Paid Pastoral Staff? A Calling to the Ministry?

Andrew Hamilton has an interesting post, something I haven’t thought very hard or long about. In it he asks this question:

“Can anyone provide a compelling biblical argument for the existence of paid pastoral staff within a local congregation?“

It’s an interesting question. He concedes that you could probably make more than one good pragmatic argument for paid pastoral staff he then also mentions his own experience of calling to ministry as perhaps a compelling argument. That got me thinking even more. If I re-phrased his question then we have another question that is often taken for granted or thought very little about:

“Can anyone provided a compelling biblical argument for the existence of a subjective call to the ministry of a local congregation?“

Life is becoming more and more complicated the more I study the Bible – the questions just keep on coming, and often they’re questions that impinge upon me directly – like questions about paid pastoral ministry. Anyone got any thoughts on these questions?

South African Solutions – An Open Forum

Ok – we’ve raised the issues and there was quite a bit of diversity amongst them. Some recurred a few times (like the ‘race’ issue) and some had a lot of overlap with each other (like TBN and the growing prosperity gospel phenomenon in some of our churches). What I want us to do now is suggest some ways forward. What should we be doing on a more specific and practical level? If you want to suggest a possible solution to just one issue or if you’d like to tackle a number of them please remember to keep your comments shorter rather than longer.

Here’s two solutions I’d like to offer (I have others but I’d like to start with these two):

First off I think we need to plant more gospel-centered, word-centered, missional churches that really engage the culture around them. The majority of this planting needs to take place outside of the traditionally white, middle-class suburbs. People need models – they need to see gospel churches in action, taking the issues head on. So we need to plant and plant often because the reality is that although there are many churches around there are very few gospel-centered, word-centered, missional churches around.

Secondly I think we need to think seriously about theological education for the majority of this country. The reality is that not only is theological training expensive but often it is not contextualized enough and really only trains church leaders to work in Western areas of the country. I think we need to develop ways of taking good contextualized training to the rural areas and not expect them to come to us. This might mean things like wealthier churches partnering with poorer rural churches as a way forward in this area. Its simply a matter of opening our eyes to the other churches out there and giving time, money, resources and effort towards uplifting them.  Part of the aim here would be to stamp out the growing prosperity theology that abounds in many of these churches and the eve-present syncretism that is so often evident.

Your turn…what solutions do you suggest?

Cheng on Training

Gordon Cheng has a brief post talking about his own experiences with theological students who have done ministry apprenticeships before going for formal theological training. In Australia this is facilitated through the MTS programme. Here in South Africa, in Durban, we have a similar programme running (although its far less developed than MTS) called the Ministry Apprenticeship Programme (MAP). I spent two years at MAP before going for formal theological training and a number of my friends who are currently studying or have recently finished studying also went through the programme with me.

Now without being completely pragmatic I have to agree with Gordon’s general summary that the people who go through apprenticeship just seem so much more focused on ministry and suited for ministry. There is a rather alarming gap in terms of maturity in ministry between the theological students who have done apprenticeship and those who haven’t. The two groups think and question on two completely different levels and from what I can see that gap remains right through to graduation and entrance into the ministry full-time. Some graduates are ready to be planting churches and growing ministries – others seem like they’re ready to NOW begin an apprenticeship (and for those who know me personally I make these comments with both colleges that I am affiliated to in mind). Programmes like MTS and MAP need to be promoted and learned by more churches and church groups if we want to raise the standard of our paid gospel workers.

BISA Open Day

Are you in Cape Town? I so come and join the staff and students of the Bible Institute of South Africa for a variety of activities starting with buffet breakfast at 9am on Saturday, 1st September 2007 – the day will wrap up at about 3pm.

