alarm and despondency on a grand scale. With friends like this, Nehemiah must have thought, who needs enemies? … Their assurance that there was no way of avoiding attack could not but depress and demoralize… Pontifications about overwhelming forces lined up against Jerusalem, with warnings that resistance would be hopeless, were the last thing that he and the builders needed, just as declarations that nothing can be done to move churches forward are the last thing that pastors and congregational leaders need to hear today.”
“But as it was in the days of Nehemiah, so it continues to be: few if any churches lack friends, of a sort, who feel it is their special ministry to impart negative assurances of this kind, and who never doubt that their doomsaying is the most helpful contribution they can make. The factual information they bring may, of course, be useful; but the oracular gloom they spread is unbelief masquerading as wisdom and needs to be nipped in the bud.”
We must try to go about our transforming work in a positive frame of mind, without propagating a self-fulfilling and paralysing prophecy of imminent collapse, for which we have no sure prophetic word from God. We may tell ourselves dismal stories. But that future we all fear, is by no means inevitable in a universe ruled by a God who specialises in resurrection. As John Bunyan, imprisoned for his faith in the 17th century, taught us to sing,
Who would true valour see,
Let him come hither;
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.
But also, let us note, we must not confound ourselves!
Whoso beset him round
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is.
No lion can him fright,
He’ll with a giant fight,
But he will have a right
To be a pilgrim.
So I heartily commend Jim Packer’s 'A Passion for Faithfulness' and the many insights he brings to bear from the ministry of Nehemiah, as we engage for the “reform and renewal” of the church in our own day. It’s also one reason why my next book is called Positively Anglican… But that’s another story!
It left me with a bit of an appetite for more Packer. So I pulled down from the shelf a book by Uncle Jim that I had bought a while ago but not read yet. It’s his exposition of the book of Nehemiah, called A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom from the Book of Nehemiah (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995). Here are some of the lessons I particularly learned from that book.
1. Parachurch organisations are not the central focus
Professor Packer points out that people who work in network or parachurch organisations (as I do) are sometimes tempted to a certain kind of false focus. He writes,
“We have all had a greater share in the church’s shortcomings and unfaithfulnesses than we know, and we may not therefore treat such sense as we have of its failures as excusing us from the need to confess that we shared in the process of its failing. Nor is it for us turn our back on the church in impatience, as “parachurch” workers, so-called, sometimes do, but to pray and work for its renewal, keeping that as the prime focus of our concern at all times.”
So we mustn’t simply attack “the church,” as unfit for purpose, as falling short. We must confess that as part of the church we are part of the problem, before we try to be part of the solution. So our prime focus must not be on making Church Society or New Wine or CEEC (or whatever) more central and important. Rather, in prayerful dependence on God, we try to make our organisations and networks more effective instruments in God’s hands for the reformation and renewal of the Church.
2. God doesn’t bless goofiness!
Some people see no value in thinking ahead. But as Jim Packer says when talking about Nehemiah’s reforms:
“Faith and planning must go together. When zealous Christians with strong faith allow themselves to go goofy when it comes to orchestrating a cherished enterprise, failure regularly results — not because God is not responsive to faith, but because it is not his way to applaud and bless goofiness. The realism of Nehemiah’s careful preparation is the true model for us to follow when we are called to make things happen for God.”
We shouldn’t just ask God to bless our dreams, but look to him to guide us. He does guide, as we put our thinking caps on. Psalm 32 is reassuring in its promise of guidance: "I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.” But it immediately adds “be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you” (Psalm 32:8-9). God promises to guide us, but prohibits us from acting like brute beasts without the gift of intelligence and foresight.
Some may have been taught (or we may have heard it said) that the way to grow a church is to “just preach the word!” This has led many of us into dead ends, not to mention relational difficulties with the people we are called to actually pastor. But especially in terms of planning, Jim Packer is right that, “The preaching pastors who have left behind them the most virile and mature churches have been those whose pulpit work was linked with good organizing, done by others if not by themselves.”
Be positive!
There is lots to get depressed about in church life today. “Prophets of woe” are doing a roaring trade. But too many people always see the glass as a quarter full and emptying fast. As Dr Packer explains:
“Pastors and spiritual leaders today whose concerns extend beyond maintenance to mission, and who seek a genuine extending of God’s kingdom, find themselves faced again and again with what has to be classed as attitudinal rubble — laziness, unbelief procrastination, cynicism, self-absorption, in-fighting and fence-sitting among the Lord’s people, and many similar factors that hinder and obstruct spiritual advance. These make the task of leadership twice as hard as it would otherwise be, and the going twice as slow.”
Many say that there is no hope, and we face overwhelming odds. There were lots of doomsayers in Nehemiah’s day. They were not Jeremiahs with a prophetic word from God about imminent judgment, but deadweights.
“Their gloomy gossiping was well calculated to disrupt the work by spreading alarm and despondency on a grand scale. With friends like this, Nehemiah must have thought, who needs enemies? … Their assurance that there was no way of avoiding attack could not but depress and demoralize… Pontifications about overwhelming forces lined up against Jerusalem, with warnings that resistance would be hopeless, were the last thing that he and the builders needed, just as declarations that nothing can be done to move churches forward are the last thing that pastors and congregational leaders need to hear today.”
“But as it was in the days of Nehemiah, so it continues to be: few if any churches lack friends, of a sort, who feel it is their special ministry to impart negative assurances of this kind, and who never doubt that their doomsaying is the most helpful contribution they can make. The factual information they bring may, of course, be useful; but the oracular gloom they spread is unbelief masquerading as wisdom and needs to be nipped in the bud.”
We must try to go about our transforming work in a positive frame of mind, without propagating a self-fulfilling and paralysing prophecy of imminent collapse, for which we have no sure prophetic word from God. We may tell ourselves dismal stories. But that future we all fear, is by no means inevitable in a universe ruled by a God who specialises in resurrection. As John Bunyan, imprisoned for his faith in the 17th century, taught us to sing,
Who would true valour see,
Let him come hither;
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.
But also, let us note, we must not confound ourselves!
Whoso beset him round
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is.
No lion can him fright,
He’ll with a giant fight,
But he will have a right
To be a pilgrim.
So I heartily commend Jim Packer’s 'A Passion for Faithfulness' and the many insights he brings to bear from the ministry of Nehemiah, as we engage for the “reform and renewal” of the church in our own day. It’s also one reason why my next book is called Positively Anglican… But that’s another story!
Lee Gatiss, Church Society, Jan 2016