Ephesians 4:11-16 Why Should A Pastor Be Trained for Ministry

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. Hi, my name is

John McGinnis, and we are supported missionaries by you guys. My wife, Johnny, is down here. Two of our kids,

JD and Lindy, are down here. We have two other daughters. I'll share more about this a little bit later.

They are married and doing their own thing right now, so we'll talk about them a little bit later.

I wanted to share a little bit, eventually today we're going to end up in Ephesians chapter 4. So you can feel free to turn there.

If you'd like to, or we'll hit it the next time when I get up to speak here. But I want to share some statistics, because what we do is we do pastoral theological education around the world.

And again, I'll go into more about what we do later, but there's some stats that are pretty important.

And as we know with all stats, things can be skewed. Things can be, depending on how you lead the questions.

But I came across these in some research, and I like where these stats kind of land.

Within 2020 or so, let me jump over here. Actually, we need to go back a couple of slides, if you can.

One more. And there we go. Before 2020, some stats were pulled up, and they found 2 .3

billion people around the world claim to be Christians. Now that's going to be basically just people who claim it.

All stripes, people we may agree with, we may not agree with. People who very well are believers, and some who may not be.

But around the world, 2 .3 billion people claim Christ and claim to be a

Christian. Shouldn't be a surprise that the next highest underneath that is at 1 .8

billion is Islam. I've had the opportunity to travel a lot, and I don't think there has been a single place

I've gone in the world where you don't see Islam have at least some sort of a presence, if not a major foothold.

And that continues to grow, especially in regions in the Middle East and in that part of the world. The next group is not really, they don't want to be a group, and it's the 1 .2

billion that say they're unaffiliated. These are the people who claim to be religious or spiritual, but they don't want to be nailed down to any particular world religion.

They maybe believe that there's something out there besides themselves. The fourth highest here is the 1 .1

billion Hindus around the world. I just had the opportunity a couple months ago, a month and a half ago, to go to Nepal, and I was at the border of Nepal and India.

We were teaching there, and I really got to see firsthand Hinduism and just the complexity of that system and what they believe and what all that means.

And Hinduism is really just an incredible force out there right now when it comes to world religions.

And the last one being 500 million Buddhists. 500 million claim to be

Buddhists around the world. Again, mostly in the Nepal, India, and that part of the world as well.

Now then, in 2020, we have another group. It was

Gordon -Conwell Theological Seminary. They're mission's wing of that seminary.

They did another survey, and they updated it just a little bit, and they came across the idea that about 2 .5

billion claim to be Christians. They raised it just a little bit. 2 .5 billion people claim to be

Christians. Then they took that group, and they narrowed it down to 285 million claim to be evangelicals.

And by evangelicals, we mean that they claim that Jesus Christ came to this earth. He lived his life.

He died on the cross for your sins and rose again for your sins. Now even within the evangelical word there, we may see a variety that we would agree with or not agree with on many areas.

But taking that number, 285 million people, or million people who claim to be evangelicals, that breaks down into about 4 ,100 ,000 local congregations around the world that are evangelical.

4 ,100 ,000 congregations that meet around the world. Now we're going to assume that each of those congregations have at least one pastor.

Now at this church there may be multiple pastors. At my church there are multiple pastors. Throughout the U .S., most churches have multiple pastors.

But what I have found as we travel the world and we visit churches in other countries, that is usually not the case.

Most churches around the world only have one pastor. So we'll just take that number, which means there are about 4 ,100 ,000, more or less, pastors in the world today that are evangelical pastors.

Now taking that number and using another stat that Gordon Conwell came up with, it shows that 85 percent of pastors around the world have little or no formal theological education.

And you think, well, that's hard to believe. And that's because we live in a country where there's a seminary or a Bible college on every corner.

And you look at there and you say that these people, do they really not have formal theological education?

I've been here before and I think I've shared the story about my friend Edgardo, one of my very best friends in Costa Rica.

And Edgardo was very faithfully attending the church every time and just was faithful and knew

God's Word a good bit, never really ever been trained. The pastor of the church, for whatever reason, left and went to another church.

And literally on his last day, went to Edgardo, took his Bible and said, you know, you are very faithful in this church and you're studying well, why don't you become the pastor of this church?

Hands on the Bible and then left. So my friend Edgardo was a pastor for eight years before I met him and he had zero theological education.

