Video Transcript: Historical Models of Ministry Training

Have you ever thought about how we're leaders raised up through really the history of the  Bible, the history of the New Testament, 2000 years of the expansion of the church. Now,  maybe you don't actually dwell on some of these topics. But that was fascinating to me. It has been fascinating to me since the early 1990s, as we think in a self aware way, about how to  raise up more leaders for renewal for revival, for restoration, how's that going to happen? It is  about the leaders, the leaders who make an impact with their calling in their life. So today,  we're going to talk in a self aware way, about the philosophy in the models of ministry  training. Let's start in the Old Testament. So we see lots of examples of leaders. But I want to  start right at the time of Elijah, and Elisha, in the Old Testament, revival prophets. Were  trained at the School of the prophets. So there was a Christian leaders Institute so to speak a  Old Testament examples of an institute that were training leaders. Now the story of Elijah is  interesting. He goes here, Elijah says, there's no one left or no leaders at the time of Jezebel  and Elijah, and there's no Mount Carmel, story, all of that, and whhere are the leaders. So God says, there will be leaders. And with Elisha, they start a school of the prophet, a CLI, so to  speak. A snapshot of this culture is easily seen the life ministry work of Elijah and Elisha. In  those days, 3000 years ago, there were seminaries of various religions, Baal worship, other  worship. There were schools for Baal worship where Baal leaders were raised up to promote  the Baal religion. In Israel and 1000 BCE, the king and queen of Israel, Ahab and Jezebel, were big supporters, patrons of the Baal religion. In fact, they were making making that the  national religion of Israel to be worshipping Jezebel's God, the God of Ekron. So what you have is a very anti God. situation, the religion of Yahweh, Jehovah, was not the popular place to be.  In fact, it was a minority religion of Yahweh. Elijah thought he was the only prophet left that  did not worship Baal. But God still had seven others than him in Israel, who did not bow the  knee to knee to Baal. Elijah began School of the prophets by calling Elisha and calling them  into service of the Lord. By the time of Elijah's death, Elijah was ready to take the mantle,  Elisha expanded this school even more. So how were the prophets trained? Well, they just  spend time being mentored by their leaders until they were ready to be prophets themselves.  This was the mentor model, where local mentorship raised up prophets, the leading prophets,  modeled the way the Lord and taught ii to the called yet to be trained, new prophets. So in  the Old Testament, the whole Prophet, way of taking leadership to the next generation was  developed. And the story of Elijah and Elisha illustrate that. And by the way, that system of  mentorship continued on all the way through the rest of the kings. And in the fullness of time,  we know that Christ came with that concept of that inner became into a synagogue type,  rabbis, and all of those things had their beginning in a Elisha and Elijah, when Jesus comes on  the scene, in a lot of ways, we hear John, who is the type of Elijah and Jesus is the type of  Elisha so you see those connections those powerful mentorship generational mentorship  connections that prompted more leaders in the New Testament. So then, in the New  Testament, we read that Jesus sets up a school of the prophets, whom he calls disciples, the  disciples of God, called the Son of God, Jesus called ordinary people, usually from the working  class, fishermen, tax collectors to be future revival leaders. We see in his ministry that Jesus  knew the Old Testament, and spends his time sharing and teaching insights about the  Kingdom of God. That would be that would be ushered in when Jesus himself would die, rise  from the dead and ascend on high. Jesus and the mentor model. That's right. Jesus also  promoted the mentor model, where a long term relationship accompanied by teaching  prepared the disciples to be the prophets, so to speak, of the early church. The wisdom of this model was questioned by the rigid religious leaders of Jesus day, they questioned Jesus, but  the power and effectiveness cannot be denied. Consider how the leaders of the Jewish religion characterize Peter and John, ever Jesus, Jesus had, had ascended to be with God. We find that  quote, when they the religious leaders saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that  they were unschooled, ordinary men. They were astonished, and took note that these men  had been with Jesus. This was the mentor model started formally by Elijah and Elisha, in  feathered through the entire Old Testament than the time of Jesus, this model of mentorship  and ministry, religious training, continue to serve Jesus with His disciples. Well, after Jesus  dies and rises from the dead and the sins on high, the early church kept that theme going.  The mentoring model was the model that drove ministry training in the Old and New 