Other activities include:

• Guest speaker Carol Arnold “The Liberation of a Resentful Wife”
• Guest speaker Gary Gilley “This little Church went to Market”
• Hear BI’s own Barbershop quartet
• Miss breakfast? Relax and enjoy tea and cake in the garden
• Take a guided campus tour
• Fly a simulation MAF plane from Ysterplaat to CT International
• View Missions & Christian organisation displays
• Buy great books by Christian authors at amazing prices
• Try student’s cuisine from various countries
• Meet the faculty and students from around the world
• Children’s entertainment with fun and games
• Play in the Volleyball tournament

Bring:
- Your family
- Your youth group
- Your church leadership
- Your missions committee
- Your school mates
- Your choir
- Your sports teams

To book breakfast (R25.00 per person) – contact:
Kathy or Mary-Anne (021) 788 – 4116

Check the BISA Open Day webpage for more details. 

Goodmanson on Training

Drew Goodmanson has some great thoughts on the type of leaders we ought to be training. He’s evidently picked up quite a bit of his stuff from the Crowded House guys. Its great to see UK guys influencing US guys concerning missional church.

Keller at his Best

The Resurgence have posted 4 articles by Tim Keller on the subject, ‘Ministry in the New Global Culture of Major City Centers‘. These four articles are bursting at the seams with serious reflection, insight and practical advice. If you minister in a major city anywhere in the world then you NEED to read these articles – Part I, Part II, Part III & Part IV

The Gospel Conversation

I have finally launched ‘The Gospel Conversation – A Gospel Conversation for Missional Christians and Leaders in South Africa‘ It’s very simple at the moment, but with lots of room for growth – go have a look.

Durban Update #2

I’m still enjoying my break. I spoke yesterday at TRAC (Training Rectors and Curates) which is a training initiative for clergy of CESA. I gave a 30 minute talk attempting to give something of an introduction to the Emerging Church. We had a good time of discussion afterwards and concluded that some of us were already involved in ministries that exhibit ‘emerging’ characteristics. We also noted some grave concerns with some things coming out of the broader Emerging Church and I think we were pretty much agreed that there are some elements of the Emerging Church that we cannot reconcile to Scripture and with which can have nothing to do.

However the concern for authentic gospel ministry is at the forefront of much of our clergy’s thinking and so I’m busy trying to put together a blog that will serve us as we endeavour to be truly missional in a Biblical sense here in South Africa. The blog is entitled ‘The Gospel Conversation’ and at the moment is still a bit off being finished. My hope is to get South African authors writing posts dealing with missional ministry in South Africa.

Durban Update

I’m back in the promised land that is Durban, South Africa, for the next three weeks. I’m hoping to do a fair bit of everything in this time. Yesterday I fellowshipped at Christ Church Glenwood in the morning and at Christ Church Umhlanga in the evening. Both services we great, real low-key and informal. We had great times of questions and answers after the services which something I appreciate so much about these smaller churches is the ability of the whole congregation to discuss the sermon in public together mutually edifying and encouraging one another.

Tomorrow I’m giving my talk on the Emerging Church – so if you’re praying, pray for that one. Somewhere between tomorrow and the 2nd of July, when I head back to Cape Town, I’ll be giving details of a new blog discussing Reformed Missional thinking in South Africa so keep your eyes out for that one. Otherwise next week I’m attending the Mid-Year Conference in KZN, which is largely aimed at the students of UKZN, its always great to hang out with a whole bunch of young people wanting to hear the Bible taught and think seriously about gospel living.

Otherwise, its just surfing, soccer, reading, eating, sleeping and anything else that grabs my fancy. Holidays are so good.

Michael Spencer and CESA

Michael Spencer (the Internetmonk) has been accused for ranting on and on about the problems of the evangelical church – and he has ranted. But some of us have enjoyed reading his rants because often they make a lot of sense and keep people thinking. In his most recent post he shifts gears a bit and suggest 5 answers to today’s evangelical crisis.

I couldn’t help notice, whilst reading these 5 answers, that a lot of what he is suggesting is already being done by friends of mine who are younger CESA (Church of England in South Africa) ministers and pastors. I can think of about 5 or 6 churches off-hand who are trying really hard to implement these sorts of things. So if Michael Spencer is right – and I definitely think he’s on to something – then there’s a lot to be encouraged by here in South Africa. I know, it’s only a handful at the moment, but its growing and has grown even over the last 5 or so years. Perhaps the reformed missional church is already alive and growing in South Africa.

