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To TopAccording to the Pattern
A Manual for Church Planting by
Edwin Stube
CONTENTS
8. Training for MinistryThe New Testament pattern of training for ministry is very radical. Jesus never scheduled a class and rarely gave a lecture. He built no school buildings. He simply gathered a little group of people, and said, “Follow Me.” He started going from one place to another ministering to people. The disciples saw the miracles He did, and the authority with which he spoke. They heard His words of command to the demons, and His words of love and encouragement to those in sickness and trouble. They observed His miraculous healing ministry to the sick and even the dead. They heard Him put down His opposition with just a few words. They saw wind and wave obey Him, and food multiply in His hands.
Later, they would sit down on the grass or wherever they happened to be and talk over what they had seen and heard. Jesus gave them clues about the meaning of the parables. He confided to the disciples that, actually, He was talking in parables to the crowds of miracle seekers so that they would not understand. Understanding of His mission and purpose could only be revealed to people who were walking in fellowship with Him.
Jesus' training program for the disciples could not be separated from their life together. They lived together in the closest kind of fellowship. They were not filling notebooks on the meaning of love, or discipleship, or the kingdom of God. They were constantly experiencing His love which far surpassed anything they had ever known before. They learned the meaning of discipleship by observing Jesus' relationship with His heavenly Father, by the demands He made upon them, and by their own ministry experiences when He sent them out to practice what He was teaching them. They were learning about the Kingdom, partly from His words, but even more by observing the power of the One who is the King.
Most of Jesus' teaching was through experience. Shortly after He gathered the disciples, He took them out in a boat (deliberately, I am sure) at the exact time that a storm was coming up. Jesus (also deliberately) went to sleep in the stern of the boat. The waves started heaving and the boat started rolling. The disciples, in terror, woke Jesus and said, “We're going to drown!” Jesus said, “What's the matter, don't you have any faith?” Then He spoke to the wind and wave and quieted them instantly. This was the disciples' first lesson on faith. It was a graphic lesson, and designed to start building the faith it talked about.
Shortly after this, He was teaching a great multitude on the mountain side. As night drew near, He turned to the disciples and said, “Give them something to eat.” They knew there was no way they could do that. So Jesus showed them how to do it. He took a little food and gave thanks, and the food multiplied. This was the second lesson on faith.Both of these lessons had to be repeated with slight variations, because the disciples did not catch on the first time, anymore than we usually do.
After the disciples had walked with Jesus for a while and had an opportunity to see His style of ministry, He called them together one day, gave them some instructions, and said, “Now go out and try it on your own.” They returned after a while saying, “Wow, it works!”
Jesus' training of His disciples was always fellowship-based and practice-oriented.
Ministering is something we have to learn to do. It can be discussed and some theories can be developed. But, ultimately, we must learn to minister by experiencing it. Ministry is a little like swimming. We could read all the books there are on swimming and still not be able to do it. Swimming is learned by getting in water, splashing around, inhaling some water, learning to coordinate, and developing muscles and skills.
Jesus almost always placed people in the midst of the activity first, and then discussed and explained it later. Practice preceded theory. Jesus wanted His disciples mature in understanding, but even more He wanted them able to minister and practice what they had learned.
After the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, we read that the new Christians gathered in houses to worship and to “continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship” (Acts 2:42). It seems reasonable to assume that the Apostles would have conducted this teaching on the same basis as Jesus had trained them.
They did not build buildings or schedule classes. They met in close intimate fellowship in believers' homes, where they broke bread and prayed together. They moved out from these fellowships into ministry, so that the Church grew rapidly. They learned the Lord's ways quickly in that type of community. The Church was a worshipping community gathered around Jesus, and it was a training ground for ministry.
Certainly we know that Paul used the same kind of on-the-job, fellowship-oriented methods for training Timothy, Titus, Luke and the others. They traveled with him as a team. They observed his ministry, and no doubt shared in it more and more as time went on. After a while, he sent them for ministry on their own for a period of time, and then had them come back for further training with him. Eventually they were sent out permanently with only an occasional letter of encouragement or advice and continual prayers.
After we moved to Indonesia in 1965, we formed a little team which began to be trained by this same method. We prayed and worked and studied together. Our family and the young Indonesians who made up the team lived in a little village high up in the mountains of East Java. We evangelized in the villages, seeing the miracles Jesus did, seeing people turning to the Lord, and new Christian fellowships being formed. We studied all the stories about evangelism in the Gospels and in Acts, and looked up all the references to the word ‘evangelize.’ We tried out everything we learned.
