My friend Steve Kneale has a new book coming out very soon from Grace Publications. I’m looking forward to receiving a copy soon and will be reviewing it here when I do.
What that means is that at this stage, I’ve not actually read the book, so of course it is possible that it could be a dud! I don’t expect it to be though. There are three reasons for this. First of all, Steve and I have chatted on and off over the years about some of the big themes that will come up in the book and I’ve always found our conversations stimulating. Secondly, Steve is a known quantity. You can read his blog, Building Jerusalem and get a feel for him as a writer. More importantly, he is a known quantity as a church elder. He has pastored a church in one of the most challenging contexts through all the ups and downs you can expect, both faithfully and fruitfully.
In my line of work, I spend a bit of time reading books I don’t like or agree with. I sometimes say that I read them so you don’t have to! But it’s very frustrating and risks being discouraging to do this. Sometimes pastors have to read the bad stuff as part of our responsibility to protect the flock both from dangerous false teaching and nonsense
So, alongside that are books I know I will just enjoy. They will be encouraging and nourishing, I’ll agree with them 100 percent. But the risk there is that your reading diet becomes a bit vanilla. There isn’t so much to chew on, to stretch and challenge me.
So, one of the reasons I’m looking forward to Steve’s book is that I expect there to be much we will agree on. I’m expecting to be encouraged. We agree on the things that matter. We are both reformed and baptistic. We both value genuinely plural eldership and the local church as the starting point. We are both complementarian. And often in our conversations we find that our pastoral instincts align.
The other reason is that I don’t expect Steve to always agree with me. In fact, our friendship started when we disagreed with each other on Twitter as it was then. We had frequent discussions and debates but also realised we were pastoring to similar if not identical contexts. So we ended up getting to know each other and visiting. I even let him preach in our church!
There are plenty of things we disagree on. Steve is a socialist, my politics are Thatcherite leaning centre right. Though we both ended up supporting Brexit and I suspect both look at the current political situation with a shared despair. I am charismatic where Steve is not. We disagreed over things like taking communion in online church during COVID. We may or may not have slightly different perspectives on the interdependent as well as independent nature of church polity (though I don’t know yet). Steve has referred to paedobaptism as sin on his blog. I wouldn’t go that far. On the other hand, he helped plant a paedobaptist church and I’m not sure I could comfortably do that!
This mixture of agreement and disagreement, unity and diversity means that Steve is one of the first people I’ll pick up the phone to in order to talk a challenge through. Sometimes I even follow his advice! But the point is that I know that he isn’t just going to affirm my own prejudices, he is going to challenge me and that will be for my good and growth
I set out to say what to look for in choosing books to read. However, I’d also encourage you to go beyond books. What are you looking for in friends, what are you looking for in your elders and pastors? I hope you are not just expecting them to be nice friends who agree with and affirm you all the time you need people around you and especially over you as elders who will challenge you.
As well as reviewing Steve’s book, my aim is to give a bit of attention here on Faithroots to the question of eldership. Watch out for more articles and videos to come.
Faithroots 