Episode Details

(Click the player to listen to the podcast version of this post, or read on …)

Here’s the third (and final for the time being) of a little ‘Back to School’ series on what I’m learning by being back in campus ministry. In the first two posts, I talked about the centrality of the Word and the power of patient culture building.

The kind of pastor that's hard to find

It’s amazing how many different kinds of pastor there are these days.

There was a time—it didn’t seem so very long ago—when there were only a few options. You could be a plain unadorned ‘Pastor’ or ‘Minister’, or you could put a few simple modifiers in front of that if you had to—like ‘Assistant’ or ‘Associate’ or maybe ‘Youth’.

But today, the possibilities are endless. You can be a Lead, Senior, Executive, Discipleship, Children’s, Youth-and-Children’s, Children-and-Families, Middle School, High School, Young Adults, Women’s, Men’s, Campus, College, Worship, Creative Arts, Mission, Evangelism, Community, Maturity, Membership, Ministry or Magnification Pastor—and I’m sure many others besides.

This is all a bit bemusing (and in some cases amusing), and might lead to a discussion about the nature of ‘pastoring’ and which roles or activities really deserve that description.

But I want to focus on a positive if rather mundane lesson from this proliferation of pastors—the perfectly reasonable point that if you want to make progress in a particular area, it usually involves commissioning Someone to take responsibility for it, whether in a paid or voluntary capacity (and whether they are called ‘pastor’ or not).

The Unmodified Pastor, on his own, hasn’t the time or the gifts to do everything. He needs appropriately gifted people to step up and take the lead in different areas—whether that’s with a particular group of people (like ‘youth’ or ‘seniors’) or a particular purpose that we pursue as a church (like ‘evangelism’ or ‘membership’). If we want some group or ministry to thrive, we can’t just hope it will sort of happen as a natural consequence of everything else we’re doing, or that an already over-worked pastor will somehow get to it after everything else. Someone needs to be thinking and praying and organizing and working hard under God for it to happen and improve and grow.

So far so obvious. What has this got to do with me being back in campus ministry again?

Well, when I was negotiating with Carl Matthei about exactly what my role would be back at Campus Bible Study (CBS), and what we would call it, I looked around at all these various pastoral titles for some inspiration. But the strange thing was that in all the big staff teams I looked at, with their many and various role descriptions, and in all the lists and discussions of pastoral titles I found online, there was one kind of pastor I couldn’t find—that is, I found virtually nothing that described the particular role or focus area that I was about to embark on.

Which of course was training.

My role at CBS is to help drive those activities that equip or train the students in aspects of Christian life and ministry—how to read the Bible themselves or one-to-one with someone else; how to really know the gospel well, and be able to talk about it with others in conversation; how to understand and live out biblical ethics; and so on. And on top of this, my job also involves the ongoing coaching and training of the ‘trainees’—the 25 young men and women doing a ministry apprenticeship at CBS at the moment.

We toyed with the idea of calling me a ‘Training Pastor’, but since that sounded a bit too much like ‘pastor-in-training’ we ended up going with ‘Ministry Trainer’.

The