If we are going to develop people-focused ministries, certain shifts in our thinking must occur. The fundamental shift consists of moving away from an institutional view of gospel ministry towards a personal view of gospel ministry. We need to stop thinking how to build ministry around structures and start thinking about how to build ministry around people.
Here are some suggestions of the mental shifts we might need to make. Each of them touches on a different aspect of structural thinking which inhibits people ministry. Once we make the transition, however, this will open up new vistas for ministry and ministry training.
1. From running programmes to building people
When planning ministry for the year ahead, there are two broad approaches we could adopt. One is to consider existing church programmes (such as Sunday meetings, youth work, children’s ministry and Bible study groups) and then work out how such programmes can be maintained and improved. The other approach is to start with people in your church, having no particular structures or programmes in mind, and then consider who these people God has given us are, how we can help them grow in Christian maturity, and what form their gifts and opportunities might take.
This is a revolutionary mind shift: when we think about our people, it moves our focus to putting them first and building ministries around them. In the course of doing so, it may become apparent that some programmes no longer serve any worthwhile purpose. It may also become apparent that a programme is no longer viable because the people who once made it work are no longer available. So the programme can be done away with. This might be painful for those attached to them (it takes guts to shoot a dead horse!), but new ministries will begin to arise as you train members of your congregation to use their various gifts and opportunities.
2. From running events to training people
Churches typically adopt an ‘event-based’ approach to evangelism. They use a variety of events to proclaim the gospel: church meetings, guest services, mission meetings, men’s breakfasts, women’s suppers, and many other creative gatherings. In order to appear successful, they keep on persevering, running more and more of these events.
However, at one level, this tactic is failing. In our post-Christian, secular age, most unbelievers will never come to our events. Even our members are patchy in their attendance. The ‘event’ tactic relies partly on the appeal and gifts of a guest speaker, and this means we’re limited by the availability of such people in what we can run. For the church pastor, and for key lay people, setting up and running events can end up dominating life, with all our time being spent on getting people to come along to things. Yet, despite the work they involve, in some respects events are a centralizing tactic: they’re convenient and easy to control for the leader/organizer, but they require unbelievers to come to us on our own terms. In the end, an ‘event approach’ distracts us from both training and evangelism.
If we want our strategy to be people-focused, we should concentrate on training, which increases the number and effectiveness of gospel communicators (i.e. people who can proclaim the good news both in personal conversations and in public settings). This sort of strategy involves identifying and equipping more speakers, thereby increasing the number, variety and effectiveness of events. In addition, you can use events to train your workers. If all the members of your congregation are given the opportunity to be trained in evangelism, more unbelievers will attend our events.
But please note: this is a chaotic strategy —an inconvenient strategy. It takes time to train evangelists. It takes time for young evangelists to build their own ministries as they go about preaching the Word. It will mean we will have to relinquish control of our programmes for, as the gospel is preached, Christ by his Spirit gathers his people into all kinds of fellowships that may or may not fit into our neat structures.
3. From using people to growing people
Volunteers are the ones who maintain and expand church programmes. Under God, volunteers are the lifeblood of our churches: they pour their evenings and weekends into Sunday meetings, children’s work, youth group, Bible studies, committees, looking after church property, and so on. The danger of having such willing volunteers is that we use them, exploit them and forget to train them. Then they burn out, their ministry is curtailed, and we find that we have failed to develop their Christian life and ministry potential. Instead of using our volunteers, we should consider how we can encourage them and help them grow in the knowledge and love of Christ, because service flows from Christian growth and not growth from service.
4. From filling gaps to training new workers
One of the immediate pressures upon ministers is to fill gaps left by leaders who leave our programmes. But if you just focus on gap-filling, you’ll never move out of maintenance mode: you’re just keeping existing ministries afloat instead of branching out into new ones.
We should start with the people that God has given us, not our programmes. We need to consider each person as a gift from Christ to our church, and equip them for ministry accordingly. So instead of thinking, “Who can fill this gap in our personnel?”, perhaps the question we need to consider is “What ministry could this member exercise?” If we begin viewing things in these terms, it will open up new areas of ministry centred around the particular gifts and opportunities of our members. So instead of filling a vacancy on a committee, one of our members might start a ministry to his/her ethnic community—or a Bible study group in his/her workplace. Furthermore, focusing on people will help us to discover and train potential candidates for full-time Word ministry.
5. From solving problems to helping people make progress
A common feeling among Christians is that they only get prayed for and visited when they’re sick or out of work. Of course, our churches will always contain people with problems; God’s people have many needs, just like the rest of the population. And as ministers of Christ, we need to love and welcome everyone, whatever their individual needs and situations, and not dismiss their problems with cheap words (Jas 2:14-17).
