During my first years of ministry I heard a pastor once say to a group of seminarians; "Don't wait around to take over my church, go start your own church". That really impacted me. I am finding that for a long, long time our preacher boys have been trained to pastor existing churches. I have noticed that our seminaries have focused on training men to take over pulpits instead of creating their own. Hence pulpit rotation (pastors moving or dying which opens up a pulpit) has become standard procedure and pulpit reproduction (church planting) has been cast to the side as a non-essential.
The only problem with this mentality is that the starting of new churches has been grossly neglected. Therefore there is a steady decline of new preachers since existing churches either already have a pastor or have declined to the point where they cannot take care of a pastor.
Young men are not regularly being challenged to pioneer new churches and launch out into the unknown by faith. The kind of men needed for church planting respond to a challenge that is bigger than they are. This kind of man is probably going to be trained in some seminary where church planting is an absolute priority of vision and purpose, which is usually outside of our work.
Pulpit reproduction insures that there will be churches who will have pulpit rotation. However, pulpit rotation eventually slows down to the point where there are not enough preachers and eventually not enough churches.
Go start your own church! Go reproduce!
David
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Great post, David! I am excited to see what God is going to do in our Associated work!
Keep casting vision, keep praying, and keep encouraging! One day, someone is going to listen!
Post a Comment