FILLING THE HOLE: HOW WILL WE RAISE THE NEXT GENERATION OF GOSPEL MINISTERS?

PAUL GRIMMOND

A significant part of my work in student ministry involved persuading young men and women to leave their careers behind to enter into ‘full-time’ gospel preaching.

Semi-regularly someone from another church would ring me up: “We’ve found some money, we can put on a trainee next year, can you send us someone?”

My answer was always, “No.” (It was sometimes an awkward conversation!)

My aim here is to explain how that answer is related to the very nature of raising people for gospel ministry, and also its implications for us as we seek to see generations of gospel preachers sent into the world.

Why “No”? It’s certainly not an answer designed to win friends. And for some, it reeked of parochialism (we were “feathering our nest” and didn’t care about the gospel needs of others).

So, why persist in saying, “No”?

Firstly, because that is what the trainees would say to me. But to understand why potential trainees might say no, we need to stop and think a little bit about what we’re asking people to do as they consider ‘full-time ministry’ (a term that I don’t like very much, although I haven’t come up with a better one).

The call to do fulltime ministry is, in many ways, the very call of the gospel to all of us.

What does it mean to become a Christian? It means to come to Christ. But the Bible is clearer than that. It means to declare “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Rom 10:9), to turn “from idols to serve the true and living God” (1 Thess 1:9). To say that Christ is Lord is to declare him the sovereign ruler over every thought, word and action. To turn from idols is to leave behind all of our old passions and desires in order to humbly submit everything we do to the will of our King.

This means learning to do different things with your money, learning to read and obey the Scriptures, learning to pray, learning to deal with unhealthy sexual desires, learning to transform the kinds of words that flow from our tongue—we could go on but you get the point. All these are implications of coming under the Lordship of Christ, and none of them are learned in an instant (even though God makes us new through his Spirit in an instant, such is the miraculous wonder of regeneration!)

It takes many years, much patience and fellowship for the Lordship of Christ to be fully worked out in life.

In God’s kindness, much of this process happens through relationships with people who share their lives and the gospel with us. The Bible encourages us to watch our leaders’ lives and imitate their faith: to walk according to their example (Heb 13:7; 1 Thess 5:12-13; Phil 3:17). This pattern is the same pattern that Paul employs in training Timothy for leadership. Paul encourages Timothy to “remember his life”, which Timothy has witnessed first-hand (2 Tim 3:10-11).

The pattern of growing young Christians is the same pattern for training up gospel ministers. Just as learning to give up your idols to follow Christ happens through the relationships and examples of those over you in the Lord, learning to become a full-time gospel minister happens in the same way. It is almost as if being prepared for full-time ministry is an extension of learning to be a Christian!

For most would-be ministry apprentices, standing on the edge, wondering if they should take the plunge into ministry training, the significance of what they are about to do becomes real in a way that it never has before.

Thinking through what God has got to say and finding wisdom and counsel at this moment is vitally important. This is why many potential ministry trainees would say no to a stranger who said: “I’ve got the money, come and train with me”.

Now there is an important caveat to put here. A key aspect of ministry leadership development involves ‘nudging the baby bird from the nest’—there is a moment in every family’s life when you realise that the ‘adult-child’ needs to leave home and learn lessons for themselves. Our aim in growing up leaders must be to see them leave (for their own sakes as well as for ours). This is partly why gaining experience under other leaders in different churches is a vital part of theological education.

With this in place, let’s get back to the argument at hand.

I said no to people who asked us to provide them trainees, because that’s not the way God designed it to be done.

Ministry trainees are raised up in ministries where those who are calling them to the ministry life have lived out an example of godly ministry, provided counsel, and built trust over years.

This has serious implications as we face diminishing numbers of people putting themselves forward for theological training. The knee-jerk reaction to this would be to run around looking for the nearest person with vague leadership potential (or even worse, charisma!), and exhort them to embark on the long journey of ministry training. If we do this, we are creating a noose for our own necks.

What we need is to ask God to grow cultures in our churches where those who are being taught to give up their lives for Christ are encouraged and spurred on, by those already in the task, to work personally through the challenges and changes required to be prepared for gospel work.

The starting point is churchgoers everywhere, and ministers in particular, prioritising time and energy for young leaders in training.

We need to identify those with godliness and gifting, we need to give them responsibility, we need to read the Bible and pray with them, and we need to work through with them how to deal with the implications of the decisions needed to head into vocational ministry.

Filling the hole we’re experiencing will require time, effort and hard work. A forest won’t grow overnight. But if we don’t plant trees now, we shouldn’t expect a forest in 50 years’ time.

What is vital is that we work together, under God, to find those who are godly and gifted, and help them on the long journey into pastoral leadership of God’s people.

We need to walk with them, pray with them, spur them on when the going gets tough, and maintain our commitment to deep personal and biblical training.