Business knows. If you fail to train people adequately they will fail to perform. Dow Jones understands this double failure isn't good for the bottom line.
The military knows. Troops who don't understand how to use and fix sophisticated technological weapons and equipment become a liability in the field and potentially lose wars.
School systems know. They send administrators and teachers to conferences and seminars designed to help them understand some facet of the increasingly complex art of educating our youth.
The church …. well, some churches know. Pastors may have earned terminal degrees (typically a doctorate) but, hopefully, that does not signal a termination of their training. If a church knows what's good for it, it won't be.
Consider the range of talents expected of the typical pastor. First, congregations expect good sermons. Did you hear the one about the two ladies sitting in Applebee's after the morning service? One asked the other what she thought of the sermon. “Well,” she replied, “I just have three things to say about it. First, he read it. Second, he didn't read it well. And third, it wasn't worth reading.” Church people have been known to be critical of their pastor's sermons.
One of the peculiarities inherent in delivering sermons week in and week out is that congregations, hearing primarily one preacher, lose the ability to be objective. They judge a good sermon based on the other sermons they have heard the pastor deliver. Likewise, a bad sermon fails to rise to the standard the preacher's own preaching has set. Thus a superior preacher can never be better than average to his own congregation because each sermon is critiqued in comparison to the pastor's previous efforts.
Or, considering the talents required of pastors, what about the value congregations place on pastoral counseling? Pastors are expected to have skills enough to help church and community members to work through the messes in which they sometimes find themselves. While an important part of counseling is listening, as Carl Rogers demonstrated years ago, it isn't enough just to be a big ear. The pastoral counselor must skillfully and thoughtfully listen in order to make observations and ask questions designed to open the minds and hearts of those who have come for help. Knowing the right questions to ask doesn't just happen. It happens because of training.
No other calling or profession requires so much of a single individual as the pastorate. The pastor must feel comfortable mingling with the country club set and the dinette set. His weddings must not only tie the knot tightly, but artfully. Funeral remarks must not only speak well of the dead and point the way to heaven, but must be literarily worthy of being kept by family members as mementos.
Part of the pastor's job is administrative. Another part is academic. Still another, larger, part involves being a people person. And I have ignored the fact that many churches expect the pastor to be a techie capable of managing web site intricacies and setting the controls on a computerized thermostat.
Even more significant, the pastor must be able to read the times as well as the Bible. In fact, the pastor's greatest challenge is reading and interpreting both to the congregation.
My purpose is neither to elicit sympathy for pastors nor to create a climate that allows them to wallow in self-pity without guilt. Rather, I seek to demonstrate that every pastor needs continual training to be effective.
Of the many wonderful memories of my pastorates, almost all involve being with people at strategic times in their lives or their families. One, however, is of a decision a church made to send me to Edinburgh, Scotland, to a preaching conference. It may be that their reasoning went something like this: “This poor congregation needs better preaching, so let's send him somewhere to learn about good preaching. Even if he doesn't learn from the experience at least we can have some good preaching while he's gone!”
Like any other skill, preaching needs to be honed if it is to stay sharp. But it is undeniably true that in helping me preach better sermons, they were also helping themselves!
But, if training is needed for pastors, what about the laity? If a football team trained as little as the typical church it would have no hope of winning a game—unless, of course, the other team was even less prepared! The predominant means of training in a Baptist church is the sink or swim method. What that has done is made a lot of people afraid of getting in the water.
It is past time for Virginia Baptist churches to get serious about training. The consequences of being poorly trained are the differences between winning and losing—not a game, but the unsaved. If we truly believe that we are engaged in spiritual warfare perhaps we should take a cue from the military and be as serious about training as it is. If Christians do not reach the lost, someone else will.
By contacting the Virginia Baptist Mission Board's web site (www.vbmb.org) or by calling (800) 255-2824 you can learn about training events scheduled for clergy and laity alike.