How Many Did
You Drive Away?

What this page is asking

There is a question preachers ask one another, and it is not a bad question. How many souls have you brought to Christ? It takes the work seriously. It assumes that something is at stake, that a life can be changed, that the labour is worth counting. Conferences are built on it. So are reports to supporters, and the quiet arithmetic a man does about his own usefulness at two in the morning.

The trouble is not the question. The trouble is that it is the only question, and that it is a question about one direction of travel. A ministry that has gathered nine hundred people and lost four hundred of them reports nine hundred. A ministry that has brought fifty people to a living faith and left a hundred and fifty convinced that Christianity is a racket, or that God is a temper waiting to go off, or that doubt is disloyalty, reports fifty. In every other field we would call that a partial account. In accounting we would call it something worse.

So the question this page puts is the mirror image, and it is deliberately uncomfortable:

It sounds modern and a little aggressive, like something from a post rather than a pulpit. It is neither. What this page found, and did not expect to find in these terms, is that the phrase is not a modern coinage at all. It is in the indictment. The Authorised Version of Jeremiah 23:2 has God saying to the pastors of Israel: Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away. Ezekiel’s list of the things the shepherds failed to do includes, by name, that which was driven away. The vocabulary of this page was supplied by the prophets, and the charge was filed a very long time ago.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by putting the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and verified the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. If you get a materially different answer, that is information, and worth publishing too.

Write a detailed, source-first investigation of the following question, in
British English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote scripture
from the Authorised Version throughout, so that every citation can be checked
free of charge. Quote the historic church from public-domain editions and give
book, chapter, section or question numbers.

  Preachers ask one another, "How many souls have you brought to Christ?"
  Scripture places a far more serious responsibility on teachers and
  shepherds for what their teaching does to people. The corresponding
  question, which is never asked, is:

     "How many people have been driven away from Christ because you
      misrepresented Christ?"

  Evaluate that question along at least these lines:

  - Jesus condemned religious leaders who made access to God harder.
    "You shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces" (Matt 23:13).
    Religious leadership can itself become an obstacle between people
    and God.
  - Teachers are judged more strictly, not less (James 3:1). A preacher
    therefore cannot measure his ministry by conversions, attendance,
    emotional responses or growth.
  - Shepherds can scatter sheep. God condemns shepherds who "destroy and
    scatter the sheep of my pasture" (Jer 23:1-2; cf. Ezek 34). Scripture
    explicitly recognises religious leadership as a cause of people being
    scattered.
  - A preacher can make God appear harsher than God is: constant threats,
    manipulation, invented rules, claims of "God told me", treating
    disagreement with the pastor as rebellion against God. People then
    reject a distorted representation rather than Christ.
  - A preacher can make Christianity intellectually unbelievable. Novel
    doctrines proclaimed with absolute certainty while the historic church
    is ignored; thoughtful people later discover that what they were told
    was "plain biblical Christianity" is in fact quite recent.
  - Scandal is serious because it causes others to stumble (Matt 18:6-7).
    The New Testament does not treat the collateral damage of ministry as
    a minor issue.
  - Paul worries about God's name being dishonoured through religious
    people: "The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of
    you" (Rom 2:24).
  - The 2,000-year Christian inheritance is a guardrail. Historical
    continuity does not prove a doctrine true, but a preacher proposing
    something radically unlike historic Christianity bears a substantial
    burden of proof. Creeds, historic liturgy, sacramental theology,
    established interpretation and accountable church structures constrain
    the ability of one charismatic personality to reinvent Christianity.
  - "Fruit" should therefore include the people left behind. A ministry
    may report large numbers reached while never counting those spiritually
    injured, manipulated, disillusioned or driven out.

  The searching form of the question is therefore: "Of the people God placed
  under your care, how many came to know Christ more faithfully - and how
  many came to fear, distrust, misunderstand or abandon Him because you
  substituted your personality, innovations, demands or claimed revelations
  for the historic Christian faith?"

  This applies with particular force to pastors, because Christianity does
  not begin with the modern preacher. He receives something that precedes
  him: Scripture, the gospel, baptism, the Lord's Supper, the creedal
  confession of Christ, and a community stretching back through centuries.
  The less accountable he is to that inheritance, the easier it becomes for
  people to confuse rejecting HIS version of Christianity with rejecting
  Christ. Matthew 23 suggests Christ takes that distinction very seriously.

