Emerging Pastor

I want to share with you this Scripture from 2 Timothy 2:1-7. This Scripture is the text I'm required to base my message on for my subject on advanced preaching subject techniques.

You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others. Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs he wants to please his commanding officer. Similarly, if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor's crown unless he competes according to the rules. The hardworking farmer should be the first to receive a share of the crops. Reflect on what I am saying, for the Lord will give you insight into all this.

When I read this I see Paul profiling the life of an emerging pastor. So lets dissect it!

One of my favorite college subjects is one called "Personal Formation". It is 3 years long and works to grow the individual in themselves. It's run as a small group (typically about 8 people) who get together over regular periods during the year to reflect on themselves, life and ministry and how God is forming them. I had my third session this year on Monday and we were introduced to the term, Missionalism. This is the tipping point from being a sucessful leader and drawing yourself into a cult of personality and sucess. And I'm prone for it!

As I mentioned earlier, we are now in the third week of our eight week bible study series on the beatitudes and I don't think things could be going better. There is a lot of conversation being generated by the participants and even new groups coming on board since it kicked off. We now have close to 100% adult participation which I believe is a testimony to how God is working in the lives of our church at the moment. Besides running my own group, I'm attending one of the new groups that were formed for the study (and I believe will continue to progress afterwards). It's been a strange experience for me to not be in the drivers seat but God is certainly working through the new leader (who had a great mentor :) to bring out His agenda for the group. It's this group leaders first time of leading "full time" and I've been encouraging him along the journey but I thought I should share some of the insights I've had with him.

On the train this morning I was finishing off one of my ethics assignments, this one is about the validity of cohabitation as a pathway to marriage.

It's a very difficult question to answer because of the crossover between sacred and secular views of marriage. The Catholic church insist that marriage has to be performed by a member of the clergy in from to at least two witnesses (the council of Trent) while Martin Luther said that marriage is a secular issue and the church should just stay out of it.

The underlying question for me is how much say can the church have in a secular society. We can not be legislators of all morality (mostly because we abdicated the moral high ground long ago) but at the same time we can be a positive influence on our society guiding them towards a Godly way of living.

After all the foundation of our societies laws are based in Judeo-Christian thought and no one argues that "don't kill" and "don't steal", while going somewhat against our nature are beneficial to society.

That's not the path I went down in my assignment though, I think once people cohabitate they have entered into marriage with each other. Australian law at least recognizes that after a certain amount of time living together you are in a de facto marriage. What we can add to society and people who are considering cohabitating is give them access to pre-marital counseling! And encourage them to make a public commitment of their relationship to their friends and family so they can feel invited to support their relationship together.

When Sally and I were married we could have eloped, had the minimum witnesses and excluded our friends, but by inviting everyone to our wedding ceremony we were saying, join with us on this journey and I think that is something that the cohabitating couples I know are missing out on, the society of friends and family invited to help strengthen a relationship.

Although I haven't blogged about it in detail I've been putting a lot of time into contemplating the life cycle of small groups in out church.

One blog I have read suggests three phases of group life being
 1) Starting / Open to all
 2) Covenented / Closed to new people
 3) Concluded

While each church has different needs and goals with their small group life and it wont fit with everyone, but I particularly like this view of small group life because it plans for the conclusion of the group. And in my mind, the conclusion of a group brings oportunities for growth.

Most of the existing groups at my church have been running for many many years. They are full (I call a group full at 12 people) and stagnant. There is no room for anyone else, no thought of splitting and no thought about concluding. They are happy in their rutt. That sounds harsh, after all they are faithfully studying the Word of God and growing from the experience but they are missing something because of their familiarity with each other. They have lost the boldness to grow.

Most strategies for small group growth in a church is to help groups get to a certain size and then split them in twain. I'm not a fan of that strategy at all! To my mind it is an unnecessarily violent act and only serves to damage both halves.

To combat the contradiction in these two areas I've been experimenting with a sort of middle of the road strategy that I call "Small Group Plants". I'm sure it's not unique or original although I have not heard anyone else articlate it, not in any books or confrences.

The idea behind small group plants is for the leader (who has been mentoring group leadership with others in the group) to support and commission two to three people in their group (I think three is the most ideal number) to go out and find at least one other person that is not in a small group and start one on their own.

The old group leader is allowed to come to the new group for a limited time period but after that they are on their own (although supported by the small group pastor, me :)

In this way, both groups move back to the starting / open to all phase and begin again recruiting members. The old group because their is now three spots freed up and the new group, well, because it's new.

Thoughts?

As a young and naive small group leader I used to believe that you could do things in your group like, pick the next study, by canvasing the opinions of the whole group, garnering a consensus and then together going down to the local Christian book store and picking one out that meets all the agreed upon conversation.

This in fact did work for a while, when the group was very small, 3-4 people finding such consensus was easy because the group was traveling very closely together in their discovery process with God. When the group grew bigger, say 6-8 people, it became much harder to reach an agreement on who would bring supper next week let alone what we should be studying.

I put these kinds of issues into the subject of Shared Leadership vs Leading by Consensus. When we lead by consensus one could make an argument that we are showing no leadership at all, I don't agree with that. It does however put an unnecessary strain on the group when people start to engage their opinions only to be upset when the group doesn't move the way they suggested.

Shared leadership on the other hand is in line with the model of mentoring new leaders from within the group to become group leaders themselves. Let's take the example of choosing a study again. In a shared leadership scenario, the group leader would pull aside the person (or people) they are mentoring and ask them what they believe the group should study next and either go with it or put it to the group. Doing this gets people to think not just about themselves but of the Spiritual needs of others in the group and that is the best training I can give them.

There is one other benefit from shared leadership, it keeps the leader accountable. It gives people permission to speak into the leaders life about where they think the group is and helps prevent leader ego trips.