Training New Elders - Lesson 1

Okay, you've made it all the way to the end of the process. It's time to train your new elders. So far, everything we've talked about has been about biblically selecting elders for your church.

Now you've selected your new elders, it's time to train them. I've learned over the years as I have trained the new elders for our church that there's often and should be humility in the room, a bit of apprehension in the room. Sometimes these new elders are wondering, well, how in the world did I even get in this room in the first place? I actually like that because what that means is your new elders understand the importance of the local church.

They wanna do really well understanding that Jesus is the chief shepherd and they understand how important their role of oversight is in the church. And so for there to be some apprehension and understanding of how important their work is, that's actually a good thing. And one of the ways that I reassure our new elders is I tell them, at this point, you are qualified for the role, but you are not yet equipped for the role.

And there's a difference. There's a difference between meeting the biblical standards of what is required to be an elder in the church of Jesus Christ and being trained to function in the role to do the kinds of things that you'll be asked to do as an elder. And that's what this is all about, training your new elders.

So in our church, there are essentially four sessions to training our new elders. And the first session really isn't much training at all. It's a bit of a social event.

So just as a reminder here in terms of the process, our selection process runs from January through May into early June. Then what we do is in mid-June, we have a social event where we are saying, we call it the hello, goodbye dinner. And so we are saying goodbye to all of the elders who have completed their four-year serving term and they're rolling off the elder team.

And all the new elders that are coming on attend this event and we're welcoming them to the elder team. So it's a bit of a social event. It's a dinner.

There's no training going on, except one of the things we do at this dinner is we have the outgoing elders lay hands on and pray for the incoming elders. And at this dinner, we always ask elders who are rolling off the team to share words of wisdom with the new elders. So it's a bit of a social event.

It's a bit of a spiritual event, a prayer event. We have a good dinner together. So this is the first thing we do in mid-June.

We do this hello, goodbye dinner. Once the hello, goodbye dinner has happened, we move into our training sessions. We do them once a month for three months throughout the summer.

So late June, late July, late August. And the reason that we spread them out over a month is that our new elders are given reading assignments that they have to accomplish before they come to the next training. So training session number one, here are the things that we cover.

And I'll start by saying that for training session number one, we require the elders' wives to attend this training. And the reason we do that is because quite often, the elder couples are doing ministry together. So if they are going to someone's house to pray, or they're praying in our prayer centers after church services, or they are entering into a marriage conflict, they are often doing ministry together.

And so for this first session, we like to train the husband and the wife together. So here are the kinds of things we cover in training session number one. I call it elder basics.

We do not assume that our elders understand everything about the church organizationally. And so it's a lot of logistics, like we give them their key cards for the buildings. We give them all of the resources.

We have put together a package of resources, books, reference material, things that we think will be helpful for the elders over the course of their serving their four-year term. We explain to them that we provide for them an expense account. So if they're ever doing ministry on behalf of the church, if they need to take someone out for coffee or take someone out for a meal, those kinds of things, we have an expense account for our elders so that they can just submit receipts and be reimbursed.

We explain to them how that happens. A lot of the time I spend on the org chart of our church. Because we are a multi-site church, it is quite complex.

And so it requires me getting to a dry erase board and I just start to draw the org chart and allow the elders to ask questions about how the org chart works. Because we have campus staff and central staff and senior directors, and so it can get complicated. And so I like to make sure that all of our elders understand how the organization works.

And so as I draw out the org chart, they ask questions along the way. Well, how does this work? And what happens in this scenario? And so my goal is to help our elders fully understand how our church operates. And I do that by drawing the org chart.

And then another elder basic for us is, we require at our church, all of our pastors to have accountability partners. And so when someone steps into an elder role in our church, we explain to them at the first training session that if they do not currently have an accountability partner, that that is something we'll be looking for them to establish. And we talk to them about how to do that if they're not familiar with how to have an accountability partner, how to sit down with someone else and be very honest with them about what's going on in your life.

Now, because accountability partners are a big part of our church culture, it is incredibly rare that an elder, a new elder ever comes to our first training session and doesn't have an accountability partner. But from time to time, it does. They might say, well, I had one for a few years and he moved away and I haven't reestablished another accountability relationship with anyone.

So those are the elder basics for us. Then we do some bylaws basics, where we ask the elders prior to this training session, they should have already read the bylaws during their vetting and selecting process, but we ask them in this first training session, do they have any questions about our church's bylaws? Bylaws can be a little bit stale, a little bit boring to read, but it's important that the overseers in the church understand legally how the organization is set up. And then we spend some time again talking about the fact that we are a staff-directed elder and trustee-protected church.

So we want to make sure that our elders are very clear on where that line is, because our elders are never directing ministry. They are always overseeing and protecting the health of the church. And so one of the things I explain to the elders, when we are talking about us being a staff-directed and elder and trustee-protected church, is they don't have to worry about crossing the line, because when they cross the line, I will gently tell them that they've crossed the line.

And one of the jokes I have with our elders is, if they start getting directive, like, hey, maybe we should do this, or maybe the student ministry should think about doing this, I tell them, okay, the way that you get to make decisions about how a ministry operates is you can join the staff. And then they all laugh, and then we move on. So from time to time, elders, you don't want everyone to be afraid of that line.

