What would you think of a parent who still felt the need to keep his 29 year old child under his roof and order him around? You’d think he’s got issues! What if another parent walked up to that 29 year old while he was living in his own apartment and said, “You need to be living with your parents! You need to have your parents telling you what to do!” We’d wonder what planet that person was from! Yet every day Christian “equippers” are walking up to the saints who live outside of religious hierarchies and asking, “Who is your pastor?” And then telling them they need to have a leader over them.
It took Jesus 3 years to equip the apostles to do the work of the ministry. Yet I sat under men who were called to be “equippers” for 29 years of my life and was never once released to do the work of the ministry. That’s longer than I lived with my own parents and far longer than Jesus spent equipping the 12 apostles. Sure, they gave me permission to work in their ministry and a “rank” to validate my work. But I was never released. And after 29 years of equipping, if I’m not ready to be released I must have developmental problems or the equipper is doing a horrible job. I wonder, did these “equippers” (-gulp-) ever have any intention of releasing me? Now there’s a scary thought. I heard one pastor say, “We release the saints! Every week after service we release them to go out and preach the gospel and then come back next week for more equipping.” If that’s what we think it means to release the saints to do the work of the ministry, is it any wonder 20 million Christians have permanently released themselves from coming back for “more equipping?”
You know, I’ve held quite a few jobs in which it was my duty to train new employees. It was my job to bring the new employee to the place where he or she could do what I did as well as I did it. (And maybe even better.) If after a given length of time had past and the employee still needed me to lean on while he was working my boss would know that one of us isn’t making the grade. Either I’m a lousy trainer or the new employee is just not cutting it. I’ve seen some pretty horrible trainers in my day. One was so bad that the new employee finally got up and walked into the boss’s office and demanded a new trainer.
It’s strange that we know what good equipping looks like in the work force but we seem to be clueless about it when it comes to the body of Christ. You know what? If I yielded the same results as these so called “equippers” do in the church I would have been fired from my job! Could you imagine me training an employee to do what I do for 29 years? And worse yet, could you imagine me never planning to stop training that employee?! I’d be the worst trainer in the world! Not to mention a control freak. Yet this approach to equipping in the church is perfectly acceptable…and even expected! Why else would an equipper say to Christians who have walked with Christ for years, “You need to have a pastor!”? If after being equipped by a pastor for decades a person still can’t pastor, something has really run amuck. Either that pastor wasn’t truly an equipper or the student was stupid. That’s just Looney Tunes! So when is the next employee evaluation?
Loren
