Sorry I've been unable to put a new post sooner. I'd like to continue the discussion about training pastors in a local church setting by adding another dimension, namely church-centered disciple-making.The church is responsible for making
mature disciples out of each of its members. An ecclesiocentric or
churchocentric view of discipleship should take into consideration a biblical
model of church. Apart from
pragmatic problems relating to isolation or reintegration, there are deep
theological issues related to the local church’s superiority over any other
institution of pastoral training. Millard Erickson sees certain biblical
images of the true church in his discourse on the nature of the church.[1]
His selection of certain biblical images is both ecclesiocentric and
Trinitarian in their approach to the identity, function, and relationships within
local church discipleship. Each aspect of the people of God, the body of
Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit carries an implication for pastoral
training as part of the doctrine of discipleship.
As
the people of God, the church is an identifiable assembly having certain
cultural expressions and positioned in a loving relationship with God the
Father. Erickson cites 2 Cor 6:16 as the primary basis for this positional
image, but he also refers to the image as having its base in Old Testament texts
whereby God expresses his ownership and nurture of Israel. The identity of
God’s people, then, is transferred to include the church in the New Testament,
and as such carries the idea of God’s demand for the church’s consecration and
devotion. This image sparks an ecclesiocentric view of discipleship that
demands total commitment to the group and a placement of leaders within the
group whose function outside the group might seem meaningless. In essence, the
identity of the leaders, the men of God, is rooted in the identity of the
church, the people of God.
One of the titles
used in Scripture for church leader is episkopos
or overseer, a positional perspective. It can be argued that
the pastor as overseer is theologically reflective of the the oversight and
headship of God the Father. In his refutation of Episcopalian polity, John Hammett
argues for a plurality of overseers and appeals to Richard McBrien as an
authoritative Catholic theologian for the case against leadership singularity.[2]
McBrien claims that it is only in the “post-apostolic period that we find
evidence for the so-called monarchal
episocopate, i.e., a local church presided over by one bishop.”[3]
However, it is the very nature of oversight that places the theological role of
the pastors into the discipleship process of the local church.
The
church is also described as the body of Christ, a functional image in that it
explains the church as the “locus of Christ’s activity now, just as was his
physical body during his earthly ministry.”[4]
Erickson calls this image “the most extended”[5]
and most Christocentric perspective on the church. It speaks to “the connection
of the church, as a group of believers, with Christ.”[6]
Under the leadership of Christ Himself, the members of the church find their
bodily functions per se. Within these functions, “each believer encourages and
builds up the others.”[7]
There is value in the contribution of each body part toward the function of the
whole, so discipleship is a functionary fulfillment of the believer’s life in
the local church.
Another title that
is contemporarily used for pastor is poimen
or shepherd. This is a functional role, as a shepherd keeps his flock, Christologically
reflective of Jesus’ function as the Good Shepherd over His flock, the church.
Using this functional image, Carl George suggests a new paradigm in his
meta-church model for pastoral ministry training. Under this paradigm, the
primary care giver is not the pastor himself, but instead the pastor is a
shepherd of a shepherding body where each member of the flock exercises her
spiritual gifts to lead the rest. It is a functional role “organized around a
system of lay-pastoral skills.”[8]
Howard Astin believes this requires the “adoption of a new leadership
structure” whereby each pastor on a pastoral team functions as a coordinator of
cell groups rather than a traditional caregiver to the entire congregation.[9] He
outlines three elements to the calling and training of new pastors within a
local church ministry, namely, prayer, vision casting, and delegation of tasks.[10]
Erickson
also describes the church as the temple of Holy Spirit. As the relational
image, it is also the most pneumatological expression of the local church’s
interactions. Citing 1 Cor 3:16–17 and Acts 1:8, Erickson points to the
indwelling nature and the empowering activity of the Holy Spirit in the church.
Through the presence of the Holy Spirit in each believer and the manifestation
of power through spiritual gifts, the church lives out an incarnational
expression of the temple, “a holy and sacred place under the old covenant
because God dwelt in it.”[11]
The local church, then, has a sanctifying work as it makes mature disciples and
leaders to minister within the temple.
A final title used
to name pastors is the relational title presbyter
or older one. Reflective of the Old Testament temple elders, an elder in the
New Testament temple community echoes the pneumatological aspect of interpersonal relationships within the
church. The elder brings stability and direction to the group, and together
they minister to one another through varied spiritual gifts.