Testaments. When the Apostle Paul was chosen as God's instrument, to spread the church to  the Gentiles. He to work with the mindset of a mentor. This model included spending time  with the newly called future prophets that have been newly called church leaders, the revival  leaders. A great example of this is his work with Timothy, who he calls his son, First and  Second Timothy are examples of mentor content that form part of Scripture. Now, I'm very  fascinated personally, by the early church, the time with all the apostles have passed away,  and no one's left. And to me, it's that next generation, that reproduceable movement of God,  that has always fascinated me. And I believe it is about being reproducible. And I believe you,  leaders, as you are raised, you will reproduce and create other leaders. You know, when  people talk about the giving that Christian leaders, those two, I often say, Well, if you've been  reached by this training, will you reach others? By being a vision partner, that's what you do. I love that anything reproducible? So by the time the apostles had passed away, they're  teaching and the teachings of Christ were written down for future leaders. They in turn pass  on the knowledge contents of the faith to newly called leaders. A revival witness passed on  generation to generation. The mentorship model was firmly dominant to the firmly dominant  model for identifying training in mobilizing of future leaders, or as they were called pastors.  They were also others were called to obey deacons and elders and all sorts of roles. Future  ministry training was a mentoring operation that included communicating the content of faith. Now in this time, ordination, development in ordination, you know, what is ordination? You  know, I think about that, you know, at the earliest moment, the first time we kind of get a  feeling of what ordination is. It's actually in the case of Phoebe, where Romans 16 verse one  and two and right in that area, you see, I commend Phoebe a diakonos. No, ordination is that,  in a sense, this is a leader. This is a leader that's recognized a diakonos, a minister. And when  we think about ordination, the early church it was way more connected to local leaders and  connected to the sort of grass roots understanding of ordination. And this has seriously  influenced how Christian leaders Alliance has set up our ordinations at Christian leaders  Institute. So ordination in the discipleship model, yielded, priests, pastors, and they were  ordained in the order of elders and they was very Jewish, like elders at the city gate, and  ministers, deacons, and deacons was very much that Acts chapter six, convention after  Pentecost, where more ministry capacity was necessary. So what occurred is they created this by the Holy Spirit, the deacons, which later in Latin, deacons translate as ministers. So in that  something, I will say that you really see how the apostle Paul populated that group he himself. It says, I was made a diakonos I was made a minister. So Paul started that way. And that  became the very reproducible system. So the leadership's are properly and in the early  church, with elders and deacons. They were used by God to spread the Gospel. In Ephesians 4 verse 11, and 12, we see how there were different roles. So I could definitely see how people  were had the qualifications of elder or Deacon. And they expressed that ordination in different roles. And you can find out about some of those roles in Ephesians. Four. So they were used  by God to spread the Gospel, the church spread quickly, the mentoring model role gradually  change to a more corporate model of training leaders, as Christianity populated by the third,  fourth, fifth century, what what you see is much more of a hierarchy type of understanding.  So what used to be very grassroots sort of became more and more centralized. So by the time of Constantine, Christianity was legal in the empire. The leaders were very connected to even  political offices. So you saw saw much more centralizing of who would become ordained  ministers and priests and so forth. And it even became, throughout the Middle Ages. As the  church's influence spread, there are many sad examples of how power corrupts and corrupts  absolutely. In well also, there are many examples throughout this whole time, where God  raised up powerful revival leaders despite the the leading of a simple Christianity. You know,  I'm amazed that given everything the church has gone through that, that in every single age,  the witness of Christ still remain there, despite all of the the side tracks and so forth. But what happened was the mentor model was left in a more formalized, hierarchical model occurred.  Within 500 years, the church organization developed to resemble the cultural organizations of the time, the monastic movement developed, sometimes, cloistering leaders away from the  very culture they were called to reach. For others, these movements help Christian leaders  make major contributions in preserving the history and culture of early Christianity. If it wasn't

for some of these monks, and monastic movements, we wouldn't have potentially the Bible in  Greek. So there were scholars and they're in monasteries, who copy generation after  generation, the word of God. And a lot of times people gonna say, you know, that whole  middle ages, and that whole organizational structure that resembled the Roman Empire and  then it resembled a middle age thing is all bad. I don't see it that way. I see what the yes the  mentor model was lost. Christianity a different role in society. Very It connects into politics.  But I see Holy Spirit preserving these wonderful connections to the early church, like some of  the writings we have and the scriptures in Greek and you know, I look at that glass half full,  not half empty, even way look at times when the church was struggling with its grassroots  nature. So, these movements help Christian leaders make major contributions in preserving  the history and culture of early Christianity. Many orders were developed, that led the way for  mission work, mission to other places of the world. So now we're developing ministry, training models, and eventually the development of traditional seminaries occurred. The church in  general continued to drift away from the simple early Christianity, church Christianity, until by the time of the Reformation, very little scripture was used to instruct the prophets, unquote,  the leaders, the Christian leaders. Instead, church traditions and practices, as they were  developed, formed the core curriculum that was communicated to the leaders of the church.  