Test the claim rather than assuming it. Work through, at minimum:

 1. Establish from the Authorised Version that the vocabulary is biblical
    and not modern. Jeremiah 23:1-2 ("driven them away"), Ezekiel 34:4 and
    34:16 ("that which was driven away"), Ezekiel 13:22 ("made the heart of
    the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad"), Malachi 2:7-9, Jeremiah
    6:14 and 23:16-22.
 2. Establish who the severest oracles are actually addressed to. Build an
    interactive that removes the addressee from several judgment texts and
    makes the reader supply it before revealing the answer.
 3. The teaching office as a restricted office. James 3:1 in full, with the
    first-person plural. Matthew 5:19, Hebrews 13:17, Ezekiel 33:6-8,
    1 Corinthians 3:12-17, 2 Timothy 2:16-18, Titus 1:11, 2 Peter 2:1-2.
    Then the confessional statement of aggravated guilt by office:
    Westminster Larger Catechism Q.151, first head.
 4. MISREPRESENTATION AS THE SPECIFIC OFFENCE - give this the most weight.
    Numbers 20:10-12 (Moses, and the phrase "in the eyes of the children of
    Israel"). Job 42:7-8 (the friends rebuked for what they said about God
    while defending him) - build this into an interactive where the reader
    must pick which speech God accepted. Ezekiel 13:22. Romans 2:24.
 5. THE CENTRAL DISTINCTION - whose offence is it? Be honest that Christ
    emptied a room (John 6:66), that he said "let them alone" of the
    offended Pharisees (Matt 15:12-14), and that Paul anathematised a rival
    gospel (Gal 1:8-9) and withstood Peter to the face (Gal 2:11-14). Then
    show where Scripture itself puts the line: Matthew 23:4 (burdens the
    binders will not carry), Colossians 2:20-23 ("the commandments and
    doctrines of men"), Acts 15 (the yoke declined), 1 Thessalonians 2:3-7
    (no flattery, no cloke of covetousness, no glory of men),
    2 Corinthians 4:2, 1:24, 11:20, 1 Peter 5:1-4 (not lords over God's
    heritage), 3 John 9-10. Make this an interactive of concrete cases with
    traps in BOTH directions, so that a reader who thinks the lesson is
    "never make anyone uncomfortable" is caught as surely as one who thinks
    any loss is the gospel's fault.
 6. THE INHERITANCE AS GUARDRAIL. The historic church did not leave this to
    private conscience: it asked the question liturgically. Quote the
    Ordering of Priests in the Book of Common Prayer - the Church as
    Christ's "Spouse, and his Body", the charge about "hurt or hindrance by
    reason of your negligence", "the greatness of the fault, and also the
    horrible punishment that will ensue", and the vow to "banish and drive
    away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrines". Add Gregory
    the Great's Pastoral Rule I ("the government of souls is the art of
    arts"; "no one does more harm in the Church than one who has the name
    and rank of sanctity, while he acts perversely"), Augustine's Sermon 46
    on the shepherds, Chrysostom On the Priesthood VI on answering for
    other men's souls, and Baxter's Reformed Pastor. Explain what creeds,
    liturgy, sacraments and accountable structures actually constrain.
 7. TWO AUDITS, EXPLICITLY PAIRED AND IN THIS ORDER. First a self-
    examination for anyone who teaches, built only from texts that address
    teachers. Second, and clearly subordinate, the much more limited
    discernment Scripture gives a hearer - with the warning that it is for
    discernment, not verdicts, stated as forcefully as the rest of the page.
    Say plainly which of the two Scripture actually assigns to the reader.
 8. FRUIT AND THE SECOND COLUMN. Matthew 7:21-23, where the ministry
    metrics are the defence that fails. Matthew 18:6-7. What a two-column
    account of a ministry would contain, and why no one publishes one.

Answer the obvious objections INSIDE the positive argument: that this
weaponises a charge against any preacher who teaches anything difficult;
that people leave for their own reasons and a man cannot be liable for every
wounded conscience; that the page cannot produce the number it asks for. Do
NOT include a separate "case against this page" section and do NOT include a
"what this page cannot settle" section.

CONSTRAINTS. Name no living person, church, ministry, author or organisation.
Everyone quoted must be long dead and cited from a published or public-domain
edition. Where an example of the preaching under discussion is needed, compose
it and label it as composed. Make no claim about anyone's salvation and
exclude that question entirely. Label every evaluative conclusion as opinion
and rest it on facts disclosed on the page.

