Twice a year our church takes a month of Sunday evening services to focus in on a particular topic. We call these series’ ‘Focus in February’ and ‘Answers in August.’
For this month’s Answers in August series, we are looking at the topic of church leadership and more specifically multiple pastors (plurality of elders). You can find this August’s messages here.
Our church currently has 6 elders/pastors and 10 deacons.
This is a fascinating topic to discuss! It is really engaging from two perspectives: 1) Bible and 2) church experiences. Both perspectives have a lot to contribute to this study. What does the Bible say about pastors and elders and deacons? And what experiences have we seen in other churches and their leadership structures?
About 10 years ago, we began to have this discussion out loud together. Those talks and messages were very beneficial to the health of the church. There are 3 specific sermons that we gave to help the church with this topic, and we think they would still be very helpful to us now. I want to provide the link to each of those here. (Just FYI, these are audio only. We did not have camera recordings back then.)
- November 25, 2018 Pastor Josh Wamble “Healthy Leadership in God’s Church” 1 Timothy 3:1-13
- December 2, 2018 Pastor Josh Greene “Those Shepherds, These Shepherds, and The Chief Shepherd” 1 Peter 5:1-5
- December 9, 2018 Pastor Josh Greene “Qualifications for Elders” 1 Timothy 3:1-7
We know that many new people have come to our church since those messages from years ago, and so we are spending every Sunday evening in August teaching on the subject again – the subject of a church having multiple pastors. May God make us a united church with healthy, Biblical leadership.