Training leaders for the future

TROWEL & SWORD

Rev. Bill Bosker

“I know of an Anglican minister who every evening went down to a nearby railway cutting to watch the train go through”. So writes Gilbert Cann in his book “Liberating Leadership”.¹ “At first the people didn’t mind. But after a few months some began to talk. So one of the vestry men went to him and said, ‘Excuse me, Reverend, we don’t mind you being interested in trains, but getting on your bike every night and riding down the main street to watch the train go through is just a little odd. The people who see you coming and going are beginning to talk. Why do you do it?’ At first he wouldn’t tell them, but under pressure he relented. He said, ‘I go to watch that train every night because it’s the only thing in this whole parish that doesn’t need to be pushed!’ Every minister and every leader knows what that means!”

The gospel of Jesus Christ is going to reach the ends of the earth. God’s “intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to His eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Ephesians 3:10-11). I don’t think our readers need to be convinced that the local church is God’s instrument to reach the world for Christ. But we do need to be reminded that this is God’s design, because we keep getting in the road of God’s work and lose our way.

I have been giving some thought to training people to lead and serve the Lord in our congregations. My perspective is as a member of a local church and also as a pastor of a local church.

As pastors we can often identify with Moses when he felt somewhat overwhelmed by the task. No wonder Moses exclaimed “I wish that all the LORD’s people were prophets and that the LORD would put His Spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29). Why is it that we have to keep looking for leaders to help in all sorts of ministry areas? We could do so much more for the Lord with more elders, deacons, pastoral workers, growth group leaders, children’s and youth ministry workers.

It seems as though the Lord of the church already planned for this problem when He gave the Great Commission to make disciples (Matthew 28:18-20). Our Lord envisaged His followers to keep making disciples who in turn keep making disciples. When the apostle Paul instructs the churches, he reminds them that a leadership task is to prepare God’s people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up (Ephesians 4:12). Paul shows us what it looks like in practice when he took Timothy aside, trained him for leadership in the churches and gave him the instruction “And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Timothy 2:2).

The training and equipping of believers is normal and necessary for a local healthy Christian church. Nobody will argue with that. But is that what we see in our own local churches?

When I look back at the congregations where I have been a member, there hasn’t always been an intentional training of leaders. Yes there were people who were servant-hearted and put up their hands to serve in various capacities. We were given tasks, a bit of encouragement, maybe some resources and did the best we could for as long as we could. Then when we couldn’t do that task any longer, we stopped and the church leadership looked for more willing volunteers to take our place.

Now that model works while you have enough people to volunteer, but it’s not very forward looking. I don’t think it’s all that obedient to God’s Word nor does it follow in the pattern given to us in the New Testament.

Here are a couple of problems as I see them:

Pastors like their territory and their status. Pastors have been called to lead their congregations and they take their calling seriously. They have been theologically trained and want to guard the purity of the faith. Though pastors lead alongside the elders, their sessions or church councils often defer to the pastor’s wisdom and experience. Pastors are often the “bottlenecks” to training others, so if they can’t train enough leaders it doesn’t happen. Pastors don’t want to give another person teaching and leading responsibilities without personally having trained them. While that motive is reasonable and understandable it has the effect of making the pastor a “bottleneck”.

Congregations are happy to have their pastors do the bulk of the work in leading, teaching and pastoring. After all that’s what we pay them for, isn’t it? This is religious consumerism and doesn’t recognize the body of believers as Holy Spirit equipped people with a variety of gifts for speaking God’s word or serving in the strength God supplies (1 Peter 4:10-11).

When reading the Form for Ordination for one of our pastors in a recent church meeting, what stood out was the broad and necessary tasks of preaching the Word, nurturing believers, instructing youth, teaching members to be faithful witnesses, overseeing public prayer, administering the sacraments, exercising discipline, and visiting members to comfort, strengthen and encourage them in Christ. What was noticeably missing in the Form was any reference to pastors and elders training leaders in various ministry areas. Perhaps the Form reflects an era when most churches had one pastor, and that’s still largely the case today.

