This message was preached by Steve Oliver at Gather 2015 Conference at Igatpuri on July 22nd 2015
We
believe in eldership- 3 elders or more in a church.
Q. But where do we actually start?
2
experiences:
I.
In
1996 Heather and our 3 boys planted our first church.
The
day I became an elder, Jeff Kidwelll was the key elder/leader. The day they
announced I would be an elder, they announced that we would be leaving the
church to plant a church
There was an honoring and sending with
authority. I come from a context similar to many many of you (Africa). We
planted the church with very little experience. I had only preached once or
twice before. I had no formal training, only a promise from God. I was sent off
to plant this church. Sheldon as an 18 year old came with us and helped to lead
worship. 64 people got saved on the 1st Sunday when a friend of mine preached
(I was too nervous) and within 9 months we had between 200-300 people
I
read scripture. In the book of Mark, Jesus gets released into his calling. He begins
teaching and praying for people and sees massive healings. He starts speaking about the kingdom- big things!! A lot of
disciples started following him. Jesus didn’t start with 12. Jesus began to
teach the crowd and disciples and began to model a kingdom life to them, then began to call out specific people.
He
called Peter and Andrew who were fishermen, the Tax collector – Matthew, even a
Zealot. Not everybody had to be the same! But then a time comes in Mark 3: 7 when Jesus withdrew with his
disciples to the lake and a large crowd from Galilee followed. In verse13,
Jesus went up on a mountain and called
to him those he wanted and they came to him.
I
started with a crowd. Heather would you cook every Wednesday for 24 people. One night, double the amount
of people arrived and we had food only for 18. God multiplied the food.
We
only had 1 car in the church. In Africa we have a saying "How many can you
get in your car?" - "Well, how many are there?"
Got
24 into the car once
Q. Whom did I bring home?
When I saw someone taking initiative -
a lady straightening the chairs - I invited her to my leadership meeting. There must be something in her for her to
do that. When we wanted something
done in the church and someone did it - I invited them. All we would do is
this - eat Heathers lovely food, sing a few songs, pray and I would bring a
simple teaching. I didn’t ask anybody their qualifications because 1 Cor. 1 says
that God chooses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. Why have
only the educated?
I
chose a random group of people. One guy was very naughty - within a few weeks
he got a lady pregnant. One man stole
stuff from the house - he had a drinking problem. Out of the original 18 about
7 started to arise as leaders. Raising
leaders is all about faith. If you believe God I have to lead these people I
need leaders - it is a faith issue from the word go. So when church leaders
say "I don’t have any other leaders in the church" I quote scripture
"O ye of little faith".
Ask God, he builds his church, gives his
materials for it. Pray them into the church. You've got to start living
with leaders even if you don’t have them. So we begin to work with this raw
material - many of them could not read or write. 50% could not speak English. I
could not speak their language. We used sign language, acted out scripture. God
is good.
The
bible tells me that my God takes the
people on the ash heap and lifts them and empowers them so they become princes.
Ps 113:7 He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash
heap; He seats them with princes ...
Sometimes
we have created this understanding that elders fall out of heaven. That is not
true. God lifts us up, he makes us he
forms us. When you become biblically convinced it gives you faith for people.
Stop judging people from the outside, ask for spiritual eyes. After a period of
time we had this massive group gathering on Sundays. A time came when I began
to see leadership anointing on some people
Wherever
I went, I always took 1, 2 or 3 with me. Heather sent me shopping, I took
someone. I used every opportunity to train. You are a nation that loves
qualifications and certificates. Please continue to get them, they are good! But
there is so much training we can do in everyday life. You can’t live in a book.
Without realizing it we were changing a culture
by sharing our lives. For me to preach a message on a Friday mornings,
takes me 9 hours to prepare. But by the following Wednesday no one remembers
the 3 points I’ve shared. Share your life and you will see people learn!
We
were very wealthy compared to everyone else in the church, so the pressure is
how do we share that with so many people? We did our best to share everything.
I even gave some of my young leaders my best red wine. I didn’t want them to learn rules, I wanted them to learn godliness.
I
didn’t lead a private life and then something else on Sundays. We need to share
our lives. People started to trust us and
then I started training and teaching them. The night I took 16 people into
the big meeting room/barn to teach them about baptism with the Holy Spirit, God
poured out on all except 2 even before I began to teach.
