What This Church Believes About Pastoral Theology

God loves his people so much he makes pastors. What that means — and what it demands — from the pulpit at Providence.

The God Who Makes Pastors

Start here, because this is where the whole conversation has to start: pastoral ministry is not primarily a statement about pastors. It's a statement about God. "Don't look at the shepherds — look at the God who cares for you so much to make people willingly give up their lives to care for you. That's an incredible God." ^[6] One of the things it means to be lost, before you were found, is that "I was made to have God shepherd me but when I'm not his, when I'm lost, I don't have a shepherd for my soul." ^[6] The remedy begins with Christ himself — "he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness... for you were straying like sheep but have now returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls" (1 Pet. 2:24–25). ^[6] Christ is the Chief Shepherd. Every elder in every local church is an under-shepherd answering to him.

And so when the Statement of Faith confesses that "Christ has given the offices of elder and deacon to the church" and that "elders occupy the sole office of governance and are called to teach, oversee, care for, and protect the flock entrusted to them by the Lord," ^[SF] it is not making a point about church polity first — it is making a point about God's affection for his people. He looks down, sees wolves and hunger and weather, and says, "It's a terrible life without a shepherd. I will come and be their shepherd." ^[6] The office exists because the love is real.

Elders: What the Office Actually Requires

The desire at the core of the elder's calling is "the strong desire to watch over people — a strong desire to be a father to a church — and that desire is so strong that it endures even when the people don't like it, and it endures even when the pay isn't great, and endures even when the culture is hostile." ^[6] That description does not describe a corporate manager or a religious professional. It describes something closer to a father who wakes up in the morning and "dutifully for years pray[s] for you and work[s] through God's word and think[s] through, okay, how can I help these people with this thing or that thing." ^[6]

The practical scope of the office is wide. Elders "are called to mediate disputes between brothers" — pulling out the Word, "helping them to be reconciled, to walk in peace, and to establish the unity of the Church." They are "called to judge in doctrinal issues" and charged to "guard the good deposit entrusted to you and raise up faithful men who will do the same thing." They must "know the Word of God so they can teach from the Word of God... protect the flock with the Word of God... weed out false doctrine, call out false teachers." ^[8] The Statement of Faith frames this same breadth when it says elders are "called to teach, oversee, care for, and protect the flock." ^[SF] Those four verbs are not decorative — they name four distinct and demanding responsibilities.

Critically, the authority is real but it is not unaccountable. "There's going to be a day when they stand as under-shepherds before the Chief Shepherd. And they're going to have to give account for how they cared for the flock." ^[8] And elder rule is not separate from the congregation — "the elders are in fact a part of the congregation... a part of the body." ^[8] The right exercise of that rule means the elder "cares for the flock and cares for the congregation, gives heed, has his ear to the needs, to the concerns — doesn't just value feedback, wants feedback." ^[8]

Preaching and Pastoral Care as One Ministry

A pastor is not simply a preacher who happens to know people's names. The preaching ministry and the pastoral ministry are meant to be "the same ministry." ^[5] "The great thing about being a pastor as opposed to just a preacher," is that "you can run things up the flagpole in private conversations with church members before you preach... you can get a sense of, does this make sense to you? Do I need to figure out another way to say this?" ^[5] The Word works both directions — it shapes the pulpit, and walking with the congregation sharpens the Word's delivery.

Paul models this when he writes to the Thessalonians in the middle of a crisis. Faced with grief and confusion, he does not reach for pat answers. Instead he does "the pastoral equivalent of teaching a man to fish — they have a crisis, and rather than simply give pat answers to the crisis, he goes into real pastoral care and takes them back to the Gospel." ^[14] That is the pastoral instinct this pulpit calls its own: back to the Gospel, reason out of the Gospel, and trust that the Gospel is deeper than the presenting problem.

The Church as the Antidote — and Why Integrity in Leadership Matters So Much

The local church is not merely a gathering of like-minded people. It is "the basic antidote to this worldly mind virus." It's the place you walk into when the battery in your faith is dead and you "jumpstart your faith because the person next to you has come and they're ready to worship and they're okay today." "We will all jump our cars off each other at certain points in life." ^[1] The weary saint — what you might call the Asaph saint, the one who almost slipped, whose feet nearly gave way — is supposed to be able to wander in and be surrounded by people who remind him that it really does matter how he lives, that God really is watching, that the faith is not a sham. ^[1]

This is exactly why the enemy targets it. "He would love to fill the church full of people, particular leaders, but also just regular Christians who are shams, who are hidden landmines of discouragement." ^[1] Disunity and fallen leaders are not minor inconveniences — they are spiritual warfare aimed at the one institution designed to resist worldly disorientation. The Statement of Faith marks "a true church" by three things: "the faithful preaching of the Word, the right administration of the sacraments, and the proper exercise of church discipline." ^[SF] All three matter. Remove any one of them and the antidote stops working.

Church Discipline: A Mark of Love, Not Severity

Discipline is not the opposite of grace. It is one of the primary ways grace is administered and protected. Historically, "together baptism and the Lord's Supper are a means of grace when they're administered, but also a means of convicting discipline when they're withheld." ^[7] When a person is excommunicated — "removed from participation in the Lord's Supper" — it is not a gesture of rejection. It is a statement that "the genuineness of their faith is in question by the way they're living their life." ^[7] The church is saying something with that act, and the something it is saying is meant to awaken, not merely punish.

The pastoral analogy is direct: "Is a parent who grabs a 2-year-old to restrain them and hold them back from the danger of the street — are they a legalist? Do I lack grace? Am I unloving?" ^[9] Intervening with someone walking in sin is "not legalism, it's not unloving, it's not evil to go and grab them and talk to them about it. It's loving. It's kindness to go and engage them." ^[9] Even the risk to the relationship is worth it — "we do that for our kids, we need to do that for others." ^[9]

What discipline must never become is what Aaron did: "baptizing a people's unbelief or managing their sin." ^[11] The temptation to manage sin rather than call it out is real, and it masquerades as pastoral gentleness. It is not. The moment a leader starts doing "the biblical gymnastics necessary to endorse the mob's anxious cravings" ^[11] — dressing up what is simply sin with theological language that makes the congregation feel better about it — he has folded. Calvin understood this. When the city council of Geneva demanded that everyone, regardless of profession or life, be admitted to communion, "Calvin was at an impasse, and he held his ground" — and the council removed him. ^[13] Holding the line on discipline is not severity. It is faithfulness.

What Pastoral Theology Produces in the Congregation

A healthy pastoral theology shapes not just leaders but the entire congregation. The Statement of Faith is clear that "God gives these and other people as gifts to serve and equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ — and men and women alike belong to a royal priesthood in which each member is gifted by God to play a vital role in the life and mission of the church." ^[SF] The goal of elder oversight is not a passive congregation managed by professionals — it is a whole body equipped and active.

That body looks like people who carry one another. Who remember that past sin is not meant to produce ongoing wretchedness but "proportional love for the God who wiped those sins away" ^[12] — "remember those debts, not to wallow in them, but so that they stir up gratitude and love for God." ^[12] It looks like a community that receives God's discipline — his pruning — as "his fatherly care," interpreting hardship in the right light: "that God is up to something good in this." ^[3] And it looks like people who are honest enough to do the hard work of confronting sin in one another, receiving correction from their elders, and showing up — even on low-faith days — so that someone next to them can borrow what they have. ^[1]

This page synthesizes what Chris Oswald has preached on pastoral theology at Providence Community Church. Every claim above traces to the cited sermons — follow any citation to read the full sermon, listen to the audio, and see the surrounding context. Minute marks are approximate, estimated from each sermon's transcript.