ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN PASTORAL THEOLOGY & PRACTICE LPTP-4 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 www.captionfirst.com *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> NICK: Thanks, Professor Senkbeil. Your response helps me understand who a pastor is, Now I'd like to know more about what he does. What are the duties of a minister of the church? >> PROF. SENKBEIL: Great, Nick. Of course actually the great commission in Matthew 28 gives to us a real focus of the duties of a minister of the church. If you remember, our Lord Jesus there giving to his church the great commission to preach the Gospel in all the world to make disciples of all nations. How? By baptizing and by teaching. Baptizing them, he said, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have command you. Now, of course, that's a tall order as well. Everything that Jesus commanded, that is everything that he set forth includes a lot of things. So Christian doctrine teaching of that Gospel is really at the heart and center of what it is that a pastor does. He first baptizes into the death and resurrection of Jesus. And then all those that are baptized into the faith he feeds and nourishes with the means that Christ has given to his church, namely his Gospel and his sacraments. Also, if we look at our Lutheran Confessions, in the 5th article of the Augsburg Confession, we find that the article of justification, that is, the central article of the faith by which God for Christ's sake declares all the world a justified, that is, without sin, he bestows upon them the very righteousness of Jesus' son in that one act of acquittal by which Jesus died for the sins of the world. He was first put to death for our offenses and then raised again for our justification. So we really understand the office of the ministry like all the other articles of the faith around that one central article, justification by grace for Christ's sake. So it is then that in the 5th article of the Augsburg Confession we read that, in order to obtain such faith, that is a justifying faith in Jesus, God has instituted the office of the ministry; that is, he has provided the teaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments. Through these as through means, he gives the Holy Spirit who works faith when and where he pleases him in those that hear the Gospel. And, really, if you think about these things, all the duties of the office of the ministry revolve around these sacred channels, these means of grace, the vehicles by which God the Holy Spirit has promised to work, that people everywhere might hear the good news of the Gospel and believing it find forgiveness and life in Jesus' name, that they might be baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus, that they might be fed with the very body and blood that Jesus gave for the sins of the whole world. So then, to cut to the chase, the duties of the office of the public ministry are to teach and to preach the Gospel, to baptize and to distribute the sacrament of the altar. These means of grace are at the heart of the core of what it means to be a pastor in Christ's church. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***