Often, believers are tempted to skip over the first few chapters of 1 Thessalonians in the belief that the ‘good stuff’ of Paul’s teaching begins in chapter 4 after a lengthy historical prelude. However, this would be skipping over a portion that is highly relevant to God’s servants today, specifically, Paul’s own description of his approach to ministry in 2:1–12. Here, Paul recounts what sort of people he, Silvanus, and Timothy proved to be among the Thessalonians.
When we consider the many accounts in recent years of ministers who have been publicly exposed to be abusers of others with respect to money, sex, and power, we must conclude that at some point we have mislaid the template that Paul provided for those who have been entrusted with proclaiming the gospel. In its place, we have seen a focus on success, power, and numbers, and putting a priority on preserving a ministry’s public image at the expense and harm of the sheep God entrusted to these ministries.
We need to recover Paul’s model of ministry and the ethos that he lived by and cultivated in his co-workers. Ministers need to adopt this ethos, and laypersons need to make it the template for their expectations for any church or ministry to which they would entrust themselves. The entire passage is full of characteristics that are so necessary today, including being free of impure motive (such as greed or seeking honour for oneself), flattery, or deceit, and ministering with the desire to please God, while knowing he sees our hearts (vv. 3–6a).
However, the gentle pastoral care of Paul is really encapsulated in an arresting series of images, even a collision of metaphors, that he uses in verses 6b–12. Paul acknowledges that he and his team could have thrown their weight around as apostles (2:6). Contrary to leadership norms then (and all too often today), Paul says in verse 7a, “we were infants among you” (author’s translation).1 By way of metaphor, Paul is describing in a startling way the gentleness of their manner with the Thessalonians: they were as non-threatening as small children among them.
Paul then immediately moves to a second, alternate comparison in verse 7b: “just as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children” (author’s translation), they imparted their very lives to the dear Thessalonians. The image powerfully illustrates the sacrificial maternal tenderness of the apostle’s care for his young congregation.
Finally, Paul shifts to a second parental comparison in verses 9–12: we worked tirelessly for you, behaved uprightly, and “dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God” (NIV). Paul’s image of the sacrificially hard-working father who models uprightness for his children and provides encouraging guidance for them completes this trio of familial images. Paul’s threefold use of family imagery underscores the truth that the church is to be more of a family than an organization or institution, and offers a mindset and ethos for ministry that we need to recover and embody today.
FOR REFLECTION
If Paul is comfortable comparing himself to a child, a mother, and a father for those to whom he ministers, why do we find it challenging to apply such terms to ourselves in our ministry roles? What does it say about the gap between the way we think about ministry and the way Paul did??
