Young pastors learn from elders

Posted: 11/18/05

Young pastors learn from elders

By Mark Wingfield

AUSTIN–If you're ever tempted to quit, call a friend first and talk it through.

That was one of several pieces of advice from a panel of seasoned pastors to younger pastors and church staff members during a seminar at the Baptist General Convention of Texas annual meeting.

While the challenges of ministry are greater than when these pastors began their careers several decades ago, the rewards remain great as well, Pete Freeman, Charles Johnson and Ken Hall told the young ministers.

Freeman is pastor of First Baptist Church of The Woodlands; Johnson is pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio; Hall is president of Buckner Baptist Benevolences and a former Texas pastor.

The greatest threat to the integrity of the church today is not theological but practical, the trio of pastors agreed. That practical challenge is embodied in leading churches to become outwardly focused, missional and not consumer-driven, they explained.

“Leading my church to be a global church with a local address is the hardest thing I've ever done,” Freeman confessed. He lamented that most church-growth models today are “consumer-driven.”

The church is not to be changed by culture but instead to challenge culture, Freeman added. “We are to impact culture.”

The missional church movement advocated by the Baptist General Convention of Texas holds more promise for the future of the church than the youth revival movement of the 1950s, he said, noting he had been a part of that earlier movement.

The changes for which a younger generation advocated 50 years ago were more internally focused, revolving around counting more people in churches and the numbers of people attending revival meetings, he said. The missional church model instead seeks to grow the kingdom of God without regard for whether that benefits an individual church.

This runs counter to the consumer-driven mentality, which says, “God loves the world, but he loves me a little bit more,” Johnson added.

Ministers and churches also must beware of thinking they can achieve ultimate spiritual growth, Hall warned. “We get to a level of spiritual growth, and we think we've arrived.”

Although the path of church ministry may have grown more difficult, the church at large is becoming more globally focused and is advancing, Hall said.

“A lot of your members think about the good old days, and they weren't that good.” For example, he said, “At the height of growth in Southern Baptist churches, we had the Civil Rights Movement. … Those weren't the good old days,” because the church too often wasn't focused outwardly.

The test for churches and pastors today should be service, Hall said. “If it's not about service to others, it's not about Christianity.”

Preaching this message may not be easy, Hall warned. “Our people, while they will espouse change … to engage culture, they're not there.”