Mark Dever’s Vision for Pastoral Ministry in 4 Words
Looking for Leadership
When Mark Dever first got to Capitol Hill Baptist Church in 1994, the deacons had been talking about closing the church down. They’d been going through a really hard time. The church had gone through a rough split when a pastor left and took a lot of young families with him out to the suburbs, leaving the older generation behind wondering who was going to lead them.
A new pastor came to the church who was incredibly gifted, but his godliness did not reflect his giftings. His ministry ended after just a few short years in scandal, as he disqualified himself in a horrendous way. The church was reeling. The church was wondering if they should just divide up the assets and give the money to missions. Around that time, Carl F. H. Henry, the founder of Christianity Today and longtime member of the church since the 1950s, wrote a letter to Mark Dever.
He had known Dever since the 1980s, when Dever was a master’s student at Southern Seminary. Carl Henry took an interest in Mark, Al Mohler, and other students at the seminary who he saw as leaders of evangelicalism in America for the future.
A Light on the Hill
Caleb Morell
This engaging Capitol Hill Baptist Church biography shares the real-life stories of ordinary people in an extraordinary place, revealing how God works through faithful church bodies.
It was when Dever was over in Cambridge, England, finishing up his PhD, Carl Henry kept him apprised of the events in the church, and he wrote to him after the previous pastor disqualified himself, wondering if Mark would consider coming and trying out preaching in view of a call at Capitol Hill Baptist Church.
The church was not on Mark’s radar. He had his sight set on teaching church history, and yet he had respect for Carl Henry. He was willing to come and preach. And when he did, the Lord remarkably turned his heart toward this seemingly dying church on Capitol Hill. It had a long, faithful history, but was seriously declined in number, and yet he thought the Lord might be leading him there.
A Commitment
When Dever came as the official candidate to the church, they asked him what his vision for the church was. What was his plan for turning the church around? He said that during his quiet time, he had just four words: preach, pray, love, and stay.
Those were the four things he was committed to. He wasn’t sure that it was going to work. He wasn’t sure that the church was going to be able to turn around. He wasn’t sure that the church would grow again. But he was committed to preaching the word, to leading the church, to praying and relying on God, to loving discipling relationships with one another, and he was committed to staying.
He and his wife, Connie, talked about buying cemetery plots, so to speak—just putting down roots and saying, “We’ll stay here as long as it takes.” And in the years that have followed, the Lord has remarkably blessed those ordinary means of grace. Just the commitment to preaching the word, to loving the saints, to praying, and to staying.
There were times when the church was growing so quickly that the elders were thinking about adding multiple services or even going multi-site. And yet as they thought about this, Dever was insistent, and he said, “Our job is not to make our influence as large as possible but to ensure that the gospel is faithfully stewarded for generations to come.”
And they thought the best way to do that was to raise up leaders within the church, train pastors, and send them out to plant and revitalize churches. He famously called this in a memo, “doing nothing and planting churches.”
He said he was thinking about Luther’s famous line from where he says “I did nothing. The word did the work.” That that was the vision. Let’s preach the gospel. Let’s see leaders raised up. Let’s plant churches. And let’s make sure that the gospel isn’t dependent on a single person or a single church in Washington, DC.
Over the past decades, dozens of churches have been planted. Pastors have been trained, equipped, and sent out. I think the vision has worked. Truly, the gospel isn’t dependent on a single person or a single church. Christ has promised that he will build his church. We can trust him to do it.
Caleb Morell is the author of A Light on the Hill: The Surprising Story of How a Local Church in the Nation’s Capital Influenced Evangelicalism.
Related Articles
How Not to Handle a Pastoral Succession
On September 17, 1944, a relatively unknown pastor named Kenneth Owen White arrived at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D. C. (later known as Capitol Hill Baptist Church), eager to prove himself.
The Story of God’s Faithfulness to Capitol Hill Baptist Church
Jesus’s promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matt. 16:18) was not given to any particular church but to the church universal.
Where to Learn to Become a Healthy Pastor
Formal theological training is important, but even more important than seminary would be simply to plant your life in a local church.
Podcast: The Surprising Impact of One Church in the Nation’s Capital (Caleb Morell)
Caleb Morell traces the story of Capitol Hill Baptist Church and how God sovereignly worked through history to both build his church and bring himself glory.
