Pastors All the Way Down?

A free public post on British evangelical clericalism and the intellectual life

Earlier this week, Tim Suffield wrote an excellent piece proposing one way in which the UK evangelical church might develop an “intellectual ecosystem”. Tim was drawing on a piece by my friend and colleague Onsi Kamel, which we ran at Ad Fontes back in 2021. Onsi’s piece is, I think, one of the best and most important things we’ve ever published. Onsi’s point was that whilst, in the US, Roman Catholics have developed a rich mutual exchange between universities, scholars, public intellectuals, and laypeople, no such thing exists among Protestants. This is especially so among evangelicals—something people have been conscious of ever since Mark Noll wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind in 1994 (the scandal being that there isn’t one).

Tim applied some of this to British evangelicalism—a very different beast from its American cousin. How can we in the UK develop deep thinkers and intellectuals who serve the evangelical church? Tim’s modest proposal was that such people “will need to be supported in what feels like a medieval way: Patronage.” Given the unlikelihood of intellectuals making a profit from their work sufficient enough to pay the bills, churches and individuals should become their patrons, rather than just expecting them to emerge semi-regularly from the ether/Oxbridge. (NB: Tim was kind enough to list me as someone worth supporting in this way, for which I’m grateful—let it be noted that I was already percolating the idea for this article before I got to the end of his post and found my name there!)

Tim’s piece picked up on a conversation that has been ongoing among evangelical writers for some time now. Jake Meador laid out some of the contours a while back, and then sketched out some practical ideas not dissimilar from Tim’s about supporting “doctors of the church”—scholars, theologians etc (more on them later).

This sort of thinking is needed because we are in the midst of a widespread crisis in higher education, which is only getting worse, and is going to directly affect us evangelicals soon, both in the US and in the UK. Almost all universities are struggling financially, including flagship Christian colleges and seminaries in the USA—at least 18 Christian colleges have closed in the US since the start of COVID; Gordon Conwell; The King’s College in New York closed this past summer; Gordon Conwell has sold its main campus and relocated. Outside of the Christian college world (something exclusive to the US), secular universities are struggling, and this will become far, far worse when they hit the 2025 “enrolment cliff”—the point when declining birth rates will collide at long last with higher education. 

We will soon see historic universities close in the UK. Those that survive will almost certainly make cuts to the humanities—the disciplines which tend to produce the scholars of theology, history, languages, and so on on whom evangelicals depend for commentaries, systematic theologies, and so forth. This will particularly impact UK evangelicals. Without Christian colleges or well-developed research departments in our small number of seminaries, we have, for a long time, relied on secular theology departments—Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, St. Andrews, KCL—to produce our intellectuals, putting little to no effort into developing them ourselves. A senior leader in a UK Bible college told me a couple of years ago that this model was intentional on the college’s part—they viewed it as beneficial to allow gifted scholars to leave Bible college, “plunder the Egyptians” in the secular theological world, and then return with its riches to become lecturers in evangelical institutions. There was no desire to develop their own PhD faculty. After 20 years of this, however, he told me he realised this was probably a mistake. Once the secular theology departments are closed or shaved down, there will be a lot less to plunder. Couple that with the increasing hostility evangelicals face within theology departments subject to Woke ideological capture, and it’s not hard to see the writing on the wall.

So, why does this matter to UK evangelicals? 

In short because, in one way or another, we rely on scholars. The average UK evangelical layperson may rarely, if ever, encounter the work of a Christian academic. Most of their spiritual input comes from the ministry of their local church, some accessible Christian books, and perhaps online sermons and/or podcasts. However, odds are that their pastor’s study, or that of their preferred Christian author or online preacher, is lined with books by academics which have heavily influenced their output. Even if a pastor tends to make use only of more accessible evangelical commentaries written by other pastors, odds are that those pastors did consult academics when writing their book. It’s never pastors all the way down.

Creative thinking will be needed, then, to ensure that (to put it bluntly) supply meets demand. I think Tim’s proposal for a patronage model is certainly a step in the right direction. A true revival of a more “medieval” model though, and a more viable option if it can be achieved, would, I think, need to involve a few big patrons who can bankroll a scholar for a guaranteed, extended period of time. This is closer, as far as I understand, to a historic model of patronage than surviving from the contributions of many smaller supporters via Patreon.

