Ministry Matters: Exegeting the Heart
This is part of a series exploring some of my core convictions in ministry, things that have increasingly shaped how I pastor. While obviously written from that perspective, I hope they can be useful to any Christian thinking through how to minister to the people around them. John Stott, in his famous book on preaching, Between Two Worlds , argues that the preacher has two tasks: to exegete the text, and to exegete the audience. To understand and study and know Scripture, and to also understand and study and know human beings in a particular time and place in a way that brings Scripture to bear on their lives. Stott reflects the biblical model for preaching—Nehemiah summarizes the task like this: “They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” (Nehemiah 8:8) Doing this task requires, as Stott puts it, a foot in each world. Obviously, there are churches and pastors that fail to take the first calling seriously.