Okay, and I've seen that time and time again as we train pastors over in Eastern Europe and in Africa and so forth, where these men, they have no formal theological education, they just have a desire to study

God's Word. So we have found this to be very true. 85 % means 3 ,485 pastors around the world have little or no theological education.

So the question that we're going to address this morning as we talk a little bit about our ministry and what we do and as we read in Ephesians is going to be the question, why should pastors be trained for ministry?

We think it's a no -brainer type of a question, of course pastors should be trained, but we really need to take the time and look at that.

I'm going to read for you Ephesians 4, this is where we're going to be at today. Ephesians 4, we're going to look at verses 11 through 16.

Verse 11 says, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, and the evangelists, the shepherds and the teachers to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the

Son of God to mature manhood, to the measure and stature and the fullness of Christ. Verse 14, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes.

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head into Christ, from whom the whole body is joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped.

When each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

In a little bit here, we're going to tear that passage apart and try to answer the question, Why should we train pastors?

Let's have a word of prayer. Lord, thank you for your word. I thank you, Lord, for what the

Apostle Paul is writing here in the book of Ephesians. I pray now as we begin our morning and we begin to look in your word and study and we worship you for who you are, that you would open our hearts, open our minds to hear your word, to understand it,

Lord. Help us to apply it in our lives each day. I ask all these things in your name.

Amen. Well, good morning again. You guys can turn your

Bibles eventually here to Ephesians 4. I want to share a little bit about, get a little bit of an update on our family and life and what we do before we jump into the passage of Scripture.

You guys have seen now my wife and two of my four children.

We are the McGinnises. We served for nine years in the country of Costa Rica. And I'm sure

I updated you on this last year, but by God's grace and divine plan and with much kicking and screaming on our part, we moved back from Costa Rica in February of 2020 because I became the director of our organization called

Tri -M, which I'll explain in a minute. And we weren't really happy about moving back home because we had some stuff we needed to finish up, but God brought us back kicking and screaming for, of course, the pandemic to hit in March.

So God is so much better of a planner than what we are. And we made it home.

We actually live here in Matawan. We're on Main Street, Matawan. We are the house that has the newly painted porch.

So if you drive by and there's a white painted porch, that's ours. We were able to do that a week ago, finally. But that's where we live right there on Main Street, Matawan.

And we have actually owned that house prior to leaving. I served for six and a half years with Pastor Don at Berean Baptist Church.

And then God moved us from there to the country of Costa Rica and now back here. I have, we have four children.

Last summer was a crazy busy summer for our family. We had two of our daughters get married last summer.

Megan on the top there, Megan is our second oldest daughter. And she was married in May, like the end of May.

And six weeks later, my second, or my oldest daughter, the second one in our family to get married was

Katie on the bottom down there. And Katie was married to Zach, is Megan's husband.

They live here. He works for Zoetis and lives here in Kalamazoo. Katie married a

U .S. Marine and who is now, as of a couple days ago, off for four months doing training.

Which means I'm one of those dads now whose daughter is moving back in our home for four months while her husband is training.

And we'll have Katie starting mid this week, middle of this week, until sometime in October. Which we're excited to have her home.

But that's our family. Ireland and J .D. then are still at home. And they're both doing school through Liberty University, Liberty Academy online is how they're doing their education.

And it's a little bit about our family. The mission, as we look at Tri -M here, the mission of Tri -M,

I'm going to do the next slide there. Should go back one, I think. There we go.

Our mission is to assist national pastors and leaders to be better able to teach, excuse me, be able to reach their people by teaching, equipping, and strengthening them, especially in areas of limited access to traditional missions and wherever there is a critical need for true biblical teaching.

So we really focus in on the teaching, equipping, and the strengthening of pastors. And we do this in areas of the world where maybe it is just not readily available.

Maybe it's not available because it's out in the middle of nowhere and people don't go there.

And we have several locations. I was just in Nepal, and the place where we go in Nepal takes about three days to get there.

It is a, I was telling Jay just recently, it's a very uncomfortable trip to get there.

Love being there, love teaching it, but the whole trip itself is really, really hard physically. But we are in parts of the world where it's just hard to get to, or maybe it's not as hard to get to, but theological education is not readily available at an affordable way for pastors to go to it.

So that is what we do as a ministry. Tri -M has been around really since the early 90s.

It was kind of formed in 1990. In 1992, we held our first module in the area of Romania.

