Ministry Apprenticeships – Small Church Style

The office is quieter  than normal today. And that’s fine. I’m being quite productive. And the reason is that the Ministry Trainees are away on the 9:38 Apprentices Conference. This seemed a good time therefore to post something I produced just before Christmas for the South East Gospel Partnership website on the subject of Ministry Apprenticeships. I was asked to write on the subject of running a ministry training programme in the context of a smaller church. Though I principally aim my comments at whoever runs the staff team, I had the team of elders in mind as well. Obviously, CCB is the smaller church context, where I’m the team leader. But, as part of the Co-Mission network of churches, we can also tap into the benefits of a combined ministry workshop which takes place on a Wednesday morning at Co-Mission HQ in Raynes Park. In all hoensty, I’d still run an apprenticeship even if we didn’t have the Co-Mission option. It would just be different, fractionally less good but definitely worth doing! But here’s what I wrote.

Small churches are the best place to train in gospel ministry. That’s just an opinion. And it’s mine. But I probably need to nuance it with a few qualifying comments. And then justify it.

Obviously, small churches are not the only place to train. You can train in larger churches. And they have their benefits. In particular, a larger church staff team can often appoint specialists to a particular ministry role. One of these roles might be ministry training. And so that staff member can be preoccupied with single-mindedly training a cohort of trainees. And therefore many of us in smaller churches assume that we can’t sensibly be involved in ministry training until we become a larger church. But that’s simply not the case. Smaller churches have two distinct advantages over larger churches. In the first place a ministry trainee is likely to have greater access to the senior pastor. Although he’ll be busy, a small church pastor won’t have to spend a huge proportion of his time managing a large staff team, overseeing a busy church programme and co-ordinating an administrative juggernaut. And so a ministry trainee can expect to spend a good proportion of his time in the company of the pastor and his family. And that’s what many of them want. They want the theory but they especially want to know what ministry looks like in practice; the good and the bad. And secondly, a small church pastor tends to be involved in a greater variety of gospel ministry. He’s not only preaching the Sunday sermon, he’s probably running the Christianity Explored course, speaking at the seniors’ tea and training the kids’ workers as well as a whole host of other stuff. And so the ministry trainee can expect to be exposed to a broad range of ministries. And that’s good since most ministry trainees will go on to become generalists in smaller churches rather than specialists in larger churches. And so training in a small church context can provide the ideal preparation they need.

In our Co-Mission Ministry Training Scheme we’ve sought to prioritise three complementary commitments; first, the strengthening of theological convictions, secondly the development of ministry competency and thirdly the formation of godly character. Although we now have a weekly combined workshop which all our ministry trainees attend, everything that we currently provide at that larger event could be done, and has been done, in a local church setting. And in many ways it was better when we were smaller. Theological convictions are formed through biblical exposure, ministry competency through critiqued experience and godly character through personal discipleship. No workshop training programme guarantees that. They need access to a pastor. And the more experienced the pastor the better. Together they can read through Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology for an hour each week or study a book of the Bible in preparation for a forthcoming preaching series. Together they can reflect on the ministry trainee’s talk at the youth group and discuss how a progressive revelatory understanding of the scriptures helps us understand what David and Goliath is really about. And together they can address and pray about the ministry trainee’s tendency to be dismissive in way in which he talks to older men. Those things happen best in the context of a deepening partnership and friendship. I treat our trainees like younger brothers and they treat me like an older brother. Ministry training is not a course in a workshop, it’s a shared life. And on reflection, I reckon that those who’ve had the best ministry training experience at Christ Church Balham were those with whom I was able to share my life and ministry. They were involved in evaluating my talks in our Monday morning staff meeting, reflecting on strategy and church politics as we travelled to ministry meetings, thinking about a particular pastoral situation over a cup of tea and reflecting on life and marriage over a beer at the end of an evening meeting. There wasn’t a programme that we followed. We just did life and ministry together.

I’ll be honest, it takes both time and energy. But it’s worth every moment and effort. If I train them well then although they’ll consume some of my time, in fact they’ll multiply the ministry. If it’s just me then the ministry is limited by my capacity. And I’ve only got five days of work in me. But if I give a day of my week to a ministry trainee then although I’ve only got four days left, so too have they. And that’s great news for the gospel and our church. And so I’m always looking for the spiritually hungry ministry self-starters because they’re the people worth investing in. And I tend to try and look within our congregations rather than recruit from without.

We are not a big church. We were 25 adults when we started and in the last ten years, under God, we’ve trained ten apprentices. We’ve exported most of them. And that’s the downside; you eventually get rid of your best. Wonderfully two have come back to be my assistant pastors because I knew what they could do. Of the others, one is serving as a missionary. Three are running churches overseas. Three are involved in children’s ministry. And one is church planting in Brixton. There are lots of things that we’ve been unable to do as a small church. But training apprentices isn’t one of them.

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Apprenticeship Pages

I’ve dumped a few of my thoughts on apprenticeships under the heading ‘Training’. They may be helpful if you’re thinking through the issue fo raising up new church leaders from amongst your own congregation.

• Why Have Apprentices?
• What do we do with Apprentices?
• What’s different about Apprenticeships?
• What is an Apprentice?
• Six Reasons to Train Apprentices
• Where do we find Apprentices?
• How to look after Apprentices

Col Marshall’s book ‘Pass the Baton‘ has been especially stimulating.

