Ephesians 4:11-13: Venture Ministries

In a previous post, I talked about the idea of ministry incubators, an environment in which church leaders nurture and resource new ministry ideas developed by church members. I first began to think about this after listening to Harvey Carey, Dave Gibbons and Gary Hamel at the Willow Creek Association's Global Leadership Summit. Then it was hammered home where, for the weekly Men's Bible Study that next week we were asked to read Ephesians 4 every day. That's where I came across a familiar old gem:

It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. - Ephesians 4:11-13.

First, God planned this. It says "It was he [God] who gave..." He set this in motion by the way that he gifted his people: not the same gift (no one person could do it all) but for the same purpose.

Second, the role of the leader (and the church) is to launch servants. "he who gave...to prepare God's people for works of service."You can't twist anyones arm into spiritual maturity. But willing servants, whose hearts have been worked on by God, should be set up for success. Ministry is not about budgets or buildings or multi-media or training binders. It is about willing hearts and lives at the disposal of the Master.

Third, God's means for unity and maturity is service. Service is not driven by the needs of the servant, but by the needs of the served. In mutual service, we are all "built up" and we all grow up ('mature'). In service, we understand Jesus more fully, because then our lifestyle echoes his.


Fourth, each church member is a minister. Some of us have grown up with that slogan handed to us from the pulpit, but do our churches really take this to heart? Each one has the Spirit of God. Each one has the gifting of the Holy Spirit. Most of them have more contact with the lost and broken of the world.

That's why I like the term ministry incubators. In the high-tech field where I work, incubators are organizations that provide infrastructure, encouragement, mentoring and training for new ventures. The idea is to get them off of the ground. After a certain point, these ventures are evaluated and a decision is made as to whether (a) to kill the idea, (b) wait a little longer or (c) invest enough other resources to help move it to the next level.

In the church, it is important to (as Experiencing God says) to watch where God is working and join Him there. That means that each of these new ventures and their leaders needs to have the humility to be willing to say: "Maybe the time for this ministry is concluded" or "Maybe I didn't understand correctly where God was leading" or "Maybe this ministry is good, but there is something more urgent right now."  Each ministry venture should be taken on as an experiment rather than a set-in-stone course of action. Ministry leaders sometimes have trouble with this tentative nature of a ministry because they have received a word from God, through their personal prayer time or an experience or from reading the Scriptures. So they find it hard to give up at an evaluation check point. But if this is God's will to move beyond a personal conviction or personal ministry, then God will have already orchestrated the same message to others.

What about leaders? Leaders are responsible to keep themselves in tune with God so that they faithfully recognized what God is doing. Gary Hamel talks about leaders who have passed their "sell by" date: they are firmly attached to the successful idea that they rode in on and not ready to recognize the next one because so much of their identity is wrapped up on their championing of the previous one. Humility is the key. Recognize that you are probably not the best source of good ministry ideas in your church, but rather the shepherd of God's good ministry ideas. Recognize that God will use any of his children--in fact, even children--to demonstrate clearly the source of ministry.

Leaders also have to make the decision as to how "core" they want to make a ministry. Do we encourage something (a ministry, etc.) as part of a person's individual mission or something the church wants to try. If the church tries this, do we try it on a larger scale? Do we incorporate it as one of the ministries under our ministry umbrella? Do we allocate cubicle space, copy paper, mentoring time, education or dollars? Does the church promote it substantially to its members or the community? Or is it one that fundamentally alters the church's course--a sort of God-designed left turn.

I am still learning and many of these ideas are still a work in progress as I try to wrestle with the implications of an enabling, incubator model for church leadership. I hold these ideas loosely and look forward to your feedback.



Second, this God's intention for the leaders of the church was to provide the environment where His people move out for serve.