Simple Church Minute 47--reproducing leaders

47—reproducing leaders

THIS BLIP NOT ON FIRST RECORDING

My name is Tom; this is Simple Church Minute.

            Vince Lombardi was the most successful American pro football coach of the late 1950’s and 1960’s.  Bill Walsh was the most successful of the 1980’s.  History records one notable difference in their legacies.  Walsh had many of his former assistant coaches move on to become head coaches themselves, with about 16* being sufficiently successful to lead their teams to the playoffs.  The only one former assistant of Lombardi became a head coach, and he was Lombardi’s successor who inherited the position as the team descended to mediocrity. 

            I had a friend in college who applied to enter the seminary of the denomination of church he attended on the 100^th anniversary of that church’s existence.  He was the first person from his church to do so, in spite of the seminary only being about 20 miles down the road.  His church may have had the most basic parts of Christian theology right, but desiring to produce leaders was obviously so low on their priority list that it wasn’t even there.

            Conversely, in the Bible, when Paul started a church, he taught new believers how to be the church while staying in the city about 3 months, once as little as 6 weeks, before leaving for another city.  In that time, he taught everyone to share in leading each other towards spiritual maturity, and trusted everyone desiring to listen to the Holy Spirit to be sufficient ongoing day by day direction.

            The current institutional church system has persons in formal schooling for 3 to 7 years, and then accredits the trained persons to take a job where he or she may be as closed off from the world as every person in the early churches was a part of it.  In that closed off situation, such trained persons create lectures under the guise of teaching, but the people taught never take tests, no one expects the teaching to sink in, and there’s no accountability for the teacher if that happens.

            You can email me at simplechurchminute@gmail.com.  For more info on organic, simple worship, visit http://www.simplechurch.com/ or (local website). 
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* I say about, as I haven't been able to conclusively figure out the number