Ministry Leadership

My wife Faith teaches a college class at Faith Baptist Bible College called Ministering to the Aging. She invited me to speak in her class. It was the first time I wrote down my thoughts on senior adult ministries in the church. Below are my notes. I added some ideas as I spoke that are not included here. I hope this perspective may be helpful.

I had the opportunity to pastor two churches that had specialized ministries to senior adults. One was developing and the other well-established with a full-time pastor overseeing it. As the lead pastor I did not directly oversee this ministry, but definitely had a heart for these people’s spiritual growth. As I look back over the years of ministering to these dear people, I am grateful for their vital role in the church and their personal impact on me. They are some of the most faithful, prayerful, generous, and supportive people I have known.

Ephesians 4:11-12 says that pastors equip the saints for the work of the ministry unto the edifying of the body of Christ. Senior adults are included in the saints that pastors equip, and they are capable of effectively doing work that builds up the body of Christ. These objectives provide guidance for thinking about effective senior adult ministries in the local church.

Every organization is prone to forget why it’s there. People come and go, the founders pass away, the culture changes. Sometimes an organization can wake up and find it’s lost its way. Other times, the organization never wakes up.

The YMCA started in London in the 1840s as a Christian outreach to young men in the inner cities during the industrial revolution. Now, the YMCA is a gym with a robust after school youth program.

Baptist fundamentalism began as a protest movement against theological revisionism and apostasy. Within one generation, the movement’s various flavors fractured over the issue of secondary separation. In some quarters, the mission drift is so extreme that evangelicals have long been considered ” the enemy,” rather than modern-day heresy and compromise.  

So, mission drift happens.

On that note, here are some short reflections for pastoral ministry from Jesus’ interactions with the Sanhedrin’s representatives during the early portion of Passion Week. They’re about “mission drift,” too.¹ It’s not a new thing.

Is Jesus your King and your Lord?

This isn’t about Lordship Salvation. It’s about whether you actually reverence Jesus Christ as Lord in your heart and give Him allegiance in your life. On Palm Sunday, the crowd said Jesus was its King. They lied. How many pastors are lying? How many professing Christians?

Leadership, especially in our Lord’s vineyard, is a challenging call. The same is true of Christian leaders who serve in society, secular work, government work, the military, etc. At first glance, leadership looks like it would be fun. You speak, people do things. The reality is much different. God-honoring leadership is servant-minded influence, empowered by the Holy Spirit, where the leader encourages those who serve with him toward the completion of a unified goal—a goal typically broken up into smaller strategic and then tactical objectives. Biblical Leadership demands that the journey towards completing the goal is just as important (maybe even more important) than the completion of the goal itself.

So much of what Jesus tells us in the Gospels impacts a healthy view of leadership. On top of the red-ink sections of the Gospels, we have equally inspired teachings from the Old and New Testament. Powerful applications can be made for leaders from Moses, Daniel, King David, Noah, Joseph, Deborah, Rahab, and more. As we transition into the New Testament we learn much about leadership from the likes of John the Baptist, Peter, the Apostle Paul, the Apostle Barnabas (my favorite leader in the early church), Epaphroditus, Aquilla, and Priscilla (to name just a few).

by Marshall Fant III

What comes to your mind when you hear the phrase “church revitalization”? Do you think of it as the next popular ministry? Or as a program replacing church planting? Or maybe you think of other “re” words like refocus, realign, rebuild, or renew. Perhaps it is better to ask, Why should we even be interested in church revitalization? Why not just let dying churches die and plant new ones? I propose to you that we should be interested in church revitalization because Jesus is.

Jesus’ Promise to Build His Church

Before we consider what the Bible says about church revitalization, we must first examine Jesus’ promise to build His church. Matthew 16:13–20 tells us that Jesus intentionally journeyed to Caesarea Philippi to give this promise. Caesarea Philippi is located about 30 miles north of the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus based His ministry. Caesarea Philippi was a Roman city with a pagan culture that worshiped the Greek god Pan. It would have been a striking location to make a promise about Christ’s church. Jesus intentionally took His disciples with Him.

The setting provided a teaching time for them. Others may have been with Jesus, but the passage emphasizes His disciples’ presence. Though these men had been with Jesus for about two and half years, they needed to grasp what was really important. Then Jesus intentionally asked, “Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?” (v. 13).

The constitutions and bylaws of independent Baptist churches commonly include language that forbids divorced persons from teaching Sunday School or holding church office. The restriction is so common that of the dozens of church constitutions I’ve read and filed, only one or two lack some version of it. Since many churches with these restrictions have some history of conflict over them, the topic also tends to be seen as a minefield—best to fence it off and leave it alone.

But these same church constitutions and confessions of faith also strongly emphasize the authority of Scripture, and one question should always be welcome: Is what we’re doing biblical? Is it compatible with Scripture and the revealed nature and purposes of the church?

Let’s consider some arguments pro and con.