This podcast is also available via iTunes and iHeartRadio.
Transcript
Host: Hi everyone. Today we are chatting again with Clare Jewell, the National Representative for the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. He’s joined by David Strope, who previously served as interim National Representative. We’re talking about strategies to revitalize churches.
Clare, one of your primary responsibilities is helping churches and pastors. That’s easy to do when the pastor asks for help, but how can you help someone who’s afraid to ask for it or doesn’t recognize that they need help?
Clare: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I mean, sometimes the answer is, you can’t help. I mean, if that emotion or thought, it could be either one or combination of the two, is so strong, then okay, you you do your best, you say what needs to be said, and you just have to walk away from it. Not walk away permanently, but in that moment, say, okay, they’re not ready to move forward. It’s like in your church, you’re looking to develop leaders. And John over here is not ready, so I’m going to have to put him a little bit to the side for now.
But I think in those cases where that’s the initial reaction, I think one of the key things that I like to do is really be transparent about my own self and say, “Hey, I you know, I can appreciate what you’re going through”, or whatever. Here’s what happened to me. Here’s how somebody helped me when I was in a situation similar—I don’t want to assume it’s the same, I think that’s kind of arrogant—but I was in a similar situation, and somebody came alongside. Or talk about a case where I was resistant to help, and how that didn’t pan out too well, and what I learned from that, and let that just sit.
And I think sometimes we have to be direct and put it out there. Other times it’s more subtle, just let the Holy Spirit take it and see what, what God wants to do with it. But I really think sharing from our heart, “Hey, I had a similar struggle or I wasn’t ready to listen at this point in my life or career, and this is what I could have learned, or what I wish I would have done in that situation if had it to do over, you might want to consider that.”
And then praying. I don’t want to leave that out. I think really praying for people, the Holy Spirit goes to work on you. That’s pretty tough opponent to deal with.
Host: David, you were on the road for three years visiting all sorts of churches, some of them healthy, some of them not so healthy. Can you sketch out a portrait of an unhealthy church? What do they have in common?
David: It is likely, and I think this is endemic in many churches, not every church, churches that shrink, shrivel and die. It’s really several basic essential matters, one of which is, there they cease an outward focus in in evangelism and discipleship. They become totally inward focused. It’s about our comfort, about what we find pleasing to ourselves.
I used a metaphor in my message at this week’s annual conference that people tend to treat the church like a country club for Christians, rather than a preparation for battle. So part of it is churches that have lost vision for any meaningful connection with their community, both corporately and then individually.
Sometimes churches become so overprogrammed that church families have literally no time to make connection with a neighbor to invite them over for a meal. I think that’s one of the issues. I think there are so many, multiple factors that that are true there.
But I think that’s the largest thing. I think part of it, and this goes back to a little bit about what, what Clare was mentioning earlier, about how do you help a church that may not want to be helped?
We prize our autonomy. I mean, we’re not a denomination, we’re a fellowship of churches. Sometimes our autonomy is our Achilles heel. We’re so independent-minded that it’s impossible that someone from the outside of my life or my church could actually provide perspective and encouragement to me, or maybe even poke me or prod me.
It was seven years ago, this very week, that I suffered a severe health crisis. I had pulmonary embolisms and was according to those around me, I’m not aware of it, fighting for my life. It was interesting. The doctors and nurses in the ER, they totally invaded my autonomy. They didn’t ask me anything. They did all kinds of things. They didn’t say, Mr. Strope, can we do this? They just started poking and prodding and inserting and trying to help because they wanted to save my life. And I think churches need to be able to have a mentality that says, “Yeah, we are sick.”
And I think there is a blindness or an inability to see the reality of what they’re experiencing.
I illustrate often in the state of Iowa, there are about 100 GARBC churches, 50 of them, half, are 50 people and less, including children. And half of that, half 25% are 25 people and less. So that may not be true across the full fellowship, but if that’s any picture of what is true in the broad spectrum of our fellowship, we’re talking about a lot of churches who are barely able to turn the lights on, let alone have a world missions emphasis, to have any meaningful penetration into the community with evangelism, to have any ability to put men into leadership ministries, or even to have a pastor.
Host: At any given time in this nationwide network of 1,000 or so Baptist churches, how many of them are looking for a pastor?
David: It is a floating number, but I would say anywhere from 15% to 20% of the churches at any one time. And we have churches, thank the Lord, they have just received a pastor, but a church with which I am very familiar, that went three years [without a pastor]. I mean, this is church of 150 people, so it’s not a tiny church. And they should have been a very attractive for man to come in and say “There’s a good core here. And I can, we can really take this thing and move it forward.” Took them three years to find a pastor.
