Breaking Tradition By Mentoring
(Continuing reflections on Breaking Tradition to Accomplish Vision by Paul R. Gupta and Sherwood G. Lingenfelter.)
Paul R. Gupta is a leader at the forefront of the movement to plant a million churches to reach India for Christ. As the movement has grown the challenge of leadership development has come to the fore. In this series of reflections upon their experiences I have been seeking to apply their insights to the African church.
Sherwood Lingenfelter writes about Gupta’s early experiences in leadership training and the realization of the necessity of mentoring. He says:
Training without mentoring by the pastor or another leader usually doesn’t succeed…Pastors did not know how to plant second or third churches without leader or peer mentoring. While they knew they should make disciples, their effectiveness was limited without mentoring or feedback. When gifted people finished the training to teach, they still were not effective without ongoing peer and master-teacher mentoring. To train new leaders and empower them for ministry they must have mentors, be mentored and learn how to mentor others.[i]
It seems that Gupta has returned to the basic first century method of developing leaders and as a result is seeing a strong church planting movement being established. This approach is what made Paul so successful as described by Roland Allen in his classic work Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?:
In little more than ten years St. Paul established the Church in four provinces of the Empire, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia and Asia. Before A.D. 47 there were no Churches in these provinces; in A.D. 57 Paul could speak as if his work there was done…This is truly an astonishing fact. That Churches should be founded so rapidly, so securely, seems to us today, accustomed to the difficulties, the uncertainties, the failures, the disastrous relapses of our own missionary work, almost incredible. Many missionaries in later days have received a larger number of converts that St. Paul; many have preached over a wider area than he; but none have so established Churches. We have long forgotten that such things could be… Today, if a man ventures to suggest that there may be something to the methods by which St. Paul attained such wonderful results worthy of our careful attention, and perhaps of our imitation, he is in danger of being accused of revolutionary tendencies.[ii]
Specifically, why was Paul so successful and we often seem to see so much failure? Could it be as a friend shared with me in an email?
Maybe what Paul did (based on Jesus?) was to live with these new converts 24/7 for a few months. We must create (re-discover) ways to make equipping more thoroughly relational. It’s only partially about information.
Relational equipping is another way of saying, “mentoring,” which is a key element in the strategy employed by the church in India and which we need to take seriously in Africa.
What is necessary if mentoring is going to take place? It means there has to be a change of attitude by church leaders who must be willing to share what they have learned with younger pastors and leaders within their churches. One of the reasons I have discovered pastors don’t want to train others is that they feel threatened by those who may be more gifted than themselves. They are fearful that they may be supplanted by the younger men. And so they refuse to train and pass on what they have learned and gained by experience to the next generation.
Gottfried Osei-Mensah comments on this situation in Africa today:
Our national leaders want to stay in office until they drop dead, and when they drop dead nobody has been prepared to take over for them. It is the same in the church…But we cannot justify this by saying it is African culture…Scripture must judge our culture, and those things that are incompatible must go, however age-old, however authentically cultural they may be. The church today needs leaders who are able to disciple younger leaders and prepare them, not just as leaders of tomorrow, but as God’s servants to serve him today.[iii]
Church leadership should not be an elite club. Older pastors, if they are going to build the kingdom of God—and not their own—must break the tradition of hanging on to power and position and commit themselves to mentoring the up and coming generation of leadership for the church. They must become future driven instead of fear driven. If not, the growing church in Africa will be crippled due to lack of adequately trained and developed leaders.
[i] Paul R. Gupta and Sherwood G. Lingenfelter, Breaking Tradition to Accomplish Vision (Winona Lake, Indiana: BMH Books, 2006). p. 98.
[ii] As quoted in Ruth Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing Company, 1983), p. 29-30).
[iii] Gottfried Osei-Mensah, Wanted Servant Leaders, (Achimota, Ghana: Africa Christian Press, 1990). p. 11.
Breaking Tradition By Trusting the Holy Spirit
(Continuing reflections on Breaking Tradition to Accomplish Vision by Paul R. Gupta and Sherwood G. Lingenfelter.)
