Peter Witkowski Discipleship

Hope For the Sideline Christian

Buried deep inside the 70-verse list of returned exiles in Ezra 2 resides the story of a clerical error any reader who has spent the day at the DMV can readily identify with and benefit from.

Desiring be a part of God’s supernatural work, the sons of Barzillai travel to Jerusalem to serve as priests in the new temple. But before they can pass go, the Jewish state presses pause on their application because of an administrative error. Ezra 2:62 reports, “These sought their registration among those enrolled in the genealogies, but they were not found there, and so they were excluded from the priesthood as unclean.” Though this providential clerical error undoubtedly discouraged the sons of Barillai, it also conveys a beautiful truth that promises to encourage all Christians: namely, that Christians can glorify God irrespective of where and how they serve in God’s kingdom.

When God Redirects

While the passage unquestionably speaks to a congregation’s need to guard the offices of the church from being corrupted by unqualified men as 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 affirm, it also speaks to those members who can no longer serve prominently in their local church. Though they desire to oversee a Sunday school class, disciple new mom, or serve as the deacon over facilities, they awake one day only to discover that God’s divine providence has put an end to their service. For some, old age and failing health rob them of the strength needed to keep teaching. For others, the arrival of their first child redirects their discipleship time to diapers and sleep schedules. For others, caring for a loved one battling cancer consumes all the energy that would have gone toward changing the shut-in’s air filters and light bulbs. Like the sons of Barzillai, Christians can find themselves barred from ministry. They have not openly violated God’s law and offered unholy sacrifices as the faithless priests had done in Leviticus 10. Rather, God’s providence which surpass human understanding had prevented their service.   

Always for Glory

When God directs Christians out of public ministry, they can be tempted to complain about and disparage their new setting. Like the saints in Ezra 3:13 who mourned the construction of the second temple because they feared it would not be as physically glorious as the first temple, today’s sidelined Christians can be tempted to fear that their new season of less or different activity will bring God less glory than previous years of service.

Thankfully, the opposite is true. The believer’s ability to glorify God is not tied to his or her station in church but to being part of God’s people. The Lord stirred and directed the sons of Barzillai just as much as he stirred Jeshua and Zerubbabel who played a prominent part in the temple’s reconstruction. God called all of them to Jerusalem and assigned all of them to the place that he providentially knew would be best for them and his kingdom. What brought God glory was not the size or prominence of an exile’s post but his faithfulness in that post. God is just as glorified in the faithful prayers of the dear saint in her nursing home bed as he is by the prayers of elder standing behind the pulpit.

Consequently, when God directs men and women out of more prominent ministry roles, he is not sidelining them or putting them out to pasture. He is repurposing them. P.B. Powers rightfully offered the following encouragement to the chronically ill: “Sick man, you have a place of usefulness for God, not the old place, but his place – the place which is best in the eyes of the all-wise one (39).” For some, that service may take the form of prayer. For others, that may take the form of writing encouraging notes and emails. For others, that may take the form of listening to and glorifying God through reading, listening to sermons, and singing hymns.

Lloyd-Jones Agrees

At the end of his life, the famed twentieth-century preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones found himself sidelined from the pulpit because of his ongoing battle with cancer. Though many of his contemporaries assumed that Lloyd-Jones would be distraught over this change, Lloyd-Jones’ friend Ian Murray reported the opposite to be true. Lloyd-Jones told Murray, “Now I can pray for you men…People say to me it must be very trying for you not to be able to preach – No! Not at all! I was not living upon preaching.” In other words, Lloyd-Jones had no reason to be discouraged for God was just as glorified by Lloyd-Jones’ public preaching to thousands as he was in Lloyd-Jones’ private praying for tens and hundreds. In this sense, no believer can be truly sidelined from ministry for the Lord has designed every act of worship in every setting to glorify him. As Paul notes in Philippians 1:21, “To live is Christ.”

