Proclaimer Blog
Training a church
We did two things at the weekend at church, which in hindsight would have been better separated apart. However, they were both part of an initiative which seeks to see the church trained as well as taught. Our conviction is that our model of ministry is right – consecutive expository ministry Sunday by Sunday allowing God to speak and make Christ present amongst us. However, our conviction is also that ½ hour a week (for most, these days) is not enough to equip us fully to live in and reach the world.
So we train. It’s not the same as preaching. It doesn’t function in the same way. It’s not of the same order. Nevertheless, we see it as an important component of equipping the saints to minister to one another.
I think this is something that our American cousins often have sorted because of Adult Sunday Schools. With the decline of a midweek meeting or a Friday night Lloyd-Jones like session, the opportunity to do this kind of equipping passes us by. So we have a once a month Sunday evening we call Thinking Like a Christian where we spend an hour tackling topics as wide as church history, Catholicism, reaching Muslims, sleep, politics, workplace evangelism – and, last week, sex. These are for the whole church so we know how to put them into practice ourselves and are able to encourage others. It was particularly good to see some of the older singles at the sex evening as we thought through how we engage with the world and pray for our young people.
Then, once a term, we have a Saturday morning. This time around we did a theology of gathering – why we meet as a church: we had a theological session (what the Bible says about gathering) and then a practical session where we tried (in smaller groups) to put into practice the Bible principles.
As I said, we probably could have done these two things different weekends, but in fact both were pretty well attended and – I hope – useful.
And here’s the thing about such training. It doesn’t undermine the Sunday preaching. It enhances it. Saturday’s training helped us see the importance of preaching as a key element of our Sunday services. Sunday’s training (on the Bible’s view of sex) set some important principles which will flow through into preaching when some of these topics arise.
Preaching is still at our heart. It is still our focus. And it not undermined by equipping the saints. Rather it is enhanced. How do your people get trained?