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Six Reasons to Train Apprentices

At our Planting for Christ conference last Wednesday I gave some input into a seminar on church planting resources. In the process of preparing for that I came across some old notes. This was something I wrote a while ago.

Apprentice has become quite a flexible term covering all manner of church based ministry experience. So let me define my terms.

When I say apprentice I’m usually talking about a man in his mid to late twenties with some secular work experience who has a proven track record of showing godly initiative in ministry in the local church. He needs to be of such an age and stage of Christian maturity that he can preach to an adult congregation and run an adult small group Bible study and Christianity Explored Course. He may well be married and ideally he has a working wife who can afford to support him financially. I recognise that sets the bar pretty high. And I recognise that this view is shaped by our urban context.

Of course, we can seek to train children’s worker apprentices, women’s apprentices and so on. And we have. But principally I want us to think about training a young man in church leadership and church planting.

Apprenticeships are modelled on the Apostle Paul’s relationship with his ministry trainee, Timothy. We’re talking about a mentoring relationship in which ministry is both taught and caught. It’s practical ministry experience that’s then assessed, evaluated and critiqued in the context of a deepening relationship.

Let me give you six reasons I could think of to train apprentices.

1.       Apprenticeships prepare people for gospel ministry

Apprentices know what to expect ahead of the game. It means that they can go into ministry with their eyes open. The mystery of what’s involved in ministry life has been removed. And so they can be realistic about the stresses and strains, the joys and the disappointments and so on. As Col Marshall says,

‘Apprentices are not thrown into the deep end alone; they are thrown into the deep end with a trainer! That is, right beside them is someone who has already had significant experience in word ministry. Their job is to help the apprentice to swim and not sink’ [Passing the Baton, p29].

Since the Christian life is a life of ministry, taking two years to do an apprenticeship is never wasted time. We’ve had people who’ve returned to the secular workplace after an apprenticeship because they realised that full time paid gospel ministry wasn’t for them. But they returned strengthened and better prepared for serving Christ and others than they otherwise would have been.

2.       Apprenticeships confront people with their strengths and weaknesses

It’s good to know what we can and can’t do before we plough headlong into theological study. Before spending upwards of £20K a year on a theological college student let’s work out whether they’ve got what it takes to run a church. Ministry brings us face to face with our limitations. That’s pretty humbling. But that’s no bad thing! If it’s true that lots of people leave theological college thinking that their graduation is the hinge around which the decline in Christianity in this country will turn then they’re likely to be face intense discouragement! Best to let them savour that before they build themselves up too much. But there’s wisdom in identifying and seeking to correct weaknesses whilst people are still being trained for leadership. Of course, the flip side is that we can identify, encourage and build on their ministry strengths.

3.       Apprenticeships create an appetite for theological study

On the whole those who’ve done apprenticeships aren’t predisposed to the idolatry of qualifications. They know that it makes very little difference what grades you got in First Year Hebrew. What matters more is being able to provide biblical comfort a widow whose husband dies unexpectedly from cancer.  Being engaged in gospel ministry makes us realise what’s important to know. It confronts us with how little we know and how little time we have to study! And so apprentices tend go to college appreciating the opportunities that they have and making sensible decisions about the subjects to study. For example, I advise our guys to do every doctrinal course on offer but to neglect their biblical studies. They’re all excited about studying Romans and Genesis, which is terrific; it’s just that they’ll be expounding the bible for years. What they won’t be doing is formulating a biblical worldview on personal care, apologetics and so on. They’ll also realise that you can’t learn church planting in a class room and so I advise them to give those courses a miss!

4.       Apprenticeships help people to learn ministry skills

Apprentices usually learn by being immersed into a ministry context and then taking on feedback from their trainers. What they learn will often be more than whether they rightly expounded the passage they were given. The variety of skills needed for ministry is huge. They need to learn to lead, organise, administer, work with children, adults, different cultures and so on. One of the key things that apprentices need to learn is people skills. They need to learn to be personal. Potential apprentices will often say how much they love teaching the Bible. That’s not good enough. I don’t want people on my staff team who love teaching the Bible. I want people who love people and who love teaching the Bible to people.

5.       Apprenticeships equip people to start new ministries

Church planters need something of the pioneering, self legislating entrepreneur about them. I think some of that can be overplayed but that some of it can also be learnt. Apprenticeships provide an opportunity to do that on a much smaller scale than a church plant. We can ask people to try and form a small Bible study group for enquirers from the friends they’re meeting at their adult education class. For example, I was asked to launch a church plant in the Wimbledon YMCA in the second year of my apprenticeship. It didn’t really take off, which was disappointing. But I learnt so much from that failure. So by the time I was approached to launch CCB it was exciting not frightening. We need to allow people to fail. We need to put them in situations that stretch them and ask questions, where they’ll be taught to pray because they’re taken out of their comfort zone.

6.       Apprenticeships provide pre theological training

In my denomination. Anglican. At the moment at least. There’s an unseemly scramble for the few decent training curacies that come up every year. Those of us who’d done apprenticeships weren’t too fussed. It’s not that we thought we didn’t need any more training. It’s just that we thought we’d had enough to break new ground after college and try something like church planting.

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