Host: Why is it taking so long?
David: It’s the general shrinkage in our churches. It’s the it’s the lack of men ready to enter ministry. It’s part of, if using a phrase, it’s the worldliness or age where families would rather have their children go to college in order to earn a high-paying job, as opposed to aspiring to ministry. I mean, I can remember my poor dad worked three jobs to put five children into school and raise us. But they constantly encouraged us to think towards the potential, if God might be able to use us in ministry.
Narrator: Some have recently suggested that the old pipeline is broken. The old system, where a teen makes a decision for Christ at camp, goes to Bible college, graduates as a youth pastor, and two years later, becomes a senior pastor. Some have said the old system is broken. If that’s true, what does the new pipeline look like?
Clare: Well, yeah, well, I was asked this question actually just Tuesday, when we had kind of a Q&A time. It is the crisis. I think if I had to single out one crisis in the church there, we could name a few. But I think the biggest one is the lack of pastors and church planters. A lot of church planters came out of youth pastors. An effective youth pastor is a great church planter, and we just don’t have many youth pastors anymore. But the lack of pastors is a big problem.
So how do we fix it? I think we got to start in the local churches themselves. So each pastor needs to take responsibility for saying I’m at least going to reproduce one. I had an example, I shared it about two weeks ago, of an older gentleman, a pastor that I know fairly well. He called me up and said, “Hey, I’m going to retire, and do you have any names of some guys that maybe we could take a look at?” And I said, “Honestly, right now, I don’t.” And I said, “Well, how about you? Do you have anybody in your church you see maybe moving up in that direction?” And his response was “Not even close.” And so hopefully he heard himself say that and, not to be mean-spirited, but realized, okay, this was more on me than it is about anybody else.
And then trying to set up residency programs with churches. I would work with churches to say, “Hey, we can help fund the residency. And what we want to see is a track record of leadership development, evangelism, disciple-making in your church. I don’t care what size it is, just that you’re doing those things.” And so let’s say they walk through the whole process and they’re good to go. The first question I get asked by almost every church is, “Where do we get our residents from?” And believe it or not, one of those churches is a church of 1700 people. And I was shocked. That was the one I was most shocked by. The first question after we walked through the whole process, they asked me was, “Well, where do we get our residents from?”
And it actually caught me off guard enough that I chuckled out loud. I was kind of embarrassed I did that, but I chuckled out loud, and I my response verbally was, “Well, I was kind of hoping a church of your size would be producing your own, and we would help you with that process.”
So that’s one big hurdle, and I’ll just give you one other one. We have to restore the pipeline to to the schools that are doing a good job of producing young men and build that relationship. I think John Green did a good job of that near the end of his time. I know David has made some definite overtures in that direction. I want to continue that. I was fortunate to talk to three college leaders, different colleges this week already, and they want to do that.
So I think we need to open that channel up a little bit more and then connect that back to local churches because it’s not our role really to be producing leaders as the association. It’s the pastor and church’s role to do that. We’re coming alongside. So if we can help connect that pipeline and even get several churches working together to produce a leader. So maybe you’re a pastor and you’re teaching one or two courses, and you know, there’s three or four other pastors, and we’re helping to raise up men together.
Narrator: If churches are finding mid-career men in their own congregation now called into ministry, does that change the way we train them? How does this change our ideas about the role of colleges and seminaries in developing leaders?
Clare: Yeah, well, I think adult education is definitely a little bit different animal. I think it’s a good animal. I like it. You know, adult education, in a lot of ways, is what regular education ought to be like. It’s more hands on and, you know, you think through learning processes, maybe in different ways. So, yeah, I think it does change it in a healthy way. It means you’re dealing with more mature people who understand the people that are in their congregation. So they understand, unlike some people that just go through school right into ministry, they don’t understand that.
Okay, I want my family time, all this that and the other, so I’m going to work 40 hours as a pastor. Well, you’ve got this businessman who’s working 50 hours at least to survive in his business, and then you’re asking him to invest anywhere from three to five hours in ministry. There’s the guys that come out of mid-career understand. They have a maturity to them, and they understand the men that they’re going to minister to. So that’s a positive. But what’s happening is, I talked to a couple pastors from New York State that they formed an—were you going to talk about that? Yeah, I’ll let David talk more about that. But they’re doing this in an adult education kind of way.
