Training New Elders - Lesson 2

One of the roles of elder in our church, one of the big roles, is to maintain unity in the body. And unity doesn't happen by accident. Being a peacemaker is an active role.

Being a peacemaker is not something where passively you just ignore conflict or just kind of let things go. No, unity in the church, a thriving, healthy church that remains unified and has peace, is because there is a team of people who are actively maintaining that peace. And so we train our elders on how to step into situations where there might be some conflict bubbling up and how to navigate conversations to make sure that there is peace in the local church.

And what we will do for this training session is essentially a book discussion. And so when we give the elders their assignment, what we tell them is for every section or every chapter of the book, we want them to write down, highlight and write down in the book or in their journal, one thought that really stuck out to them and one question that that chapter or section generates for them. And I tell them, if you don't do that work, our conversation is going to be terrible.

So they have to read the book, engage with the book. And then for every section, once again, have a thought that stuck out to them, a bit of an aha moment, and then a question that is generated from that section. Then I simply lead a book discussion for about three hours and we're extracting all of the learnings out of the book.

And as we're going along and they're pointing out things that stuck out to them, as they're asking questions that the book generated, what I'm doing is I'm listening for spots where I can apply the learnings to particular church scenarios or case studies. So I might make up hypothetical scenarios. And so if they're bringing up a thought from the book, I might ask them, what is a time where you have experienced in the life of the church the application of that thought? And then we'll start talking about scenarios and case studies.

So all we're really doing is a book study, a book conversation, and trying to extract as many learnings as we can from that book. So here is an example of the kinds of conversations that emerge as we're discussing the book. In chapter four of the book, it's titled, Is This Really Worth Fighting Over? Proverbs 19.11, a man's wisdom gives him patience.

It is to his glory to overlook an offense. And a great conversation emerges here. What is Proverbs telling us here, overlooking an offense? Do we just let everything slide? Is it a free-for-all, or is it telling us something different? And so what often emerges in our conversation here is the difference between what we consider primary doctrines and secondary doctrines in our church, where we say there are certain things about Christian theology that are worth fighting over.

If you don't agree on those things, it's no longer Christianity. But then there's all of these secondary things that good, intelligent, spirit-filled Christians disagree on. And we'll get to heaven and figure out who's right and who's wrong.

But we don't fight over these things. So it could be theological, is this really worth fighting over? And so our elders are often talking with people in the church and pointing out, this is not something we fight over. Or sometimes it's about sin issues.

In Proverbs 19, it talks about, it's to your glory to overlook an offense. Sometimes we become judgmental as Christians and we make small things, big things. And so a lot of times our elders will enter into a conversation where they're really coaching someone towards forgiveness and overlooking an offense.

And so these are the kinds of conversations that emerge because in the real world, you have to decide, is this something to overlook? Is this a big deal? Am I gonna confront it or am I gonna let it go? And this is where spirit-directed wisdom comes into play. So walking through this book and having these conversations during the training session is really helpful for our new elders. There's one other thing that we handle in training session number two that has nothing to do with the book.

The majority of the training session is the book discussion. Then the other thing that we handle in training session number two is what we call meeting basics. So once a month, our lead elders from all of our church campuses get together for an elder meeting.

And what I do in training session number two is I explain to them how the agenda for that meeting is set, how the meetings normally run, what we expect of elders in those meetings. And the biggest coaching here I have for our new elders is that they have been selected and they have been trained to function in their role as elder, which means from the very first meeting, we want them to have the confidence to fully engage. I've learned if I don't say that and give them permission to do that, the new elders often defer to the more veteran elders.

And so they might spend the first year of being an elder not really contributing to the elder meeting. And we don't want that. We want everyone actively participating and engaging.

And so we walk through how we set the agenda, how the elders can communicate with me and ask the question, there's a topic that I'm curious about. Is this worth an agenda item for the meeting? Or is this something you and I can just talk about? Most of the time when the elders communicate with me and say, hey, is this worth an agenda item at the elder meeting? It's often not. It's just they need a little bit of information.

So a 10 or 15 minute conversation handles whatever it is that they're curious about. So we walk through all of these things, how the agenda is set, what we do at meetings, how to participate in the meetings so that they are fully prepared and understand when they come to their first elder meeting in September. The last thing we do in training session number two is we give them their assignment for training session number three.

Their book assignment for training session number three is a book called Christian Beliefs by Wayne Grudem. That book is about 160 pages. It's the condensed version of a much lengthier work, Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, which is about 1600 pages.

So our elders are quite pleased when they find out that they only have to read the 160 page condensed version. We give them Wayne Grudem's full systematic theology as one of their reference tools, but they don't have to read the whole thing to be trained as an elder. And in session three, I'll talk to you about how we use that book and why we think it's so important.

But for right now here, I will point out you may have already picked up on. When we talk about our elders protecting the health of the church, protecting the life of the church, when we say it's staff directed and elder and trustee protected, we're talking about three main categories of protection. The first is prayer.

Our elders are trained to pray. And that is the primary way that they protect the health and the life of our church. They pray for our church, they pray for the pastors, they pray for the ministries, they pray for the people.

Our elders are prayers. The number one way that they protect the life of our church is through prayer. The second way that they protect the life of our church is by being peacemakers, conflict resolution, making sure that division doesn't run rampant in the church.

That is an active role of an elder in our church. The third way they protect the life and the health of our church is theologically. They are responsible for paying attention to what's going on in the life of the church and sniffing things out when things might be getting funky.

And so we want to make sure that we have sharpened the saw a bit, remind them about fundamental Christian doctrine, the basics of the Christian life, which is why we use Christian Beliefs by Wayne Grudem as the book that we read and discuss in training session number three.