Often we went to the cities and towns in Java and even to other islands to teach in churches and encourage Christians, or to hold evangelistic meetings.
I remember in particular a trip we took to Tana Toraja, a rather primitive area in the interior of the island of Celebes. We visited twenty-one of the little villages scattered all over the mountains. We walked about two hundred kilometers from village to village, and baptized about two hundred new converts. Everywhere we went, the Lord performed miracles with very little help from us. In one village, three people from the preceding village told what had happened in their village. The Holy Spirit began to baptize some and bring others to repentance. Still others were healed while we stood and watched in amazement. In another village, as one of the young men of our team was preaching to a crowd outdoors, a crippled youth who had not stood or moved his legs for fifteen years got up and began to walk. I was deeply moved the next day to see him walk a mile down a steep hill to the river to be baptized, and then climb back up with no difficulty.
The ministry in every village was totally different. Each time we came into a town, we prayed and listened to the Lord. He told us through prophecy and visions much of what was going to happen in that village and how we were to approach the ministry there. We were learning to walk with the Lord and observe His ways, like that first little group of disciples long ago.
In 1971, we established the Lawang Bible Training Center, in which the same general principles are applied. It was very different from ordinary Bible schools or seminaries. There was no school year, and students came when they had been accepted and stayed until they had a definite call to their own ministry somewhere else. There was no formal curriculum or set courses as such. From the outset, the students went out for ministry in the surrounding villages. New students went with more experienced ones. At any stage in their training, students could be sent out as teams to other islands. One or two experienced people went with the new ones. In the course of two or three years, students received a great variety of ministry experience in village evangelism, church planting, teaching in established churches, evangelism among college students in the city, and evangelizing primitive tribes on remote islands.
In between times, we sat down together and studied the Bible, mostly by discussion. Sometimes the Lord directed us to a particular book of the Bible and we read it a few verses at a time discussing them as we went and applying them to our lives and ministry. Other times we studied a certain topic, such as healing ministry, methods of church planting, baptism, worship in the Holy of Holies, ministry gifts, or the Bride of Christ. In each case we took all the scripture references to the subject, put the Bible verses down the left side of our big chart and the questions we wanted answered across the top. We filled in the chart, reviewed the columns and drew all the conclusions we could. Finally, we decided how the study could be put into practice.
Practical training leaves far less time for actual academic study than conventional methods. But experience shows that, after a few months, our students know more Bible and more theology than those who have studied for years by traditional methods. Everything they learn is forged on the anvil of experience, and they do not forget it. The knowledge immediately becomes life and ministry.
Essentially, our training centers are communities of people trying to live as the Body of Christ. First priority is given to a personal relationship with the Lord. There are several quiet times during the day for meditation and private devotion. Each evening the whole community gathers for 1 Corinthians 14, and they minister to the Lord and to each other in the Spirit.
The Lord still teaches in fellowship, with His people coming together to be with Him, so that they can be sent out to minister.
When people go out from such a community to form new congregations, they try to reproduce the sense of community they have experienced. The main thrust is toward making each of these new congregations a worshipping and ministering community, which can in turn reach out to its own village and neighboring villages, and the process goes on.
On the island of Irian there are hundreds of very primitive tribes, living in the jungle. Many of them still have not heard the Gospel; it has not been presented in their language or cultural setting. But they are very open to the Gospel. Over the past fifty years, missionaries have gone to many of these tribes, learned their languages and customs. In due course they have presented the Gospel, and it has been received.
A few young people from some of these tribes go to school out in some of the more civilized towns and villages along the coast. They have learned the Indonesian language and culture. Graduates of the Lawang Bible Training Center have formed training centers in different parts of the island. Tribal people are trained and go back to their own tribes to communicate the Gospel and become Christian teachers for their tribe. They can lead their own tribe and sometimes some of the neighboring tribes to the Lord.
Undeniably, the best place to do discipleship training would be in a local church. But the church would have to function as a community. The people would need to be walking in the Spirit and flowing freely in the manifestations of the Spirit. They would need to know what their individual ministry gifts were and be functioning in them, so that they could train up the new candidates for ministry.
Unfortunately, very few churches function on this level. The alternative is to let the Lord gather together a small group of people who want to learn to walk in the Spirit and move into the ministry gifts. Let this community become a small manifestation of the Body of Christ. Then all who come into the community can be trained together according to the Lord's pattern. Eventually, some of the churches will see the effectiveness of these methods and will put them into practice.
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