So at this time, then, a priest named Martin Luther started to realize something was wrong. So this priest, led I believe, by the Holy Spirit, put the 95 theses at the door Wittenberg started a  chain reaction to question Who are we as a church. And what these leaders did is they started positioning Christianity to different places. And in that positioning of Christianity, they wanted to go back in this was not just a Christian thing in the Reformation. But this was like Erasmus,  and the printing press was invented, there was a desire to go back to antiquity. In the general  culture, a lot of people say, well, it was only in the Reformation, they went back to the writing  of Augustine. None of this was just a general culture thing, because people could read, and  they wanted to read what did the ancients say? It was also a time where they will go back to  the ancient philosophies. So many things occurred in this time, we're literacy in the printing  press, and a lot of people could read. So very revolutionary priest of the Catholic Church, like  Martin Luther saw that, hey, women, we need to rediscover some of the truths that were in  the Catholic Church, you know, 1000 years ago. So in the process, there is the Reformation.  There was also a Counter Reformation, from the Catholic that went back to, you know, clean  the church up of some of the corruption. So the word seminary at that time, were at the time  when the enlightenment and the time of education was spreading through universities and all that sought to train ministry leaders, the word seminary, became used first by the Catholics  and then by the Protestants, the word seminariums in Latin Seminarium, which means  seedbed. Roman Catholics started calling their ministry training institutions, seminaries at the time of the Counter Reformation. At these Roman Catholic seminaries, personal disciple,  discipline and philosophy were central. And whether again, this was the Catholic Church  attempt to get closer to character and even going back to many Bible things. And again, the  historic differences between the Catholic and the Protestant church, in many ways, were two  snapshots in time, the Catholic Church was influenced by a man named Thomas Aquinas,  tradition was elevated at the same place of Scripture, the Protestant church went back to a  earlier time the fifth century with Thomas or sorry, of Augustine. So you had these people that were pretty much, all Catholics, then they went to a different version of the Catholic Church.  And then there is the 15th century version and 16th century there was the fifth century and  this was a lot of the discussion, which occurred around the Reformation, in both of them had  seminaries for their ministry training. So Protestant churches started seminaries. They didn't  have stress, the Middle Ages traditional Catholic church, they stressed an earlier version of  the Catholic Church that looked more like fifth century Catholic churches, the work of Thomas  or the work of St. Augustine, rather, was stress instead of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas on the 15th century. To show you this, Graham Hill and notice that this is in the study of history,  Dr. Graham Hill, the founding director of the global church project wrote, The wide  dissemination of the scriptures in the church fathers, due to the extraordinary success of the  printing press, was a powerful contributor to the religious renewal of the 16th century.  Remarkable among these Church Fathers Augustine of Hippo, who was between 364 in the 

430 and 430 years of this century, has been regarded as the most consequential patristic  source for the Reformation. In the centuries prior to the Reformation, interest in the study of  Augustinian theology dramatically increased, there was an Augustinian Renaissance. So the  Reformation really built on the words you know, John Calvin quoted St. Augustine numerous  times, so did Luther, there was a renaissance of Augustinian Catholic thinking that took the  Reformation back to that time period. So, the Reformation and the Counter Reformation did  not return ministry training to the mentor training model, Christian leaders left their homes in  went to a seminary to receive their training and receive their certifying ordination. So, today,  we have really either a fifth century version in many places, or we have a 16th century  version of how training and ordination occurs. Now, we also in the concept of ordination to  have many phony ordinations where there's no training someone just, you know, sends a  website some money, and then they can have a legal ordination in the United States. But I  want to put us into the historical framework. So we have two basic ways the school of the  prophets ministry training occurs, one is very institutional reliever home and go to a seminary or a Bible school. The other is to somehow get a discipleship model. We call it a mentor  model. But you know, both of them are out there. And many mainland denominations have  two paths of ordination. One path is seminary. And the other path is a discipleship style. We're certain bases are covered. Now, in your reading assignments, I outline the pros and cons of  the different models of ministry training, you can read that for yourself. So Christian leaders  Institute is in some ways, bringing we want to bring the best of the seminary delivery system,  top notch, formal, excellent professors, in beam them to a mentoring model, a school the  prophets model, where local leaders are connected locally, and they process that education,  the local relationships, but we still beamn them. This top notch seminary approach. Church,  Christian leaders Institute seeks to combine the benefits of both the discipleship model that  set mentorship local connections in the seminary model for ministry training, the goal is to  mobilize as many effective and sustainable Christian leaders as possible for ministry, the  