However, we don’t want to create the kind of ministry environment where the only way people can relate to one another is by discussing their problems. If ministry in our churches is based on reacting to the problems people raise, many will receive no attention because they are more reserved in sharing their problems. Our goal is to move people forward in holy living and the knowledge of God, whether they are facing problems or not; this is why we proclaim Christ, “warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Col 1:28).
So ask yourselves whether your ministries are reactive or proactive. If we are mostly reacting to people’s problems, we won’t have the energy to put into proactive training and growing new work. If we take a problem approach to ministry, our programmes will become dominated by those with the most critical needs, and these needs will wear us out and exhaust us, and reduce the effectiveness of our other ministries.
6. From clinging to ordained ministry to developing team leadership
Denominations are quite right to ordain or accredit ministers to be faithful shepherds of Christ’s flock. However, there are a number of ways in which the practice of ordination hinders ministry training in the churches. Firstly, if the only ‘real’ ministers are people ordained by the denomination, our churches will not have any incentive to encourage others who are not ordained to test their gifts of preaching and teaching. Secondly, if the policy is limited to filling ministerial gaps in vacant churches, why look for evangelists and church planters who could grow new work? Thirdly, it means that we will tend to select people for training who fit the mould of the ordained minister, ignoring the fact that some gifted people may not fit comfortably in traditional ministries, and that their gifts could potentially lead them to break new ground for the gospel outside existing denominational structures.
In traditional thinking, the ordained minister of a church is expected to exercise all the public ministries of Word and sacrament, pastoral visiting, evangelism, school Scripture classes and more. But if we are going to focus on training, this implies team ministry. Church members are often opposed to team ministry for a variety of reasons. Firstly, training appears elitist as only the few are selected. Secondly, some Christians only want the ‘real’ minister to preach or visit, and are not happy when his place is taken by a trainee or lay minister. Finally, the time the minister spends training the team is often perceived as a distraction from his pastoral duties. However, the benefits of team ministry are many, so it’s well worth freeing up our ministers so that they have the time and space to build themselves a team.
7. From focusing on church polity to forging ministry partnerships
Local ministry is often dominated by issues concerning how churches are governed. At one level, this is to be expected because all denominations are partially defined by their distinctive understanding of church government, and it’s important for a church to be faithful to its evangelical heritage. However, inflexible commitment to a particular polity can destroy training. Churches can find themselves spending too much time debating questions like “Where do trainee ministers and ministry teams fit into our structures? Are they elders, deacons, ministers or members of the church committee?” Instead, it’s probably more helpful to think of these things in terms of ministry partnerships instead of political structures. Furthermore, if you have a partnership ethos, it will draw workers into gospel enterprise.
8. From relying on training institutions to establishing local training
Bringing together gifted and scholarly pastors to provide rigorous theological and academic training in a college setting is a wise strategy. This sort of training is essential for both lay and ordained ministers. But a college cannot be expected to provide total training in the character, conviction and skill that is required for ministers and co-workers. Much of this ought to be done through training ‘on the job’ in church life. So it’s ideal if education in colleges and training in churches can work together hand in hand.
8. From focusing on immediate pressures to aiming for long-term expansion
We are easily consumed by keeping ministry programmes running. The urgent crowds out the important, and everyone thinks that their agenda should be dealt with first. We know that training leaders will help to maintain and expand our ministries, but it takes all our energies just to keep the wheels turning. However, if we take our focus off our immediate pressures and aim for long-term expansion, the pressures we face will become less immediate and may eventually disappear.
9. From engaging in management to engaging in ministry
Ministers do need to be responsible managers of the resources entrusted to them, and therefore they will always have a certain amount of administration to do. But the trap for them is that they become so caught up in the management exercise, they weaken the ministry of teaching and training. How many hours per week does your minister spend attending committees, managing property, organizing programmes or conducting church business? Could you train others to take over some of this work? Could your minister be relieved of some of his administrative workload so that he can devote time to training one or two new leaders?
10. From seeking church growth to desiring gospel growth
Once we’ve spent time and resources training our leaders, we soon fear losing them. However, one of our goals in training people should be to encourage some of our leaders into further formal training in theology so that they might progress into denominational or missionary ministry. We must be exporters of trained people instead of hoarders of trained people. In a resource-poor church, this can be very hard to do. Even in churches with many leaders, regular turnover and re-training is demanding. But our view of gospel work must be global, not just local: the goal isn’t church growth (in the sense of our local church expanding in numbers, budget, church plants and reputation) but gospel growth. If we train and send workers into new fields (both local and global), our local ministry might not grow numerically but the gospel will advance through these new ministers of the Word.
