I suspect that many churches feel that developing ‘teachers’ is straightforward, as its essentially the same as developing ‘shepherds.’ There’s something to that, the two are grammatically linked in Ephesians 4 in a way that the other three gifts aren’t.
Except, I think it’s tricky. Developing any of these gifts has a challenge to it because that development—like all development—requires time and opportunity. Lots of the people you want to develop are not on your church payroll but need time to develop their God-given gifts. Helping them find this time is part of a church’s role in their development.
The first step is to give opportunities—which means you need to either have or be able to develop opportunities to give them. This is fairly straightforward for prophets and evangelists, and not that difficult for shepherds. It’s more challenging for teachers and apostles. I suspect many churches think that the sort of opportunity that develops a teacher is allowing them to preach; while not irrelevant, this isn’t going to help particularly, especially because that’s more likely to develop someone as a shepherd rather than into teacher.
We need opportunities in our churches for people to teach. I don’t think most churches have them; we should (and not just for this reason!).
If we narrow to considering the teacher, though I think this is applicable wider, the number of opportunities you have will not allow you to develop widely. In my experience, most churches are keen to develop breadth and so give opportunity to lots of people, whatever we’re talking about. The problem with this model is that it doesn’t recognise that doing something once or twice a year is a great way to test someone and a great way to recognise a gift, but not a great way to develop one. Development takes opportunity over a concerted length of time, with feedback, reflection, and the chance to try things. Development requires duds as well as successes, and ideally the duds are thrown in smaller settings to protect the person and allow them to be developmental rather than the end of opportunities flowing their way.
This means that we need to focus our opportunities on a small group of people. We don’t tend to like this as it flows against our inclusive tendencies. What I think we need to remember is that development takes a long time; depth is hard won. We need to take a long view: every teacher you develop might grow ten more through his life and if we think about church generationally then this will do us more good in the long run.
Add to this that the teacher doesn’t need to just to teach, they need to study—particularly to read but probably also to write—and there’s a high up front ‘cost’ in someone’s time to developing a teacher. This doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be paid to do this, but some will need financial help to get the time required to study. It doesn’t just mean academic qualifications—it might not mean any for some—and our institutions could easily change to make that an unattractive option. If it doesn’t it will need to mean other ways to interact with other teachers and have the helpful pushback required to get somewhere over time.
I think these principles broadly apply to both developing people in your church and to the wider gifts that work across churches. Firstly, you have to recognise someone to develop—which may require some breadth of opportunity—secondly you need to give them opportunities, and lots of them. Thirdly they need time with others like them, and time to pursue their gift’s development—perhaps in prayer for the prophet and study for the teacher (though both would benefit from the opposite too!).
None of this is that complicated, but my concern is that most churches expect development to just happen if you give people chances to do stuff. Development is harder than that and requires more intention; but it’s not more complex than that. The difference between hoping development happens and making development happen is the difference between spreading your net wide to see what happens and choosing to work with these two people to see how far you can take them. Every leader should be aiming to replicate themselves, yes, but also aiming to help people surpass them.
Whether you’re looking to develop Ephesians 4 ministries or not then development is something you should be putting energy into. It’s hard, I know it is, because much like planting a garden you need to do lots of things that don’t show any fruit, and you need to wait a long time, and not everything you plant will grow, and when it does grow it wasn’t really you that made it happen.
People often moan that their churches need more leaders or elders or pastors or whatever it may be. I suspect they’re right; most churches would say the same thing. We aren’t waiting for the miraculous person to drop out of the sky; instead, we assume that the Lord has given our church everything that it needs for everything he is calling us too and we work hard at developing the people we’ve been given. We might need to take a long view, perhaps the work will pay off in ten years, or perhaps it’ll be long after we’re dead. That’s still the work, and his labour is always worth doing.
Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash
To subscribe and receive email notifications for future posts, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.
Would you like to support my work? The best thing you can do is share this post with your friends. Why not consider also joining my Patreon to keep my writing free for everyone. You can see other ways to support me here.
nuakh 