Final Thoughts

In short, all stations in life and the corresponding ministry are designed to glorify God. The eight-year-old bouncing through kids ministry by faith, the forty-year-old preaching to jam-packed auditoriums by faith, and as an eighty-year-old shuffling between chairs by faith can and do glorify God. To quote Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”

Moreover, God will always direct us to the place that is best for our soul and that will most glorify him even if he must move us about through a clerical error or cancer. Even in those moments, Christians can rest assured that God is working all things together for their good.

Dear believer, if you feel sidelined, take heart. You have not been sidelined but redeployed for the glory of God. 

Peter Witkowski Ecclesiology

How Skipping Church Helped My Soul

My favorite Sunday during my blog’s summer break was ironically enough the Sunday I skipped church.

In making this statement, I am not offering cover to those who have intentionally and sinfully neglected the gathering of their local church to play golf, to take in a baseball game, or to sleep in a little more. As I have written elsewhere, God’s plan for our spiritual growth, life, and vitality flows through and is facilitated by the local church. One can no more expect to grow in their faith apart from church than a tree can grow apart from its roots. Our goal should be forever and always to be in church.

But in the hours leading up to this particular Sunday, my body had gone down with a fever and its accompanying aches and pains. Despite my best efforts to kick the illness and to think positive thoughts, the illness remained entrenched and I had to surrender the pulpit and the management of the church to my fellow elders.

Such a surrender proved difficult for me because I too am tempted to find my value and worth in what I do at church. After my family left for church that Sunday, I spent the next hour or so taking an unscientific poll of my body’s abilities, trying to discern whether I had wimped out. Was I really that sick? Eventually, the thermometer would leave little doubt about that fact. But at that moment I did not conclusively know, though both my dear wife and my fellow elders had told me to “Stay home.” Still, I wanted to be at church, supposing myself to be essential to my congregation’s well-being. You can’t have church without the senior pastor who spent all week on sermon prep!

But as I watched my church’s worship service unfold via the church’s livestream, I knew my fellow elders and bride had been right. Turns out, you can have church without the senior pastor. In my absence, my fellow church members faithfully praised the Lord through song, lifted up their hearts to the Lord through prayer, and preached the good news of the gospel.

That Sunday proved to be my favorite because it reminded me afresh that the Lord (and not Peter) builds, sustains, and grows his church. I saw firsthand that the Lord cares far more for the saints of my church than I ever will and that while my church loves me it can exist without me. Though I will have moments of weakness, the Lord will never grow sick or old or dotty. As long as the Lord is at work in my church, I will have every reason to rejoice even when I am not there. To God be the glory!  

Peter Witkowski SBC

One Down, One To Go: What 2026 SBC Annual Meeting Got Right and What Comes Next

I left the Southern Baptist Convention’s 2026 Annual Meeting grateful for my fellow messengers’ commitment to the Scriptures.

The Truth and Unity Amendment: What it Means

A touch under 75% of my fellow messengers voted to adopt Dr. Albert Mohler’s Truth and Unity Amendment to the SBC constitution. The vote reaffirms the SBC’s commitment to the historical Baptist and (more importantly) biblical truth that only qualified men can serve as pastors/elders/overseers of a local SBC church.

Though some national media outlets and quite a few social media personalities have portrayed the Truth and Unity Amendment as an assault upon the dignity of womanhood and/or a violation of local church autonomy, the amendment neither restricts women from serving their local churches nor requires churches to fire their women pastors. Mohler’s amendment speaks only to how women interact with the office of pastor/elder/overseer. It does not address, much less condemn, the woman teaching a ladies’ Bible study, the woman organizing meals for the new mom, or the woman sharing the gospel with her neighbor like the women of old did that first Easter Sunday. As the companion resolution to the Mohler amendment on the office and function of a pastor/elder/overseer makes clear, Southern Baptists continue to “express gratitude for the indispensable service, discipleship, evangelism, missions work, and ministry contributions of women throughout Southern Baptist life and encourage churches to continue affirming and deploying women in biblically faithful ways.”

