Dunkirk is first and foremost a movie about Dunkirk; the amazing deliverance of almost 300000 British soldiers from the French coast during World War II, largely via civilian charters. Inevitably, however, the film throws up other bigger issues, matters of enduring interest and concern. It is these that I would like to address in shorthand here:

1. Our insatiable appetite for hope: pier master Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) is a sympathetically portrayed naval officer, who serves as the herald of both the extremity in which he and his men find themselves, and the emergence of hope from the cloud-dim waters of Dunkirk. In distinction from some modern war movies which portray only the leaden hopelessness of conflict, Nolan emphasises the power of aspiration, and our appetite for deliverance (more on that below). What is achieved is an enviable balance between hard reality and hope’s horizon. The glimmer of a smile which plays on Bolton’s lips as he spies civilian vessels draw near to ‘The Mole’ powerfully captures the human predicament: marooned between the rock of our circumstance and the hard place of vitriolic adversity, but daring to smile at hope’s tentative arrival.

2. The tenderness of paternal love: Nolan has (somewhat anachronistically) been criticised in some quarters for the absence of female characters in ‘Dunkirk’, but we should be thankful for his compelling picture of masculinity, regardless. Mark Rylance’s Mr Dawson is an economically drawn figure, but one whose paternal heart is evident. His mild authority, his pragmatically expressed compassion, his understated capacity for bravery, speak the name of a love that doesn’t always dare to identify itself publicly: fatherly affection. Dawson doesn’t needlessly emote, there is little effervescence to his personality, but he commands and commends, steers and reasons, and he deeply cares about the boys on board with him. Powerful indeed, inspiring as well.

3. Our stubborn and irreducible depravity: the evil of dive bombing a hospital ship is obvious, but so is the Goldingesque trawler sequence in which racism, rabid and selfish survivalism, and bullying cowardice are all too evident.

4. The enduring power of deliverance: the hemmed in men on Dunkirk beach are in need of deliverance which must be mediated through a miracle. The sight of dozens of civilian vessels emerging from the mist is deeply affecting. Even the boys on board the trawler understand both the need for and the cost of a substitute. In a world marked by cynicism about salvation, and arrogance about self-redemption, the image of uniformed men helplessly dependent on others is powerful. The relevance and power of these themes for those of us who believe in the need for personal deliverance from sin through Jesus Christ is overwhelming.

Recently Thom Rainer posted some reflections on church member visitation, providing 15 reasons why those in pastoral ministry ‘shouldn’t visit much’. While the risk of being viewed by one’s congregation as a sanctified social worker or life coach is ever present, and while some local churches impose utterly unreasonable visitation demands on their Pastor, there are also significant dangers in neglecting this vital work.

Here, rather than critiquing Dr Rainer’s reasoning, I share 15 of my own incentives to keep going at pastoral visitation. I read Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor once every year, and am forcibly reminded from its pages just how far short I fall in this area of ministry. The following are, however, offered as aspirational statements. They appear in no particular order.

I should also say that balance and context must always be borne in mind with regard to our ministry priorities. Every Pastor ministers in a different setting with differing time constraints, and under different expectations. We are all unique individuals with varied gifts, and these general observations in no way seek to steamroller those.

1. The principles behind pastoral visitation are biblically mandated. While there are no direct injunctions in Scripture for home visitation, the broad picture of the Pastor in the New Testament is one of a man engaged with the people under his care. Paul supplemented his public ministry with ‘house to house’ discipleship (Acts 20:20); he shared not only the gospel but his very self (or life) with the Thessalonians (1Thessalonians 2:8); his instruction to Timothy incorporates broad brush ministry, but also specific relational guidelines for differing groups of members (1Timothy 5:2). We could build a solid theology of interpersonal pastoral discipleship from the New Testament. These encounters don’t need to be realised in people’s homes, but often that is the best location of all.

 

2. Pastoral visitation keeps the need for plurality of leadership firmly on the Pastor’s agenda. A church with a significant number of members will soon wear out the best intentions of any man who believes that he can exercise pastoral care outside of the biblical pattern of a plurality of elders. Seeking to meet some of our people’s pastoral needs will help us to recognise that we can’t meet them all. This is a great impetus to train others to share the privilege of private discipleship with church members.

 

3. Pastoral visitation applies needed pressure on our preparation and study time. Speaking personally, I need pressure to work. A fifty or sixty hour week of study for two Sunday sermons sounds like bliss at times, but in reality I could never fill those hours with entirely productive study. Balancing my time between preparation and visitation keeps my perfectionistic tendencies in preparing a sermon in check, and applies sufficient pressure on me to actually meet the never-ending deadline of Sunday ministry.

