What would you think if you went to a physician and he purposely make things up as he went along in regards to your medical treatment? He called himself a Board Certified Purpose Driven specialist. Whatever he think works is the best treatment.

What if you took a formal English course because it was a required course for your advancement and the professor taught you ghetto slang instead? He said you need to be able to be able to communicate with the underclass.

What if you were blind and the word scanner paraphrased the words out of your calculus text book because the program designer believed that truth is relative?

What if you go to Bible college to learn the Bible and they teach you how to do everything but learn proper biblical exegesis. Guess what, the latter is happening all over this country some evangelicals are guilty of spiritual malpractice.

Pastoral Malpractice and the Visible Church

Suppose you were to contract a potentially serious medical condition and went to see a doctor. Upon asking him details about the diagnosis and medical consequences you found out that he does not take medical literature literally. In addition, he has not kept up on the latest medical research and has been out of medical school for several decades. He prefers to make his patients happy and comfortable rather than to force them to confront the truth about their health condition. Would you see such a doctor? Neither would I. Such a doctor eventually could be found guilty of malpractice.

I have assumed in Warren’s case that he indeed has the tools to perform sound exegesis. Some of the other leaders of large congregations—Bill Hybels, Robert Schuller, or Joel Osteen—likely are capable of doing sound Biblical exegesis and correctly applying the Bible to the lives of those who attend their churches. But sadly they often do not use sound exegesis—or even use the Bible as the main source of their messages.

Pastor Warren may be correct that you cannot do both—expound important Biblical topics and appear attractive to seekers at the same time. But I disagree completely with the idea that we must appear attractive to lost sinners. We need to preach Christ to lost sinners so that they can know the terms of the gospel. That is the only valid “diagnosis” that will do them any good. In the book of Acts this was done up front, and not through a back door after presenting an alternative that would seem attractive to people in their lost state.

The Bible does not give pastors the liberty to handle the Bible in a sloppy manner.

The issue of motivation to develop the skills and use the tools to perform Biblical exegesis also has reached seminaries. Because of a growing lethargy concerning Biblical interpretation and sound doctrine, many have turned to such sidetracks as “marriage and family therapy” or deceptive mysticism such as “spiritual formation.” Young people from around the country have written us stating that they want to go into the ministry but cannot find a school where they can gain a solid theological education without being subjected to postmodernism, mysticism, the therapeutic gospel, or church growth theory. If many churches are not looking for those who “labor in word and doctrine,” seminaries have little market to train people to do just that. So we find ourselves in the lamentable situation where young people who want to be godly pastors trained with the tools to accurately handle the Bible have difficulty finding a place to be educated, and those who actually do find such an education have difficulty finding churches that want them. As a result, our evangelical movement has grown accustomed to pastoral malpractice as though it were the norm.

The standards are strict and generally well observed for those who treat our bodies and cure our physical ailments. But the standards for those who care for our souls have fallen woefully short.

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