I became the director of our ministry several years ago. We were still living in Costa Rica, and in 2019,

I believe, I had traveled about 125, 130 days out of the year

I was out traveling. As the director, I go to the countries and I get to teach. We do a, what's called a player -coach model, where we lead, and we actually do the teaching ourselves as well.

But I get to teach, as well as observe and see what's going on, making sure that our modules are doing the way, functioning the way they should, as well as, as we open up new countries,

I'm usually one of the first guys in there to see if that's even possible. Like, this coming year,

I will do a good bit of teaching. Between now and the end of fall, I'm going to be heading to Central Asia the end of August.

I'll be back in Costa Rica with my son. I'm taking him with me. Costa Rica in September, I'll be in Rwanda, Africa, and then in the

Mediterranean after that. So I'm pretty stacked. The way we do it, it's kind of, we're very atypical missionaries.

We're very, very busy, and then it's a lull, and it's very, very busy, and then a lull. And in these lulls, the downtime, we prepare, and we train, and we study, and I get very antsy at that point.

And just about the time I'm ready to be, just drives me crazy, that I'm crazy busy for about three months, and then it's slow again.

So we're trying to enjoy the slow times, because it gets pretty busy.

My responsibility is a lot, as much of what a director would do, is I get to open up countries, get to observe things,

I get to speak at opportunities like this, and also get to recruit team members for our ministry.

So where are we serving? The Ministry of Triumph, we serve throughout Eastern Europe.

We are in, primarily in, and I use that term, we are in loosely.

We are primarily in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, all of these regions right now that we are not in right now.

We have had the opportunity to help fund some pastors that we work with right there in the

Ukraine. We've been able to give about 70, a little more than $70 ,000 into the hands of the pastors to help them in some pretty difficult parts of that world, of that region.

As well as we are able to do some training, theological training, in Russia right now, and by doing that, we're able to use

Zoom, and national pastors that are doing a lot of teaching for us as well.

And then we opened the country of Belarus pretty much just quick enough for it to close back down for the time being.

So that's all in God's hands, and we are continuing to grow and expand, and we'll let God continue to develop that.

We are in the Mediterranean, in a particular country over in the

Mediterranean that is relatively limited access. We are throughout

Central and Southeast Asia, in several countries there. I just mentioned we were in Nepal. We have six cohorts, six teaching module locations in the country of India.

We have four in Nepal, we're opening two more in Nepal, that's a part of the region that we're really growing and expanding in.

We're in about nine countries, or nine individual countries in the continent of Africa, and we're in those countries in varying levels.

And then we're in Central and North America. Of course, we were in Central America and Costa Rica, we opened that country.

And I continue to go back and teach there. And in North America, we really focus on American Indian reservations in North, South Dakota, and in Minnesota.

Those are areas that we do a lot of theological education and training. Currently, or at least in 2021, and it looks like it's heading that way for 2022, we have about 500 students that are within our training in a given year.

And that gives us the opportunity, that's 500 pastors or key leaders, men who are heading to become a pastor.

About 500 or so is where we focus on each year. There are seven of us that do what

I do. There are seven teachers that travel, we all live here in the States, we all travel and cover multiple countries to be able to provide theological education.

I mentioned earlier, we want to talk a little bit, and we're looking in the book of Ephesians on why should we train pastors?

Why should a pastor be trained for ministry? Why is that important? And we're going to tear apart

Ephesians 4 here in that process, and we'll do it kind of little chunk by chunk here.

And I have really three main points that we're going to walk through. And then after we're doing the three points, we're going to try to draw some application for us even here today.

Let me open our time in prayer. Before I do that, I really wanted to say something totally off topic.

I really appreciate your guys' singing. I really appreciate, I mean, of course, I appreciate Dave and the worship that we have here.

We get the opportunity to travel and see a lot of churches, and we try not to judge churches.

But you can tell a lot by how a church sings. You really can.

You can see a lot about the spirit and the attitude of the church itself by those who participate. And to look around and to see the older, the younger,

I mean, just belting it out was a very great encouragement to our family and to myself.

And I just really appreciate you guys and your heart in that. Let's open our time in prayer. Lord, Paul says a lot about the pastor, and Paul says a lot about the role and the function of the pastor,

Lord. We think about what you are doing around the world with men who are leading congregations, leading churches today in times and in places of peace, as well as in turmoil.