Read Michael Spencer’s post and see what you think.

Keller, Preaching and Service Leading

“Worship and preaching in the “vernacular”. It is hard to overstate how ghetto-ized our preaching is. It is normal to make all kinds of statements that appear persuasive to us but are based upon all sorts of premises that the secular person does not hold. It is normal to make all sorts of references using terms and phrases that mean nothing outside or our Christian sub-group. So avoid unnecessary theological or evangelical sub-culture “jargon”, and explain carefully the basic theological concepts, such as confession of sin, praise, thanksgiving, and so on. In the preaching, showing continual willingness to address the questions that the unbelieving heart will ask. Speak respectfully and sympathetically to people who have difficulty with Christianity. As you write the sermon, imagine an particular skeptical non-Christian in the chair listening to you. Add the asides, the qualifiers, the extra explanations necessary. Listen to everything said in the worship service with the ears of someone who has doubts or troubles with belief.” Tim Keller – Evangelistic Worship

This is a reminder to me of just how much harder I need to be working on my sermons. I know how I cringe when I listen to guy who has totally ignored the above comment – it grates your ears as you think about the unchurched who might be sitting next to you. It’s not just the preaching but the whole service leading too.I find it so wonderfully refreshing when this is really taken into account and practiced in corporate meetings of the church. It makes the world of difference – in terms of breaking down unnecessary barriers to non-Christians hearing the gospel. At St. Stephen’s we try to make sure, as service leaders, that we’re keeping all of this in the back of our heads. In fact its only recently that I’ve realised just how crucial good service leading is – it means I have to work harder on preparing how I’ll lead the service rather than just rocking up on Sunday evening.

I suppose you also don’t want to make it too rigid where the onlooker gets the sense that everything is programmed. In a liturgical church like ours (albeit contemporary liturgy), this is a real danger. It’s not overcome-able though – I’ve seen plenty of guys, who I know have prepared their service from top to bottom in detail, and yet the way they lead it is relaxed, low-key and very relational. It really comes down to hard work on the part of the service leader.

Keller continues on the subject of clarity in services:

“Explain the service as you go along. Though there is danger of pastoral verbosity, learn to give 1 or 2 sentence, non-jargony explanations of each new part of the service. “When we confess our sins, we are not groveling in guilt, but dealing with our guilt. If you deny your sins you will never get free from them.” It is good to begin worship services as the Black church often does, with a “devotional”–a brief talk that explains the meaning of worship. This way you continually instruct newcomers in worship.”

Some people might question this as to whether it won’t all end up becoming a bit pedantic – and the Christians in the congregation start feeling like they’re being treated as children – and I think that’s a real concern. But once again , I think through hard work and careful preparation it can be avoided. Either way I think Keller’s words are crucial for us to stomach and think about our local churches.

Apprenticeship

One of the glaring needs of our churches here in South Africa is to run good apprenticeships, giving opportunities to people to explore full-time Christian work under the watchful eye of senior ministers before pursing further theological studies. The apprenticeship programme that I did prior to coming to college was probably the best training I could have had before Bible college. One of the people who came as a guest speaker during my apprenticeship was Colin Marshall who heads up MTS in Australia. Colin has a book coming out this month entitled ‘Passing the Baton – a handbook for ministry apprenticeship‘. This guy is the absolute guru of in-church training and so this book will definitely be worth getting hold of. Check the Matthias Media resource guide 2007 for more details.

DG Conference Audio

Desiring God Ministries have made all the audio from 20 years worth of the DG conferences absolutely free. There’s an absolute goldmine of conference talks there. Big thanks to DG for helping us plebs out like this. (HT – Justin Taylor)

This is interesting…

Byron suggests that Powerpoint might be under threat – and a whole lot of other things we do in our services – based on some new research conducted in Oz. If you’re a teacher of any sort then you should read this.