There are, of course, challenges to getting a model like this off the ground. I wish to focus on one in particular which is particularly pronounced within UK conservative evangelicalism: clericalism.

One of the biggest barriers to developing a UK evangelical ecosystem is the fact that, despite the aforementioned reliance we have on scholars, we essentially distrust people who aren’t pastors. In this sense, we are a highly clericalist community. Please note here that I principally have in view my particular part of UK evangelicalism: that is, the non-charismatic, conservative part (both free church and Anglican). This is, in many ways, quite a distinct tribe from the more charismatic circles which I know Tim comes from, and so, whilst I’m sure there is overlap, I am not claiming to speak beyond my bounds.

So: I think our clericalism cashes out in two big ways: 

1. We are reluctant to platform writers and thinkers who are not in pastoral ministry, and so instead make pastors into “public intellectuals”, even though they are not necessarily qualified for the role. (Note that, by “public”, I mean public within the UK evangelical world. The question of being an intellectual for the general public is related but different, and to be honest not something I think most UK evangelicals care about)

2. We invest money disproportionately in immediate pastoral needs (pastoral training, church plants etc), but neglect investing in supporting the scholars on whom these things depend

This distrust of non-pastors has its origins in some valid priorities and concerns. For one, as evangelicals we are keen to uphold the biblical primacy of church eldership, the local church, and the ministry of preaching. Biblically speaking, spiritual authority lies with church elders, and we are wary of undermining this by making appeals elsewhere. Stressing the importance of scholars and intellectuals can seem to threaten this biblical setup, introducing a kind of fifth column into the congregation, enabling snotty church members to disagree with their elders at every turn because somewhere, at some point, some scholar said something different.

What’s more, evangelicals are historically “activist” (as famously noted by David Bebbington)—that is, we are insistent that faith must impact our everyday lives, believing firmly that faith without works is dead (James 2:17). We are wary of naval-gazing and idle speculation, aware that “of making many books there is no end, and [that] much study wearies the body” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). As such, where we do explicitly welcome scholarship, we want to see that it has clear and obvious benefits to pastoral ministry. Understandably, this means that, where we do develop further study in our institutions, it’s geared towards what I call “Masters for Pastors”—specific research projects for those already in ministry (or about to enter it) which tend to have a fairly immediate pastoral relevance.

Also, evangelicals are very conscious of how secular theology departments have slid into theological liberalism—and this is fair enough. When I was at university a decade ago, every year there was a whole load of young girls (they were almost all girls) who arrived as evangelicals to study in the Theology department. They almost all came out significantly more liberal than when they started, or as entirely apostate. Such stories rightly set alarm bells ringing for evangelicals when they think about academic theology departments—the spiritual dangers of that world are real. Evangelical Anglican animosity toward such departments is exacerbated by how closely tied their decline is to the wider decline of the Church of England; free church animosity is exacerbated by having long been shut out of the universities altogether due their historic nonconformism.

Finally, evangelicals are “conversionist” (to quote Bebbington again). We (rightly!) know that Hell is real, that judgement is coming, and that the harvest is great but the workers are few. And so we put a huge emphasis on evangelism and church planting in order to reach the lost. Investment in other projects, such as scholarship, can, understandably, seem somewhat “off-task”.

There are certainly other contributing factors, but these seem the most significant to me: a desire to defend biblical pastoral ministry, an earnest desire for pastoral impact, a justified suspicion of academic theology departments, and a sense of evangelistic urgency.

The end result, as I said above, seems twofold: we prefer for the “public intellectuals” within evangelicalism to be those in pastoral ministry, and we choose principally to invest financially in immediate pastoral needs like ministry training and church plants, rather than in supporting intellectuals and scholars. We place a high urgency on producing “Gospel Workers”—a clunky, almost Germanic sounding neologism which my corner of conservative evangelicalism seems to have normalised in recent decades, which I have always found curiously sterile and utilitarian, rather like calling someone your “spouse” or “partner” instead of your husband or wife.

