Every Tuesday morning Tim and I get together for a “staff meeting” (although I’ve officially dubbed it “staff hanging” because it’s more about hanging out and connecting than it is about having an official meeting). Besides coffee, conversation, planning and prayer, we study together. We recently finished up Wayne Grudem’s Bible Doctrine, which was a rich systematic study of the key doctrines of Scripture.

If you love God’s Word, making your way through Grudem’s book is like enjoying a thick ribeye cooked to perfection. Seriously, it’s that good. I recommend it highly.

Beginning in January we’re going to be reading and discussing John Piper’s book, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. I am so stoked! With more and more books about ministry focusing on church growth via a business model, it is so refreshing to see that Piper has not strayed from the simple priority we see in Scripture to keep the emphasis on the ministry of the Word and prayer.

Piper offers this rationale for the title:

We pastors are being killed by the professionalizing of the pastoral ministry. The mentality of the professional is the not the mentality of the prophet. It is not the mentality of the slave of Christ. Professionalism has nothing to do with the essence and heart of the Christian ministry. The more professional we long to be, the more spiritual death we will leave in our wake. For there is no professional childlikeness, there is no professional tenderheartedness, there is no professional panting after God.

The title of this book is meant to shake us loose from the pressure to fit in to the cultural expectations of professionalism. It is meant to sound an alarm against the pride of station and against the expectation of parity of pay and against the borrowing of paradigms from the professional world. Oh for the radically Bible-saturated, God-centered, Christ-exalting, self-sacrificing, mission-mobilizing, soul-saving, cultural-confronting pastors!