Monday, 15 January 2018
Dear Church Family,
“The Steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” Lamentations 3:22-23 (ESV)
On Wednesday evening, at Prayer & Worship, it was my great pleasure to share with the church family the need that we have, at this time, to strengthen the leadership team. As you will all be aware, we’ve seen God’s mercies [that] never come to an end, at work among us over this season, as the church has grown not only in size, but also in diversity and complexity. All of this is wonderful! Yet all of this ‘God activity’ comes with greater levels of responsibility to ensure we are caring for each other well whilst also ensuring that we steward what God is doing amongst us appropriately. As a result, over this last term, the leadership team has felt the growing need to strengthen itself, so we can better serve the church family. In light of this, and with the support and advice of Goff Hope, we’ve invited Dan Jones and Darren Cox to come and join the team. Friends, it is a great joy for us to be able to have men of such good character, who are servant-hearted and have clear leadership gifting and who are willing to serve and pour their lives out for the sake of you and me here at Kingsgate.
At this point however, let me make a few things clear:
1. The leadership team is fulfilling a temporary role, until we can move towards the Biblical model of elders and deacons.
In the New Testament, elders (also called pastors or overseers) worked as a team and had the ultimate responsibility for leading, teaching, caring for and protecting the church.
Working alongside the elders were deacons who helped them, by running and coordinating significant aspects of church life.
You can read about this in the Bible: Acts 20:28, 1 Timothy 3:1-13, Titus 1:5-9, Hebrews 13:17
2. New Testament leadership is always servant leadership and focused on releasing and empowering the whole body (see Ephesians 4).
Adding Dan & Darren into the team is about enabling more capacity to help each member of the church to find their place in God’s great mission among us here in Great Yarmouth and beyond!
3. By taking this approach, it gives us some breathing space
The last thing that we want to be doing right now is rush ahead of ourselves as we move forward as a Church. So by giving ourselves some additional capacity in this temporary team, this will enable us all to explore what scripture has to say about leadership in the New Testament; how we might look to identify that type of leadership amongst ourselves and give space for it to naturally emerge! The best leadership ‘appointments’ are where the vast majority of the church family are able to say, “Oh, I thought they were already leading!’ Of course, that type of approach just takes time!
Further questions that you may have
Will a future Eldership Team grow out of the present Leadership Team?
Not necessarily! I think we are quite some way off seriously exploring eldership as a church. We want to be open and attentive to what God is doing amongst us and so any future Eldership Team could be drawn from a variety of areas within the church.
What impact does this have on me?
On the one hand, I hope that you feel encouraged that we are looking to try and appropriately resource the church family, so we can carefully steward what God is doing among us. However, I would ask that you do two things:
1. Pray for the leadership team We are in an exciting season with God doing lots of wonderful things amongst us. However, that requires an increasingly greater level of care, wisdom and ability. I think it is appropriate that all those involved in the leadership team should feel out of their depths and thus ever increasingly dependent upon the Lord.
2. Ensure that you are ‘stepping in’ and finding your place in this growing body We need everyone to play their part (including you!). If you are struggling to know what that part is, then do come and chat with one of the Leadership Team and let us try and help you find it.
I’ve still got questions about all of this?
No problem! Come and chat to one of the team and we can talk things through with you.
Yours in Christ,
Team Leader