One to one: The essential ingredient of pastoral care

The Lord Jesus took hold of my life in 1983 when I was in my final year at school. I had been inoculated against the gospel through repeated small doses of school chapel over the previous ten years, and the message I’d heard had led me to believe that God was a lot like the headmaster: his main concern was that I obey the rules, thus preserving a healthy distance between us. I had a great deal to unlearn.

It isn’t easy to unlearn things, and it’s particularly difficult to unlearn lies about the gospel. For me, unlearning took place largely through one-to-one Bible studies. Over the next couple of years, I spent time with a number of friends who patiently taught me the Bible and helped me apply it to my life. I remain deeply grateful to God for this gentle discipleship.

Since then, I have tried to model this ministry in a variety of contexts. I have called it by many names, but the activity has always involved sitting with another man and studying the Bible on a one-toone basis. What are the advantages and opportunities of this kind of ministry? What does it look like in practice? And for the busy pastor, is this a wise and strategic use of time? Let’s begin with the last of these questions, looking to the example of Richard Baxter.

One to one and The Reformed Pastor

Pastors spend a great deal of time and energy preparing their Sunday sermon, and rightly so, for the proclamation of God’s word stands at the centre of pastoral ministry. However, Richard Baxter challenges us not to define preaching by the number of people we speak to, nor by the limited ability of the listener to dialogue with the preacher. Baxter, a 17th-century Puritan in the English town of Kidderminster, devoted himself to house-to-house visiting in order to teach and train families in the Christian faith. He spoke about this kind of teaching ministry as a “conference” in The Reformed Pastor:¹

I hope there are none so silly as to think this conference is not preaching. What? doth the number we speak to make it preaching? Or doth interlocution make it none? Surely a man may as truly preach to one, as to a thousand. And… if you examine, you will find that most of the preaching recorded in the New Testament, was by conference, and frequently interlocutory, and that with one or two, fewer or more, as opportunity served. Thus Christ himself did most commonly preach. (p. 228)

Baxter was realistic about the level of commitment required to teach God’s word on a one-to-one basis. He recognized that it’s easier to focus solely on the pulpit. But his comments about the effectiveness of pulpit ministry to his own congregation may strike a chord: “Let them that have taken most pains in public, examine their people, and try whether many of them are not nearly as ignorant and careless as if they had never heard the gospel” (p. 18).

Baxter’s strategy, pursued relentlessly throughout his years of ministry in Kidderminster, was to teach God’s word to every household in the town. Indeed, his goal of seeking to “upgrade the practice of personal catechizing from a preliminary discipline for children to a permanent ingredient in pastoral care for all ages” became Baxter’s main contribution to Puritan thought, and was the impetus behind The Reformed Pastor (p. 13). At the time of his ministry, Kidderminster was a town of around 800 homes. Baxter visited them all, and taught and applied God’s word to everyone who would listen. When he saw people living contrary to God’s word, he rebuked them and urged them to repent and believe. Baxter encouraged pastors to adopt his model, and anticipated our objections with typical directness:

1. In ourselves there is much dulness [sic] and laziness, so that it will not be easy to get us to be faithful in so hard a work…
2. We have a base man-pleasing disposition, which will make us let men perish lest we lose their love, and let them go quietly to hell, lest we should make them angry with us for seeking their salvation…
3. Many of us have also a foolish bashfulness, which makes us backward to begin with them, and to speak plainly to them … we blush to speak for Christ or to contradict the devil or to save a soul, while, at the same time, we are less ashamed of shameful works. (pp. 192-3)

Transferring the model

Baxter’s model of one-to-one ministry seems daunting to the modern pastor, but there is no doubt that the model is transferable. Wallace Benn comments,

I became increasingly convinced that people needed pastoring which was as thorough as [Baxter’s], and that there was a lot of confusion amongst the Lord’s people about how to work out their faith, given the challenges and pressures of modern living. Although I believed passionately in the priority of preaching (and still do), and how basic pastoring is done through preaching and teaching, I was beginning to see that, like Paul, I must take every opportunity to minister the Word and not just be a pulpiteer.²

Starting with these convictions, Benn and his staff team at St Peter’s Church in Harold Wood, UK, adapted Baxter’s strategy for their own context, both within the regular congregation and the youth ministry. Their experiences provide one contemporary example of ‘Baxter in practice’ and are well worth studying in more detail.³

However, an alternative strategy would be to create a culture that replicates the model. Paul expected Timothy to teach faithful men who will in turn be able to teach others (2 Tim 2:2); if we take this verse seriously, the only people in our churches who should not be teaching others are those who cannot be relied upon to handle God’s word faithfully. No doubt there will be some who fall into this category. But for a good percentage of our congregations, it should become the normal expectation that they be involved in teaching God’s word to others. Pastors can develop this sort of ministry culture by reading the Bible one to one with a few, so that the ministry is replicated as time goes on. It may seem slow to begin with, but it will reap huge long-term benefits for the gospel.⁴

Christ in our hearts

We’ve considered the significance and benefits of one-to-one ministry; what of its content? What is the end goal? Thomas Watson, another great Puritan, warns us of the danger of being people who carry Christ in our Bibles but not in our hearts.⁵ All of our study of God’s word should lead to “the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12). Every engagement with Scripture should be life-changing. However, in our day-to-day experience, we are sinful human beings who slip easily into patterns of Bible reading that produce little transformation. People who read God’s word but are not changed by it are people who carry Christ in their Bibles but not in their hearts.

Therefore the focus of one-to-one Bible study must be to bring our lives under the Lordship of Christ as we sit under his word. This is the fundamental challenge of discipleship. As we try to encourage new Christians in their walk with Jesus, it is easy for us to teach a set of observed behaviours that must be copied. But reading the Bible and going to church are not ends in themselves; they are means to an end. And that end involves living out the new life that God in his mercy has given us.

So the heart of one-to-one Bible ministry involves bringing together a deep understanding of God’s word with a deep appreciation of the struggles and dilemmas of the person we are discipling. It is this direct application of God’s word to an individual’s life that highlights the difference between one-to-one ministry and pulpit ministry. From the pulpit, we can ‘teach, rebuke, correct and train’ (2 Tim 3:16-17) in general to the entire congregation; one-toone ministry allows us to teach, rebuke, correct and train in much more personal ways. In one to one, the conversation that develops around particular Bible passages enables us to explain and teach God’s word with reference to the specific culture and worldview of our friend. In addition, although certain discipleship programs and course materials can help us consider which passages to study, in one to one we have the flexibility to think through areas that our friend may need to unlearn or reconsider. Indeed, it was this direct application of God’s word to an individual’s life that characterized Richard Baxter’s pastoral ministry; he was not afraid to correct and rebuke individuals when he saw them living contrary to the Scriptures.

This is why the content of one-to-one Bible ministry flows from the bringing together of God’s word with the specific situations of those meeting together. Let me illustrate this with some case studies that demonstrate ways in which expositing God’s word helps people from different backgrounds and contexts carry Christ in their hearts, not just in their Bibles:

• One of the wise friends who taught me what it means to follow the Lord Jesus understood my background of works-based pseudo-Christianity. So he spent a great deal of time explaining the nature of sin and grace to me over and over. He did not tell me to read the Bible and pray every day, for giving me daily rituals to adhere to would simply have reinforced my works religiosity. He wanted to bring God’s word to me, so we studied passages together and prayed over their message. At the end of each study, he would leave me with a key verse to chew over and grasp. This process went on for many weeks as God’s Spirit worked in my heart to help me to understand the miracle of true grace.
• I worked with a group of southern Sudanese pastors to help them to develop a discipleship training program for their churches. Remembering my own experience, I suggested that the starting point be a study explaining the nature of grace. “Yes”, they agreed, “after we have taught about witchcraft”. It seemed extraordinary that ‘Discipleship 101’ in Sudan should begin with a study on witchcraft. But as I talked with my Sudanese friends, I came to appreciate that to understand grace, we must first realize that God is sovereign over all creation and that our world is not controlled through curses and spells. True grace cannot be understood properly by those trapped in an animistic worldview.
• A Christian woman converted out of a Muslim background may have little trouble committing herself to regular prayer. But she may be amazed to learn that ‘regular’ does not necessarily mean praying at specific times using prescribed postures. She may be even more amazed to discover that the purpose of prayer is not to earn merit, but rather prayer is an expression of a freely given relationship with God. She can walk into the throne room of grace, confident that her heavenly Father will hear her and answer.

~

The work of one-to-one ministry is very simple: open God’s word and teach it to an individual. It involves two components— firstly, committing ourselves to studying and understanding God’s word so that we become faithful stewards of the Scriptures, and secondly, committing ourselves to a deep sacrificial friendship that understands the people we disciple.

Many discipleship programs include teaching about the need for Christians to continue meeting together to spur one another on to “love and good works” (Heb 10:24-5). In addition, the New Testament’s expectation is that Christians will meet to encourage each other to persevere in following the Lord Jesus. This mindset places our faith squarely in the public arena: we cannot keep our faith to ourselves as a personal and private matter as well as fulfil the New Testament’s expectation that we be part of a Christian community. After the Sunday service, as we stand around, drinking coffee and chatting, what percentage of our conversation is focussed on spurring each other on to love and good works? My guess is not much. But one-to-one Bible study not only provides us the opportunity to teach others how to do it, it also allows us to model it in significant depth.

So let us take a page from Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor and make one to one a permanent ingredient of pastoral care. The results will be life-changing.