Output a single self-contained interactive HTML page with at least eight
interactive sections that make the reader commit to an answer before the
sources are revealed. At least two must be capable of showing the reader that
his instinct is wrong. Publish this prompt on the page.

Two instructions shaped the page more than the rest. Requiring traps in both directions in Part V stopped the page becoming a brief for soft preaching, which is where this question usually ends up; half the cases there are people who left because the gospel cost them something, and the reader who marks those against the preacher is told so. And putting the teacher’s audit before the hearer’s, with the order made explicit, is what keeps Part VIII from being the only part anyone uses.

What do you currently think?

Eight questions, two or three minutes. Answer from what you believe now, not from what you suspect this page wants. Your answers come back at the end alongside what the sources say. Most readers miss the same three, and two of the three are verses people are sure they already know.

What follows

Who is actually being sentenced

Begin with a question about the Bible itself, before any argument about ministry. Think of the most frightening passages you know — the ones with the wrath, the woes, the blood required, the millstone. Picture the person on the receiving end. Most readers picture an outsider: a tyrant, an idolater, a persecutor, the wicked man of the Psalms. Someone, at any rate, who is not in church.

That instinct is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that is easy to demonstrate. Below are seven judgment oracles from across both testaments with the addressee removed. The words are the Authorised Version’s; only the name of the person being sentenced has been taken out. Supply it from the four options, then reveal.

0 of 7 answered.

The word in the indictment

Now look closely at the text this page takes its title from, because the Authorised Version is doing something in it that modern paraphrase tends to flatten.

“Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the LORD. Therefore thus saith the LORD God of Israel against the pastors that feed my people; Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them: behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings, saith the LORD.”

Jeremiah 23:1–2 · Authorised Version. The Hebrew word rendered “pastors’” is ro‘im, shepherds; the Authorised translators chose the Latin-derived word that English has since handed exclusively to the clergy, which is a happy accident for this page’s purposes.

Three things are worth slowing down for. The first is that the charge is not under-performance. God does not say you have failed to gather a flock. He says you had a flock and it is gone and you are the reason. The metric is not the size of the congregation but the direction of travel out of it.

The second is the phrase itself: driven them away. Not “lost them”, which would be negligence, nor “failed to keep them”, which would be incapacity. Driven. It is an active verb with the shepherd as its subject, and the sheep went in the direction he pushed them.

The third is the sentence, which is a piece of deliberate verbal symmetry the translators preserved: ye have… not visited them: behold, I will visit upon you. The punishment is named in the vocabulary of the neglected duty. What the shepherd would not do for the sheep, God will now do to the shepherd. It is not an arbitrary penalty bolted onto a failure; it is the failure turned round.

Ezekiel takes an inventory, and the driven-away are on it

The companion passage is longer and considerably more specific. Ezekiel 34 is a full audit of bad shepherding, and it is remarkable for how much of it is about omission rather than abuse — the things not done for the weakest animals in the flock.

“Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto the shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them.”

Ezekiel 34:2–4 · Authorised Version.

Read the list of the neglected as a list of people, because that is what it is. The diseased. The sick. The broken. That which was driven away. The lost. Five categories, and the fourth is the subject of this page: a sheep that is not merely missing but was made to go. It is in the indictment by name, between the broken and the lost, as one of the standard conditions a shepherd is expected to deal with and these shepherds did not.

And then the passage does something that changes the tone of the whole enquiry. Having listed what the shepherds would not do, God announces that he will do it himself, and the list comes back in the same order.

“I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick: but I will destroy the fat and the strong; I will feed them with judgment.”

Ezekiel 34:16 · Authorised Version.

That verse is the reason this page is not a despairing one, and it is worth saying so early. The driven-away are not a write-off, a statistic, or a group whose fate is settled by what was done to them. God names them as the objects of his own search. Which is a comfort to the sheep, and the opposite of a comfort to the shepherd, because the same sentence that promises to find them promises to deal with “the fat and the strong” — and in the context of the chapter the fat and the strong are not the flock.

