More on home-cooked elders

Matt Schmucker, writing for 9 Marks, posted an article a few months ago aimed at pastors. The gist of the article was how a pastor can prepare the church for “the next guy” when the current pastors is “called” to a different church, Prepare the Church for the Next Guy.

I found an interesting assumption in this article. It assumes that the next pastor of a given church will be a stranger, recruited and hired in from the outside. Is that the way it worked in the New Testament? Not at all. Men were appointed from within the local body to minister within that body (Acts 14:23). I left this comment on the 9 Marks page and on Facebook…

If pastors are doing the task they are called to (Eph 4:11-16) this won’t be a problem because men in the local church would already been doing the work of ministry and that church wouldn’t have to hire a stranger to come in and minister to people he doesn’t know. Nothing beats home-cooking,whether in the kitchen or in the church!

I stand by that statement 100%. While there will always be bumps in the road with any church, I firmly believe that men who are discipled and equipped to minister in a given local church will best serve the Body of Christ in that local church. It makes no sense to send men away to minister among strangers and then hiring strangers to come in to minister locally. Equip and empower men, new Christians and more mature, so that they can minister to the local body. If we do that, we wouldn’t need to hire in professionals from outside of the local body.

Pie in the sky? Perhaps but it is also in keeping with the letter and spirit of what we have in the New Testament.