Prophets, Evangelists, and Shepherds

The Three Voices of Christian Cultural Engagement

My latest piece at American Reformer, reproduced in its entirety.

Christians need to have a strong voice in the public square, but different voices are needed for different moments. My aim here is to identify three different voices of Christian cultural engagement–prophet, evangelist, and shepherd–show the pitfalls and opportunities of each, and conclude with a call for greater unity on the Christian right.

For my purposes here, I’m assuming a faithful, Bible believing, conservative Christian audience. In other words, this is a friendly word to faithful leaders within my own circles.

These voices can be pictured on a continuum. At one end is the evangelist, who focuses on conversion. At the other end is the prophet, who focuses on God’s holy standard. In the middle is the shepherd, who focuses on the process that guides people from one end to the other.

Most Christian leaders should be “tri-vocal,” able to use all three voices as needed. But every leader has a preferred voice, and the danger comes when we elevate our own preference as the standard for everyone else.

The Prophet

By “prophet,” I don’t mean the OT office or a NT sign gift. I simply mean the type of leader God equips with unusual spiritual discernment who feels compelled to speak.

Prophets in scripture stood in God’s presence, received visions and divine knowledge, and spoke on God’s behalf. Jeremiah was asked twice by God, “what do you see?” (Jer 1:11, 13). God then told him, “I have put my words in your mouth” (1:9). Today, God’s still raises up men of sight and speech, men with clear-eyed zeal, who are unafraid to name sin and call for repentance. Their message sounds like this: “Here is God’s standard. You are falling short. Repent, or face judgment.” The prophet is the least common of the three voices.

The prophet’s gift is sight. Most people are blinded by the spirit of the age, but the prophet sees through it. Like the men of Issachar, he “understands the times” (1 Chron. 12:32). His clarity makes him disruptive, especially to institutions built on cooperation and compromise. Institutions love “nice guys,” and prophets aren’t nice. They’re blunt. They ruffle feathers, which is why they rarely thrive inside institutional power. They attract too many enemies.

Prophets are often lonely, maligned by elites, but supported by ordinary Christians who hunger for truth. They carry heavy burdens and face constant temptations. Some are tempted to despair, since they see what others refuse to see, making them feel hopeless and ignored. Others are impatient. They demand immediate obedience, forgetting that sanctification takes time. Still others become proud. Assuming those who disagree with him are cowards or corrupt, prophets can become stubborn and uncorrectable.

On bad days, the prophet’s burden curdles into bitterness. He forgets his own need for grace. He’s often right, seeing dangers years before others do, but they get angry when celebrity Christian leaders pivot without acknowledging their previous error. Prophets take no pleasure in this kind of vindication. He grows weary of being branded “the discernment guy,” as if his foresight were a flaw. Being early on the scene always feels lonely. And so he becomes a voice crying in the wilderness, angry that no one listens.

At his worst, the prophet burns bridges he should preserve. At his best, he shakes people awake to God’s holiness and steers them back to covenant faithfulness. The church desperately needs him, though few are willing to publicly acknowledge it.

The Evangelist

On the other end of the continuum is the evangelist. He’s chiefly concerned with reaching unbelievers, preaching the gospel, and calling them to turn from their sin and walk faithfully with God. The evangelist may know and live by the standard the prophet preaches, but his primary focus is not on getting people to meet the standard, but on getting people to acknowledge their failure to meet the standard so they would repent and receive the forgiveness offered in the gospel.

While the prophet is a controversial figure, the evangelist can be quite popular. That’s because the evangelist is driven by a different burden. The prophet’s burden is to get people to meet (or at least try to meet) the standard. The evangelist’s burden is to get people on the path towards the standard in the first place. He wants to reach the lost and save them from hell. His passion is to save as many as he can. Although he certainly wants people to grow in sanctification, his urgency to reach the lost focuses his attention more on getting people converted than on helping people grow. That’s not a criticism, that’s a blessing to the body of Christ. Not everyone has the same gift or calling.

The evangelist has his own temptations, however. I’ll name three. The first temptation is to soften sin. In his zeal to reach the lost, he might assume that people won’t accept Christ if they know what the Bible really teaches. So he sands down the rough edges of God’s word, focusing instead on the more pleasant aspects of the gospel. He preaches “accept Jesus into your heart” without ever confronting fornication, greed, or idolatry. But without repentance, there is no gospel. Thus, the evangelist often prefers a non-confrontational, “winsome” approach to evangelism, which is an Achilles’ heel. He fails to recognize that faithful preaching of the gospel includes confronting another man’s most precious sins.

Another temptation is to downgrade doctrine. He tends to see all of ministry from an evangelistic frame, thus prioritizing soul winning over every other aspect of Christian obedience. The worship services become “seeker” driven, sermons get watered down, songs are selected to appeal to unbelievers, leaving the sheep starved of spiritual nutrition. Thus, one’s passion for reaching lost souls can lead to a kind of spiritual Stockholm Syndrome, where the church and its message are held hostage by the fickle whims of the lost.

A third temptation is to become gullible. Discerning and denouncing evil makes the work of soul willing more difficult, so the evangelist dismisses such things as impediments to reaching people. He may even become so focused on soul winning that his own heart begins to sympathize with unbelievers in their unbelief, growing frustrated with more doctrinally minded Christians. He may even end up inverting the first and second Great Commandments–loving the lost at the expense of loving God. He justifies any compromise as a concern for mission, which is an easy sell for mission minded Christians. The evangelist may end up convincing himself that disobeying God is OK as long as it leads to more baptisms.