The office that comes with a heavier account

If the prophets supply the vocabulary, the New Testament supplies the principle, and it is stated most plainly by the writer least likely to be accused of discouraging zeal. James is the hard man of the New Testament epistles. He is the one who says faith without works is dead, who will not let the rich off, who tells his readers to count it all joy. And when he comes to the subject of teaching, what he writes is a deterrent.

“My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation.”

James 3:1 · Authorised Version. “Masters” here is διδάσκαλοι, didaskaloi, teachers — the Authorised Version’s “masters” carries the older English sense of schoolmaster rather than of ruler.

Three features of that sentence tend to disappear when it is quoted. The first is that it is restrictive. It is not teach carefully, or teach only what you know; it is let there not be many of you. The supply of teachers is to be limited on purpose.

The second is the reason given. Not that teaching is difficult, or that error is embarrassing, or that the congregation deserves quality. The reason is judgment: knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation. The deterrent is eschatological.

The third is the pronoun, and it is the one almost always dropped. We. James is an apostle and the brother of the Lord, writing under inspiration, and he puts himself inside the warning. There is no sentence in the New Testament in which a teacher warns other people about the judgment on teachers from outside it.

Twelve statements about the teacher’s account

Before the rest of the evidence, commit to something. Below are twelve statements about what Scripture says concerning teachers and their answerability. Some are plainly affirmed, some are plainly denied, and some are not addressed at all — and that third category matters, because a great deal of confident teaching about teaching turns out to be in it. Mark each one.

0 of 12 answered.

The watchman, and whose blood it is

The sharpest statement of aggravated responsibility is Ezekiel’s, and it is worth reading as a whole because the logic is legal rather than rhetorical.

“But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand… When I say unto the wicked, O wicked man, thou shalt surely die; if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.”

Ezekiel 33:6, 8 · Authorised Version; the same principle is stated at 3:17–21.

Notice the structure, because it is carefully balanced and both halves are usually misused. The man who dies, dies in his own iniquity: Ezekiel does not transfer the guilt. The watchman is not charged with the dead man’s sin. He is charged with the blood — with the death that his silence permitted. Two distinct liabilities, separately assessed, neither cancelling the other.

That is the shape of the whole doctrine, and it is the answer to the first serious objection to this page. Nobody is arguing that a preacher is responsible for another adult’s unbelief, or that a person who walks out of a church has no agency, or that a hearer can plead that the sermon made him do it. Ezekiel forecloses that reading in the same breath. What the text does insist on is that the watchman has a liability of his own, arising from his office, assessed on what he did with it, and not discharged by the fact that the other man was free.

And it cuts in the direction people do not expect. The watchman in Ezekiel 33 is condemned for not sounding the alarm. The first thing a teacher can be liable for is silence — which is worth holding on to through the rest of this page, because the temptation of anyone persuaded by this argument is to conclude that the safe course is to say less.

The same principle, in the confessions

This is not a reading that had to wait for modern sensibilities. The Westminster Assembly, asked in the Larger Catechism what makes one sin worse than another, answers in four heads, and the first is not about the act at all. It is about the person.

“From the persons offending; if they be of riper age, greater experience or grace, eminent for profession, gifts, place, office, guides to others, and whose example is likely to be followed by others.”

Westminster Larger Catechism, Q.151, first head · 1647. Free in full from several confessional bodies; the whole answer runs to four heads and is worth reading entire.

Count the terms that apply to a preacher: eminent for profession, gifts, place, office, guides to others, whose example is likely to be followed. Six of the nine clauses in that sentence describe a man in the pulpit. The divines are not being rude about ministers; they are stating a principle of moral gravity that they believed was biblical, and which they applied to themselves. The same catechism is the one those ministers were ordained on.

Put those six together and a doctrine emerges that is not a mood and not a modern anxiety. Teaching is an office. The office carries a liability that does not depend on the hearer’s innocence. The liability is assessed partly on outcomes in other people — faith overthrown, households subverted, the way of truth spoken against, one little one caused to stumble. And the threshold is one person.

Five ways to misrepresent Christ

“Misrepresent” is a strong word and it needs unpacking, because the obvious reading is too narrow. If it meant only preach heresy the question would be easy and rare: most of the people who drive others away from Christ hold the creed. They can recite it, they believe it, and if you examined them on the Trinity and the incarnation they would pass.

The misrepresentation in view is of a different kind. It is what the congregation learns about God’s character from the way the man who speaks for God behaves and speaks. And on that, Scripture is unusually specific. Five distinct patterns are named, each with a text against it, and none of them requires a doctrinal error to be in play at all.