These images are indeed Trinitarian in
nature, but they apply specifically to local church discipleship and the
pastoral sphere. According to Mark Dever, the church should be the primary disciple-maker
and is being “irresponsible by not taking measures for equipping future
pastors.”[12] David P. Nelson concurs when
he admits that “life in the community of faith, the cultivation of a liturgical
life, and the enactment of faith as a way of life is the stuff of real
discipleship. And the church should be diligent and intentional about shaping
the life of the community to allow for relationships that form mature
disciples.”[13] If pastors are best developed
in the context of local church discipleship, the local church should have a
full-orbed doctrine of discipleship.
Modern
practitioners are quick to point out the deficiency in modern local church
discipleship programming. Alan Hirsch very explicitly says that “the quality of
the church’s leadership is directly proportional to the quality of
discipleship. If we fail in the area of making disciples, we should not be
surprised if we fail in the area of leadership development.”[14] Neil
Cole suggests that “multiplication the continued expansion and reproduction
of disciples who are producing other disciples is the heart of any Biblical
movement.”[15] David Nelson believes that the New Testament provides
descriptive insight into discipleship models for the apostolic era but that it
does not prescribe one specific model. He believes that
there
simply isn’t a singular pattern in the Scriptures that is monolithic or that is
prescribed
as the primary means of discipleship. Jesus taught the masses and discipled a
group of men. And even when we find in Scripture those indications of more
personal attention given by Jesus, it isn’t strictly
in a “one-on-one” relationship. We should not, therefore, read too much into
the descriptions of these relationships in the text.[16]
However, he does maintain that “discipleship is best done
in the context of the community. The one-on-one model lacks the robust
opportunities for the formation of life that is found when a believer is
influenced by more than one person.”[17]
By some standards,
any discipleship that exists outside the local church might not be considered
adequate. According to Hammett, expressions of unity outside the structural
sphere of the local church should be considered spiritual in nature and not
organizational or institutional.[18]
Therefore, expressions as such wherein there is cooperation between or
participation among adherents to various denominations could be considered
“parachurch”.[19] The question then arises
whether bible colleges or seminaries that facilitate the learning of students
from various ecclesial backgrounds constitute parachurch activity as opposed to
strictly denominational activity. Whatever the answer to that question, it can
nonetheless be ascertained that the seminary is not a strict extension of a
single local church’s teaching ministry.
Hammett appeals to
Baptist ecclesiology as his basis for discipleship within the local church. He
presents a strong case for congregational polity as “democratic participation,
with every member having an equal voice and vote.”[20]
From that political perspective, he sees “no evidence for an authority such as
a bishop, presbytery, or general assembly over local churches in Scripture.”[21]
Moreover, he argues that the “relationship of the congregation to associations
and conventions is not as direct and intrinsic to congregationalism as are its
relationships to elders and deacons.”[22]
Continuing that thought, Hammett also discusses the ordinances as a strictly
local church function demanding the participation of the entire local church
and which cannot be administered in isolation by even a subset or “small
portion of the church.”[23]
Therefore, discipline and discipleship are local church functions within the
Baptist theology of the church.
Bill Hull’s theological
method for understanding discipleship is four-fold in process: descriptive,
modeled, historical, and profiled. Like Hammett, Hull also argues for a
“churchocentric discipling model.”[24]
Like Nelson, he sees true discipleship as “a churchocentric discipling model
required a community relationship, a shared discipling among several people.”[25]
As the primary thesis of his teaching, writing, and praxis, he declares that “the
church has the responsibility to provide the clear vision and the vehicles that
bring Christians into mature discipleship.”[26]
The Bible clearly
says that God gave some people to the church to be pastors (Eph 4:11–16). It
would then logically follow that the role of pastor is the ultimate end of one
branch of discipleship for those who have been thus called and that the Bible
would provide some modeling for this type of discipleship. It would also follow
that training pastors should be an integral part of discipleship within the
local church. Training pastors in the church helps discipleship in the church.
By deduction, therefore, removing pastoral training from the local church in
fact damages church health.
Nelson argues for
a nonprescriptive view of leadership development in the New Testament[27],
but Rad Zdero suggests that “although there is no direct evidence concerning
the exact way local leaders were developed, several patterns emerge.”[28]
Zdero suggests that there are three identifiable patterns. He presents what he
calls Apostolic coaching within the local church to describe the Apostles
direct method of instruction for pastors. He then classifies a discipleship
chain to describe ongoing apostolic teaching within the local church for all
members. He then describes an apprenticeship model, the same method employed by Mark Dever in his Capitol Hill Baptist pastoral internship program.[29]
Dever’s model is
an alternative to formal theological education in seminary and Bible college.