revolutionary impact of the internet allows us to venture into seeking to bring the best of both approaches. And I'm going to conclude this presentation by just giving some benefits. What  are the six benefits of this approach? First, is that we continue to promote local mentor  culture. You know, we talked about this in the last presentation how, you know, the missionary movement has spread throughout the whole world. So why not tap in to that resource in  leaders bloom where they're planted. Second, this is an accessible in mission driven  opportunity. Another words our goal is to reach the whole world. And we want to connect into  ministry training as many people as possible, guided by local mentors Third, appropriate  academic expectations, not enough someone to say, we don't really need to talk about  academics. Well, you know, academics are very important. Academics are highly important.  And Christian leaders Institute, we recruit top notch academic leaders, because we want you  revival leaders to get the latest Biblical understanding of ministry training, so you do well.  And when you meet people who went to a seminary and went to high academic standard  place, we want you to be able to converse and be confident when secular people or atheists  come to you, we want you to know how to give an account. When the new generations of  people come. We want you to be confident in your ministry training. So we think that  appropriate academic rigor is very important. We also desire to have bi- vocational  sensitivities. That is, I was at dinner tonight with Michael Green, our provost that, I guess he  called the director, I guess, not provost. That's Dr. Fellows, right. Our director of the Enterprise Program, and we're talking about, you know, the apostle Paul, and to me, the apostle Paul was a business leader, he provided for himself and his associates, like Aquila and Priscilla provided for the poor like in Jerusalem after the tragedy, they had their to collect, they took a  collection. That's wonderful. But he's also ministry leader, and he was a philosopher. Well, if  we're going to mobilize hundreds of 1000s of million revival leaders, who support themselves, and again, I'm not against in the ministry position, wonderful, Paul said the worker is worth his hire, my issue is not there. But I just loved how the apostle Paul had a very reproducible  system. In modeling where people were able to provide for themselves, people were well  grounded in ministry training, there was a system of mentor model. He was grounded in  excellent wisdom and philosophy. These are the type of things that I am excited about, at 

Christian leaders Institute. Another benefit of this approach is low ministry overhead  orientated. You know, what that means is the internet. We don't have to have lots of buildings  in the latest buildings. What we need is people raised up now I'm going to talk about one  more benefit. And that's just starting to happen. More and more, this paradigm of beaming  appropriate academic content into mentor relationships, is getting more and more perceived  credibility as Christian leaders is to grow with top professors in effective practices,  opportunity for credibility, the credibility and even US Department of Education Accreditation  are coming near. In fact, we've been laying the groundwork for accreditation for a long time  getting the classes to be accredited. Quality, and getting our grading policies, right up with  the highest standards in the education world. Getting our record keeping everything we do,  we we have the aim that we will be able to be accredited by the US Department of Education.  Now until then, we have relationships with other accredited institutions like Calvin, western  and northern and, you know, can you read all about that? And I want to say one more thing  about this is We have to be careful about when we go for our accreditation, because  accreditation sort of takes away some of that control, because now we have to do this way,  this way, this way, this way, where we add anything new we can because there's this and we  have to make sure that dust settles before we just go headlong into that. Yet I kind of believe  a rose by any other name is a rose if we deliver the highest quality, some of the some of the  highest quality ministry training. It just is. And we will have non traditional accreditation  agencies like the International Association of Bible schools and seminaries that we work with,  and we're happy with all that. But to me the proofs in the pudding and You're experiencing the pudding. We care about accreditation, but we have to be very careful about that. Because we  understand that being a seminary into all sorts of different relationships is not the same as  having one central location where everybody comes. So, right now, we are forming  agreements with accredited schools, if students want to go and get higher degrees that are  accredited by the US Department of Education, they can go and do this. So in the end of the  day, we want to go back to the school the prophets model, go back to the strength of  mentorship and discipleship and in our role is to beam this education into those relationships.  We love partners, and and we have been developing more and more partnerships, you've  probably noticed that if you've been around Christian Leaders Institute to went to our website, you'll see different partners that we want to work with that we are working with, for what  purpose to have more revival leaders. And you may be called being one of them. And our  passion for you is a Get Connected locally, that you take in the ministry, the formal ministry  training that you do well, and that as things progressed more and more and more and more,  more leaders will be raised up with a high quality ministry training that will raise up more  disciples of Christ. They'll proclaim the gospel more fully on this earth.