This first appeared as a letter in Evangelicals Now here.
Evangelicals Now have recently published an open letter from John Brand, principal of Edinburgh Bible College. It’s addressed to “church leaders training men for ministry.” Well, that kind of sounds like me, so I hope that John and EN will accept an open letter in response from those of us seeking to train future pastors.
First of all, John seems to assume that those who are offering to train and prepare people for Gospel ministry are leaders of large churches. It is certainly true that some of the larger churches around, St Helens and All Souls in London, Christ Church Fulwood in Sheffield have put a particular focus on providing training and development programmes. Several, including larger churches here in Birmingham offer Ministry Training schemes. However, in most of those cases, the assumption is that the church is only providing the foundational aspects of that training with those involved. Those seeking to serve in full time capacity will often go on to train full or part time at one of the main Theological Seminaries.
The other side of the coin, is that often, those of us who have got involved in training others in recent years have not been doing so from mega church contexts. I’m currently on the eldership team of a church with average weekly attendance of about 60-70 and around about 40 adult members, hardly large by anyone’s standards. Previously, I was training people whilst leading a church that grew from around about 80-180, again, not a mega church. The very reason why quite a few of us are seeking to train people in house is because we are concerned to help future pastors be trained in context so that they will gain a sense of what real life ministry is like. It’s exactly because we don’t want men going through the sausage machine of large church apprenticeship after University followed by seminary and then finally an assistantship in another large church. It’s not that there is anything wrong with those churches and routes, tts that we see a greater need, especially in urban priority areas that such traditional options doesn’t work for.
My second concern with John’s article is his perception of what real church life is like. It feels like a thrown back to some kind of golden age, not so much “Evangelicals Now” as “Church Yesterday.” There seems to be a lot of this kind of nostalgia hunting in what is being generatefd as advice from elder statesmen right now.
There are three harsh realities that we need to consider here. First, that most churches, especially the ones with only 15 or so members left are unlikely to be able to run two services and a traditional mid-week teaching slot, exactly because they are down to their last, faithful dozen.
Secondly, I am not at all convinced that even if feasible, that such an approach is, or ever was that healthy or helpful. First, it placed the emphasis on one man that stunted the life and fruitfulness of churches, second, it seemed to confuse quantity with quality (to be sure a man can easily preach three talks in the week but there is a pay off in terms of preparation time and how else that time might be used. Thirdly, the risk is that we end up with a culture of keeping people busy at church to protect them from encountering the world outside.
Even whilst our current church was small, the priority of its leaders was on plural ministry so that it has always been the case that leaders would be preaching once or twice a month. Even as we’ve grown, we’ve not attempted to add an evening service because we don’t want to give people spiritual indigestion, we want to give them opportunity to apply what they’ve heard. We don’t have and wont’ have a third preaching slot in the week because we find there is more benefit in encouraging small groups where people study God’s Word together, pray for one another and share their lives with each other.
This begs the question as to whether a significant cause of decline has in fact been that unhelpful kind of busyness. This brings us to the third harsh reality. There is a reason why a church gets down to its last dozen or half dozen members. Any conversation about revitalisation and outside help must include an understanding of that. Sadly, too often, busyness was used to paper over the cracks. A church that will not address the cracks will not benefit from revitalisation and in fact, is likely to not really want all that is entailed in having help. The result in my experience is that they will make all the right noises at consultation meetings but when it comes to making changes, they curtail the partnership.
This brings me to a further point, actually there is a lot already happening in terms of help offered to small and struggling churches. And for every one that counts the cost and prefers to continue with a vision to die, there are many wonderful stories of churches where Time of Death of was about to be called and what we’ve seen is God turn things around incredibly. I’ve had the joy of seeing this happen first hand in a few of those cases.
I guess my open letter is to those who see themselves as “elder statemen”, who want to offer advice to those on the frontline of church-based ministry from parachurch contexts. I think such advice is best given relationally, where it comes from a position of praying and encouraging others on. Please guard your tone from harping back to a golden era that never was. Please seek to be informed about what is happening before telling us off for failing.
Faithroots 