Posted on December 11, 2008 - by Stephen Murray
Communities Led by Teachers
“If we want to create communities with a missional mindset, we cannot allow our churches to be held back because of a lack of professional pastoral leadership. Every believer is called to missions, regardless of a more specific vocational calling. Equipping more laypeople to lead ministries and churches is exactly what Ephesians 4:11-13 describes.
The Bible goes into too much detail about pastor/elders not to assume they were a normal part of the local church. But the qualifications are those of a godly person with one exception. The godly person must be ‘able to teach’. Beyond the standards of godliness, that is the biblical qualification for a layperson functioning as a pastoral leader in a church plant.” Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches, p.78
If we’re developing missional communities that, for all intensive purposes, function as small churches in a network with each other, maybe united by a central Sunday gathering, then surely all missional community leaders must be able to teach. If the leader is not able to teach then is the missional community really a self-contained church formed and led by the Word of God?
I know that some guys (even in the more theologically conservative wing) in the missional community movement don’t think that the leaders of individual missional communities need to be elders but I think that’s something of a contradiction in terms. They want their missional communities to function as micro-churches but they don’t want them led by elders. I can’t see how you can get away from it: not elder-led=not biblical church. I know there are other ways to ‘lead’ and numerous different ways in which non-bible teachers in a church ‘lead’ others but at the core of biblical ecclesiology is elder leadership which is, as Stetzer points out, a teaching leadership. Or am I missing something here?
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Stephen Murray
Christian, husband to my beautiful Robin, missional dreamer, pastor, church planter, Arsenal, Sharks and Springbok supporter, surfer (in the real sea), patriotic South African, Capetonian. Find out more about the church planting work I'm involved in at my support blog.
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December 11, 2008
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Jonathan Dodson said:
I appreciate and embrace your emphasis on elder-led churches, Stephen. However, not all missional communities are churches. And not all of Paul’s churches had elders initially. He had to come back into these communities and appoint elders, after they were planted. Therefore, it is biblically plausible for a “missional community” to exist without an elder, at least for a season.
The finer point that needs to be debated is: “At what point is a missional community a church?” Having an elder that is able to teach and people that are willing to listen doesn’t do the job, and it certainly doesn’t mean the church will be missional.
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December 11, 2008
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Stephen said:
Appreciated – I agree that having an elder that is able to teach and people that are willing to listen doesn’t do the job, and it certainly doesn’t mean the church will be missional. I guess my concern as we plan our gospel communities (that’s what we’ve opted to call our communities btw) is that I want our mission to come out of the Scripture – I want to see the people in our groups studying the bible seeing the implications of the gospel and saying ‘hey we need to live like that’. I don’t just want us to try harder because the church of the previous generation didn’t. I’m trying to work out how I can keep the bible saturation and see real mission birthed out of it.
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December 11, 2008
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Jonathan Dodson said:
Agreed. We are striving for that too. CH calls them gospel communities and emphasizes gospeling one another. We dont use all of that language because it doesnt fit our context, but we agree with the principle. We train our CG leaders in shepherding their communities in the gospel and use three approaches, including one advocated by Soma, one advocated by CH, and one advocated by John Piper.
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December 12, 2008
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John said:
An elder able to teach and people willing to listen – that sounds like a church to me. The question is just what kind of church. Is it a functional or a dysfunctional church? In fact sounds like a lot of churches I know. And I agree many of them are not missional, at least not in practice.
But what more do you need to have a church (“gathering”) than Christians gathered to be fed by the Word and on mission. If the church is not actually on mission – is it a church, no matter how well the Word is proclaimed?
As for elders – I agree with a plurality of elders, who actually and actively shepherd the people from the Word, as the central core of the church leadership. We need to give people that name and teach them the responsibility that goes with it – hopefully that will inspire them to actually fulfill that role. Rather than just have a title and attend council meetings.
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December 12, 2008
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Sam Groves said:
Good point. I wonder if the issue also has to do with a misunderstanding of what it means to be ‘able to teach’. I think that we often don’t appoint capable men (in terms of character and the ability to handle the Bible faithfully and refute false gospels) as elders because they lack charisma- they’ll bore people to death, we think. But surely we should be educating people (and ourselves) to fight against such wordly notions and honour men who get on with the task, even if with little wow-factor. I’d like to know from others if this is ever the case?
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December 12, 2008
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Chris Ebden said:
I agree Sam. I believe God does gift some with amazing charismatic gifting, able to teach the Bible and hold a crowd for an hour. But looking at the church this is the great exception. That is why there is often such a following after these few exceptions. I think God will provide the leadership from within the gospel community. One has to identify according to the biblical criteria those men God places before us rather than waiting for the next Obama look alike to come along.
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December 19, 2008
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eden2zion said:
Stephen, I think the confusion lies in the three different ways the N.T. uses the word “church”.