And we think of what a pastor needs in the area of education and training,

Lord. And I just pray, Lord, you help us to direct our attention today on that, to focus in on your word and see what it says, and pray,

Lord, that we would be an encouragement to our pastors as well here in the United States. I ask all these things in your name.

Amen. Ephesians 4, 11, and he gave the apostles, the prophets, and the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers.

The first thing I want to bring out is that the pastor is a gift to the church.

The pastor is a gift to the church. Go ahead and do the next, first slide here.

There we go. We've talked a lot, I'm sure you guys have talked here as a church as well, about spiritual gifts.

And there's a lot, the scripture says a lot about different spiritual gifts that we have. The book of Romans, Romans 12, makes a list of several spiritual gifts.

It talks about, by the way, we're not going to have a lesson here on spiritual gifts. I'll let

Pastor Don deal with all of that. But prophecy, serving, teaching, exhortation, giving, leadership, mercy.

These are gifts that have been given to you and I, to the church, for the building up of the body of Christ, for edification.

1 Corinthians 12 goes and talks about words of wisdom, words of knowledge, words of faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, distinguishing spirits, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues.

There are gifts that have been given to the body of Christ. For you and I to have, that help us function well in the body.

Little side comments here. If you're a follower of Christ, you have been given a gift, a spiritual gift, that is intended to be used in this church.

And the question I have is, are you using those gifts? Are you plugged into a ministry? Are you doing that?

Because that's why God gave you those gifts. Not for yourself, but that you can be using that for the building up of the body of Christ.

And along with these gifts that we have all been given individually to help build up the body of Christ, God gave us gifts in the church in the form of the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers.

To establish the church and to build it up and edify it. One of the gifts, or two of the gifts given to the church are the apostles and the prophets.

Ephesians 2, Paul had just written previously. Ephesians 2 .20, Paul says, he's talking about the church built upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets,

Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone. Now there are some churches and denominations that have these apostles.

People who claim to be an apostle. I was in Latin America for years and we saw a lot of those guys. And really, this is not what

I think we're seeing here in this passage. You have the apostles being someone who, of course, witnessed and saw, knew

Jesus Christ firsthand. And saw the resurrected Christ. And Jesus had his disciples, his 12 apostles that were around him, that were part of his ministry.

And as we read throughout the book of Acts, you begin to see how these apostles carried on the ministry of Christ when

Christ ascended into heaven. Carried on that ministry to really form what we know of as the church today.

So they were saying, hey, look at Jesus Christ and what he did. And they began to meet and form these congregations.

Prior to that, you have over here, you have a group that were called the prophets. And the prophets, we tend to think of more of the

Old Testament prophets. The prophets looked towards this guy called Messiah, who we now know as Jesus Christ.

And the major and minor prophets throughout scripture, we see these prophets that were there. And they said, this guy is coming,

Messiah is coming to rule and to reign. And then Christ comes, now the apostles are saying, this is who it was.

This is who the Messiah, that's Jesus Christ. And this is the foundation, the bedrock that we have for the church that we know today.

The next group you have listed here are called the evangelists. Now, evangelists,

I think we've all heard of evangelists. We think of maybe D .L. Moody, we think of Billy Graham.

I don't know if you realize this, but I'm a pretty cool guy. And to prove that I'm a pretty cool guy, when

I was in high school, I took a date, who is now my wife, so it worked.

On a date to a Billy Graham crusade. That's how cool

I am, I'm just saying. So kids, take your notes, take your dates to the Billy Graham, no, not possible anymore.

But I did that, and we think of evangelists in those areas, right? Those guys who stand, the televangelists, the guys who stand there, proclaim the word of God, and eight million people come forward, it seems like.

And that's what we think of an evangelist. And that's really not, again, what we see here.

Acts 21 talks about a guy by the name of Philip the Evangelist. And Paul's traveling, and he stays in the house of a guy by the name of Philip the

Evangelist. And what Philip was doing was, Philip was going into other regions, and was sharing the gospel and establishing these churches and so forth there.

Kind of what we think of modern day missionaries would do. So he gave the apostles and he gave the prophets to give this foundation.

He gave these evangelists, these guys that had the entrepreneur type attitude that goes out, and it really expands the reach of the gospel in that area to places that maybe they don't know the gospel.