Below are five sentences of the kind this page is describing, each composed for the purpose — no living teacher is quoted anywhere on this page, and these are constructions, not citations. For each one, pick the text it collides with before revealing.

The five patterns, set out

“Whom I have not made sad”

This part is about the specific offence of misrepresentation, and it rests on three passages that between them make a claim most readers will not have met: that it is possible to say things about God which are pious, defensible, quotable, and wrong in God’s own judgement — and that Scripture records God saying so.

The experiment: four speeches about God

Here is the interactive, and it is the one on this page most likely to go badly for a confident reader. Below are four speeches about God and suffering, from one book of the Old Testament. Three are from one group of speakers and one is from another. All four are in the inspired text; being in the Bible is not in question. The question is narrower and stranger: which of these did God himself say was right?

Decide for each. Then reveal.

0 of 4 answered.

The verdict, and why it is so uncomfortable

The friends are theologically impeccable for long stretches. They affirm God’s sovereignty, his justice, his power, the shortness of human life and the folly of arguing with the Almighty. Several of their lines are quoted approvingly in sermons, and at least one is quoted in the New Testament. And at the end of the book:

“And it was so, that after the LORD had spoken these words unto Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.”

Job 42:7 · Authorised Version. The charge is repeated in verse 8: “lest I deal with you after your folly, in that ye have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant Job.”

Sit with what that sentence does. The men God is angry with are the men who spent thirty-seven chapters defending him. The man God vindicates is the one who accused him of injustice to his face, demanded a hearing, and said he would maintain his own ways before him. God does not say the friends were insufficiently tactful. He says they have not spoken of me the thing that is right — a charge about accuracy, not about tone — and he requires a burnt offering and Job’s intercession for them.

Why were they wrong? Because their system was tidier than God is. They held that suffering is always punishment, that prosperity tracks righteousness, and therefore that a man in Job’s condition must have earned it; and they pressed that on a man in the worst week of his life with great confidence and considerable eloquence. Every individual proposition was arguable. The portrait of God assembled out of them was false, and it was false in a way that crushed the person it was aimed at.

The grief God did not cause

Ezekiel makes the same point as a formal charge, and it is the most extraordinary verse this page found. It is addressed to prophets — the preachers of their day — and it has two halves, both indicted.

“Because with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad; and strengthened the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his wicked way, by promising him life.”

Ezekiel 13:22 · Authorised Version. The chapter as a whole is against prophets who “have seduced my people, saying, Peace; and there was no peace” (v.10).

The first half is the sentence this page exists for. Ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad. There is a grief in the congregation, and God disowns it. He did not put it there. Somebody else did, with words, and God treats the manufactured grief as an offence against him rather than merely an unkindness to the sufferer.

The second half is the discipline of this page. The same verse, the same prophets, the same indictment: they also strengthened the hands of the wicked by promising him life. A ministry can produce both outcomes simultaneously, and in practice the ministries that do are the ones with a single clear enemy and a single clear in-group — the people who are already anxious get more anxious, and the people who ought to be disturbed are told they are fine. If this page were a brief against serious preaching it would have to drop half of its best verse, and it declines to.

Moses, and the precise location of the offence

One more case, because it settles a question about severity. If someone grants everything above and asks how much weight Scripture actually puts on misrepresentation — whether it is a serious fault or a catastrophic one — there is a case with a recorded sentence.

“And Moses and Aaron gathered the congregation together before the rock, and he said unto them, Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock? And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also. And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.”

Numbers 20:10–12 · Authorised Version.

No immorality. No money. No false doctrine. No scandal of the kind that makes the newspapers. A man spoke to a difficult congregation in anger, claimed a share of the credit for a miracle he had not worked, and struck the rock he had been told to speak to. And the sentence is that he does not enter the land after forty years of leading people to it.

The phrase to notice is the one locating the offence: to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel. The damage is not in Moses’s private heart and not in the theology of the incident. It is in what the people saw. The water still came; the miracle worked; by any measurable standard the ministry succeeded that afternoon — abundantly, says the text. What failed was the representation, and the representation is what the sentence was passed on.

Which is a fact about this whole enquiry: in Numbers 20 the visible outcome and the thing God assessed were different, and if you had been standing in the congregation with a clipboard you would have recorded a success.