There are three very different uses -
1. The Universal Church (bride of Christ, Matthew 16 etc.)
2. The City Church (beginning of every epistle, Revelation 1-3, throughout Acts)
3. The small body usually meeting in a home (end of 4 different epistles, 1 Cor. 12 etc.)
Elders are at the city church level in Paul’s ministry (this is clear from Acts 20)
So yes, you can have a body that is not lead by an elder if you have elders overseeing the city church that oversees the smaller communities.
Teaching in Paul’s model, especially the 5-fold ministry of Ephesians 4, also happened primarily at the city church level (Read Acts 19). It’s clear from Ephesians 4 that these 5 types of people are church equippers (there is no mention of them involved in church leadership) so if they are equipping various churches (body and city) their ministry belongs more to the universal church (referenced at the beginning of Ephesians 4.)
Practically what all this means is if we want to see great things happen at the body level (or missional community level) we need to have a rockin’ city church established with strong elders and access to training and equipping from all of the 5-fold ministry (Eph. 4).
I think many MC guys who are trying to push the lion share of teaching and training down to the MC level are going to create radically imbalanced communities as some will be dominated by only one 5-fold gift and others will lack people who are truly able to teach. Training needs to be shared at the city church level!
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December 19, 2008
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Stephen said:
I’ve heard that 3-way division of the church in the NT before. At first glance it makes sense but at second glance I have to ask how well defined those categories actually are. For example the list is primarily made up of descriptive examples – there’s precious little in the prescriptive texts saying ‘this is what church is…’ – as an entire book I think Ephesians comes closest. I fail to see where the warrant comes in that allows us to say that the 5 fold ministry is meant for city level church – it simply doesn’t tell us. The churches in Revelation are also somewhat mysterious in that we have no way of knowing exactly how big or small they were. I see the value in the 3-way explanation but I’m also wary to put the NT ‘church’ into too tight a paradigm – I think its more dynamic than that.
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December 19, 2008
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eden2zion said:
Stephen, then why are you asking biblical questions about how eldering functions in the New Testament and why Paul is calling elders to have the ability to teach and how people are equipped according to Ephesians 4 if the biblical descriptions can’t help answer those questions? It seems you would prefer a church planting guru to answer the questions instead of Luke. Isn’t this why we have Acts? I agree these are not prescriptive commands in many cases but does that mean they’re more suspect and less helpful than an appeal to Ed Stetzer?
You responded “I fail to see where the warrant comes in that allows us to say that the 5 fold ministry is meant for the city level church”. But I didn’t write about the 5-fold PRESCRIPTIVELY I wrote that in Ephesian 4, 5-fold ministry “happened primarily at the city church level” it’s simply a biblical observation. Paul dispatched guys to cities, when Luke wrote of Paul’s ministry he referred primarily to cities and when Paul wrote letters he wrote them to cities. I’m not saying this as a restriction. I think its helpful to know what was typical for them as your post seems an attempt to piece together how the 5-fold ministry and eldering worked (in the New Testament).
Taking a step back I should tell you one of the reasons I posted a comment here was that I felt you were actually appealing to Scripture and perhaps interested in developing an Ecclessiology more from Scripture (and maybe that is your intent). This I found refreshing in the Missional Community circles because many are teaching that we are free to invent Ecclessiology from mission because the N.T. has so little to offer on the subject. I’m hoping you feel differently and that what you mean by “dynamic” isn’t that we’re left to make the church whatever we want.
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December 20, 2008
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Stephen said:
Eden2zion – I think I’ve missed you here judging by your response. I was simply pointing our that your 3-way division relies heavily upon descriptive passages in the NT and not prescriptive passages. As a general hermeneutic rule I try and work out backwards from the prescriptive to the descriptive in order to establish a theological truth – although I recognize that one can’t always do that – sometimes the truth is only found in a descriptive passage. My intent is and always will be to develop my ecclesiology from scripture – I simply used the Stetzer quote as a platform for discussion because I was reading the book at the time of writing his post – its not really an appeal to a guru. When I said that the church is dynamic I meant that it is able to look, at times, quite functionally diverse whilst retaining certain core biblical elements that demarcate it as a NT church. I’m completely against those in missional circles who want to invent their own ecclesiologies – hence you’ll notice that on this blog most of my interaction with the missional movement takes place within the more conservative (even Reformed) wing of the missional church. I’m sorry if I came across antagonistic – that really wasn’t my aim at all. Blessings.
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December 24, 2008
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Herman Groenewald said:
I believe that often the circumstances and location of members dictate to us how we should go about furthering the gospel.For example how does one address the needs in an informal settlement?
I believe this can only be effective in setting up a “Hub” from where we teach leaders who live in the communities,and exersize responsibility and leadership through a “Hub”. Sometimes this may be outside a regular denomination due the various backgrounds. However the “Hub” sets out to teach Biblical values and truths and go about finding and training leaders.
In short we$ are given circumstance that dictate to us in an ever changing world.