So you see the church now beginning to grow. And then you have the third group here. You have the pastor -teachers.

Now there's two ways to look at this. You can say that he gave, he says he gave the shepherds and the teachers, or you can say he gave the shepherd -teachers.

And that word shepherd is where we get the word pastor, by the way. And I really feel, as you look at it, you study it, it's not talking about pastors and teachers, it's talking about the pastor -teacher.

That that's what the function, that's what the role of the pastor does, is he is the pastor and the teacher together. And we know what pastors do, and the gift that they are to the church, and that they train and equip and that they build up the body of Christ.

There is an article, and I don't have it with me right now. There's an article that a pastor that we work with in the country of Ukraine, and this is during the time right at the beginning when the

Russian invasion happened. And he wrote an article which was later published by the Gospel Coalition. And the article was titled something along the lines of Why We Choose to Stay.

And the whole article that he writes about and that he's talking about is in the midst of all of this war and battles and people are fleeing, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, why they chose to stay in Kiev, or in one of the outskirts of the capital city,

Kiev. Why they chose to stay there, so that their church, they could be the example for their church, and their church can be the hands and feet of God in a very difficult situation.

And we have several friends. I was actually able to go over. I was in Ukraine in December. Everything happened about,

I believe it was in March when everything really started to get bad. And we have a lot of good friends in that region.

And I remember, you know, when all this was coming down, texting back and forth with them and seeing who's staying and who's going.

And I have many, many friends now who have fled or in Poland and in France. And then we have several friends who are still right there in the capital city.

And one pastor in particular, he opened up his home to people who would be interested in fearing.

And at one point in time, he had 25 individuals living in his home, right there in the capital city of Kiev.

And their church continues to go on and on. And we have videos of pastor friends of ours, who you could hear the sirens in the back from the bombing raids.

The sirens going off in the back of church, while the church is singing and worshiping and meeting on Sunday.

Just crazy difficult. I can't even imagine, can't even fathom what that would be like to make that decision, saying, you know what, we're going to do it.

My wife, my kids, we're going to do it. We're going to stay here because that's where God has us. And you look at those guys and you say, that is a gift to the church, clearly.

Hard leadership stance that they make. And some left, and that's good too. They prayed about it and they made their decisions.

God gives these pastors to the church as a gift. The second comment that I want to make about this, is that a pastor, or the pastor, is to equip the church.

The next verse we have here, in verse 12, it says, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ.

The role of the pastor, the pastor is definitely a gift given to the church, but he's given to the church with a purpose.

His job is to equip or to train, to get the people ready to do the work of the ministry.

This idea of equipping is the idea of completely furnishing. We watch a lot, probably too much,

HDTV. We can move back to our home from Costa Rica.

Our home was newly remodeled by our church and was a huge blessing to our family. We have the nice clean walls and kind of a new blank slate to go off of.

We're watching HDTV. If you ever watch those renovation shows where they totally remodel this house, but then they go through and they put this particular couch, and they're matching furniture, and they're matching curtains, and then they get the picture just right, and they're getting this perfect vase that was just a great deal at this thrift store, and now it looks perfect right there.

They're staging the house for the people to come back in and see it. That's what the idea of equipping is, is to get it ready, to get it fully equipped, fully ready to be viewed and to function.

It's kind of like parenting. As parents, we should be equipping our children for adulthood and for the rest of life.

We've got two adult daughters now that are married, and it's kind of funny. My wife, when our daughters turn about 16 or so, so it's

Ireland's time here. She just keeps pushing it off. But when they turn about 16, they have a responsibility, our girls do, and that's to make dinner at least for one day of that entire week.

It starts off, you're having a lot of mac and cheese, and then it goes to more complicated -type meals.

The idea was my wife helps them in this process, of course. The idea was we want our daughters to be able to cook and to be able to do that.

We have two son -in -laws that are very thankful for that at this moment. But it's kind of funny because we get the phone calls from Katie, our oldest daughter.

She's like, Mom, I have this, this, and this. What can I make for dinner? And Johnny will walk through with them, and we'll talk about it and stuff.

But the idea is we equip our children so that when they enter into adulthood, they can function.

That's what our role as parents is. Yes, we love our children, and yes, we want to have them there.

I'm glad Katie, our daughter, is moving back with us for four months. It's going to be fun. But we didn't train them so that they could live with us.

We raised them so that they can go out and that they can do what they were intended to do.

