Good and useful men

I got this this morning from the Founders Ministries Blog (www.founders.org/blog) and it was very encouraging to me so I wanted to share it with you.

For the full blog entry, go to http://www.founders.org/blog/2007/09/in-praise-of-bivocational-pastors.htmlIn his Lectures on the History of Preaching (50-51), John Broadus quotes a passage from John Chrysostom “in which he bestows generous and exuberant eulogy on the country preachers around Antioch” in the late 4th century. From his Homilies on the Statutes (XIX), Broadus quotes the following:

You might see each of them now yoking oxen to the plow, and cutting a deep furrow in the ground, at another time with their word cleaning out sins from men’s souls. They are not ashamed of work, but ashamed of idleness, knowing that idleness is a teacher of all wickedness. And while the philosophers walk about with conspicuous cloak and staff and beard, these plain men are far truer philosophers, for they teach immortality and judgment to come, and conform all their life to these hopes, being instructed by the divine writings.

Such “good and useful men,” Broadus notes, “have abounded…in every period, country and persuasion in which Christianity was making any real and rapid progress.”

~ by synopsisblog on September 25, 2007.