Below is a list of my academic publications, which can also be accessed on the Publications tab:
Chauvet and Anglican Sacramentology, Journal of Anglican Studies, 2018
Dialogue or Proclamation? Communication Ethics and the Problem of Persuasion in Mission, Missiology: An International Review, 2017
Virtue Ethics and Church Planting: An Critical Assessment and Reevaluation of Church Planting Utilizing Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Missiology: An International Review, 2016
Welcome to my personal website. Please use the tabs above for links to all of my academic and popular writings, as well as more information about me.
In fact, duty seems to have disappeared from the discernment process altogether, both for those looking for a career and those who wish to serve in a church. We have the enormous fortune in our society to have a large degree of freedom in choosing a career, and many spend the majority of their 20s and 30s attempting to match career with god-given ability. This is all well and good, but what can easily be lost is a sense of obligation. Self-fulfillment is one component of work—we also work to glorify God, interact with God’s creation, provide food, clothing, and shelter for ourselves and our family, earn resources to give to those in need, strengthen our mental and physical capacities, and much more besides. The purpose of work is complex, and there are times where devotion to God requires the subordination of our perceived personal fulfillment for the sake of our obligations to our Lord. Our duty to God requires us to sacrifice ourselves, perhaps even sacrifice our personal vocational goals, for the sake of following God and serving others. This is a calling worth celebrating.
A brief treatise on labor, pastors, and complaining about work, published last year at The Gospel Coalition:
As a pastor who often hears other ministers teach and preach, I am disturbed by the number of times pastors allude to their jobs as being particularly difficult. Yes, we face many challenges—ministry may involve times of high emotional and spiritual duress—but I don’t think these difficulties merit special recognition with regard to other vocations. After all, being a pastor involves almost no manual labor, which makes it physically easier than most other occupations in history. It doesn’t require a 60- to 80-hour work week, unless you somehow equate longer working hours with more of the Holy Spirit’s presence. And although the emotional and spiritual challenges faced are difficult, teachers and social workers—to take just two examples—face similar or greater obstacles.
In many ways this issue reflects a broader trend in how Americans approach their vocations. We generally derive our value from what we do rather than who we are, so those who do more are more important than those who do less. To prove your worth in society, you must continually boast about the difficulty of your vocation. For pastors in America this trend is particularly ironic given the relative ease of the job compared to other parts of the world. I recently had dinner with one of our bishops from northern Nigeria who stated that the work of a pastor is hard, then proceeded to instruct us on how to minister to members whose churches had just been burned, and how to pray when you’re about to be executed.
I do not intend to denigrate the work of ministers, nor to whitewash over the real hardships faced by ministers. Ministry often requires you to get involved in the messiness and brokenness of life, and to labor in such situations in relative obscurity. However, I want to caution against such an overabundance of vocational teeth-gnashing, as it can create specific problems for local congregations.
First, it can help build a mystique around the pastoral office, erecting a barrier between clergy and laity. Laity grow up learning about the pastor’s difficulties and begin to believe that pastoral duties can only be performed by such highly trained and skilled artisans. This can work in a mutually reinforcing downward spiral. Laity do not think they can teach, preach, disciple, and counsel others, so they place all of this burden on the pastor, who then complains about the difficult job of masterfully performing each of these duties. One of the primary duties of a pastor is to help release gifts in the laity for building up the entire body of Christ. To do so a pastor must model various duties with simplicity.
Second, pastors need to be mindful of what they are implying about the men and women they serve when they complain about their jobs. No one appreciates feeling like a burden to others. So pastors who appear exhausted by their job may find a congregation less and less willing to bring forward valid cares and concerns.
Third, pastors who continually complain about the difficulty of their job set poor examples for how Christians ought to approach work as a whole. Vocational crises often result from a faulty theology of work. We elevate the quest to discover the perfectly fulfilling career above all other purposes of labor, such as fulfilling duty to family or accumulating resources to help expand Christ’s kingdom. Pastors who portray only the hardships of their jobs may tend to mirror or enhance the vocational anxiety in their parishioners.