That's what the pastor does, and that's what the idea of equipping is. A pastor's job is to train the church, the saints, to do the work of the ministry so that the body of Christ, the church, may be built up.

The problem is when you go around the world and you see a lot of churches, a lot of times I see a lot of totally exhausted pastors because the pastors are doing everything within the church.

And the people come on Sundays, they listen to the message, they sing, they go home, and then they come back the next

Sunday, and then they sing, and they listen to a message, and they go home, and they don't do anything. That's not how the pastor is to function.

The pastor is to train you and I so that we can do the work and we can minister in the body of Christ, particularly in the church.

The problem is with our culture is we want what is easy and what demands the least amount of effort.

I love technology. Like it or not, I'm an Apple guy. I love the fact you plug it in and it all works.

I like easy. I like that. And the problem is that creeps into how we function here as the body of Christ.

We continue to try to figure this out. I don't know if it's the post -COVID culture or if it's the culture of the

United States before we move back and we just don't realize it. But it seems like many of us, we just don't want to do stuff.

You know, the idea of watching church on TV, there's parts of that was really good and needed during COVID, but it's easy to do that.

And we need each other. Talk about that in a minute. Verse 13 tells us,

So the pastor is to be training and equipping until we all attain unity of the faith.

Now, unity is kind of a hard thing for us right now in the culture that we live in.

So that alone tells me this is going to be a while. And then it says, So this is a task that's going to take the pastor a long time in doing.

This is not just a one -and -done sort of thing. So the pastor is to equip the church.

The pastor is a gift to the church. The last thing here in the remainder of this is that the pastor is to protect the church.

The pastor has a responsibility, a role of protection over the body of Christ.

Verse 14. So that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves carried out by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by crafty and deceitful schemes.

So Paul begins here and says that we're not like children. Now, I've worked with youth and adults, and I did a little bit with children.

Children's not my ministry, not my forte. I do it. Of course, we do it often, but not my biggest strength.

But I have learned around the world. I do like it to an extent because children are relatively gullible.

And I'm all over the world. I'm in areas where they don't speak my language. And my dad taught me a magic trick a long time ago.

And I mean, kids are around. All you've got to do is like that. And I've got him in there, and I'm able to hold her.

You know, why am I able to do that? Well, first of all, I practice a lot on how to do it. JD's actually better at this than I am. It's a

McGinnis thing. We learn it. It's because they're easily tricked. They're easily tricked.

And we are not to be like that as followers of Christ. We hear something.

We hear a pastor or a speaker say something, and we're like, oh, that sounds great.

And we start going over this way, and it makes a lot of sense. But really, when we dig down deep into the theology of it, you're like, that does not land with Scripture.

That does not go with what Scripture says. So we need to be the people who are not easily tricked like a child.

And then it talks about basically like bobbing in the water, following the currents and the waves with the wind blowing.

It's like taking a—and Jay and I, we talk a little bit about fishing here. It's like taking a bobber, a cork, and throwing it out in the middle of the water.

And you just watch it going, and it'll go wherever the current goes. The wind blows, it moves over here. And that is the world we live in today, and that is the

United States. We follow the next coolest thing and the thing that sounds the greatest without really digging into what does this really mean.

And we as believers, as followers of Christ, we are not to be like that.

And it is the pastor's—one of the responsibilities of the pastor is to protect us, to be able to help us, to open our eyes and say, hey, think about this.

That's probably not the best book to be reading or probably not the best way to do this particular thing.

Winds of doctrine, human cunning, craftiness in deceitful schemes.

These are the words that the Apostle Paul uses here. Part of the pastor's job is to protect the church from the things that may sound or look good.

They may look cool, but in reality they are man's twisting of Scripture for the sake of relevance and convenience.

I mentioned earlier about online church. Now, I like that I can watch services online.

I've had the opportunity to watch my home church, to watch their services on five different continents. So I appreciate that, to be able to tune in and be able to catch a service.

I don't miss on what's going on in our current services as well as— it's just encouraging and I really enjoy that.

And I've talked with many pastors, and the funny thing is it's not just here in the U .S., all over the world, churches,

I mean in Nepal, in India, in Africa, churches at one level or another, they've had to move to an online format during COVID so that their people could at least tune in or listen in on their phones or whatever and be able to hear what's going on.

