Support

There is a facet of ministry that is currently lacking in our system; the personal touch. Our current model of calling, training, and supporting pastors is quite programmatic. We stand in front of thousands and give an invitation to "surrender to God's call" and then trust that God will touch those who need to move. We take those who respond and stick them with thousands of others in a homogeneous learning environment hoping God will teach them what they need to know. Then we send them into the field and tell them that they can attend this conference or that retreat (for a fee of course) to fill in the holes that inevitably arise between their education and their practical experience. Intended or not, the net result is that we have thousands of pastors moving through ministry feeling very alone and desperately looking for some model upon which they can base their calling. That is one reason why things like 40 Days of Purpose have been so successful in attracting users. In reality it is very likely that God wants to create an entirely new and unique model in our pastors, but that requires personal training and direction that they do not receive.

Much like calling and training, I believe that they way we support pastors in the field needs to be more personal. Our current method of support involves seminars, retreats, books, and many other impersonal, generic solutions. They are not bad things, they are just insufficient. They are solutions that could work well in partnership with a one-on-one discipleship and mentoring relationship. Most people explain our current support methods with words like "efficiency" and "stewardship". It is just too costly, some will say, to minister to each church or pastor individually. The problem is... that is just not true. And, even if it were true it would still not be a good enough reason to continue spending our resources on a broken strategy. If the current strategy was producing marked results, then we could argue that it is a good use of resources. Evidence suggest that the current method does not produce such results.

Contrast that with the work that the Healthy Church Group is doing in California. In the last 5 years they have done individual consultations for over 400 of the 2,000+ California Baptist churches. Of those over 40% have seen a marked increase in Sunday worship attendance, baptisms, and giving. Imagine if 40% of SBC churches began seeing growth in these three areas in the next 5 years. It would be incredible! The truly amazing thing is that the main reason the other 60% do not see the same improvement is that they do not choose to follow the recommendations of the consult. The HCG is currently making more changes to include long term 1-on-1 coaching to increase the personal and relational impact of their consults with hopes that it will increase the number of pastors and churches who follow through with change.

Even with such evidence that a personal, relational solution can provide great results, some will still argue that it is not cost-effective... that it just requires too many people to be practical. The fact is that the current SBC structure would allow this kind of individual support for every church in the convention without the need to add any additional staff. Merely using the current State and Association level staff members they could offer an individual consult for each church every 5 years or so. I personally believe this is the direction conventions will move if they want to survive in the coming decade.

The Church in America is much like a house built on a foundation of sand. The way we have been calling, training, and supporting our pastors over the last few decades has left a crumbling foundation. Our current methods are as effective as a man trying to hold up that sandy foundation. As soon as he moves to support one corner another begins to fall. He may grow efficient at moving and supporting and be able to artificially keep the thing standing for a while. But, eventually it is going to come crashing down unless the foundation is changed. In this analogy, the foundation of The Church is local body, led by the local pastor. We must change the way we build that foundation in order to reach future generations and redeem the current generation.