The Trellis and the Vine (19 page)

• We pray earnestly and often for our people—that God would melt their hearts.

• We teach and apply God’s word to them—from the pulpit, in smaller groups and one to one. One way to do this would be to take the material from the opening chapters of this book—especially chapters 1-6—and work through it with a key bunch of people. You might just steal the ideas and turn it into Bible studies or sermons (we don’t mind!). Or you might actually work through the book one chapter at a time, with discussion and Bible study.

• We give people a taste for serving others by taking them with us as we do different things in ministry. Take someone visiting or door-knocking with you, or let them sit in as you do a Bible study with a new Christian.

• We patiently persevere. All this often takes time, depending on how mature and godly your people already are.

Q7. Why is ‘training’ needed alongside faithful preaching and pastoral ministry?

There is a very right instinct that says that if we prayerfully and faithfully preach the word, then people’s hearts will be changed and they will want to give themselves to disciple-making and the service of others. So why do we need this separate thing called ‘training’?

The answer is that ‘training’—as we have defined it—is not really a separate thing, but simply the outworking of prayerful proclamation as it connects with individual people. Training is
not
just about imparting certain skills. It’s a ministry of the word leading to growth in conviction, character and competence. The real power of training is not in the method or the strategy, but in the way God’s word and Spirit work in people’s lives.

Another way of putting it is that ‘training’ is the exercise of pastoral ministry before the crisis. It’s how you work with each one of your people for their growth and maturity when you aren’t nurturing and caring for them in their grief, sickness and family problems.

The ‘training’ mind-shift also adds a dimension to how well people hear and learn from your teaching. If the constant culture of your church is that every Christian is not just a hearer but also a speaker, then it changes the way they listen. There’s nothing like having to explain the gospel to motivate you to actually learn what the gospel is.

Q8. What about the importance of Christian community? Is all this ‘training’ talk individualistic?

If the goal is to train disciple-making disciples of Jesus, then the goal is to train people who love one another as Christ our Lord commanded. In our experience, churches that have a strong culture of training (as we’ve defined it) end up building deep, honest, loving communities of Christ. The people in these communities no longer see themselves as consumers or spectators, but as servants wanting to see others grow.

Training may start small. It may focus on individual people, and on what each person needs in order to grow, but the result is an outbreak of love.

What also tends to happen is that as people ‘get’ the vision of ministry and training, and start reaching out and developing new ministries around their particular gifts and circumstances, new little fellowships of God’s people develop, either as subgroups within congregations, or as new church-plants.

Q9. How do small groups fit into your concept of training?

In many places today, a small-group network is one of the key ‘trellises’ of church life—a structure that allows Christians to get together to encourage each other over the Bible, and to pray for each other.

However, some pastors are rightly sceptical about the value of small groups. If small groups are not led and run well, they can easily become ineffective or even dangerous structures where people gather to share their ignorance, and where there is no genuine pastoral oversight.

Without training
, delegation of pastoral ministry and responsibility to a small-group structure is an abdication of pastoral stewardship. Small groups can be very effective vehicles for ministry, but only if we train leaders to have a sound grasp of doctrine, a godly character, and the ability to understand and teach the Bible through group discussion.

Because many churches do not adequately train their people, and thus do not grow the kind of vine-workers who can lead effective small groups, leadership and teaching tends to be centralized around the ordained pastor/s and perhaps a few key lay elders. This guards the gospel, but it doesn’t multiply the ministry.

Small groups can be a very useful structure
in which
to train people. If the group leader sees himself or herself not as a facilitator or chairperson but as a
trainer
, it completely changes the goals and dynamics of the group. The group leader’s goal becomes the same as the goal for all ministry—not just to make disciples, but to make disciple-making disciples.

Q10. How does your approach to ministry and growth fit in with church-planting? Isn’t the planting of new congregations a key strategy in the growth of the gospel?

In many respects, the ‘trellis and vine’ metaphor helps us to understand and clarify what’s so useful and important about church-planting. It also alerts us to some dangers.

Metaphorically, we might say that if we have a trellis with a flourishing vine on one side of our yard, and we’d like to see it grow on the other side of the yard, we could take two approaches. We could water and prune and work on the vine, while also maintaining and expanding the trellis, so that eventually the vine grows all the way across the back fence to the other side of the yard. A mega-vine, you might say. Or we could construct a new trellis on the other side of the yard, take a cutting from the original vine, and start again.

Both approaches are legitimate, and the choice between them will depend on numerous factors (not least the skill of the leadership to be able to grow and hold together a large congregation). However, many churches have found that planting new congregations in new contexts, locations and times, or with new emphases and styles, has really helped with vine growth. Growing a ‘vine’ from 30 or 40 members to 120 is often easier, especially in terms of the trellis complications, than growing from 120 to 200.