The apostle Paul explains to Timothy that those who aspire to become overseers desire a noble task. May we as pastors handle this vocation with the upmost nobility, working hard in our daily tasks while modeling with dutiful and joyful obedience to the Lord the simplicity of the pastoral life.
A brief treatise on Roland Allen as the most important Anglican Theologian of the 20th Century from The Common Vision:
Roland Allen (1868-1947) is the most important Anglican theologian of the 20th Century. I make this assertion not only based on Allen’s enormous impact on missions theory and ecclesiology, but also because Allen’s life and writings were the bell cow for the revolution in 20th Century Anglicanism as a whole.
It is amazing to me that even to this day the majority of the West still does not acknowledge the shift in Global Anglicanism from the West to the Global South. We only have to look to the recent firestorm over the Church of England’s acceptance of women bishops: this was treated by the press, and more importantly, ecumenical partners, as the demarcation line between Anglicanism and other denominations. For many, as England goes, so goes Anglicanism. This is despite Nigeria having roughly 10 times as many practicing Anglicans as England.
Such lack of acknowledgement of the reality of Global Anglicanism is a validation of two of Allen’s principle themes: the need for indigenous, self-sustaining mission churches and the ways in which established churches tacitly dismiss such endeavors. These principle themes are evident in his appropriately titled The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes Which Hinder It (1927) and in his assertion that the churches often patronized foreign Christians through the distinction between missions and churches:
“The first and most striking difference between his (Paul’s) action and ours is that he founded ‘churches’ whilst we found ‘Missions’… The theory is that the Mission stands at first in a sort of paternal relationship to the native Christians: then it holds a coordinate position side by side with the native organization; finally it ought to disappear and leave the native Christians as a fully organized church. But the Mission is not the Church … The Mission represents a foreign power, and natives who work under it are servants of a foreign government. It is an evangelistic society, and the natives tend to leave it to do the evangelistic work which properly belongs to them. It is a model, and the natives learn simply to imitate it. It is a wealthy body, and the natives tend to live upon it, and expect it to supply all their needs. Finally, it becomes a rival, and the native Christians feel its presence as an annoyance, and they envy its powers; it becomes an incubus, and they groan under the weight of its domination. In the early stages it maintains a high standard of morality, and in all stages it ministers largely to the advancement of the native community by its educational and medical establishments; but it always keeps the native Christians in check, and its relations with them are difficult and full of perils (Missionary Methods, Chapter 8).”
The spontaneous expansion of the Church did indeed happen in sub-Sahara Africa, and it was accomplished in part due to the relatively quick handing over of church authority from overseas missionaries to indigenous ministers. For example, from 1890 to 2010, the Ugandan Anglican Church went from having virtually no members to 10 million adherents. This astronomical growth, common in other sub-Saharan Anglican Churches (Nigeria and Kenya in particular) was otherwise unprecedented in the history of Christianity. In addition, this remarkable growth paralleled a remarkable withdrawal of foreign missionaries as the primary church authority: Uganda had virtually no European clergy by the 1960s.
Allen’s direct influence on such expansion is difficult to quantify—he is best viewed as a part of a larger corpus of Anglican missionaries and missiologists (such as Henry Venn and Alfred Tucker) whose labors came to fruition most visibly in Africa. Allen’s writings stand as the most enduring representative voice of late 19th and early 20th century Anglican missions, missions that would radically change the face of Global Anglicanism well into the 21st century. The rest of the world is still slow to live in this new reality.
Rather than offer a summary of Allen’s thought, I simply encourage readers to take an afternoon or two to read Allen’s seminal works Missionary Methods and The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church. They are short, pointed treatises that will greatly impact your view of the church and of missions (they are also public domain and available for free online).
Rev. Dr. Michael Niebauer 