Interview
R. Kent Hughes
by Art Azurdia
(Continued from page 2)
AA: Let’s shift gears. You’ve been retired for about seven months now. What are the aspects of the pastoral ministry that frankly, you’re not missing, or from which you feel great relief?
RKH: I’m not missing the annual meeting of the church. I don’t miss that at all. I don’t miss my elders’ meetings. Twenty-seven years times ten elders meetings per year is two-hundred seventy elders’ meetings at an average of about five hours each. That means I spent thousands of hours in elders’ meetings. Toward the end I got to the point where every new idea presented was one I’d heard ten years before. I love my elders, but I don’t miss elders’ meetings. What I miss the most is the enforced discovery of having to plow through a new text every week and the sense of wonder and awe that you uncover in the most unlikely places in God’s word. It was twenty-seven years of being surprised and thrilled every week. I don’t miss the marriage counseling or the traumas. When you have a large congregation, you live in constant trauma: two or three people at the verge of eternity and several marriages on the ropes. You live with that constant sense of not being able to come close to getting it done. So I don’t miss that.
AA: Besides the weekly exposition, what else do you miss?
RKH: My colleagues were like my small group. I really did invest myself in my staff. We took two retreats each year that ran from Sunday night to Thursday on which we took the spouses and the babes in arms. All we did was study the Bible in the morning, pray until noon, played all afternoon, and played in the evening while building relationships. We had long staff meetings that used to start at 7:00 in the morning with breakfast and go until 10:30 every week. We prayed for an hour and talked about each others’ ministries. I really miss my colleagues that I saw weekly and prayed with and worked with. Corporate worship is another thing that comes to mind. When you have worked as a leader with your people on the hymns that are going to be sung, worked on your pastoral prayer, preached, and you get together with the people of God who are seeing the glory of God, it is amazing. When you’re praying and all are united together, when you can hear people affirming what’s going on, there is something very wonderful about the gathered body of Christ. There is an encouragement that takes place from singing with the people, affirming the same things, saying “amen” to the reading of God’s word, having your Bibles open with all the pages turning at the same time to the text that can’t happen individually. There is nothing like gathered worship.
AA: If you were given the opportunity to address a group of young men just entering pastoral ministry, what are two or three things you’d want to say to them?
RKH: Well, I say this as a cliché but it’s very important. Take your ministry seriously. Don’t take yourself too seriously. You’re totally expendable. God doesn’t need you. The notion that God needs anyone is a huge fallacy. The church doesn’t need me and it doesn’t need you. It doesn’t need any of us, so that‘s what I mean about not taking yourself too seriously. I also believe that the pastor does not have to be a ubiquitous presence, at every meeting with his fingers in every pot. A pastor functioning in that way is taking himself far too seriously. It’s as if he believes the Holy Spirit can’t work if he’s not there. The thing you need to take seriously about yourself is your relationship with God and with your family. And as I said, you need to work for the best in all of these areas. Be the all-around renaissance pastor, taking your ministry and your calling seriously and, at the same time, remember that you don’t have to be everywhere. Learn to take a day off. Have meals with your wife, putting everything out of your mind that has to do with the pastoral ministry and engage her. Talk about what she wants to talk about with genuine interest in what is going on with her. Take time with your children and take your vacations. Understand that if you’ve got a young family with a 3 year-old, a 4 year-old, and a 7 year-old, and you don’t take vacation, you’ll never take it with the same people again because children change so fast. Take advantage of those times and learn to enjoy a meal to the fullest with people.
AA: Given the fact that you mentioned you have been doing this forty years, what would you say to a group of pastors who’ve been at the task twenty years . . . the halfway point?
RKH: You’ve got to be a man of substance. In Between Two Worlds, John Stott quotes a bishop by the name of Cyril Garbett. Bishop Garbett said that if you were a liberal pastor who didn’t study, at mid-life you’d be known for your hatreds and dislikes. And if you’re an evangelical who didn’t study you’d be known at mid-life for your sentimentality. I see men that don’t make any progress. They can get emotional. They can cry over things. They can tell stories. But they’re just sentimentalists . . . evangelical sentimentalists. There is no substance to them. I would tell pastors to keep at the task and to do the main things. The beautiful thing about doing expositional preaching is that I have gone through the book of Genesis, various other books in the Old Testament, and about two-thirds of the New Testament with a fine-toothed comb. I have grown theologically throughout my ministry by opening a new text every week. And I would say that I have grown more theologically in the final ten years than in my early years of ministry. My grasp of biblical theology and my grasp of the whole Bible have been significantly enhanced. About thirteen years ago, I was introduced to a very elementary book by some of my friends in Australia: Graeme Goldsworthy’s Gospel and Kingdom. It opened that whole area of biblical theology to me and I began to see the Bible in a different way. I always said that the Bible is a book about Christ from beginning to end, but I began to understand how wondrously it is a book about Christ. |
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and ought to say to himself, 'I am a theologian.'"  |
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Every pastor is a theologian and ought to say to himself, “I am a theologian.” It’s not a self-serving term. You’re either a good theologian, a modest theologian, or a poor theologian, but every pastor is a theologian and so I think the persona you need to take is that you’re a pastor-theologian. And if you are constantly studying the Scriptures and constantly reading, you’re constantly growing as a theologian. I wish that would sink into every pastor’s identity to the point he’d say, “I’m a pastor-theologian.”