In declaring “that the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,” the messengers also have not limited who a local church can hire. Rather, in passing the Truth and Unity Amendment, the messengers have sought to limit who can cooperate or partner with the SBC. Even if the amendment passes again and is enshrined in the SBC constitution at the 2027 Annual Meeting, Baptist churches can still have women pastors/elders/overseers in their pulpits on Sunday if they so choose. The messengers are powerless to remove said women pastors. The Mohler Amendment cannot proscribe whom the church hires. But the amendment will prohibit those churches that employ women pastors/elders/overseers from cooperating with or being part of the SBC. Just like our political parties and countless civic institutions, the SBC reserves the right to set its boundaries of cooperation. And it has historically attempted to build those boundaries around the clear teaching of Scripture as recounted in the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.

I believe that the Truth and Unity Amendment helps to strengthen these biblical boundaries of cooperation. The amendment reaffirms the teaching of the apostle Paul, who proclaimed that only qualified men (“the husband of one wife” – Ti 1:6; 1 Tim. 3:2) could serve as pastors/elders/overseers and who also proclaimed that he did “not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet” (1 Tim. 2:12). I am thankful that the majority of the messengers at the 2026 Annual Meeting stood with the apostle Paul….stood with the teaching of Scripture.

Come to Indy

But the battle is not yet won. For Mohler’s amendment to be incorporated into the SBC constitution, a supermajority (67%) of the messengers must pass it a second time at the 2027 Annual Meeting. I encourage all like-minded Southern Baptists to be at the 2027 Annual Meeting in Indianapolis. Let’s pass the Truth and Unity Amendment one more time and thereby put an end to this generation’s debate over women pastors in the SBC.

Resolutions Worth Reading

The messengers also voted to adopt a slate of resolutions that addressed everything from political violence and antisemitism to bivocational pastors and the use of technology in the local church from a biblical perspective. The adopted resolutions reaffirmed messengers’ “continued opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide in all its forms, including practices now described as ‘“medical aid in dying”’ and ‘“death with dignity;”’; their condemnation of “political violence in all its forms, including assassinations, attempted assassinations, terrorism, rioting, mob intimidation, vandalism, threats, and coercion as morally evil, contrary to the sanctity of human life, destructive of ordered liberty, eroding equal protection and the rule of law, and incompatible with the way of Christ”; and reaffirmed their belief that “a local church is the embodied assembly of baptized believers, gathered for his glory and gifted for service, for the good of one another, and for the advance of the gospel, and is not merely a virtual or technological experience,” nor can any digital form, by itself, constitute a New Testament church (Romans 12:3–13; 1 Corinthians 12). Though these resolutions prove non-binding, they do not prove inconsequential. The resolutions convey the opinions of the messengers and thereby can influence the practices of the SBC’s entities (IMB, NAMB, etc.) and shape the broader SBC culture. I encourage you to give them a read.

An Unending Work

Though I took great joy in most of my fellow messengers’ actions, I still recognize that the SBC remains an imperfect people (after all, I am one of them). A few messengers explored a rabbit trail about future convention sites with far too much zeal, others attempted (thankfully without success) to inject some conspiracy-theory language into the resolution on antisemitism, and still others took to the microphone for political causes incidental to the convention’s missional and educational purposes. But in each instance, the broader body of messengers graciously restrained these and other less-than-optimal impulses that arose. The body of Christ did its work.

The same could be said of the messengers’ choice of officers. Though all the men put forward would have been faithful leaders, the messengers chose the better of their good options. For example, I think Dr. Willy Rice will make an excellent SBC president and look forward to seeing him bring his principles of renewal and reformation to bear on our convention.

Final Thoughts

As Dr. Mohler often says, “Southern Baptists eventually get things right.” This year, Dr. Mohler’s maxim came true. The messengers got things right.

My hope and prayer is that the spirit of Christian charity and biblical fidelity that defined the 2026 Annual Meeting will once again dominate the 2027 Annual Meeting.