David: They’re finding the same thing. They don’t have pastors for the churches. So the churches in the state fellowship, in New York Northeast Fellowship, they’ve kind of gone back to the old idea, they’ve created a local church institute, and it’s staffed by pastors in the fellowship, and it’s designed to train laymen.
Some of those laymen are mid-career people who would, by that training, then be ready to enter pastoral ministry. It’s almost 100+ years ago, where Bible institutes were formed to train new Christian leaders. It’s kind of a reinvention of the wheel, where churches are saying, and I do agree, schools and colleges, seminaries, they can only take what the churches give them. So I think it does come back to the local church that would really, both with its young people, but also with its training ministries, even with adults and young adults and middle-aged people, to say, “Here are vehicles that can be used and need to be used, so that we see the primacy of the local church.”
Just a couple of positive anecdotes, because we talk often about the negative. I can remember very clearly my mother, at one point, resurrected my report cards from elementary school. They had the notations on it. “David would be a good student if he only could pay attention.” You know, some of those kind of things that got put on there. One of them, my fourth grade teacher, who was a Christian member of our local little Baptist Church in Newark Valley, New York, she said “David would make a good preacher someday.” And it’s just planting the seeds in the minds of our young people.
And another quick anecdote, I of course “retired”, or just ceased ministry from senior pastor at Ankeny Baptist church after 23 years. And by God’s providence, what that church was able to do to identify its next lead pastor was to identify a young man, born and bred in that church, educated in a nearby institution, but still actively involved in our church. We called him back eventually, as a pastor on staff for 11 years, and then the church says it’s cream rising to the top and saying, “Okay, here’s one of our own, now 40-year-old man ready to take the reins and lead church ministry.” And I think that’s the ideal. And that’s the New Testament model. How did it occur, back in the early days of the new church? Which is people getting saved, being trained and set in the in the church congregation, saying, “This man is gifted by God and is trained and is godly. We need to establish him as one of our pastoral leaders.”
Clare: Yeah, if I could add one other thing real quick, I think it’s also training, equipping our parents to disciple their kids, and then engaging those kids in disciple-making. There’s no greater joy, because I’ve seen it with my own daughters, and then I’ve seen it now with a couple of my grandkids, where they’ve led a friend of theirs to Christ in junior high or in high school. And there’s nothing that will lock somebody into a desire to go into ministry more than being equipped to and then being able to follow through and actually be a part of the transformation of a friend’s life. And they get hooked on ministry. And that’s not going to happen if we don’t train our parents how to disciple their kids, or we don’t engage those kids. Even at an early age, like junior high, and actually doing ministry, not just moving chairs around and handing out bulletins. That’s fine, but getting involved in actual, real-life ministry where they feel that pull.
That’s what drew me into ministry. I was trying to do Bible study with guys at Michigan State University. I just was a year-old Christian, and seeing their hunger and my inability to feed them properly from the Bible, is what God used to draw me to Bible college. And so that’s kind of what I’m talking about.
Host: A historian might look at our own history to find a lot of initiatives and revitalization programs that didn’t really do anything. What’s the difference now? When we embrace this vision, what’s going to make it different to make sure this actually works?
Clare: That’s a great question. My first response is, I don’t know. But I what I do know is it’s going to take dependency on the Spirit of God, dependency on God and the Holy Spirit moving among us. And I would add this is going to take all of us individually, being willing to grow. I don’t mean to keep referring to it, but in that message, I said, “If we grow, our churches will grow, our association will grow.”
So it’s got to start there. It’s got to be organic. And I don’t mean that in some awoke way or some—cliche way is probably the word I was looking for—But I don’t mean it that way, in a cliche way, but it has to be organic in the sense it gets birthed in our hearts. Revival has to start in the church, not out there. And so it has to start with us, as pastors, as leaders, to say, “Alright, I’m going to be committed to grow, and as I grow, my church will grow.”
I saw that happen as a pastor. I mean, God knows if any of my congregation were here, they’d tell you, “Yeah, Clare needed to grow.” And I think that’s true for all. I need to grow in this role, whatever role, I need to keep growing till I die. So let’s grow and see what God does with that. I think if God sees humble pastors willing to grow, truly willing to grow, and allow Him to change them and move in their churches. I think God’s going to say, “You know what, I can work with those people”, because He gives more grace to the humble, but He resists the proud.
Narrator: Thanks again to David Strope and Clare Jewell for their time with us today.
