Equipping Planters and Pastors Beyond the Brook Hills 7 2

In this fourth post of the series, I want to share our equipping beyond the Brook Hills 7 (BH7) related to church planting teams and pastors. If you have not read the previous posts in order, it would be helpful to do so to understand the context:

Share Today’s Stories Later Today

Why We Do What We Do the Way We Do It

An Engine for Developing World-Impacting Disciple Makers

We pray and work diligently to raise up church planting teams and pastors from within our membership.  While there is absolutely nothing wrong with partnering with those outside of one’s church (and we do a great deal of such partnerships in other countries), we believe that equipping and sending our members is the most healthy model for our church; it is biblical, creates a culture of expectation, requires church ownership, and allows for pastoral (and church) accountability with those whom we send to other locations in Birmingham and across the United States.

When members of our faith family say they believe they should serve on a church planting team or serve as an elder–either within the church or to serve another church–we provide additional equipping beyond the BH7. Our church planting and pastoral training is about 12-15 months in length, with a great deal of hands-on training in Birmingham. The figure below displays what is provided in either our church planting track or pastor track. Just as we aggressively evaluate the BH7, we also are making necessary on-going adjustments to our approach beyond the BH7.

We believe there are biblical, missiological, and practical distinctions between church planters (i.e., missionaries) and pastors–no matter where they serve in the world. Our expectation is that our church planting teams are to make disciples, plant a church, appoint/equip pastors, and repeat the process (see previous post–and my writings on church planting). We are not training church planters to pastor churches.  Whether we are in Birmingham, across North America, or throughout the world, we allow the biblical paradigm of church planting to provide both a definition and direction for us. Our church planting training is designed to make disciples and plant churches from unreached (and unengaged) people groups–wherever they are found.

An exception for us is when someone says he wants to plant a church and pastor that church (Yes, I know this is the opposite of most church planting thinking in North America–and certain parts of the world.). While we do not forbid such practice (pastoral calling is a wonderful thing), we put the member into our pastoral ministry track and equip him as a pastor (not as an apostolic-type missionary). We then try to find long-term Kingdom citizens whom he can pastor as a new church.  We believe most church planting pastors need an instant church to serve (from the beginning of the planting endeavor) and to shepherd for local and global disciple making.

Much of our pastoral equipping is devoted to church revitalization.  In the U. S., for every 10 men we send from our church to pastor an established church, 9 of them will be overseeing congregations that are in need of revitalization.

I recognize there are a multitude of definitions for what constitutes church revitalization.  For us, church revitalization is not:

• church planting
• merging a local church with The Church at Brook Hills
• buying another church’s property
• paying a man’s salary (from our church) to pastor another church
• developing a Brook Hills’ campus, or site.

While I plan to share more about our church revitalization process in the next post, revitalization is more about helping create a healthy marriage between a sister church in need and a man who has our church’s DNA–though we are not trying to clone our church, or make another church in our image.