Q. did we have failures? Yes we did
Some mistakes I made:
1. Not being inclusive when it came to my
leadership team. So I would gather them to tell them what is going to happen. They
would come from very ordinary backgrounds and I never empowered them to take
decisions. If I wanted something done - I would tell them how and when I wanted
it done. That was a mistake.
2. I never involved enough people from outside
to be involved in my life. We had lots of friends who would come and
minister. But my understanding was that God had called me, it’s my
responsibility- and nobody should interfere. 7 years later, God pulled the carpet,
and the church came crashing down and I realized that I needed help. I got sent
to Gary Welsh. I realized how badly I was building and I started all over again
with the help of godly brothers. Things were so bad with my team that I got
Gary to lead the team even though he was living so far from us.
We honor one another’s gifting. All
these wonderful things we have been learning- we preferred one another, I
started giving people freedom- Ok you lead the meeting this week. When
someone would ask me, what must I do, I said go and pray. Suddenly we started
to see leaders coming through. We started to give the younger guys opportunity
to preach and usually, we didn’t check their notes.
We wanted them to know that I trust what I have taught you. Afterwards
we used to be so encouraging, point out a few shortcomings but we would
celebrate that a young leader took a step of faith. Where they made errors we
just brought a simple explanation and suddenly we saw leaders come through. Eventually
we had 7 elders and 5 in training and 12 young men and women in future leaders.
Fusi Mokeana is one of those 12 who came.
II.
Then
we moved to Dubai
It
was a different scenario. There were no elders in a church of 200. I had to do
it in a different way. There was a loose leadership team and so I took the
existing group - 2 of them had preached in the church before- and started to work with them and started
to release them almost immediately. It was a bit of a shock for them. I
guided them a bit and off you go. Very soon, I started to watch for other
leaders.
Where leaders make a mistake is to wait for
people to prove themselves before they recognize them. It should be the other
way round. If you see something in
someone, it’s your job to get it out of them. I started to go after people.
After about 7 months of being in Gateway we grew from 200 to about 275 and one
of them who had been there for quite a while came to visit us. When he arrived
he saw all these new leaders in operation and he wept. All I did was to give people opportunity and
let them know I was there for their success. We met together, drank coffee,
talked about the things of God and gave opportunity.
I
said to the church, because of the nature of Dubai, we could have a big name
preacher every week and gather a crowd or we could take some of the young men
in the church and give them opportunity to preach. By choosing the latter, in a
year to come, we will be able to celebrate that we have raised a whole army of
people. Often we want our leaders to be
perfect before they minister
Q. Who then is up to the task?
After
3 years we began establish an eldership team. I had 10 men - this is the key- not
all of the elders could minister publicly from the word of God.
1 Tim 3: 3 says that the elder should
be able to teach. Some of my elders are able to teach 5's or 10's but
not able to teach a group of 100. But they are elders. It doesn’t say -elders
must be charismatic and able to expound the scriptures to 150 people. To some
of my elders I would say, “would you meet that new convert and teach him?”
Not all my elders are able to handle a
church budget. So what we do? In the eldership team, we understand our capacity. We understand what we can do and can’t do.
I (Steve) am not on the finance team because I would give all the money away. I
submit a proposal and the elders decide. If I as the lead elder overrule then
it shows I do not trust them. That’s how team works.
I do not lead our elders meetings because
then all we would do is pray and prophesy and we would never plan. Somebody
else leads the meetings. So play to your strengths.
When
it comes to setting our budget - 5 of the 10 elders have the capacity to handle
that type of thing and so we let them do it and then once they finalize and
have a good budget and plan for the year they send it to all 10 and then we
meet and pray over it.
We
also handle very little pastoral issues
in our eldership team. We have got a church of between 600-700 people. The
church is full of sinners so there are lots of problems. If we know someone is
having a problem we don’t take 10 men’s time to discuss it. We find those who
are relationally linked and release them to go address the issue. All they have
to do is to tell us that it is done.
All
the elders were not exactly the same. They
did different tasks, had different capacities and anointing. But we are a Team.
Word of Grace is an Evangelical (Born Again), Spirit filled (Charismatic), Reformed, English speaking church in Pune that upholds the Bible as God's inspired Word for life. We are a church community that have people from every part of India and parts of the world. We are here to put the Great Command and the Great Commission into practice by equipping and releasing every member into works of service. To know more about us please log onto www.wordofgracechurch.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment