Training New Elders - Lesson 3

We move on to training session number three. This happens in late August in our process, and so the lion's share of this training session is discussing the book Christian Beliefs by Wayne Grudem. We do the exact same thing with this book that we do with the Peacemaker book.

There are 20 Christian beliefs in this book, and so for every one of the sections, I ask all of the new elders to highlight one thought that stuck out to them and one question that that section generates for them, and then we just methodically talk through the book. And once again, as I'm leading this conversation, I'm listening for places where I can ask them questions about how would this show up in the life of our church? How have you experienced this being important? Why would it be important that we make sure that we maintain this Christian doctrine? What would happen if we let this slide? And so I'm helping them with practical application in the life of the church. So the lion's share of training session number three is discussing the book Christian Beliefs.

A few other things we do in training session number three is we talk about what I call the firsts, or when you feel over your head. So what to do when you are in a scenario where it's the first time you're dealing with something as an elder. So for example, someone calls the church office and says they think something spiritually weird is going on in their house, and they would like to request some elders to come to their house and pray.

And if this is the first time that an elder has ever done this, it might be a little bit awkward, or they feel in over their head. And so for this training, we just talk about what to do with those firsts when you feel in over your head. And really, honestly, the most of the training here is just to remind them that they're on a team.

We're never going to deploy them to do something that they haven't been trained to do, or they're not capable of doing, and we never ask them to do it by themselves. And so we remind them there are lots of elders that have plenty of experience on the team. And so whenever they're doing a first, we will often partner them with another elder couple so that their first experience is with someone that has a little bit more experience with that particular scenario.

So we talk a little bit about what to do with the firsts and when you feel in over your head. Then we also assign a mentor elder to each of our new elders, which simply means we're saying, hey, this elder has been serving for three years already on the team, and so we're going to connect you directly with that elder. Now, they all have a relationship with one another, so it's not like they don't know every other elder on the team.

But what we say is this mentor elder is the person you can call always. So if you are getting ready to sit down with a couple that's having marriage difficulties and you just want to bounce your approach off of somebody, you have a mentor elder that you know that's your person to contact specifically for just having a sounding board as you're preparing to handle anything as an elder. Then, because this is our last training session, we just do a broad recap and we spend some time with Q&A, where I say, okay, we've done a lot of training, we've read a lot of books, we've had a lot of conversations, so what kind of questions are still rattling around in your mind? What kind of apprehensions do you still have? What is still unclear to you? And so we just spend some time bringing clarity to all of these things.

And then that concludes their training, and the first official elder meeting starts in September. So training session in June, training session in July, training session in August, and then we start the ministry year with our elders in September, and that concludes their onboarding training. But then I will also mention here before we're done talking about training, is that we work hard at each of our monthly elder meetings to continue our learning, to continue our training.

So sometimes we will provide our elders with articles to read, and then we'll discuss it at the elder meeting, or I love case studies. So I will take a situation that happened in the last month in the life of the church, and I will bring it to the elder meeting as a case study, and then we'll just discuss it. How do you handle this? What do the scriptures say about this? And so I love case studies and I love real-time case studies.

And so our ongoing training for our elders is often using something in the life of the church as a discussion point, so that we can continue to sharpen the saw and get better and better in our role as elders. Well, we did it. We have walked through the entire process of selecting and training elders in your local church context.

We collected the names, we did an initial screening, we had an initial conversation with them, we had a second conversation with them, we officially interviewed them, and then we put their name out to the congregation for public comments, and then we trained our new elders. So here are three reflection questions for you as we wrap this up, and then we have one more session together where we're going to do some Q&A, where we're going to ask some detailed questions about what we've learned so far. But for now, here's your three reflection questions.

Question number one, how will you change or adapt your elder process based on these sessions? Question two, what can you start doing without much effort to train your elders more effectively? And three, how have you experienced the negative consequences of not training your elders to protect the church through prayer, peacemaking, and doctrinal fidelity?