 

4. Crisis and emergency pastoral care is deepened and more fully facilitated by regular visitation. At times of need people are often inundated with specialists from the secular world who are concerned with meeting their needs in the short term. In such circumstances they need pastoral care from a trusted confidante, rather than a tasked consultant. The time spent with people in the non-crisis moments of life opens the door to ministering to them meaningfully at those times when the wheels come off.

 

5. Pastoral visitation leads to real evangelistic opportunity. Our church members do not live vacuum-sealed lives. Many of them have non-Christian family members and friends, or unsaved neighbours. Our presence in their lives and homes provides opportunity to share our lives and the gospel with non-Christians whom we would never otherwise meet. These seemingly arbitrary and casual connections can yield rich fruit if properly cultivated.

 

6. Constant exposure to/study of Scripture places the Pastor in a unique position to bring biblical counsel. While much that we glean in preparation and study should be invested into the lives of others who can in turn minister, we are also privileged to be in sustained contact with the Word of God in a way which will uniquely shape the contours and content of our pastoral counselling. Often what I read in works of Biblical Theology is as helpful in counselling a weary Christian as it is in producing a helpful sermon.

 

7. Regular contact with the members of the churches in which we serve is a great antidote to pastoral frustration. If our time is spent chiefly in the company of commentaries, colleagues, and people who are gospel-oriented enough to want to be trained for ministry, then we can easily disconnect from the struggles that our members are facing. We preach with the glory of God always in view, but also with the express concern for people growing in their faith. We can easily slip into critical patterns of thought when we see those in our care not growing in grace as we might wish. Spending time with them, listening to the pressures and obstacles to Christian growth that they are facing, might enable us to encourage and challenge them with more compassion and a greater appreciation of just how tough it can be to develop in our Christian lives.

 

8. Our prayer lives are enriched by intentionally listening to the needs of our people. Through pastoral visitation I am privileged to be able to pray for our members in much more meaningful ways, understanding their needs and challenges more clearly.

 

9. False teaching and wrong thinking can be more sensitively (and less censoriously) dealt with in one to one contact. There is certainly a place for exposing false teaching through our pulpit ministry, but we are enabled to gently inform the doctrinal thinking of our church members through private conversation and counsel.

 

10. Through visitation we get to share not only our preaching but our lives with fellow church members. Aside from getting to know members of the church, they get to know us a little better, and that can be of enormous help to their engagement with our preaching.

 

11. We need to be encouraged through the fellowship that visitation fosters. I often end a day of visitation wondering who has been more blessed by my calls to people’s homes: me or them? I need the encouragement that conversation with my brothers and sisters brings. Paul might have wanted to go to Rome to encourage the believers there, but he also needed to be encouraged by them (Romans 1:12).

 

12. Visitation protects us from living a sheltered life. This is a world full of challenge and contradiction to the work of the gospel. By listening in on the lives and struggles of our brothers and sisters we are reminded constantly of what the ‘real’ world is like. There is an argument for the Pastor being the least sheltered member of the whole church.

 

13. Our preaching, particularly in terms of application, is enriched by visiting with church members. I would never allow visitation to set the agenda for my preaching, but I might benefit from allowing it to steer my application. Understanding where people are at helps me to show them where the teaching of a Scriptural passage fits in the life they are living.

 

14. The best forum for a members’ Q&A session can often be in their living rooms. Christian believers often harbour questions, concerns, and even doubts about their faith that they would never articulate in a group setting. What a privilege for the Pastor to be able to listen carefully and seek to answer biblically the questions that many Christians have about Scripture and holy living.

 

15. Pastoral visitation humbles me by its never-finished nature. If preaching is a task for which there is seldom immediate meaningful feedback, then visitation reflects the same reality. I am never fully satisfied with my visitation, I am conscious of my shortcomings, and can even question my usefulness in serving the Lord in this context. But God is sovereign, and God is using even my weakest efforts in seeking to promote growth in grace in the lives of others. Not knowing what impact seemingly trivial contact with others Christians might have is a great driver of faith and trust in God using my very weakness for his glory. Who is to say that that visit in which we struggle to connect or counsel in a measurable way isn’t the very conversation that God might use to effect change in the life of one of His children? I sow in faith when I am spending time with people as much as when I am spending time in the pulpit.

Ask a group of ten Christians what their favourite verse is and there’s a hefty chance that at least one person will reference Jeremiah 29:11. This sterling, promise-packed reference carries immediate resonance and reassurance for our troubled lives. God intends good for us, it seems to say – our welfare and our hope are secured in his plan, so we don’t need to worry, harm is not on the immediate agenda.