Dever explains that he is
not opposed to seminaries, although
they are unknown among Protestants before the
eighteenth or nineteenth century.
I’m simply saying that in the Bible, the local church – a community where
people are known, their conversion is testified to, and their gifts are
witnessed – is the appropriate place to make that kind of heavy statement about
God’s gifting and calling in somebody’s life. Raising up leaders is part of the
church’s commission.[30]
Dever claims unprecedented success in this model, and he
raises it as a biblical standard for
twenty-first century theological education alternatives.
Until the fall of
communism, there were no models for formal theological education for pastors in
Russia. Instead, any pastoral training was done only within the context of the
local church. For that reason,“within a culture that lacked both ecclesiastical
and secular traditions of good public speaking, the oratorical art was neither
developed nor taught in Russia.”[31]
It could be added that no other model for ongoing theological training in local
churches has taken root either. Regarding this lack of formal training in
Russia, Mark Harris notes,
Within
the churches the approach to preacher development made little use of formal
methodologies which could have been utilized, such as direct
mentoring or the passing on of a set of objective principles by which sermons
could be evaluated. Personal gifting and maturity carry much more weight than
knowledge of principles learned in a classroom. One cannot assume that all men,
especially the older brothers, are even interested in gaining such formal
training.Serving to counterbalance the lack of formal training was a strong
tradition of brothers meeting together to discuss and deal with biblical ideas
and difficulties.[32]
He continues his observations,
Mainly the young men of the
churches have been the ones to receive homiletic training, and the results have
been mixed. Some have noted that the classroom training has tended to produce
very theoretical and often dry sermons, long on intellectual approach to ideas
and short on practical application. Some of this can be attributed to the lack
of life experience of the young preachers, but at times the bookish training
may have promoted a certain youthful arrogance, arising from the possession of
knowledge that older preachers have not had.[33]
However, regardless of any
homiletical and oratory shortfalls, the Russian evangelical church has modeled
a biblical approach to pastoral training as it continues to attach a strong
theological significance to the local church as the locus for discipleship.
[1] See Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985), 1034–41.
[2] John S. Hammett, Biblical
Foundations, 140.
[3] Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism (New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), 867.
[4] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 1036.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 1037.
[7] Ibid, 1037–38.
[8] Carl F. George and Warren Bird, The Coming Church Revolution: Empowering Leaders for the Future
(Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 1994), 30.
(Grand Rapids: Monarch, 2002), 64.
[10] Howard Astin, Body
and Cell, 73–74.
[12] Mark Dever, “Raising Up Pastors is the Church’s
Work,” n.p. [cited 25 February 2010]. Online:
http://www.9marks.org/CC/article/0,,PTID314526_CHID598016_CIID2463176,00.html.
[13] David P. Nelson, “I Was Never ‘Mentored’: A Report
from the Field, Part 3,” n.p. [cited 8 February 2010]. Online:
http://betweenthetimes.com/2010/02/08/i-was-never-“mentored”-a-report-from-the-field-part-3.
[14] Alan Hirsch, Forgotten
Ways: Reactivating
the Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos
Press, 2006), 119.
[15] Neil Cole, “Movement Math,” n.p. [cited 26 February
2010]. Online: http://onmovements.com/?p=101.
[16] David P. Nelson, “I Was Never ‘Mentored’”, n.p.
[17] Ibid.
[18] John S. Hammett, Biblical
Foundations, 53.
[19] Ibid.
[20] John S. Hammett, Biblical
Foundations, 143.
[21] Ibid.
[22] John S. Hammett, Biblical
Foundations, 145.
[23]Ibid, 262.
[24] Bill Hull, The
Disciple-Making Church (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 1990), 18.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Bill Hull, Disciple-Making
Church, 33.
[27] David P. Nelson, “I Was Never ‘Mentored’”, n.p.
[29] See Mark Dever, “Raising Up Pastors,” n.p.
[30] Mark Dever, “Raising Up Pastors,” n.p.
[31] Mark Harris, “Toward an Understanding,” Paper Presented to Mission Consulting
Group, (Pasadena, Calif.: Mission Consulting Group, 1996), 6.
[32] Ibid, 8.
[33] Mark Harris, “Toward an Understanding,” 9.
No comments:
Post a Comment