Urgency to Train Church Leaders
by Curtis McGinnis
I grew up on a dairy farm in southwest Wisconsin. I knew from an early age the importance of urgency, steadfast commitment, and dedication. As dairy farmers, my family had to milk the cows each morning and evening, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. When spring came and the weather turned nice, we had to get in the fields and plant the crops. On a beautiful summer day, we were not going to the lake, but we were out in the fields. When the crops are ready you make hay (literally!). In the fall when the soybeans and corn were ready to harvest, we took advantage of every nice day to ensure the work was complete before the snow began to fall.
Gary did a great job at the beginning of August on this blog when he defined the word urgency as “what is of pressing importance requiring immediate attention.” If my family had no sense of urgency the crops would not be planted or picked, the cows would not be milked, and all production and potential profit would halt immediately. I learned very quickly on the farm that there is no time to be playing farmer, you have to get busy doing what is most important because the strength, effectiveness, and health of the farm are directly related to urgency and our responsiveness to it.
Proverbs 10:5 tells us, “He who gathers crops in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son.”
A proper sense of urgency makes us wise.
We need the urgency of a good farmer in our churches today. We have too much apathy, complacency, and tyranny of the urgent (but not what is truly important). We are too content to sit on our hands and watch as a dying world waits to hear the hope of Jesus Christ.
We need a sense of urgency in areas such as preaching, evangelism, and discipleship; however, I want to focus on the need for a sense of urgency in training up the next generation of church leaders. Much has been written lately in the evangelical church, but also in the Restoration Movement over the need for more church leaders.1
Recently at a multi-denominational church conference, I was struck by how nearly every denominational leader noted the need for more men and women to be trained for ministry. Independent Christian churches also have a great need for training and equipping ministry staff. We are also seeing more openings in churches than we have trained people to fill, and it is taking longer.
We can point the finger at many reasons for this reality: the closing the Bible Colleges, changing demographics, less interest and emphasis on ministry as a career, etc. However, what we need now is a sense of urgency showing it is of pressing importance and requiring immediate attention.
The organization I lead is working to bring Christian Higher Education back to the churches through partnerships with Christian Universities, providing resources to help strengthen existing churches, and start reproducing churches. In addition, we are working to create partnerships with organizations like e2 where we can serve as an extension of the organization and be a catalyst for ongoing elder training and coaching for the churches in the upper Midwest. The new Preaching Elder Initiative from e2 is in direct response to the growing difficulty of churches to hire ministers and fills in a critical gap that has been missing, namely the training of lay elders to rightly handle and proclaim the truth of God’s Word.
We realize that we need to invert the pipeline of ministry training and hope that someday soon 75% of ministers will be coming from within the church, with 25% trained outside. We realize that if we wait to develop leaders until we need them, it is too late!
Our commitment is to come alongside the local church to select, prepare, send, and support people for ministry. As my friend Rick Shonkwiler has said, we want to call out the local church to be recruiting and encouraging people to consider vocational ministry. Think about this: if each church would recruit one person every ten years, regardless of the size of the church, we could see some things change.
All this requires urgency on the part of the local church. It will take urgency on the part of Sunday school teachers, servants (“deacons”), elders, staff, and senior ministers to not only see the importance, but begin to act by praying, encouraging, mentoring, and supporting those whom God has given potential to lead in his church. We need church leaders who will see the urgency of the matter and spend time in prayer and fasting asking for God’s forgiveness, favor, and foresight that he would make known those He is preparing.
The Bride of Christ is too important, too valuable, and too beautiful to not have a sense of urgency. The strength, effectiveness, and health of the Church are at stake.
Would you join me in praying Matthew 9:38 which says: "Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field" and asking people to consider the call to ministry?
