Breadth from Depth:
William Still was a gifted pastor in the United Kingdom. He has impacted the lives of great preachers in our day like Sinclair Ferguson, Ian Hamilton, and Phil Ryken. This is a quote from his book
The Work of the Pastor. In our churches we need to labor for both breadth and depth. But as he asserts, the breadth, often and necessarily flows from the depth:
Some of the hardest nuts to crack in the Christian world are those who have been so busy evangelizing that they have never allowed the Word to be turned upon them, and who therefore regard the Bible as a mere book of Gospel texts to hurl at others, or at least to bait them with. The sad decline in the quality of Christian life and witness in our country (United Kingdom) is largely due to the fact that the evangelical church has for several generations been a huge nursery, not only of infant babes but, much worse, grown-up babes…If our use and direction of the power and gifts of the Spirit tend in practice towards a short-sighted tactic rather than to long-term strategy, then we shall precipitate a problem that we may not have the means to solve. As a result the whole school of Christ will become one vast kindergarten, overflowing the classrooms. Nor will there be any teachers for them, because all the should-be teachers are out driving more and more infants to school. And when the teacher is away, the children play! Here then we have a school overrun, almost infested with infants, and all the monitors, guardians and teachers are out looking for more!…It is doubtless, a fine thing to be evangelistic: who is not, who deals faithfully with the Word? But it is one thing to gain converts, another to produce evangelists, missionaries, ministers—not to speak of powerful witnesses for Christ in innumerable lay fields. The church’s task is not only to gain converts, but so to build them up that they are ‘thrustable out.’