Now, there are of course exceptions—pastors do not have a total monopoly on our public intellectual racket. Evangelists would be the primary example. We put some evangelists into the role of “public intellectual” because we believe they are gifted at reading the times and engaging contemporary culture. Plenty of these evangelists are not in pastoral ministry, but work for or run independent evangelistic ministries. However, I suspect that evangelists still have the “feel” of pastoral ministry to most UK evangelicals, since many of us will have had a “church evangelist” on staff at some point. The roving, “all the world is my parish” types have had a big role in our churches since the days of Wesley, and so, I think, are afforded the same credibility as the more directly pastoral types.

And you do, of course, have a few people who are genuine public intellectuals in their own right within the conservative evangelical world. A swift glance across the homepages of the UK’s main Christian booksellers throws up a few such folk. Yet, from my knowledge of the careers of these individuals (and there are few enough that I’ve met a good number of them in one way or another), few if any have been significantly developed in and by the church in their intellectual work. Rather, they have carved out successful careers in vocational fields—science, art etc—and developed a ministry out of that. And this is no bad or lesser thing—I have benefited from the work and ministry of the people I have in mind. This is merely to say though that they are not, by and large, people whose intellectual life has been significantly patronised by the church.

These exceptions aside then, we treat pastors as our public intellectuals within UK conservative evangelicalism. Briefly, what are the potential problems with this?

First, we should not assume that simply because someone is in pastoral ministry that they are qualified to speak publicly into difficult theological or cultural issues. Some pastors, if appropriately gifted, certainly can do this. And all pastors are responsible for guiding their flock through such issues, drawing on the best resources as they do. But engaging with deep and difficult issues robustly and faithfully requires a lot of intellectual time and effort, as well as the appropriate gifting, and these are simply things which most pastors don’t have and shouldn’t be expected to have. When we bundle pastors into the limelight because we sense we need someone to say something about Topic X, everybody gets short changed.

Second, this model is incredibly short sighted. There is a curious doublethink here: we are suspicious of intellectuals and yet, as we’ve noted, our pastors’ studies are lined with their books. If the church as the church is not thinking about how to develop and support scholars, what books will our pastors be drawing from a generation or two from now? At that point, it will become pastors all the way down, and we will lose a grip on the important areas of theology in which scholars help the church to maintain clarity. If the church is not thinking about the development of scholars, it is cutting off the branch it is sitting on.

The retort may be made that the church’s greatest thinkers—Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin—were all pastors, so what’s the big deal? Can’t we just assume that the church will keep producing such men who will keep us theologically well supplied? This is, of course, a red herring. For one, these men were clearly all truly exceptional individuals, and we should be slow to make examples of them. Second, the academic and theological formation and education which each of these men received was so much more rigorous and broad than that of any pastor today that they scarcely bear comparison. Third, whilst they were engaged in direct pastoral ministry to an extent, each of these men had a significant amount of their time set aside for the intellectual life—something which very few do today. Their daily routine, I am confident, looked nothing like that of most UK evangelical pastors today. They were all of that office that we have mentioned already: doctors of the church; men set aside for a particular focus on theological and intellectual matters. 

The question of course, “where is this in the Bible?” In short (and I think there is immense historical precedent for this), a doctor of the church is someone with the distinct office of “Teacher”, listed in Ephesians 4:11. “Teacher” is a fairly broad term; it certainly includes what we see in the ministry of preaching throughout the New Testament, yet there is no reason we should assume that this is all that it means. From the get-go, the Christian church has clearly seen the need for some to set themselves aside for hard intellectual work, and understood this as compatible with the New Testament’s teaching about church offices.

There is much more that could be said here. Time is surely best spent on thinking how we work constructively to address this imbalance in conservative evangelical thinking, and make scholarship great again. Tim, commendably, has written some great pieces to this end recently (see here, here, and here). Yet I think we are still at a point where, certainly in my circles, we need to become aware of the problem before we can think constructively about possible solutions. If we are to see a revival of the patronage model, as Tim has suggested, we’ll need to convince people that an intellectual ecosystem is something worth patronising in the first place.

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*Image: “Portrait of the Mennonite preacher Cornelis Claesz Anslo and his wife Aeltje Gerritsdr, Schouten” by Rembrandt