What are the Requirements for Pastor? Pastor Requirements
Topic: Pastoral Requirements
By Pastor David Cox
My second subtitle is what I will deal with mostly on this post. You can check in the sidebar for more individual treatments on the requirements for pastor. Let me put this is the context of a false prophet entering or trying to enter into the pastoral position.
Rather than specifically entering into a discussion on the requirements individually in this post I want to talk about them collectively at first. There is a great importance that God has placed on them. And if we do not grasp that importance, then we will go down a road that leads to great problems, maybe even spiritual destruction.
Besides that, those who make these decisions about the new pastor have the results and consequences of that decision on their hands for eternity. Many people just want anybody to take the position so that they don’t have to do anything else in that matter. God will greatly bless them and thank them for doing their job well. Or He will condemn and hold them accountable.
Resume: This article explains the thinking and strategy of using a sermon outline when preaching sermons.
Sermon outline, What is it?
A sermon outline is simply a guide to where you will logically “go” (speak) during a discourse. The options here are limited. (1) You use some kind of guide (a sermon outline). (2) You speak without any guide, just entering with a general topic to which you do not hold alliegance to follow, but rather wander from topic to topic.
Some preachers actually think that the later is somehow “being guided by the Holy Spirit”, and that is the only valid way to preach. We have no evidence really as to public speakers using or not using these “topical guides”. Dr. Bob Jones Jr. used this later strategy, and his defense was, “A sermon outline is like a skeleton. When you see a person’s bones, something is very wrong.”
While this thinking is actually popular among a lot of preachers, and many preachers who use sermon outlines actually break from their outline regularly holding this thinking as “a moving of the Holy Spirit”, the thinking is really not that great. It is flawed, and has a lot of problems. First of all, Dr. Bob Jones Jr had a lot of preaching experience and exposure (his dad was an evangelist so he grew up in the element of preaching). People like that have from where to draw from. Experienced preachers who have more than 10 or 20 years of preaching “under their belt” can preach extemporaneously and can “pull it off”. Most others fail when trying, and even experienced preachers have their problems when preaching without thinking through what they are saying. Not that last comment. Preachers that have preached on salvation hundreds of times can stand up without notes and do fine. But that is not to say that they did not prepare, it is to say that after preparing and preaching so many times on the same topic, to comment on it from memory is very easy and can be done very successfully.
A sermon outline is simply a prepared list of thoughts and verses that the preacher uses to guide his presentation.
There are two key issues to clarify in using a sermon outline: (1) Does an outline hinder the Holy Spirit? (2) Is an outline necessary and serve an essential purpose?
How to read a Christian Book as a student of Scripture, how to read, analyze, and understand a Christian Reference Book on some biblical topic. You may think that this is a silly topic, everybody that knows how to read and write can read a book. But as a student of Scripture preparing sermons and Bible classes, this is not true. You need to know how to get into a book, quickly find what you need, and then extract it and go on with your studies.