Whose offence was it?

Here is the objection, and it is the only objection to this page that is genuinely difficult. It goes like this.

Every sentence of that is true, and the last one is the important one. The objection is not a dodge; it is a correction, and any version of this page’s question that cannot absorb it is a weapon rather than an argument. So take the hardest case first.

“Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?… From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.”

John 6:60, 66 · Authorised Version. Verse 67 has him turn to the Twelve and ask whether they will go too; he does not modify the teaching.

And the second hardest, where he is told that the religious establishment has taken offence and declines to do anything about it:

“Then came his disciples, and said unto him, Knowest thou that the Pharisees were offended, after they heard this saying? But he answered and said, Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”

Matthew 15:12–14 · Authorised Version.

So it is settled, from the highest possible authority, that a ministry may lose people and be faultless; that offence taken is not evidence of offence given; and that there is such a thing as letting people go. Any reading of Matthew 23 that contradicts John 6 is a misreading, and this page does not advance one.

Where Scripture puts the line

What Scripture does not do is leave the matter there. It distinguishes, repeatedly and in concrete terms, between two kinds of departure. The distinction is not about how upset anybody was. It is about what they were leaving.

Put the two columns side by side and the test becomes sayable in one sentence: did they leave over something Christ said, or over something you added? That is not always easy to answer and on some cases honest people will differ. But it is a real question with a real answer, it is answerable in most concrete instances, and it is not the question “was anybody upset”.

Twelve people who left. Which column?

Twelve cases, composed by this page. For each, decide whether the offence was the gospel’s or the teacher’s — or whether the case as stated does not tell you. There are traps in both directions. A reader who concludes that every departure is the preacher’s fault will score badly here, and so will a reader who reaches for “the gospel offends” as a general-purpose defence. Most readers get between seven and nine.

0 of 12 answered.

The question, asked in a liturgy

There is a version of this page’s argument that ends in nothing but anxiety: a serious man reads Matthew 23 and James 3, concludes that the office is terrifying, and is left with no resource except trying harder. That is not where the historic church left it. It had an answer, and the answer was structural: you do not solve the problem of a man misrepresenting God by asking him to be careful. You solve it by giving him something he did not invent, is not permitted to alter, and can be held to by people who outrank him.

That is what the inheritance is for. It is worth being exact about the mechanism, because “tradition” is a vague word and the guardrails are specific things that do specific jobs.

The charge, revealed one clause at a time

What follows is from the Ordering of Priests in the Book of Common Prayer, in the form settled in 1662 and still printed. It is the bishop’s exhortation to the men about to be ordained, and it is read aloud to them in the service, in front of the congregation, before the questions are put.

It is revealed below one clause at a time, with a guess before each, because the shape of the thing is the argument: a reader who expects a liturgy to be bland will find that the Prayer Book asks this page’s question more directly than most modern writing on ministry manages.

What that document is doing

Four features of it are worth drawing out.

It identifies the congregation with Christ. “The Church and Congregation whom you must serve, is his Spouse, and his Body.” The move is the one Christ makes on the road to Damascus — why persecutest thou me — and it is what turns mistreating a congregation from a management failure into something done to a person.

It counts individuals, not the institution. “If it shall happen that the same Church, or any Member thereof, do take any hurt or hindrance by reason of your negligence.” One member. That is the arithmetic of Matthew 18:6 written into a service book, and it is exactly what the single-column ministry report has no row for.

It is unembarrassed about the stakes. “Ye know the greatness of the fault, and also the horrible punishment that will ensue.” A modern ordination service would not put it that way. Whether that is an improvement in pastoral tone or a loss of nerve is a judgement readers can make for themselves; what is not in question is that the older form said the thing out loud, to the man, at the start.

And it makes him promise to drive something away — but not people. One of the questions put in the same service is whether he will “be ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God’s Word.” The verb this page has been tracking appears in the liturgy with a different object. The thing a minister is sworn to drive away is bad doctrine. The charge in Jeremiah 23 is that he drove away the sheep instead.

The same question, in the pastoral classics

The Prayer Book is not an outlier. The historic literature on ministry is, to a striking degree, a literature about this danger, written by men who had the office and were frightened of it.

