RECRUITING THE NEXT GENERATION OF PREACHERS

The latest newsletter from the Evangelical ministry training network 9:38 is a spirited and in many ways sizzling defence of its vision against charges of big-church, posh-university elitism.

This organisation, based at St Ebbe’s in Oxford, takes its inspiration from Christ's words in Matthew 9v38. In the light of the fact that the evangelistic task is enormous but those willing and able to undertake it few, Jesus commands his disciples: ‘Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.’

9:38 runs conferences for ministry trainees, known as apprentices, who work for a year or two in a local church as a way of testing the water for possible for full-time ministry.

Mr Matthew Morgan, 9:38’s administrator, explains the original vision behind the network in his article ‘Part of Something Big’: ‘In the western world, fewer and fewer people are going to church, and those going forward for full-time gospel ministry are few and, on average, getting older. Some sort of strategy was needed to help the local church get more and more members of their congregations to think about going into full-time gospel ministry, and to get more churches thinking “recruitment” for themselves. In the past ten years, 9:38 has been running conferences for people to think through full-time gospel ministry; to demystify what it is, who it is for, and to see what different types of gospel ministry there are and what they involve. They have been an easy way for ministers to keep recruiting on the agenda.’

He concludes: ‘So if you are a lonely apprentice in a small church in a small town, remember you are part of something big. You are part of God’s work of raising up workers for His harvest field.’

This note of speaking up for ministry in the smaller church continues to sound in another piece by Mr John Percival who did children’s ministry together with his wife Sarah in a small church in Hastings: ‘Ministry to little people in a little church’.

He wrote: ‘Hastings boasts an impressive set of vital statistics in deprivation, teen pregnancy and other such measures of society in a mess without God. It was into this challenging situation that Sarah and I were thrown in 2006 as apprentices to be involved in all areas of church life. I had been to a rather posh public school and never given a talk to anyone younger than 14. Sarah was slightly less from “another planet” (as we were affectionately described recently).'

Such honesty is refreshing and speaks of true Christian commitment.

What will decisively win the argument are of course actions and not words - when the large city-centre, university and suburban churches and their church plants currently running large-scale apprenticeship schemes begin pro-actively to encourage their best trainees to move out of the comfort zone and go to the sort of ministry situations Messrs Morgan and Percival so eloquently describe.

Otherwise, an unusually interesting and well-written Evangelical newsletter is just piddling into the wind. It's a tough world out there and it won't be won for Christ unless the next generation of Evangelical preachers follows Mr Percival and breaks out of the bourgeois public school cocoon.