But here’s the thing. Planting a new trellis and vine somewhere won’t facilitate growth if the vine is not healthy to begin with. The mere act of transplantation won’t create gospel growth—that is, the evangelizing, converting and growing of disciple-making disciples of Jesus Christ. But if that sort of gospel growth
is
happening, and you plant some of those people somewhere else, the chances are that they will grow and multiply there as well with renewed enthusiasm.

In other words, the excitement over church-planting can sometimes lead people to think that the mere fact of putting up a new trellis somewhere will result in a new, healthy, growing vine. But the key thing about the church-plant is not the quality or location of the trellis, but the quality of the people—the vine-workers—who are starting the new work. Once again, it comes back to how well we are training our people to be disciple-makers.

For many, the activity of church-planting implies erecting a trellis with familiar, recognizable features: a building, an ordained minister, a constitution, and so on. But if we understand that vine work is the key thing, then we can be flexible about the particular kind of trellis needed to plant a new vine in this new location. For example, we may start with a group of Christians meeting in a lounge room without an ordained minister.

Whatever approach we take, training vine-workers is critical. We need to build teams of disciples engaged in Spirit-backed word ministry. We need to build it around the people, not the structures.

Q11. Is your approach to ministry anti-big-church? Are you saying that the ‘ideal’ church is a pastor-trainer with 120 people?

Absolutely not. The principles of ministry we are outlining are (we argue) the Bible’s principles for making disciples of all nations. They apply as much to the small Bible study group of eight people as they do to the mega-church of 2000. That is, the goal of all ministry is to see people become godly, mature disciples of Christ, who in imitation of their Lord are longing to reach and serve others and make disciples of them as well. Training disciples in conviction, character and competence should be at the heart of all Christian ministry, regardless of the size of the fellowship and its structures.

For example, we know of a pastor who is currently grappling with how to grow his congregation from 500 to 1000. He faces organizational and structural challenges (‘trellis’ challenges), and the leadership and human management skills he will require are more significant than if he was pastoring a church of 80. He knows that he needs to do some work ‘on the business’ and not just ‘in the business’. However, this particular pastor also knows that his goal is not simply to get an additional 500 people to sit in his building (which he could achieve in various ways!), but to grow 500 more disciples of Jesus. And he knows that he won’t be able to find and gather and teach these new disciples on his own. It will only happen (under God) if he keeps training his people to work alongside him in outreach, follow-up, growth and training. In other words, growing a big congregation not only requires highly able and skilled leadership, but also an unwavering commitment to training an army of co-workers. It requires an even greater commitment to keeping people at the centre rather than programs.

It must be acknowledged that not everyone has the leadership abilities and personality to build and lead a large congregation. But our philosophy of ministry should lead us to support, encourage and champion those who do. Ministry should be built around people and their gifts. If someone has the gifts to build a really large and significant gospel work, let’s give them every assistance and training to do it.

One other important point on this: one of our MTS trainers chose to train and send over 30 of his best leaders into gospel ministry around the world, with the result that he has not built a mega-church. These 30 leaders are now serving as pastors, church-planters, missionaries and theological educators. If he had kept them all on his staff, who knows how big his church might be today? But by intentionally and generously giving them away, the gospel has advanced on many fronts. It’s a strategic choice between growing our own churches and growing the gospel beyond our local work. Of course it is possible to do both. But we must not value big churches as the only measure of gospel progress.

Q12. I am a pastor. Much of what I do is to care for those who are hurting and sick and in need. From what you are saying in chapters 8 and 9, are you really suggesting I don’t do that any more?

Of course not. The sick and suffering in our congregations certainly need to be cared for. What we’re suggesting is that they aren’t the only ones that need your time and ministry. If you really want to care for them
and
see real gospel growth, then the wise thing to do is to train and mobilize the godly mature Christians in the congregation to do some of that caring work.

This may present some tricky choices for the pastor. We need to pray for godly wisdom. And there will be crises and needs that simply need the pastor’s attention. But your responsibility as the pastor is to ‘feed the sheep’—all of them. If all your time and energy is absorbed by the sick and ailing sheep, then not only will the healthier ones not be fed, but they might also end up wandering off somewhere else!

Q13. If we are encouraging people to start their own ministries, using their gifts and opportunities, won’t the whole thing become a bit messy and chaotic?

Yes. And your problem with that is…?

The fact is that many of us are ‘control freaks’, and place too much value on having everything neat and tidy and under control. A bit of messiness is inevitable in people ministry.

However, the kind of control that is needed is the control of sound doctrine and godly character. Some administrative or organizational chaos can be managed, but the chaos of sin or false teaching does real damage. This is why it is so important to train people in conviction, character and competence so that the ministries they are involved in are godly and Bible-based.

[
1
] M Dever,
The Deliberate Church
, Crossway Books, 2005, pp. 161-70.

Appendix 2.
Resources for training from MTS and Matthias Media

The philosophy of ministry in
The Trellis and the Vine
has been brewing and developing in our minds and lives over the past 30 years or so. It has spawned two ‘sister’ organizations:

• The Ministry Training Strategy (MTS), developed by Phillip Jensen and Colin Marshall throughout the 1980s and launched as an independent training agency in 1992

• Matthias Media, launched by Tony Payne in 1988.

Both organizations have this book in their veins (if books can be in veins), and in various ways seek to promote this ministry philosophy and provide resources to support it.

Training and apprenticeship resources from MTS

The particular focus of MTS is ministry apprenticeship. The MTS vision is to raise up 10,000 new ‘gospel workers’ by training trainers who, in turn, train their people and recruit the next generation.

• MTS is training ministers of the gospel to declare the saving work of Christ to the world. Our focus is to train men and women as faithful and competent Bible teachers who will serve Christ as pastors, evangelists and church-planters.

• MTS offers a two-year ‘hands-on’ apprenticeship program conducted in churches and specialist ministry teams. It involves on-the-job ministry training based on prayer, Bible study and practical ministry.

• MTS is identifying those who have gifts for full-time Christian ministry. We are training innovative leaders who can break new ground for the gospel. We are equipping leaders who will train others for the work of the gospel.

• MTS training is conducted around the world in churches from various denominations and in a range of evangelistic ministries.

To find out more about MTS, and to gain access to the resources and services that MTS offers, please visit our website:
www.mts.com.au

To find out more in particular about ministry apprenticeship, read
Passing the Baton: A handbook for ministry apprenticeship
by Colin Marshall (published by Matthias Media).

Gospel growth resources from Matthias Media

Matthias Media explains its mission like this:

We want to persuade all Christians of the truth of God’s purposes in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Bible, and equip them with high-quality resources, so that by the work of the Holy Spirit they will:

• abandon their lives to the honour and service of Christ in daily holiness and decision-making

• pray constantly in Christ’s name for the fruitfulness and growth of his gospel

• speak the Bible’s life-changing word whenever and however they can—in the home, in the world and in the fellowship of his people.

Matthias Media has a wide range of excellent resources for Christians to use in the ‘gospel growth process’—that is, to facilitate outreach, follow-up, growth and training (see chapter 7).

In listing and recommending resources, we’re not for a minute suggesting that simply by running a course or setting up a new program, all your worries will be over. These Bible studies or training courses are not magic bullets; they are frameworks for disciple-making.

For example, the
Just for Starters
set of Bible studies is designed for following up new Christians and helping them become established in the faith. And it’s been used for this purpose by tens of thousands of people around the world over the past 20 years. However, it’s not
Just for Starters
that does the follow-up. That happens through personal relationship and ministry—through a more mature Christian getting next to a new Christian, meeting regularly with them, sticking with them, praying for them, and sharing their struggles and victories over an extended period of time. It happens, in other words, as one Christian disciples another. What the Bible studies do is improve the quality and efficiency of this process. They provide tested, proven, high-quality biblical material that works through all the important subjects a new Christian needs to think about. And by saving the time of having to devise and write these studies yourself, you are more able to pour your time and energy into personal ministry relationships.

All of the Matthias Media resources operate on this principle. We want to support and promote gospel ministry by providing high-quality, reliable, ready-to-hand tools to do the job. You can browse the full range of our resources at
www.matthiasmedia.com
, but here is a selection of the key ones.

To facilitate outreach

Two Ways to Live
is a memorable summary of the gospel that has been used to share the gospel with hundreds of thousands of people around the world. It comes in a range of styles, formats and languages, but each different resource that uses the
Two Ways to Live
framework features the same six-step logical presentation of what the Bible says about Jesus Christ.

For more information, go to
www.twowaystolive.com
.

To facilitate follow-up

Used by thousands of churches worldwide,
Just for Starters
is widely regarded as
the
Bible study for following up new Christians. The seven studies look at what the Bible teaches on seven fundamental topics: Saved by God, Trusting in God, Living God’s way, Listening to God, Talking to God, Meeting with God’s family, Meeting the world.

This recent book by Paul Grimmond is especially designed for new Christians, to orient them to the new life that they have embarked upon with Christ. It not only clearly explains the gospel (so that the foundations are solid), but also goes on to discuss the many practical issues and challenges that new believers face. It’s a warm-hearted, engaging, exciting read about the adventure of the Christian life, and as such is very helpful as a refresher for longer-serving Christians as well.

To facilitate growth

The basis of all Christian growth is regular feeding from God’s word. Matthias Media publishes two series of Bible studies for individuals and small groups.

Pathway Bible Guides: shorter, simpler studies that are easy to digest

Interactive Bible Studies: solid food for growing Christians

Both series focus closely on the passage of Scripture, rather than bouncing too quickly into discussion or application; both seek to read the passage in its context; and both maintain a balance between providing input and direction, and allowing plenty of room for exploration and discovery.

To facilitate training

Our best-known training program is
Two Ways to Live: Know and share the gospel
. This seven-session course teaches participants to know the gospel thoroughly for themselves, and then trains them in how to explain that message clearly and naturally in their own words, using the well-known
Two Ways to Live
framework. With role-plays, DVD and audio input, the course is easy to run and highly effective.