The evangelist’s heart for souls is essential to the church. Without him, the church would stagnate in self-righteousness and isolation. But without the weight and ballast of the prophet, his winsomeness can collapse into worldliness.

The Shepherd

The shepherd stands between the prophet and the evangelist. While the prophets and evangelists focus their message on the beginning and end points of the Christian life, the shepherd’s focus is on guiding people from conversion to maturity. He has the broadest range of the three, because he cannot afford to specialize too much if he wants to be effective. This also makes him the most common of the three voices. Although the “shephed” voice could include a number of vocations, for my purposes here, I’ve got pastors in view. Pastors especially must speak with all three voices—sometimes calling unbelievers to repent, sometimes rebuking mature believers, always helping the flock grow in grace.

Even though the shepherd’s voice has a broad range, every shepherd will nevertheless lean towards the evangelist or prophet. For example, a shepherd with an evangelistic bent will tailor his sermons to unbelievers and new believers. A shepherd with a prophetic bent will tailor his sermons to mature Christians. But his focus is moving people along the path to greater sanctification. He calls sin what it is, but he also points to the Spirit’s power to change. He says not only, “Here is the standard,” but also, “Here is Christ, and by His grace you can walk in it.”

Thus, he speaks to the process. He equips them with tools of growth. He shows them how to study the Bible, how to pray, how to share their faith, how to have a God-honoring marriage, how to raise their children in the Lord, and so on. Sometimes in his ministry, he will lean on the evangelist voice, preaching grace to weary souls, reminding them of the grace of Christ that empowers obedience. At other times, he will lean on the prophetic voice, forcefully denouncing moral evils and calling people to repent. For those who persist in sin, he may put them under church discipline.

In other words, he does not have the luxury of narrowly limiting himself to one or the other end of the continuum, for that would not serve his congregation well and would inevitably lead to a spiritually lopsided church. Prophetic-oriented churches may struggle to reach unbelievers. Evangelistically oriented churches may struggle to produce doctrinally mature disciples.

The shepherd’s main temptation is vagueness. Vagueness keeps him safe. If you speak in abstract, doctrinal ambiguities, no one knows what you’re talking about, though you sound smart saying it. If you just say pleasant, religious things, people will think you’re a smart, nice man. For many pastors, that’s good enough. Thus, shepherds may avoid the sharp edges of prophecy and evangelism, preferring the pleasant middle. The result is a spiritually bland church, without teeth or spine, neither evangelistically effective nor doctrinally mature. The pastor talks for 30 minutes each Sunday, says a few nice things, and shakes a few hands at the door on the way out. No feathers ruffled.

A skillful shepherd learns to stretch his voice. Sometimes he must thunder like a prophet. At other times, he must plead like an evangelist. But he cannot hide in the middle without starving his flock and hindering the church.

Concluding Exhortations

These three voices are not enemies but allies. The church doesn’t need fewer voices, the church needs a unified voice that covers the full range of Christian witness. Prophets must keep speaking hard truths, evangelists must keep reaching the lost, and shepherds must keep tending the flock. But each must learn to appreciate the others. Each serves a different need, and the church suffers when one is elevated at the expense of the others. Paul captures this balance in 1 Thessalonians 5:14: “Admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all.” That’s prophetic, evangelistic, and shepherding work all in one verse.

Put differently, Christian leaders often elevate their preferred voice for public discourse as the singular approach to cultural engagement, while denouncing others whose public voice is different from their own. In other words, it’s easy to judge and condemn others as unfaithful when they simply have a different calling and gifting.

The hardest part for unity on the right is what to do with the prophets. Evangelists and shepherds usually coexist peacefully, but prophets wield the sharpest blade. They name names. They disrupt. And yet, in an age of compromise and corruption, their voice is more necessary than ever.

Evangelists and shepherds must resist the reflex to dismiss prophets as un-Christlike simply because their tone is sharp. Sometimes discomfort is the point. Meanwhile, prophets must learn to use discretion, learning when to wield the serrated edge and when to sheathe it. Zeal without wisdom can burn down what God wants to build up.

So my counsel is simple: don’t judge other voices by your own preference. I lean into the prophetic voice, so I’ve had to learn to appreciate the evangelist’s gentleness and the shepherd’s patience. I still critique the “winsome” movement, but my critique is not against gentleness—it’s against making winsomeness into a dogmatic, one-size-fits-all rule for every situation.

Remember, the prophet’s burden is sight. He sees things before others do, and he’s constantly gauging the wisdom of how much to declare what he sees. I assure you, I know many men like this, men with extraordinary skills of discernment, and they are heavily burdened by the wickedness they see. They have their faults, as we all do. Sometimes they are overly harsh in their assessments. Sometimes they just get it wrong. But for most of the men I know, they are driven by zeal for God.

God raises different voices for different moments. If the prophet offends you, pray for him, especially his wife and children. Don’t tone-police him into silence. God may be using his hard words to rattle dead consciences. Let him cook. My personal policy is simply this: “I wouldn’t say it that way, but it needed to be said, and I’m glad he’s saying it.” Then I trust God and let it go.

Likewise, if the evangelist seems too soft, thank God for his zeal for the lost. If the shepherd seems too patient, remember sanctification takes time. God raises up different gifts and different voices for different circumstances.

We’re living in times of great cultural change and spiritual warfare. It seems to me that we are standing on the precipice of a potential awakening in America. God seems to be stirring something, but it’s too soon to know exactly what God is up to. Regardless, more than ever, we need the prophet’s fire, the evangelist’s urgency, and the shepherd’s steadiness. Only then will we have a movement that both stands firm and moves forward.