How to Shepherd the Leaders in Your Church

Host: TJ Freeman

Summary: In this episode of Rural Church Renewal, TJ Freeman shares insights on making church leadership meetings spiritually enriching. Discussing his experiences with elders' meetings, TJ emphasizes the importance of incorporating spiritual practices like singing, scripture reading, and praying into meetings. He suggests ways to foster soul care among leaders through sharing about each other's lives and prayer. TJ advises church leaders to focus on spiritual matters alongside practical issues, ensuring meetings guide the church towards fulfilling the Great Commission and discipleship. Practical tips include starting meetings with worship and having members share personal updates, all aimed at building up a spiritually supportive leadership environment.

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Transcript

Leadership meetings. Ooh, those can be a challenge sometimes in the church, whether you have elders, deacons, committees or something else. You need to, as a leader, maximize the spiritual benefit of those kinds of meetings. I'll tell you what I mean. Stick around.

Thank you for joining us for another episode of Rural Church Renewal. My name is TJ Freeman and I am a rural pastor in Northern Pennsylvania. Normally I have a couple of co-hosts around. They are off. I don't know, somewhere else. You got me today. And today I want to talk to you about your leadership meetings. 

In my context, at my church, we have elders. We haven't always had elders. For a while, this was a board led church, which was this kinda like mixture of elders and deacons without a lot of clarity together, and everyone just always knew that the church is led by the board.

If you want anything done, you gotta talk to the board. Maybe you have a board, maybe you have a bunch of deacons. And you're not real sure. Are they elders? Are they elder ish? That's not laid out real well, but you do know that you're meeting regularly with the deacons and that their input is valuable and the church sees it as important.

Maybe you have a bunch of committees. At your church that kinda run everything and you end up as the ex-officio member of all committee meetings. If that's part of your job description, I'm sorry, that is a tough road. 'cause you're really not voting. You're there to just kinda weigh in and listen and you end up at a lot of tough meetings. Anyway, whatever it is, you have a responsibility as a leader in the church to weigh in spiritually.

Now I wanna zoom in a little bit on whatever the leadership is that makes the decisions. Especially about the shepherding in the life of your church, and I want to encourage you to think about ways you can shepherd that group and you can allow that group to shepherd you. So we have a tendency in any meeting we're in to just try to rush to the meat.

Let's deal with the content, whatever the issue is that we were drawn together into this plastic table session with each other for, let's just get to that. I understand that we wanna be good stewards of time. You know, there's tons of meetings, let's just just get to that stuff. But actually in your leadership meetings, kinda your core leadership team, that's really not the most helpful thing to rush to.

You have an opportunity when that group is together to model what it looks like to care for souls, and to care for one another's soul in a real way, and to receive some care for your own soul. So I wanna just tell you a little bit of what we've been doing at our elders meetings that may help you in some of your leadership meetings to allow some more spiritual work to be done.

Now we start off our meetings with singing, with the reading of whatever text will be preached on that Lord's day, and then we'll ask two questions that I stole from my friend Jeremy Meeks. They are what's weird in this text, like what confuses you or jumps out as odd or strange, or you have a question about it? And then two, what's something that's just interesting or just pops out as helpful from the text?

You will never regret doing that in a leadership meeting. If you're preaching on Sunday, get that feedback from those people and let the text just start marinating in the life of the congregation as you have these leadership meetings. And singing is always good. We're meant to sing, to encourage each other, not just on Sunday mornings, but in a meeting like that.

So when you open up with singing the public reading of scripture, some discussion and then praying together, it sets a tone that says, we're not just here to make sure that the water heater doesn't fail before the next baptism, or that the parking lot is plowed, or that there's cookies at the Sunday afternoon fellowship.

It's not about those things. It is about soul care and spiritual matters. Eternal weighty matters should be brought into those meetings. That's why you're a church and not the Lions Club or the PTA. So think about ways that you can integrate those things into your meetings. And then the next thing we do in our elders meetings, and you're gonna have to be wise and sensitive about how you would introduce this into your leadership meetings.

But we care for each other's souls by having one person report on kind of a general life update. How are you and your family doing? What specific needs have come up lately that are weighing on your heart? In what way are you studying the Bible with the rest of the people who live in your house?

Is there anything in your life that needs to be brought into the light? These kinds of questions have served us really well, because, as shepherds, we sometimes forget to shepherd each other and having built in times like that, make sure that those who are doing the shepherding are also being shepherded really intentionally.

And then have a couple of people in the meeting pray for that person who reported. We also. Make that person who's giving their self-report bring the snacks. So, hey, snacks help pretty much every meeting. And that's a good way to remember I got the snacks and I'm self-reporting tonight. And you do it too.

As the pastor, you're just part of that group. And when it's your turn, you do those things just like everyone else and be open and honest and transparent. Again, you need to think about the best way to work that into your leadership meetings and which meetings are appropriate to go to that level of depth publicly with each other, and the context that you're in.

But hey, this is just normal Christian behavior. We should be encouraging one another, stirring one another up to love and good works. Being honest about our struggles, and you can begin to again, model that and then be shaped by that in those kinds of meetings. And then after that you can work towards your content.

The thing that you actually gathered around. If these are elders or kinda like elder deacon meetings, board meetings, that level of a meeting, not just a kind of a committee meeting, then you want to make sure you are focusing together on the things that the shepherds of the congregation need to do.

And again, I'm recognizing that you may have some terminology that doesn't say elder, and that may create some confusion in some of those relationships on what you guys should be doing in that meeting together. But the people who are carrying the spiritual weight of the life of the congregation need to work together on a spiritual level, not just a functional, practical level.

So just think about how you can connect back to those kind of principles. How is what we're doing helping us fulfill the great commission as a church? How is what we're doing furthering the discipleship of God's people? How is what we're doing equipping the saints for the work of ministry? That way you don't descend down into just pragmatic or prudential matters, which you'll have to deal with, but you need to know that you're dealing with them from a spiritually minded perspective, and I think that may help. 

So what did we talk about today? Just trying to make sure that you use your leadership gatherings, not just to get stuff done, but to actually lead each other, to bring in right kind of spiritual weight.

So you should consider praying together, singing together, discussing scripture together. When you meet like that, you should consider shepherding each other by having somebody answer a few questions about where they're at kinda spiritually and just in life in general. Snacks are always helpful and then you should make sure that you connect back to spiritual eternal issues even as you deal with prudential or pragmatic issues that you'll have to deal with from time to time in the life of the church. 

So have a try at that. Don't get frustrated if these things are difficult to work into your meetings. Don't just go in and tell everyone there's a new sheriff in town and we're gonna change things up.

Think and pray about how you can introduce some of these principles into your leadership meetings and trust the Lord as you press on for His glory in your local church, in a rural community. I'll be praying for you. Thanks for tuning in for this edition of Rural Church Renewal. I almost said Joe's line.

If you don't know it, go back two episodes and you can listen to what Joe says at the end of every episode that I'll now leave hanging. See you next time. Oh, hey, did you stick around? Because by the way, this episode as well as every episode is part of a ministry called the Brainerd Institute for Rural Ministry.

We are here to equip the saints to lead healthy rural churches. You can head on over to brainerdinstitute.com for more information, or if you'd like to reach out, we'd love to get in touch with you. Have a great day.