All of this is marvellous, apart from the nagging fact that the chapter in which this verse appears is complex, and unkindly elbows our hope in the ribs a little. Sometimes context can be a killer.

As with many passages of Scripture it can be a shock to find that Jeremiah 29 is not immediately about us.  Jeremiah is not issuing an insurance certificate to risk averse Christians in this chapter, but is writing a letter to specific people in a concrete historical setting.

Jerusalem, the citadel of the sacred, is crumbling. The Temple has not proved to be the talisman that inhabitants of the city had hoped it might be. It has turned out that living off the vestiges and vapours of the glory days of being God’s people has afforded little protection against the consequences of sin and convulsions in society. The chasm which has opened up between professed belief and godless behaviour is now yawning wide, and the old pretences and the old protections are proving impotent. The King and his retinue have exited stage left, and there are now a group of people living in Babylon as exiles. To get under the skin of that word ‘exile’ we might want to summon the images we have in our minds of helpless refugees who are far from home and far from hope. Exile is awful.

It is to these people that Jeremiah addresses his letter, and for whom verse 11 was originally intended. These people are not to think that their time in Babylon is a kind of gap year judgement from God, a period of work experience in divine discipline which will soon come to a close. They are going to be in Babylon for a long time, 70 years in fact. From the vantage point of history 70 years seems like a minimal period, but imagine that you are standing in the dock and a judge has just sentenced you to that duration of imprisonment. Hope in such circumstances has a habit of evaporating. These people are to build houses and build homes, they are to allow themselves the dubious luxury of seeking the welfare of the city that they are in. They are, in short, being called to settle for exile.

And the reason why they can do this is because of the truth of the eleventh verse: God knows what he’s doing, he has a plan, a long term strategy which will be future oriented and hope laden. God is still at work, even though these people are far from where they long to be, and will never get their lives back to where they want them. “Accept this”, God says, “trust me, I’m working off a different script than you are”.

So, what about the people from that group of ten who selected Jeremiah 29:11 as their favourite verse? Do they need to hand it back to the exiles in Babylon, and have done with it? Do we handle this verse like we might test drive an iPad Pro in the Apple Store – we can appreciate its features but we ultimately have to leave it behind because it’s not our property?

Well, yes and no.

If we want to have a verse which functions as a kind of safety net or welfare state for our temporal lives, then we are doing violence to Jeremiah 29:11. But if we gather up all of the material facts around this verse and then seek to apply it to our lives, then we can truly make it our own. Sometimes context can be a clincher.

Here are some ways in which we might rehabilitate our use of Jeremiah 29:11

• The genius of God’s protection of his people is that he can preserve us in trouble as well as from trouble The recipients of this promise had traded their optimism for realism. This verse is sent to them after terrible things have happened, and that ought to protect us from the Disneyfied view of life and Scripture which ultimately leaves us disappointed. God is sovereign when we’re in very real bother, and God speaks to us when we’re in very real bother – even if we are painfully reaping what we’ve sown for ourselves.
• Realistic acceptance of our circumstances can be a dynamic assertion of God’s sovereignty. Jeremiah calls these exiles to accept where they are and to seek to live where they are. They are not called to dream away the dramatic changes they have experienced. They now live in Babylon, and that’s that. This acceptance is not, however, merely cognitive, but covenantal. Buying a plot of ground in Babylon is not denying the plot of God in history – he knows his plan and this is part of it.So acceptance is part of our worship. We are here, and so is God. What an application that brings when we are living in the wake of the wheels coming off. Joy is not dependent on a journey back to the halcyon days of pre-trauma life – covenant commitment from God lends covenant contentment to his people: regardless of their terrain.

• Present hope is ultimately secured on future hope. A seventy year lease on property in exile meant that the generation who received Jeremiah’s letter would be buried in Babylon. This would not resolve in their lifetime. Where they might be tempted to think in the immediate, God is working towards the ultimate. And he wants them to know that that’s enough. 

  We live in a world of 24 hours rolling news, and we get frustrated when events and their explanation don’t make themselves known immediately. But God works on a different timescale. Sometimes like Joseph we get to read the final page of our personal story and phrase the blessed conclusion in our own words, but some of us – perhaps most of us – live and die in the middle chapters of a tale we don’t fully understand. And God says that’s ok, because the words ‘hope’ and ‘future’ are happily married.

  The real test for the exiles is a test of faith – are they willing to trust that God will eventually and majestically work through these circumstances even if there are multiple loose ends in their lifetime? That’s a huge challenge, but a promise-packed one nevertheless: our difficult ‘now’ is governed by the ‘not-yet’ of what God is going to finally do in the consummation of His covenant promises in Christ.

