Read The Trellis and the Vine Online
Authors: Tony Payne,Colin Marshall
Tags: #ministry training, #church
• preach in a way that helps the congregation learn to read and speak about the Bible themselves; show how you arrived at your conclusions from the text
• tackle apologetic and pastoral issues that will be useful not only to those present, but also to others via the personal ministry of those present.
It’s not only the sermon that sets the agenda and starts to change congregational culture. In your church meetings, get members up the front to share about ministries they are involved in. Don’t just get the superstars or the success stories; provide examples for the congregation of people who are stepping out of their comfort zones and trying something new.
This also flows into what we pray for in our gatherings. Make the various personal ministries of congregation members a regular subject for corporate prayer.
We can also build a culture of training into the way people contribute to the gathering. Provide training and feedback for those who are participating—in music, Bible reading, praying, sharing a testimony, welcoming newcomers, and so on.
Step 2: Work closely with your elders or parish council
In building a disciple-making and training emphasis in your congregation, it’s obviously vital that the existing elders and leaders of the congregation are fully included in the thinking, planning and decision-making. Here’s an example of how one pastor went about it:
When introducing the Ministry Training Strategy into the Christian Reformed Churches of Australia (CRCA), we had to bear in mind that these churches are governed by a system of elders in each congregation. All decisions about the life and direction of the church are made by the elders that form the church council.
So when Colin Marshall invited me to join his Art of Ministry Training course [a forerunner of this book], I knew that I had to get my eldership team on board as well. I asked Colin for permission to photocopy the reading assignments for my elders. It became required reading before each church council meeting, and then we discussed the readings for the first half-hour. I did this throughout that year, so that by the time I finished the course, the elders had also done the readings.
Having completed the course, and being very keen to get into it, I asked the elders what they thought. They agreed it would be part of what we do as a church. What was important about how we processed it was that they were on the journey with me. They had time to assimilate all the new ideas. They had time to reflect and make it their own, so that when I asked them at the end of that year, “Shall we do it?”, they were ready to go.
It is so important to give your leaders the time to process stuff and come to terms with it and own it. I say this because my colleagues did not take the steps I took, and when they put it to their local church councils many found resistance to these ‘new ideas’. Several colleagues asked me to address their elders and I spent an evening in those churches workshopping the main concepts of ministry training. It was delightful to see the ‘light go on’ for some of the senior elders, who went on to encourage their minister to set up training in their church.
In the CRCA this processing by the elders needs to be an ongoing thing, as our elders each serve for a term of three years. I train all my new elders for six months. This training process, and the four workshops we run on what MTS is and how it works, has them keen about the training mindset by the time they are inducted as leaders of the church. Seeing young men coached in preaching, Bible study leaders trained, and an apprentice learning the skills of ministry has given the elders the sense that we are a training church; it is part of our DNA now. It’s all about developing a mindset: ‘this is how we do church’. It’s being faithful to ‘making disciples’ and ‘equipping the saints for ministry’. It’s what we need to do if we want pastors, evangelists and church leaders now and for the future.
Building some form of regular training and ‘ministry talk’ into the agenda of church council meetings is very useful. Over time, it cements the eldership team together as co-workers in the gospel, rather than as a council of regulators and accountants. Decisions are made through the prism of gospel growth.
Over time, we can also create the expectation that being an elder or parish councillor also means being engaged in some personal ministry of the word—visiting newcomers, or meeting one to one with others, or mentoring people with potential to be leaders in the future. The overall goal is to increase unity around the common task of gospel work.
Step 3: Start building a
new
team of co-workers
The principle is: do a deep work in the lives of a few.
This is your band of brothers and sisters who would die together for the sake of the gospel; those with whom you will share your life and ministry in the expectation that they will learn to evangelize, teach and train others.
Notice that it is a
new
team. Don’t just think about those who are already serving in ministries or on committees. Choose a mixture of current and future leaders that you would like to build the ministry around for the next five years.
Remember: you are not grooming people to fill gaps in your church program, but training co-workers around whom you will build ministry according to their particular gifts and opportunities. Some of these people will start new ventures in outreach or Christian growth—things you or they haven’t yet imagined or thought possible.
Training this team of co-workers can be done through one-to-one meetings, group meetings, or more often a mixture of both, and includes our now familiar mix of the three C’s (conviction, character and competence). See chapter 9 for more ideas about how to train a team of co-workers.
Step 4: Work out with your co-workers how disciple-making is going to grow in your context
So you are training a team of co-workers—but how is disciple-making going to grow from this base? How does it multiply? There is of course no single correct answer, because it depends so much on the gifts and circumstances of your co-workers, and the church or ministry context in which you’re working. Here is just one idea to get your juices flowing.
Your congregation may already have an existing Bible study group network that is functioning reasonably well, but the real challenge you have is in helping new people (whether Christian or non-Christian) to find their way into the congregational life and be discipled. So you work with your co-workers on a visiting and follow-up ministry aimed especially at newcomers. The aim is that every newcomer or visitor to the church is personally visited in their homes, and then followed up over the next several months, until such time as they are safely and happily involved in a small group (where the group leader takes responsibility for discipling them). Your co-workers are the front-line in getting this integration process happening. You take them with you to visit newcomers, and train them in how to assess where someone is up to in ‘gospel growth’. Each co-worker might personally take on two or three newcomers over a three-month period: to meet with each one several times, to evangelize them if they are not Christian, to read the Bible and pray with them, to explain the church’s vision and how to become involved, to have them for lunch and introduce them to other congregation members, to call them when they don’t come to church to see how they’re going, and to see them join a small group.
A wealth of resources are available to assist your co-workers in meeting with newcomers to minister to them one to one. There are Bible study tools for working through the gospel with someone, or for establishing someone in the basics of Christian faith and life, or for simply reading the Bible one to one with another person. There are also excellent resources for helping you to train co-workers in these ministry skills. (See appendix 2 for examples of these resources.)
Now, this idea will only work long term if the small groups are functioning well—and, in particular, if the group leaders have been trained to see themselves not merely as facilitators or organizers but also as front-line disciple-makers and ‘mini-pastors’ of the people in their group. Spending regular time with your group leaders to train them in this may be your next priority!
Step 5: Run some training programs
Although we have been emphasizing the need for training to be personal—as opposed to just running people through a three-week course—there are still lots of advantages in running structured or off-the-shelf training programs. They not only provide a level of formal structure that can improve the quality of the training, but they can also function as a first step in identifying people who are suitable for more responsibility and more intensive personal training.
For example, you could encourage all your small groups to do a training course on personal evangelism in their normal group time—such as
Six Steps to Talking about Jesus
or
Two Ways to Live: Know and share the gospel
. This will give all the group members, no matter where they are up to or what their level of gift is, a basic degree of skill and confidence in being able to talk about their faith. This is something every disciple should have! However, running a course like this will usually reveal people who are really good at evangelism, and who are ripe for further training and ministry in that area.
Again, see appendix 2 for a range of high-quality programs.
Step 6: Keep an eye out for ‘people worth watching’
As the number of people in training and ministry grows, keep an eye out for those with real potential. Invite one or two of them into a two-year ministry apprenticeship. (See
Passing the Baton
for all the details on how to set up and run a ministry apprenticeship.)
The long-term goal might be to see these apprentices do some further formal training, and then return to the congregation to work alongside you, or plant a new congregation with your support. Ministry of the kind we are talking about always generates more ministry. As more and more people are trained as disciple-makers, more and more people are contacted, evangelized and/or followed up. The amount of people work gradually mushrooms. And the need for pastors, leaders, overseers and elders grows accordingly. The number of paid staff in your congregation will thus need to grow, simply to cope with the growing number of people to be led and pastored.
P
LEASE REMEMBER: THIS IS
just one set of ideas about how to make a start. Your ministry and context will generate its own variations and challenges.
As you begin to introduce these concepts to your congregation, be careful to keep preaching the gospel of free forgiveness through Jesus, and the life of joyful obedience that flows from it. Keep holding high the death and resurrection of Christ, and keep praying for your people. The motivation to serve and to be trained will come from the gospel and from a deep work of the Spirit in people’s hearts. It won’t come from you going on and on about training, and harassing people until they finally sign up! It’s grace, not guilt. Don’t make ‘training’ the new test of true discipleship.
However, the possibilities for training and growth in most congregations are endless, and endlessly exciting. And you will need to think through for yourself the possibly radical changes that need to happen. To help you do so, and as a useful way to conclude, let’s try a little mental experiment.
Imagine this…
As we write, the first worrying signs of a swine-flu pandemic are making headlines around the world. Imagine that the pandemic swept through your part of the world, and that all public assemblies of more than three people were banned by the government for reasons of public health and safety. And let’s say that due to some catastrophic combination of local circumstances, this ban had to remain in place for 18 months.
How would your congregation of 120 members continue to function—with no regular church gatherings of any kind, and no home groups (except for groups of three)?
If you were the pastor, what would you do?
I guess you could send regular letters and emails to your people. You could make phone calls, and maybe even do a podcast. But how would the regular work of teaching and preaching and pastoring take place? How would the congregation be encouraged to persevere in love and good deeds, especially in such trying circumstances? And what about evangelism? How would new people be reached, contacted and followed up? There could be no men’s breakfasts, no coffee mornings, no evangelistic courses or outreach meetings. Nothing.
You could, of course, revert to the ancient practice of visiting your congregation house-to-house, and door-knocking in the local area to contact new people. But how as a pastor could you possibly meet with and teach all 120 adults in your congregation, let alone their children? Let alone door-knock the suburb? Let alone follow up the contacts that you made?