And now the biggest struggle that pastors have is getting people back into our churches, getting them back here because it is convenient to watch a service in my pajamas in my home.

And yet we need this, and I'm preaching to the choir because we're all here, we need each other. We need to be able to see each other, to encourage each other, to hold each other accountable.

How was your week? What's going on? How can I pray for you? That rubbing of shoulders, the iron sharpening iron, we need that to be here together.

And that is one of the areas that I know many pastors are wrestling with today. How do we address this within our church to bring people back into here so that we can protect them from the idea that we need each other,

We need fellowship, biblical community. That has to happen. The pastors I know, they take this role of protection very, very seriously.

I don't know any pastor that I work with that I've worked with at an intimate level that just kind of blows this one off.

It says in Hebrews 13, 7,

For that will be no advantage to you. It says, Your pastors stand before God on how we are doing as a church.

It's an important task, and they take that very seriously. Ephesians 4, 15, it says,

It says, When each part is working properly in the church, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

So the goal here of the pastor is to see the church equipped, working properly, and growing up itself in love.

That is the goal of what a pastor is to be doing. So, ask the question again.

Why should the pastor be trained? Why should the pastor be trained for ministry?

We're going to see that in Ephesians 2, 2. Go ahead and turn it over if you would, just briefly. Ephesians, I don't think there's a slide for this one here.

Ephesians 2, 2. This, I'm sorry, not Ephesians. 2

Timothy, excuse me. 2 Timothy 2, 2. 2

Timothy 2, 2 says, Paul is writing

Timothy in 2 Timothy, his son in the faith that he has mentored, that he has worked with. And he says,

That is what we are doing. That is why pastors need to be trained, because it is the pastor's job to reproduce within this local congregation, to find men and women and people he can pour into who will then in turn pour into their families and pour into others as well.

Why do we as a ministry do what we do? We train and equip pastors so that they can go on and train and equip their church.

I want to kind of hit these slides at random here. Each of these men in these slides, and I got like four of them here, each of these men in these slides, they represent a church, and they represent a church that is facing challenges.

They're facing challenges, they're facing problems, they're facing struggles. Many of these men must stand for truth in a very difficult place.

And some of these men will end up giving their lives for the truth of the gospel.

I know most, if not all of these guys on all of these pictures. And they serve in difficult places and they do what it takes to edify and to grow the body of Christ.

And that is why we train pastors for ministry. It is our goal to equip them so that they can in turn train and equip their churches to do the work of the ministry.

Wrapping it up here, application. Two questions I want you to ask. One, do you see the pastor as a gift? Do you see biblically the role of pastor as a gift, let alone your pastor's as a gift?

Second question, do we recognize his role, the pastor's role, as an equipper and a protector?

As an equipper and a protector. Hebrews 13, 17. Obeying your leaders, submitting to them, for they are keeping watch over your soul as those who will give and account.

Do we respect them? Do we honor them? Do we pray for them? Our pastors are not perfect, but last time

I looked around and checked, neither are we. And they need to be given grace and mercy as well, just like you and I do as well.

I want to end our little slide here with some pictures of our family over the last several years.

This was when we started, and this is kind of where we're at now. God has been good to our family as we started doing missions.

Now, just about 12 years ago, we began doing missions.

I want to thank you guys for your role that you have played in that. Recast has been a good, faithful supporter for us over the years, and the monies that this church provides for us goes towards the equipping of these pastors in all the different regions around the world, and we thank you for that.

We're going to transition now into a time as we look towards communion and the idea of doing the

Lord's Table, and I want to pray for that as we think through the role that Christ played in our lives, because we train pastors all over the world who are meeting with believers all over the world.

I really like the song Dave's right, that last song of that first set, just about my favorite song now, the idea of worshiping

God and how we are all together worshiping the Lord, and it is so much fun.

I have a really fun job in that I get to see all the different nationalities, all the different parts of the world praising and worshiping

God for who he is and the impact the gospel has had on their lives. We're going to reflect on that in a few minutes here.

Let's pray. Lord, I thank you for your word. I thank you for your son who died on the cross for our sins.

I pray, Lord, you'd now help us to be focused on the sacrifice that he gave, celebrate that we have salvation through Jesus Christ.

I pray for our friends and our pastors around the world who are faithfully serving you. Pray for your protection over them and their congregations as well as many of them are doing the same thing right now, recognizing and remembering the sacrifice that your son gave.