From the Senior Pastor

Dear friends,

Thank you for the vote of confidence you have given me to be one of your two pastors (with Mick) for this year. I’ll do my best!

What’s a pastor for? The New Testament mentions at least five kinds of church leaders. Bishops (episkopoi) are overseers or guardians; elders (presbuteroi) are ‘mature leaders in the plural’; pastors (poimen) are shepherds, who guide and protect the flock; apostles are in ‘front-line’ ministries; prophets bring us a word from the Lord for our current situation.

In a healthy church there will be dimensions of all these leadership models. Does the pastor have a leadership role that is more than ‘first among equals’? Yes: the young pastor Titus (1:5) had the authority to appoint elders without a majority vote of the church’s annual meeting! In our Baptist traditions (note the plural!) we have majored on ‘congregational’ models of church government. Whilst that is appropriate in our culture – and indeed wise – democracy was unknown in the New Testament church. Leaders there are more like ‘tribal chiefs’, who hopefully listen carefully to people, operate consensually, then lead. The Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15)

is a good example.

I happen to be a ‘consensus’ person. I believe church members should ‘own’ where the church is going. Down the track we’ll talk with one another a lot about all that.

Please pray for our leaders as they wrestle with a G-R-O-W model to understand where God might be leading us all (Goals? Realities? Options? What do we do when?).

Have a good week!

Rowland Croucher 3rd April 2003