Finding pastors for small churches

I apologize for not writing much in recent days.  We were gone a week to help our son and his family after his back surgery, and I returned home to a pile of work that had accumulated while we were away.  I do want to thank you for praying for our son.  His surgery went well, and he seems to be recovering well.  We are very thankful for that and pray that his recovery continues to go as well as it has been.

I've written before about the problem of finding pastors for our smaller churches.  Right now seven bivocational churches in my Area are without pastors.  I've given each of them the same handful of names, and one called me yesterday saying they needed more names.  I'll call them in the morning to tell them I don't have any more to give them.  I feel badly about having to tell them that, but I feel even worse knowing that it's only going to get worse if things don't change.

The change that needs to happen is that more people need to realize they have been called by God to provide bivocational leadership to these smaller churches.  At the same time, these churches need to realize that the days of being served by a full-time, seminary trained pastor are over.  In many of our traditions we have stressed the "priesthood of the believer," but we have not lived that out very well.  If we truly believe in the priesthood of the believer, then we must begin to also believe that God has equipped each of us with spiritual gifts that are to be used in ministry.  Small churches need to create ministry teams built around the gifts God has given the people in their churches.  We have to move from a pastoral care mindset to a congregational care mindset.  As the authors of a book I just finished reading wrote, we must begin to see baptism as the ordination to ministry.  We can no longer be satisfied with being Christians; we must become Christians with a ministry.

Many of you have heard me talk before about the model of ministry we find in Ephesians 4.  The apostle Paul writes that God has given the church ministers whose primary purpose is to equip all the saints so they can do the work of ministry.  He did not give the church ministers to do all the work but to equip and prepare every believer to use the gifts God has given him or her so that we can all minister together.  This will be a huge paradigm shift for many of our churches, and for many ministers, but it is one we must begin making.  Some say that it will take up to seven years for some churches to make that change, so it's probably important that we start now.

If any of you are interested in moving to southeastern Indiana and pastoring a bivocational church, let me know.  I've got plenty open.  But, it is more likely that God will use you where you are.  If you have any sense that God might be calling you to bivocational ministry, I encourage you to begin to pray about that calling.  Let me know, and I'll be glad to pray with you or answer any questions you might have about such ministry.  One thing I'm certain about is that God has persons for each church.  We just have to be sensitive to His leadership in this and open to how He might be wanting to use us in those churches.