Often, when we talk about “building a ministry training culture” in a church, this can be understood (especially in UK conservative evangelical churches) as a call to raise up full-time gospel workers through ministry traineeships and theological training. That is important and there are some resources on this below – but what we are talking about first and foremost is training everyone in the church family to use their gifts to build up the body. We need not only to raise up more pastors and full-time gospel workers but also, in a team ministry church, we need more leaders at every level.
Short form resources on cultivating training culture across the church:
- Danny Rurlander, Developing a Training Church (article)
- Team Leader’s Handbook (Reach resource based on the book)
- Slightly longer: The Ministry Training Church (MTS paper)
So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up
To say you have “no one to train” is to say you have no one to minister to. Don’t look over the fence and think someone else has it easier: whoever is in your church, get on and train them, and train them to train others.
Fairly quick win
It is likely that there are some teams and areas of church life where that has not been training and envisioning – typically the areas which are less obviously word ministry.
- Audit training coverage. E.g. are you currently providing training and support for those involved in music ministry, corporate prayer, public Bible reading, welcoming, stewarding, tech team?
- Starting with the most critical, ensure every team has training – both for the team leader and for the team members.
- Envision each team in their theological purpose – this might initially be done by the senior pastor – e.g. an evening on Membership with all the teams involved in this area where there is a theology of welcome and a vision for the church we want to be and what we want to be the experience of every newcomer.
- Ensure ministry leaders develop specific training for each team which will equip members with the nuts and bolts of doing their job really well. This will include initial orientation/on-boarding and on-going regular training top ups.
Longer term project
- Some churches call this ‘Prepared to Serve’ or ‘Equip’ or ‘Maximise’. The idea is that you invest in a group of 8-20 people to deepen their maturity, increase their appreciation of the church’s DNA and equip them with some basic ministry skills. It is a combination of ‘adult Sunday school’, church membership 201 and leadership development.
- Usually this group would step out of their normal midweek small groups for one year to be part of the training cohort.
- It could be required that people go through this course before becoming small group leaders or other ministry team leaders.
- An example curriculum for this sort of course. Some groups might work through a particular book – e.g. Gospel DNA.
- Towards the end of the course, have a ‘Serve Conversation’ where a member of the Equip team has an intentional conversation with an individual or couple about how they would like to contribute to the life of the church, asks what their gifts and skills and capacities are, explains some of the needs in teams.
- It is out of course like this that you are likely to find people progressing into leadership of all sorts of ministry teams (as well as potential ministry trainees and pastors in training).
Long-form deep dive resources:
- Craig Hamilton, Wisdom in Leadership Development
- Rhett Harris, Leadership Pipeline (Reach Australia ebook)
Where do I focus my efforts in training the next generation?
- Effective pastoring – training priorities (Ralph Cunnington script)
- Effective Pastoring Training Priorities (Ralph Cunnington slide deck)
Orlando Saer – Effective pastoring: Training priorities – audio (recorded at London Pebble Forum 2023):
More resources on building a training culture:
- 9:38 Ministry Trainee Finance Guidance (last reviewed Aug 2022)
- Considering Gospel Work (a Co-Mission resouce to share with those thinking of next steps exploring Christian leadership)
- Becoming a training church (Richard Perkins)
- Discipleship in the greenhouse (Josh Monteiro)
- Raising our game in ministry training (Orlando Saer)
- Supervising Trainees
