Category: Ministry & Church Health

Take a look most church libraries or in their supply closets under “bible study” and most often you find slickly packaged materials complete with assignments and questions that was written by someone outside that church.

It is easy to see why this is so when you go into most Christian bookstores and in the section labelled “bible study” you find these same packaged materials, bearing the names of such prominent people as Beth Moore, Priscilla Shirer, Henry Blackaby, and others. We should find it curious that in these Christian stores, “bible study” rarely, if ever, includes materials about how churches identify, train teachers and evaluate teachers, or that provide instruction for teachers to teach the Scriptures. Even when they do, the overwhelming emphasis is on packaged ‘studies’.

Even the vernacular “come join my Bible study!” issued by one church member to another usually means come over and watch a video or come over and do a packaged workbook.

Certainly there are occasions when materials prepared by those outside your congregation are a useful tool in the church’s teaching ministry. Yet God has given the church — each congregation — the gifts it needs to operate, including teachers (Ephesians 4:11-12, 1 Timothy 3:2). When the default teaching function falls to those who we know only through a pixellated image on a video screen or head shot on a dust jacket, we implicitly suggest that God has not provided enough teachers to the local congregation.

We have plenty of ‘facilitators’. Usually packaged ‘bible study’ materials only require someone to insert the DVD, call attention to the reading assignment, and direct a discussion through the packaged questions. The one who does so is not a teacher, but is instead a facilitator or discussion leader. There may be a valid use for facilitators, but they are not the teaching ministry of the church.

A teacher is one who is able to take material from the Scriptures (or a book — more on that later), study its meaning, weigh the purpose of presenting it, devise a method of presentation consistent with the purpose, and present it, complete with fashioning questions and activities to complement the presentation, so that the student learns. Regardless of our modern technological access to them, we are not to be dependent on those outside our congregations for such instruction. God has promised to give each congregation those people-gifts.

One misconception that fuels the deferral to packaged materials is that a congregation’s only teacher is the pastor. Other church members can’t become teachers, and since the pastor can’t teach every class, facilitators must pick up the slack. Another misconception is that facilitators are teachers. Another misconception is that the church must have as many bible study and Sunday school classes as people in the congregation seem to want. This results in very segmented, homogeneous bible study groups.

Facilitators, as we have seen, are not teachers. And while the pastor is the primary teacher for the congregation, the Scripture tells us that there should be multiple elders (pastors) in each church and that each of them should be able to teach (1 Timothy 3:2). And if we believe that God gives each congregation the gifts necessary to be healthy, then the conclusion is that a congregation should have only as many classes as there are teachers.

This is not to say that discussion groups, bible studies, book studies and the like cannot occur: to the contrary, members should seek opportunity to gather to study and discuss Scripture apart from official church time, especially when doing so provides opportunity to expose unbelievers to the gospel. But church leaders and members should not mistake this activity for the teaching ministry of the church.

Small churches especially feel the pinch of the need for instruction in the face of a lack of available teachers. Larger churches should have no such problem, but even they typically defer to facilitating the packaged materials of others and refer to such as “teaching.” The biblical reality is that every congregation should constantly be developing teachers: raising up from within and training those who are biblical teachers.

When a church as an ordinary situation finds itself without its own teachers, then there is something unhealthy about that congregation. God will provide what each congregation needs to be healthy, but the first step is for each congregation to question its reliance on outside sources, and how they are used.

The various options of family ministry, as will be assumed here, are what has been termed family-integrated, family-based, and family-equipping (see Perspectives on Family Ministry). A “small church” is one in which there is a high ratio of children needing supervision to adults available to supervise them: typically this will occur most frequently in new churches and in church plants.

And I am not promoting mere pragmatism: “what works” is directed at those practical considerations that influence whether such a small church is able to select freely from the various options, regardless of theological agreement with them, or if such a church is only able to choose one or two.

For a hypothetical example, consider the church plant that begins with eight couples as the core group. Two couples have children who are grown, three have children ranging in age from 4 to 16, and three — the youngest couples — have kids ranging from infant to 4. This might reasonably give the church a mainstay of 30 people: the 16 adults and 14 children (a real congregation with which I am familiar has the equivalent of 16 core adults and 22 kids). conceivably, 7 or more of the children might be toddlers, the sort that adults might find distracting if they are wandering around during the service.

The question, then, is whether this congregation could — even if it wanted — choose a family-based ministry model in which children’s bible study is age-graded, and there is a nursery for every church function? Available manpower suggests not.

Anecdotally, the majority of plants, new churches, and otherwise small churches find that such focus on the children is simply too labor-intensive to prove a feasible option. Consequently, they limit or completely eliminate age-graded bible study and offer no nursery or child care during worship services. In effect, they become family-integrated by necessity.

As churches increase in size, however, the child care ratio starts to reverse, and there are more adults available to teach and tend the nursery, or the church is able to hire child care workers. In most cases, churches seem relieved to have grown enough to segregate by age, and those which have been age segregating for years seem not the least bit interested in questioning the status quo.

But is what the small church must do by necessity actually better practically and spiritually? In words, is it inherently and automatically the best choice to age-segregate congregations as soon as size permits?

There are, of course, many facets to the family ministry discussion. One historical anchor should surely inform our contemplation, though, and that is that the one-room schoolhouse and church gathering where everyone remained together were the norm for much longer than age-segregation has been on the scene. And just as surely, these images are much more reflective of real life: when students graduate, they certainly don’t find life age-segregated, and when they walk off the church campus they find they must interact with people of all ages, not only their age peers.