We just want to be aware that that line exists to be a staff-directed elder and trustee-protected church. So I tell our elders that the number one way that they protect the health of our church is by asking great questions. If a question comes to their mind, hey, how is this working? Or, Pastor Eric, how are you doing? This has been a tough season.

Are you taking time off? So I prompt them with all kinds of questions that they could ask about their pastors, about the church in general. And I tell them, no question is off limits. One of the dangers I have often seen in high-level oversight of churches, so elder and deacon-level oversight in the church, is that leaders are afraid to ask questions.

The elders and the deacons are afraid to ask questions. But if they don't ask good questions, then they're not really protecting the health of the church. And so I coach them the number one way to protect the church is to ask really great questions.

Once again, we're staff-directed, elder and trustee-protected. Okay, then the lion's share of training session number one, and it will make sense to you why we ask the wives to attend this session. We spend a lot of time talking about how to pray with people.

This is the number one thing that our elders do in our church. They pray a lot, which is why when we're in the vetting and selecting process, we really dig in on their prayer life. What do they understand about prayer? Do they have a regular prayer life? Are they comfortable praying with other people? To what extent do they have experience with that? Because we know in our church, our elders do a lot of praying.

And so we walk through all different kinds of prayer training. So for example, in our church, we celebrate communion once a month in our weekend worship services. And on communion weekends, our church knows that our elders are available for healing prayer.

And so we go to the James 5 passage where it talks about, are any of you sick? Then call the elders of the church to pray for you. And we train our elders on how to open the Bible and read the James 5 text to people when they come for healing prayer. And we train them on how to do both the work of praying for physical healing, but also honoring that James 5 text, which seems to indicate that sometimes we have physical problems that have spiritual roots.

And so our elders will ask people, is there anything that you would like to confess? Sometimes God uses physical things to get our attention. And so is there anything that you want to bring to light now before we pray? And so we're training our elders on how to pray for people on communion weekends, specifically for healing, using the James 5 text. In that James 5 text, it also talks about anointing with oil.

So we talk to them about why we anoint with oil and what it represents. So we're walking through the James 5 text, how to pray for people for physical healing, and then we actually practice it. And one of the things we do going forward in elder meetings is if any of our elders comes to the meeting and they have a physical thing they'd like prayer for, we don't ever just randomly pray.

We say, okay, this is a great time to practice. And so I'll point to one of the elders and say, okay, Jeremy, you're praying today. So do it exactly the way you would do it on a communion weekend.

So he opens the Bible to James 5, he grabs the anointing oil, and he walks through the whole process of how we do it. So we train our elders on how to pray using the James 5 text for physical healing. We also train our elders on how to pray when people want someone to come to their house to pray for spiritual reasons.

Sometimes people say like, I think there's something spiritually weird going on in my house and they don't know how to describe it. Sometimes they'll use demonic language or they'll just say, it's just weird or dark, or people will explain it in all kinds of ways. And so we do a training session on how to go to someone's house and pray in their house.

We spend a little bit of time talking about what some people call spiritual warfare or what happens when you think there's some kind of demonic influence going on. And we talk a lot about what the scriptures tell us and what the scriptures don't tell us. I am often skeptical when people have a 200-page handbook on how to cast out a demon.

I'm wondering where they got all their content from, because we don't have a lot in the New Testament. What we do know is that the spiritual realm is real, that there are angels and demons and the Holy Spirit. And we are told that we have authority as believers in Jesus to cast out evil spirits.

And so we talk about how to do that with confidence, without presumption, and without giving into some of what I would consider some of the fanatical teachings on these kinds of things. Because once again, I am very skeptical of anyone that has a 300, 400-page manual on how to do these things specifically. So we talk about how to do that.

Another category of prayer that we train on is just really the general praying for people. You never know what people's issues are, what they want prayer for. How do you pray for somebody after a church service? Not specifically on a communion weekend for healing prayer, but just in general, if our elders are available for praying for someone, how do you do that? How do you not get sucked into a 20- to 30-minute conversation where now they're actually looking for counseling? So what are some effective ways to make sure that you get to the prayer and you pray for the person? So we do a lot of training on how to pray.

Another category of prayer is going to a hospital to pray for somebody. And there's a lot of logistics there. Things like don't just walk into the room if someone says come in, because you might stumble on an awkward situation.

How long should you spend at a hospital with someone? These are logistical, pastoral-type things. How short is too short? How long is too long? Things like stop in at the nurse's station and tell them who you are and why you're there, because it respects the role of the nurse on that floor. And so hospital visitation prayer, we do some training on that.

So depending on how you deploy elders in your church, you'll want to think through how you want to train them to pray. And then the last thing we do in training session number one is we give them their homework assignment for training session number two. Before I tell you what that assignment is, I want to remind you that for training session number one, we really don't give them any homework.

This is the first session coming in. And so everything I train our new elders on in training session number one didn't require any pre-work on their part. They just show up and we start the training.

And I will tell you that these training sessions are about three to four hours. So we get together, we have dinner, and then we start. We go from about six to ten o'clock once a month for these trainings.

The assignment that we give our new elders for training session number two is a book called Peacemaker by Ken Sand. The entire book is about exactly what the title says, how to be the peacemakers that God has called us to be.