As I have been thinking about empowering God’s people for ministry I have become more convinced that the clergy\laity divide has been a great detriment to the growth and development of the church.
Paul “Bobby” Gupta writes of his experience of church planters in India which illustrates what is so common in the church here in Africa as well.
“Often missionaries successfully evangelize people in an unreached group, but fail to train and empower indigenous leadership or to contextualize the church. Fearing the immaturity of new believers or the dangers of syncretism, they retain leadership and control of the process and inhibit the birth of an indigenous movement.”[i]
Why is it, that the missionary, or in a local church context, the pastor fails to train and empower God’s people? Why is the pastor reluctant to allow church members to use their gifts and exercise leadership? There may be a number of reasons but may I suggest that a fundamental and underlying reason is that we don’t trust the Holy Spirit?
Do we trust Jesus through His Spirit to guide the church and its members? Or do we only think He gifts and empowers the “clergy”? Do we allow Him to be the head of the Church or do we usurp that role by our insistence on controlling access to ministry by reserving it for the clergy alone? How does our practice answer those questions? ”What? Trust the Holy Spirit? We can’t do that…!” (Of course we would never verbalize that!)
Perhaps we should examine the relationship of the Holy Spirit and leadership selection in the early church which is highlighted by some fascinating and instructive examples.
In Acts 6 a crisis over the feeding of the Hellenistic widows arose, the church gathered together to deal with the issue and the body was told to select leaders. The qualifications for leadership were that they were to be men of good reputation, full of the Spirit (emphasis mine) and of wisdom. When we think of the chronology it seems by our standards today they would have been relatively new believers. And yet, the apostles had no problem having them assume positions of leadership. Why? Isn’t it reasonable that they trusted the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the lives and leadership of these men?
Paul’s strategy seems to follow this pattern as we see him appointing men to be elders in a short time after their conversion. Let’s put this example in context. In Acts 13:52 (NASB) we read, “And the disciples were continually filled with joy and the Holy Spirit.” We need to emphasize that these were new believers who had come to know the Lord under Paul’s ministry in Pisidian Antioch (vs. 14).
And yet on the return leg of his first missionary journey to visit the churches he had planted, Luke records in Acts 14:23 that he appointed elders in every city. Who were in this pool of potential leaders Paul could draw from? He only had these new Holy Spirit-filled believers. How could Paul do that? He had to trust the leading of the Holy Spirit in his choice and the work of the Holy Spirit in those elders who had no training at all and very little discipleship. I find it incredible, that Paul did that. Wouldn’t we say that a church planter was being very irresponsible if he did the same today?
Paul’s trust in the Holy Spirit in relation to church leadership is underscored in Acts 20:28 (NIV) where he addresses the Ephesian elders and says, “Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers.” Clearly it is the Holy Spirit who was at work in a plurality of church leaders to provide pastoral care for the Ephesian church. It was not left to a clerical elite.
It is naïve to think that the way to avoid problems in the church is to keep the control of ministry and leadership in the hands of the clergy. Formalized training and installation into a pastoral position does not guarantee spiritual maturity. There are enough cases of serious moral and spiritual failure by those in that class to disabuse ourselves of that notion!
Did Paul fear immaturity in the leaders or syncretism or other such dangers in the early church? I don’t believe so. In Acts 20:29-30 he acknowledges that there will be external and internal attacks upon the Ephesian church. And yet Paul was comfortable and confident to leave the leadership and future ministry of the flock in their Spirit-guided hands. And so he could “commit [them] to God and to the word of his grace, which [could] build them up…”[ii]
To allow our fears be the reason we don’t empower our church members for leadership and ministry is not consistent with the Pauline pattern which was to trust the Holy Spirit to oversee and guide the church.
If we are going to break the clergy\laity tradition we must learn to trust Jesus as the Head of the Church to lead all of his spirit-filled members to use their gifts to build the kingdom. Anything less is not biblical.
“From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.“[iii]
[i] Paul R. Gupta and Sherwood G. Lingenfelter, Breaking Tradition to Accomplish Vision (Winona Lake, Indiana: BMH Books, 2006), p. 69.
[ii] Acts 20:32.
[iii] Ephesians 4:16.
