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Surveying the evangelical landscape these days, I sense that much of the frustration expressed across warring camps has less to do with methods or principles and more to do with temperament and calling. In many of today’s debates about posture and practice, we’ve witnessed a collapse of context—a blurring of vocations—as if every faithful Christian leader should approach the moment in the same way.
You can see this confusion in recent videos urging believers toward a brand of cultural engagement and evangelism that resembles Charlie Kirk’s political punditry more than Tim Keller’s pastoral legacy, as if both men were called to the same vocation. They weren’t.
Tim Keller ministered for decades as a pastor of local churches (first in rural Virginia, then in New York City). His call as an evangelist and pastor was not to win policy debates or mobilize political movements. The work of a shepherd is fundamentally different from that of an activist who operates through campus events, social media clips, and podcasts.
That’s not a criticism of political pundits. We need politicians and pastors, pundits and preachers. What we don’t need is the false expectation that pastors should be more like pundits.
This confusion surfaced again in a recent dustup over where to draw the line between the pulpit and punditry. Some argue that since people already consume podcasts and political commentary all week long, the pastor should step into that space and become the primary voice shaping their worldview. That sounds plausible, but this move ends up doing two contradictory things at once: it diminishes and distorts the pastor’s calling.
It diminishes the pastor’s role by pulling him down into the same cacophony of voices that fill the rest of the week. In striving to “cut through the noise,” he risks becoming part of it. The distinctive voice of Scripture—the one thing the pastor is primarily called to echo—gets drowned out.
It also distorts the role by expecting pastors to speak authoritatively on an ever-expanding list of issues that touch the political realm. One quality I’ve always appreciated in John Piper is his restraint in this area. He rarely speaks to specific economic policies or the intricacies of political life, not because he lacks convictions but because he knows the limits of his expertise. When asked why he doesn’t weigh in on every news headline, Piper once explained,
I feel today that most of the macro and international, political, economic issues are too complicated for me to figure out. Therefore, I don’t have anything authoritative to say from the Bible about particular strategies for how to solve various political or economic issues. I just can’t get to the level of expertise that makes me feel warranted to get up and say, “Listen to me, folks.” I feel that way about the Bible. I want people to listen to me. I want them to hear my perspective on the Bible. But seldom do I come to the point where I feel like, with some complex issue out there, I’ve risen to the level of knowledge that would warrant my voice to be authoritative.
That humble posture is part of what makes Ask Pastor John so powerful. Piper knows where to steward his voice and where not to. Albert Mohler has a different calling. He hosts a popular podcast that offers a daily briefing of the news with his commentary. Mohler isn’t a pastor. He’s a Christian leader weighing in on areas of concern for conservative Christians in the public square.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has benefited over the years from both Mohler’s and Piper’s ministries. And I appreciate that they’re not the same. They have different callings. That’s a beautiful thing.
We shouldn’t expect pastors to be omnicompetent. Such expectations inflate the office beyond its biblical design and, ironically, flatten the contributions of lay Christians called to engage in law, politics, economics, and other fields.
History warns us here: Mainline denominations stumbled when their leaders began issuing statements on every policy issue under the sun. They went way beyond merely articulating biblical principles and began prescribing political solutions well outside their expertise.
We need faithful Christians in politics and, yes, even in punditry. But we shouldn’t expect pastors to fill that role. Erick Erickson, a popular pundit on the right (and a Presbyterian) made this point recently:
I do talk radio for a living. I’m surrounded with the news all day. If I went to church and every Sunday became a political monologue wrapped in scripture, I’d change churches. Preach the gospel. Work through books expositionally. Do deep theology. Let the Spirit work.
Kevin DeYoung has sounded the same note:
Most pastors have nothing particularly unique or insightful to say about politics. So much of “speaking prophetically” or applying the Lordship of Christ to all of life amounts to little more than slapdash criticism and recycled talking points. If we feel the need to say something about what’s in the news, let’s slow down, log off, read widely, get lost in some old books, give ourselves to months or years of reflection, and then maybe we will have something worth saying—something that isn’t being said by a hundred chattering voices already.
If this sounds like an excuse for silence or a retreat from bold witness, then listen to J. Gresham Machen, the stalwart defender of orthodoxy whose century-old Christianity and Liberalism still convicts and clarifies:
Weary with the conflicts of the world, one goes into the Church to seek refreshment for the soul. And what does one find? Alas, too often, one finds only the turmoil of the world. The preacher comes forward, not out of a secret place of meditation and power, not with the authority of God’s Word permeating his message, not with human wisdom pushed far into the background by the glory of the Cross, but with human opinions about the social problems of the hour or easy solutions of the vast problem of sin. . . . Is there no refuge from strife? Is there no place of refreshing where a man can prepare for the battle of life? Is there no place where two or three can gather in Jesus’ name, to forget for the moment all those things that divide . . . and to unite in overflowing gratitude at the foot of the Cross? If there be such a place, then that is the house of God and that the gate of heaven. And from under the threshold of that house will go forth a river that will revive the weary world.
We need pundits who view the world’s problems through the lens of Scripture and the wisdom of the church. But we mustn’t confuse that calling with the pastor’s.
In my 2011 book Counterfeit Gospels, I warned against both a quietist gospel that would deny or diminish the social implications of the good news and an activist gospel that would subtly push the cross from the center of the church’s proclamation and put a cause (even a good one) in its place, as the unifying force for the church.
For several years, most of the criticism I received came from readers who wanted to see the church mobilized for social causes more associated with the political left. That’s not surprising, since research has shown progressive Christians are much more likely than conservative Christians to bring political punditry into the pulpit. But today, gospel centrality is under fire from those who want churches mobilized for the political right. When it comes to the resurgence of the Religious Right, the gospel-centered types are in the way. So be it. I’m going to keep banging the same drum—being gospel-centered in season and out of season.
Thank God for pastors. Thank God for pundits. Thank God for pastors who are not pundits.
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Trevin Wax is vice president of resources and marketing at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to The Washington Post, World, and Christianity Today. He has taught courses on mission and ministry at Wheaton College and has lectured on Christianity and culture at Oxford University. He is a founding editor of The Gospel Project, has served as publisher for the Christian Standard Bible, and is currently a fellow for The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He is the author of multiple books, including The Gospel Way Catechism, The Thrill of Orthodoxy, The Multi-Directional Leader, This Is Our Time, and Gospel Centered Teaching. His podcast is Reconstructing Faith. He and his wife, Corina, have three children. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook, or receive his columns via email.
