Missional Elders?

For the past year or so I have been lending a hand at a local church in mid-Sussex.

As well as doing some preaching, expressing pastoral concern and trying to talk to people about the gospel, I have been involved in a leadership development group.

This evening, we are doing session nine of a ten-week course based on Robert Thune’s practical book Gospel Eldership.

I was interested to see that in this session Thune pushes back on the idea that all our thinking about eldership has focused on the elder’s responsibility to those already in the flock.

Yet what about the eldership duty towards those who are not part of the flock?

Thune points to the qualification for eldership that calls for elders to be hospitable. He reminds his readers that the underlying Greek word philoxenos means the love of strangers.

This resonates with the biblical emphasis on welcoming the outsider and the stranger and the ministry of Jesus that was willing to cross geographical, social and race borders to reach people.

Thune says that an elder should have a missional heart:

“He longs to see people know and follow Jesus. He sees worldly people not as enemies, but as spiritually lost people in bondage to sin and Satan — and he believes that God wants to reach them with the gospel.”

And in addition, they should have missional skill:

“He has developed competence and proficiency in sharing the gospel in all types of situations. He is aware of the basic types of unbelief and idolatry in the culture around him. He has a welcoming spirit towards self-righteous moralists, irreligious relativists, and everyone in between — and can talk about the gospel intelligently with all. He knows how to do basic apologetics; how to answer questions about the Bible; how to get underneath surface objections to heart-level issues of worship, trust, and obedience. He shares the gospel naturally, not awkwardly and formally. He has learned all of this not by reading book, but by practice in actual situations.”

Perhaps it needs to be said that not every elder will have all these skills, but substantial fragments of these missional skills should be in every elder and all these skills should be evident in an eldership as a whole.

I was particularly pleased to see Thune speak about the gospel motivation for all this.

“When the renewing grace of the gospel is at work in our hearts it always moves us out into mission.”

If church leaders do not have this motivation or impulse, it is often a sign that the gospel is not actively gripping their hearts and shaping their thoughts, desires, words and actions.

One of my favourite sections on preaching is 2 Timothy 4:1–5. I have written many times in this blog on the directive: “Preach the word,” yet it is worth noting what is said at the end of this exhortation to Timothy:

“Do the work of an evangelist.”

Not all preachers are called to be evangelists, but we are all called to have a distinctive evangelistic edge to our preaching. If it is missing maybe we need to recalibrate our appreciation of the gospel itself.

Photo by Andrea Lightfoot on Unsplash