Book Review: The Shepherd Leader: Achieving Effective Shepherding in Your Church
Reviewed by Phil NewtonDo you dream of developing a leadership team that actually shepherds the church yet struggle to know what it looks like and how to do it? If you’re a pastor, this dream needs to become a reality!
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"I Learned the Hard Way": Mentoring at South Woods Baptist
By Phil Newton
I wish I could tell you that it was my earliest pastors who taught me to pastor.
Yet my earliest mentors in my home church were several godly couples. The pastor himself was decidedly a-theological, more concerned with denominational programs than teaching the Bible or engaging people with the gospel. He didn't offer any example even after several friends and I declared our interest in gospel ministry.
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Moving from a Deacon-Led to an Elder-Led Church
By Phil Newton
In one of my early pastorates, two deacons did something unusual: they actually shepherded the congregation. Apart from those two men, the church had a typical mid-twentieth-century Baptist polity: eight deacons served as a board of directors, and the congregation as a whole voted on virtually every decision affecting church life at monthly business meetings. The deacons generally focused on property, finances, and occasional squabbles.
ELDERS BY ANY OTHER NAME?
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The first steps in changing church leadership structure
To begin with, before seeking to make changes in the leadership structure of your church, make sure that you are committed to see the process through to the end. Brief pastorates only confuse issues. Changes in the leadership structure require devotion to the church and willingness to endure whatever unsettling times might follow. Few churches will follow a pastor’s lead unless they trust him as a man of God. Here is the outline that I found to be workable in my setting.
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What are the Essentials of the Gospel?
“Essentials” implies necessity – something that cannot be left out if the gospel is to be properly understood. Charles Haddon Spurgeon seemed to have mastered the “essentials of the gospel” in his preaching and ministry. Though numerous areas of biblical thought were open to debate, upon the essentials or “fixed principles,” as he called them, there could be no debate. I have found his outline to be helpful in sharpening my thinking on the essentials of the Christian gospel.
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