When discussing leadership and leadership training in our churches today, you often hear people say that the pastor or pastors are the leaders. Others say the pastor and the elders are the leadership team. Still others say that a focus on leadership is buying into a business model and the church is not a business.

Pastors who recognize the need to train leaders say they don’t have the time to train leaders because they are busy fulfilling all the duties of ministry. I understand that thinking because that was once the model I was operating with.

So how can we get out of this bind? One clear answer is to raise more leaders who can work and serve together as a team. The acronym TEAM spells “Together Each Achieves More”. There’s a synergy in working and serving together that Solomon wisely observed in Ecclesiastes 4:9&12 “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work. Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”

How can we train, equip and support more leaders in each local church? We need to think strategically about how we train and multiply our efforts. We need to empower and release people into the task with supervision, encouragement and accountability.

Start with small steps and watch ministry blossom. Consider a one-to-one ministry where same gender people meet regularly to read the Bible, pray, build a relationship and encourage each other. This is a basic form of discipleship and leadership training and it relies on the Word of God and prayer to be the tools the Holy Spirit uses for growth. Get younger and older adults doing this together right across the congregation and you have a training engine for growth that’s not fancy but it’s free. Arrange for some larger group meetings a couple of times a year where you share experiences, give resources, pray together and plan your next meeting. Leaders will emerge from this ministry as they love God’s Word and love people.

From this group of emerging leaders you can start to give them more responsibility in, for example, a growth group, after some initial training and resourcing. Once people have been trained to lead a group, it would be good to take some of these leaders and ask them to train others in leading a group. This gives you a training pathway where leaders are training leaders in their area of newly gained competency. Once you have this culture of training and equipping you will find people who are self-starters who can then help write Bible studies and give Bible talks. These people are equipped to take on leadership roles in children’s and youth ministry, pastoral care, evangelism, or serve as elders or deacons. Some will have the gifting and skills to give a Bible message to various groups and eventually share in a supervised word ministry to the whole congregation.

These are small, intentional and progressive steps, achievable in any sized congregation where there’s a will to train, equip and support gospel leaders. In this way pastors can build a ministry team to share the work, encourage each other and experience the synergy of serving the Lord together.

There is great joy in seeing people you have helped train and equip, serving and ministering in the congregation, and going from strength to strength. Even more so when they do it better than you could.

It is with this spiritual and training environment in mind that our CRCA congregations seek to embrace the Third of our Four-Fold Tasks, namely “To multiply the number of well-trained persons (ordained, non-ordained, full time, part time, voluntary) lovingly dedicated to the creation and development of such fellowships and congregations by proclaiming the gospel”. This is also the thinking behind the design of TASK 3 prepared by the Board and Faculty of the Reformed Theological College (RTC). While it is proposed as an alternate pathway to the ordained ministry of the Word, it has the advantage of also providing quality training and assessment with a local church-based theological education in partnership with the resources of the RTC. Even doing part of the course, or selecting various units, is going to equip people for various areas of ministry.

Can you imagine what the future might look like? A body of believers, prepared as God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. In all things growing up into Him, who is the Head, that is, Christ. From Him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work (Ephesians 4:12-13,15-16). That’s what I’d like to see. By God’s grace with Christ as Builder and the Holy Spirit as Equipper we can help make the future a reality.

Footnote:

1 Gilbert Cann Liberating Leadership Classic Press, 1998 p.60

For Discussion & Action:

1. Have you thought about the benefits of having a one-to-one relationship with a same gender person to meet regularly for one hour to read the Bible, pray, build a relationship and mutually encourage each other? What’s stopping you from starting soon?

2. There are lots of home improvement shows, backyard blitzs and healthy eating programs. Are you prepared to put in some disciplined energy and training into growing yourself as a better-equipped disciple of Christ?

3. Encourage your pastor, elder or growth group leader by saying you would like to be mentored and equipped to take a leadership role or share leadership with them. Ask them what you can do to assist them. Be prepared to see them shocked before they give you an answer!

4. Consider how Jesus entrusted the establishment and building of His Church to a few men. How did Jesus prepare them and what instructions did he give them? What leadership and training patterns can you discern from Jesus’ instructions to the seventy-two in Matthew 10:1-24?

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