Interlude Number Two
New chapter starts next Monday
Next week I start a new chapter on the importance of staying in your community if you someday hope to hold the office of a church elder.
In the meantime, I thought I’d ask you to help me share these brief mailings with others. It doesn’t take much to click the share button. The hardest part is to take about three minutes to think of one or two people who could benefit from the teaching.
Then click the SHARE button and your options become: 1. copy the link (which allows you to text, email or whatever that link you copied) and send it to a few friends in your contact list. Or 2. share it through your FaceBook page. Or 3. straight on email it to someone.
I’d really appreciate it if you would take those few minutes right now. I know how easy it is to put off something for later and then never get around to it.
As for the next chapter on: staying in your community, I intend to encourage men that if you aspire to be an elder, that people need to trust you. Trust requires time, a lot of time, like decades. It stands to reason, therefore, that elders should be homegrown and not strangers. Rooted in the community, not transients.
The church is fooled too often when people pass through. A few weeks, months, years and they are on gone, they’re on the move again. Sometimes they leave the area, but more often they are off to “become a part” of another local congregation. These types must not be elders. Elders must be stayers. They must put in their time, a long time, before they are ordained to the office in your church.
Yet how often do churches bring into the congregation someone they do not even know? They trust their denomination to send them a young guy with a short track record, who ends up hanging out as their shepherd for about 3-1/2 years and then moves on (or is forced out) to another community to start the process all over again. That system should be abandoned.
One more thing, on Thursday I will post a book review. It may be a little longer of a post, but it is worthwhile and serves as an addendum to this book’s topic.