The audit Scripture assigns to you

The next two Parts are a pair, and the order is deliberate and is itself one of this page’s conclusions. Scripture puts the weight of this question on the teacher, not on the congregation. Almost every text assembled above is addressed to the man with the office: Jeremiah 23 to the pastors, Ezekiel 34 to the shepherds, Matthew 23 to the scribes, James 3 to prospective teachers, 1 Peter 5 to elders, the Prayer Book charge to the ordinand on his knees. The hearer gets considerably less, and what he gets is for his own protection rather than for reaching a verdict. So the large instrument comes first and the small one second, and if you only engage with one of them, Scripture’s preference is clear.

Fourteen questions, with the text each one comes from

Answer honestly; nothing is transmitted anywhere and nothing is stored. The value is not in the pattern of the answers but in whether any of the questions is one you have never put to yourself. The text behind each appears when you answer.

0 of 14 answered.

And the much smaller one it gives a hearer

Scripture does give hearers something. It is not nothing: the Bereans are commended for checking an apostle against the text; the Galatians are told to reject a gospel even from an angel; Paul rebukes the Corinthians for tolerating a man who devours them and smites them on the face, which makes passivity under abuse a fault rather than a virtue. “Try the spirits” is a command. So is “obey them that have the rule over you”, and both are in the book.

But what the hearer is given is narrower than what the teacher is given, and it is aimed at a different target. It is aimed at teaching, not at the standing of the man who gives it. Galatians 1:8 curses the message, not a personality. The Bereans examined the scriptures, not Paul’s motives. And the instrument below is limited accordingly: it describes what is being said and done, and it stops there.

Eight marks, drawn only from the texts already established above. For each, say whether it describes what you are currently hearing.

0 of 8 answered.

The second column

Which brings the enquiry back to where it started: the report. Not the theology of ministry but its bookkeeping, because the bookkeeping is where the theology either shows up or does not.

Consider what a conventional account of a ministry contains, and then consider the New Testament’s own warning about exactly such an account — which is, when read carefully, a list of ministry metrics offered as a defence and rejected.

“Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”

Matthew 7:22–23 · Authorised Version.

Look at what is being pleaded. Preaching, deliverance, and “many wonderful works” — three categories of demonstrable, countable, publicly verifiable ministry result, all of them done in his name, and on the speakers’ own account really done. Christ does not dispute the claims. He does not say the works did not happen. He says the works are not the thing he is assessing. It is the one passage in Scripture where a ministry report is read out loud at the judgment, and it fails — not for being false, but for being the wrong document.

Build the report

So here is the exercise that closes the argument. On the left, the things a ministry ordinarily counts. On the right, the things the texts on this page treat as outcomes of ministry and which no report contains. Move each item to the column where it actually gets recorded in practice, not where you think it should be.

0 of 14 placed.

Why nobody publishes the second column

Four reasons, and only the last of them is discreditable.

It is genuinely unmeasurable. This page cannot produce the number in its own title and has not pretended otherwise. You cannot count the people who quietly stopped believing, because by definition they stopped telling you. You cannot interview them, because they will not come back to be interviewed, and the ones who would come back are not a representative sample. Any figure anybody offers for this is invented.

It is attributionally hopeless. Even where you know someone left, you rarely know why in a way that would survive examination, and people’s own accounts of why they left a church change over a decade. Part V’s twelve cases were classifiable because this page wrote them with the relevant facts included. Real ones arrive without them.

The incentives all run the other way. Support is raised on the first column. Platforms are built on the first column. Nobody is invited to speak at a conference on the strength of having injured fewer people than expected.

And it is unbearable. This is the real reason, and it deserves to be treated gently rather than used as an accusation. A man who has given thirty years to a work cannot easily entertain the thought that some of the damage in his own congregation is traceable to him, because the thought, fully admitted, would stop him from getting up on Sunday. The defence mechanism is not wickedness. It is survival. But it has a cost, and the cost is borne by other people.

Your answers, revisited

Here is what you said before you read the page, next to what the sources show.

Check it yourself

Fourteen items. Almost everything load-bearing on this page is out of copyright and free, which is why the Authorised Version was used throughout. If you read only four, read the ones marked Read this first — between them they contain the whole argument, and three of the four are short.

1. 1. Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel 34, read whole and in one sitting. Read this first. Twenty minutes, free everywhere. These two chapters are the page’s foundation and they do not need an interpreter. Read Jeremiah 23 for the charge (“driven them away… have not visited them”, v.2) and verses 16–22 and 32 for the prophets who ran unsent. Read Ezekiel 34 for the inventory at verses 2–6 and for what God undertakes to do himself at verses 11–16. If you disagree with this page after reading these two chapters, the disagreement is worth having.
2. 2. Ezekiel 13, and in particular verse 22. Read this first. Ten minutes, free. The chapter on prophets who daubed a wall with untempered morter and said “Peace” where there was none. Verse 22 is the verse this page regards as the most remarkable thing it found, and both halves of it should be read by anyone inclined to use this page in only one direction.
3. 3. Matthew 23 entire, then Luke 11:37–54. Read this first. Twenty-five minutes, free. Read them together, because Luke’s version of the woes includes the key of knowledge (11:52) which Matthew does not, and Matthew includes the shutting up of the kingdom (23:13) in sharper form. Read to the end of Matthew 23, because the chapter closes in grief rather than in anger and that changes how the whole thing sounds.
4. 4. Job 38–42, in one sitting. Read this first. An hour, free. The only way to feel the force of Part IV is to read the friends’ speeches and then 42:7. Read at least one whole friend-speech first — Eliphaz in chapter 4 or Zophar in chapter 11 — and note how much of it you would be content to hear from a pulpit.
5. 5. James 3, Hebrews 13:17–21, 1 Peter 5:1–4, 1 Thessalonians 2:1–12, 2 Corinthians 4:1–2 and 11:16–21. Thirty minutes, free. The New Testament’s own material on the office and on Paul’s method. 1 Thessalonians 2 is the most useful of these and the least preached: it is an apostle describing his own conduct in a congregation, item by item, and it reads as a checklist.
6. 6. Numbers 20:1–13, and then Deuteronomy 3:23–28 for Moses’s own account of the refusal. Fifteen minutes, free. Read the second passage as well. It is the same event from the inside, and it is not self-justifying.
7. 7. The Ordering of Priests, Book of Common Prayer (1662). Read this first among the non-biblical sources. Fifteen minutes, free online from the Church of England and from several archives of the 1662 text. Read the bishop’s exhortation and then the questions. The whole of Part VI rests on this and it is shorter than most magazine articles.
8. 8. Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule, Book I. Ninety minutes for Book I; free in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers second series, vol. 12, at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and at New Advent. Written in about 590 by a man who had just been made pope against his will. Book I is the argument that the office requires an unlearned art; Book II is on the character required; Book III, which is much longer, is on adapting the teaching to different hearers and is the part a working preacher will find most directly useful.
9. 9. Augustine, Sermon 46, On the Shepherds. An hour; the Latin is in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 41, and English translations appear in the Works of Saint Augustine series and in older collections. A bishop preaching Ezekiel 34 to clergy in about 414. Read it to establish that the application of that chapter to ministers is not a modern polemical invention.
10. 10. John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood, Books III and VI. Two hours; free in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers first series, vol. 9, at CCEL. Book VI is the one cited here. Book III contains the famous passage on the terror of the office and is the reason the treatise exists: it is a defence of having run away from ordination.
11. 11. Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (1656), chapter 1 at minimum. Two hours for chapter 1; free in full at CCEL and in several other digitisations. Relentless, repetitive and very hard to read comfortably if you hold any teaching office. The quotations in Part VI are all from the opening section on the oversight of ourselves.
12. 12. Westminster Larger Catechism, Questions 149–152. Fifteen minutes, free from several confessional bodies including the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Q.151 is the one quoted; read 149 and 150 first or the fourfold structure of 151 will not make sense.
13. 13. On the other side of the argument, read these whole before accepting this page’s conclusions: John 6:22–71 (the emptied room, in full, including what he does not do about it); Matthew 15:1–20; Galatians 1 and 2 (an anathema and a public rebuke of an apostle); Acts 15:1–29 (the yoke declined, and note who declines it and on what grounds); Ezekiel 33:1–20 (the watchman condemned for silence). Ninety minutes, free. These are the passages that keep this page’s question from becoming a charge against anyone who says anything difficult, and a reader who takes only the indictment and not these has taken half the evidence.
14. 14. For the Hebrew behind “driven away” in Jeremiah 23:2 and Ezekiel 34:4, 16: the root is nadach, and free interlinear and lexicon resources are widely available online. Ten minutes. Worth doing if you want to satisfy yourself that the Authorised Version has not been pressed into service here beyond what the text will bear.