So it turns out that Jeremiah 29:11 is a great verse to select as a favourite after all. It gives us far better hope than a ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card ever could. It meets us on strange Babylonian turf (being elect exiles as the Apostle Peter describes the Christian) and tells us that we can trust God even among the ruins, even when we feel lost in the middle, knowing that he is working to a grander scheme for our good and his glory.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope

I believe that the Bible is not a metal-tweezered promise box from which we can select our favourite passages and promises at random.

I believe that the pulpit is not a stable in which I get to show off my favourite hobby horses to a weary congregation.

I believe that the authority of the preacher is always secondary to the authority of Scripture as revealed by God.

I believe that the Scriptures are God breathed in their entirety, and that their structural integrity is part and parcel of how we come into contact with what God has said, and how God has said it.

Consequently: I believe, heart and soul, in systematic expository preaching. I am relieved of the stressful duty of deciding on a weekly basis what is going to be profitable, or palatable, or practical for the congregation in which I serve. The Scriptures as an authoritative body of truth, and as an organic whole, shape the contours and content of what I preach. I am not left clueless as to what people might need to hear.

With all of that said, there is still a measure of decision and choice entailed in the task of preaching. I may not leap randomly from text to text each week, but in any given year we might be engaged in the study of the Old Testament or New Testament, in narrative or poetry or epistle, and behind that fact lies the process of choosing a series in which to immerse ourselves. If expository preaching can help avoid the whim of the preacher or the people, how can it be discerned what we should devote perhaps weeks, months or years of preaching and listening and learning to as a group of God’s people?

For me the selection of a series is a multi-layered affair, and here I want to share some (but not all) of the factors which help form my thinking as to what we should study and for how long:

1. Logical factors: there are certain features of choosing a series which are decidedly pragmatic. If I am preaching an Old Testament series in our morning services, then it may be prudent to take a New Testament series in our evening service. Alternatively, if one of our services is working hard on narrative, then the other might lend itself more helpfully to epistolary or poetic materials. Here the key is balance, seeking to take into account what we are studying, or have been studying, and for how long. A strong diet of the fibrous truths of a book like Romans, might be offset by the lighter textures of the Psalms, or a rich section of Old Testament narrative.

   Logic also takes stock of the circumstantial elements of Bible teaching. Preaching an Easter series during Advent might be deliciously subversive, but it is unlikely to make much sense to those under the sound of our voice. A long series in Revelation might seem like just the ticket on paper, but if it is proving difficult for many Church members to understand, or assimilate and apply, then we do well to pay sensitive heed to these issues.

2. Pastoral factors: for me the task of preaching and pastoring go hand and hand, and I feel little envy for those whose pulpit ministry is not earthed in the real-life issues of caring for people’s souls privately. As a teaching elder it shouldn’t be difficult to get a sense of a congregation’s spiritual temperature and dietary needs. If there is clearly confusion on the central tenets of the gospel, then it is pastoral wisdom to address this by focusing on areas of propositional truth which shed light on what we believe and why, or on the core facts of Christ’ life and mission as elucidated in the gospels. If there are complex and widespread pastoral problems among a congregation then the comfort of God’s promises and the liberty of plaintive prayer which the Psalms facilitate might prove beneficial and consoling to the Christian hearer.
3. Affective factors: this final factor is the most difficult to articulate. For me as a preacher there is just a prayerful sense of what we ought to study, and where God is leading my heart. It might be that my own interaction with Scripture has brought me face to face with truths which cry out to be preached, or that there is an abiding, repeated impression in my consciousness that God is leading me to teach in a certain section, or a recurrence of passages of Scripture which cannot be mere coincidence. These things are ‘felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’ (to quote Wordsworth) and cannot easily be quantified.

   Perhaps a recent example might make this more clear. Over a recent period of leave I found my heart more and more compelled by the force and glory of God’s love for us as His people. Much of my thinking was driven by readings in 1John 4. Would this, I wondered, make a suitable summer series for me return to the pulpit with? On the following Sunday a visiting speaker touched on these very themes as he shared at Communion, and there was a sense of it being sealed that this was where we ought to spend a few weeks together.

   I would fear to make these affective factors the sole means of seeking out a series of studies, but they are important nevertheless.

As with all else in life, I am glad that I am not ultimately sovereign over series of studies in our church fellowship. The Chief Shepherd loves His sheep, and has commissioned his under-shepherds to faithfully feed them on the rich fare afforded to us in Scripture. What a blessing to expose our hearts and consciences to what God says for Himself, to us His people, on the pages of Scripture.