Pitfalls in Mass Rural Church Planting

I just finished writing an overview on contemporary issues in mission regarding church planting. I suppose you can look at church planting under two main sub-divisions: Urban vs. Rural. I tried to survey both briefly and I’ll be doing a presentation on my findings in a month or two.

One of the interesting things I came across looking at issues concerning rural church planting is the number of mass church planting movements around. You might be used to listening to missionaries come and tell you about the massive number of churches being planted in Africa or Asia etc. Now being the sceptic I am, I had to see if there were two sides to the story – and lo and behold, there was. Here’s just one South African example, that made I mention of:

Dr. Tim Cantrell, currently senior pastor of Honey Ridge Baptist and former dean of students at Christ Seminary, Polokwane, conducted research into 250 church plants done in the Limpopo province. He managed to survey 85 leaders. The average age of the plants was 9 years – what he discovered was startling. Firstly a third of the churches were pastored in a satellite capacity where the pastor had almost no contact with the church during the week, but only arrived on Sundays and sometimes only twice a month – Cantrell called it pastoring by “remote control”. Less than half the pastors believed in expository preaching of the Word, a third of them acknowledged no link with a mother church, only a third of the pastors felt that their congregation really grasped the gospel, there had been an average increase of one person per congregation a year over nine years and there was an absolute dearth of male headship with the vast majority of these congregations being made up of females and children. Cantrell concluded, along with others, that 20 to 25% of those churches had ‘become healthy or mature, responsible churches’. (2005: 274) – in the Baptist Theological Journal 2005.

I’ve had the chance to get to know Tim a little bit in the past, and I’ve been a delegate at Baptist Assemblies in both 2003 and 2004, where I heard about all the great church planting work that was going on – so Tim’s research comes as something of a corrective just to balance things out a little. I’m not knocking the church planting initiatives of the Baptist Union, but I am saying we need to be a bit wary when we hear these figures being thrown about. I think we also need to be a bit more thoughtful on the issue of planting self-sustaining churches that will go on to grow and plant other churches – it’s clearly a desperate need here in Africa.

Tale of Two Colleges

Today I registered as a part-time student with George Whitefield College (GWC), which is my denomination’s official training institution. On Monday I’ll register as a full-time student for my final year at the Bible Institute of South Africa (BI) which is an inter-denominational training college. When I complete this final year, and a few part-time courses at GWC I’ll be doing some further post-graduate studies for another year at GWC before I begin my curacy in the Church of England in South Africa (CESA).

Meeting a whole bunch of new students today reminded of the great privilege I’ve had of being able to study the Bible in these two institutions. I’m not sure that the apostle Paul would have had the diverse and complicated world of seminaries and Bible colleges in mind when he thought about raising up Christian leaders, and, whilst I’m very pro holistic church based ministry and training, the pragmatist in me is very grateful for quality colleges and the work they’re doing.

Chris Wright points out in his CT article the vast numbers of Christians here in Africa, and whilst those high numbers are a great cause for rejoicing they also pose huge problems regarding the massive lack of quality church leadership on this continent. And while there are sterling exceptions to this, overall there are masses of church goers who have very little in the way of real pastoral oversight like many of us in western churches are used to.

To this end, BI and GWC are faithfully labouring to train up Africans for the sake of the gospel. One of the great examples of this is BI’s Christian Leadership Programme where the college is training pastors and Christian leaders mainly from under-developed or low income areas who have had almost no theological training in the past and yet are pastorally responsible for many church goers in the Cape Town area. The remarkable stories of growth and positive change in these pastor’s ministries could fill a volume of books. There is really a great work of God going on here.

Pray for these colleges, whilst we reach as many as we can there are still overwhelming numbers of church leaders who we are not able to reach, largely because of financial reasons. Pray that God would grant us the resources and finances to make a significant impact upon the Christian leadership of Southern Africa, for his sake and glory.