Should our churches, then, teach an age-segregation that life does not permit, or train people to interact with people of all ages?

In The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline (Crossway 2010) Jonathan Leeman describes the different facets of a member’s submission to his local church body.

In a proper, biblical relationship, members submit to their church: publicly, physically and geographically; socially; affectionately; financially; vocationally; ethically; and spiritually. Submitting this way assumes that members will seek the counsel of elders and other church leaders, not in the sense of yielding to authoritarian rule, but of utilizing the wisdom of shepherds God has placed over the flock.

We rarely consider counting others more important than ourselves (Philippians 2:3-4) or of obtaining wise counsel, especially in such important matters as where we live, how we spend money, and what we do for a living, and even with regard to members of our own churches, who are frequently as unknown to us as estranged third cousins.

Submitting vocationally to the interests of other church members, as Leeman suggests, is particularly alien to us.

How we earn our living is a significant component of our image of ourself, both as we are and as we want to be. Nothing, we suppose, is more fundamental to self-governance and personal liberty than our vocation.

But decisions about jobs and careers frequently involve changes that require us to move away from our congregation or that place demands on our time that lead us to give less of it, and have implications for our giving, our fellowship, and our ministry in the body.

If we truly count the interests of others as more significant than our own, as the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament authors indicate we should, then how a promotion, or relocation, or career change will affect our ministry to others in the congregation should factor as prominently as salary, title, and 401k.

This is difficult enough a concept in the abstract, but when faced with the choice between accepting a job promotion with better pay and more hours or rejecting it in order to keep teaching the 4th grade boys, it appears simply unthinkable.

But think, we must, because it is all too easy to make life decisions considering only our own interest. A sure corrective, as Leeman suggests, is to begin yielding to our fellow members in these areas.

One reason people give for avoiding organized church is that churches are full of hypocrites. Another reason is the children’s ministry.

Or, the lack thereof.

It is not difficult to notice that many churches — despite their size or resources — develop a “children’s ministry” as soon as possible. Usually “children’s ministry” means that there are activities for kids of all ages — or baby-sitting services — so that the adults can separate from their progeny as soon as they hit church grounds. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.

Parents have become unabashed and unashamed to confess that what they look for in a church family is the “children’s ministry.” This automatically eliminates from their consideration those churches that are too small to have a gymnasium, or too frugal to schedule weekly field trips, or too healthy to serve pizza at every church function.

This parental mindset — and the corresponding marketing blitz by churches with youth programs — is customarily seen in only those parents who themselves are from the larger churches that fielded youth programs. But it is increasingly true that even smaller churches, and even more home-grown parents, are feeling the pressure to “youth-enize” their ministry.

I recently spoke to a father who, as a youth, had grown up in a small country church. As an adult he had attended a different, but still small, community church. Because of dissatisfaction with them, he and his family were “doing church” at home (the smallest congregation, as it were). I suggested that he attend services at our church plant (only 9 months old at the time), and his only query was to ask what we “do for the children.”

I said that we provide parents a spanking spoon, and show them how to use it.

Not really.

Yet here is the problem illustrated: rather than fellowship with other believers in worship and instruction without a “youth program,” he preferred to keep his family away from biblical fellowship.

This is neither a right view of the purpose of church or a right view of rearing children.

The church must do a better job of correcting this erroneous mentality. The man, as head of his family, is charged with leading in instruction and worship beginning in his home. He is then charged with ensuring that the family participate in corporate worship with other believers, making certain that the church they attend is doctrinally faithful, ethically responsible, and evangelistically healthy. The interest in entertaining children is usually at odds with all of these responsibilities.

What the church must teach, and what parents must realize, and what unbelievers must be shown, is that a church that properly trains adults to follow Christ generally produces children who receive the faith.

I know of at least one church that requires all teachers and even small group leaders to be deacons. It does this because subjecting teachers — those responsible for the front-line duty of teaching the faith to believers and unbelievers — to the general character qualifications for deacons (primarily 1 Timothy 3:8-13) enables the church some measure of oversight to what teachers do.

Typically churches use the Desire Test for recruiting teachers: if someone wants to teach in the church, then obviously he is qualified to do so. But having set desire as the criteria for judging teachers, the church is in a tough position to then determine that despite his ardent desire and best intentions, that man cannot teach. A very real result is that a teacher who expresses in class that “we don’t need to listen to Paul — he’s a man, after all” cannot be removed from teaching responsibility because to do so would hurt her feelings and crush her spirit.

One of the most important aspects of teacher qualification is character. There is, obviously, much to be said for preparation skill and classroom ability, but the best teacher will still sabotage the mission and unity of the church if his character is not in order.

This is so because everything that the teacher does teaches. If he openly disagrees with church docrine in class, if he expresses disdain for church leadership or their ministry philosophy, if he calls into question teaching material that the elders approved, he is teaching much more than the missionary journeys of Paul.

And this also applies to those we wouldn’t consider “teachers” and situations we wouldn’t classify “teaching.”

All people who occupy positions of influence in the congregation wield considerable ability to sway the opinions of others. Committee chairmen, group leaders, discussion “facilitators”, department leaders…all can exert tremendous influence over other members of the congregation.

And when those influencers bristle at the teaching of the spiritual leaders, when they resist training required by the elders, when they show open disdain for those things, that rebellious and non-submissive attitude will infect the rest of the congregation.

At that point, the spiritual leader of the congregation should not care one whit how good a “teacher” that influencer is; he should have no official platform for that negative influence.

Should churches then, like the congregation I know, require all teachers and less formal influencers to satisfy the requirements of deacon?