Churches Reproducing
by admin ~ July 14th, 2018. Filed under: Brandenburg, church, gospel.In the last few weeks, I’ve read a few articles and then discussions about the absence of young men becoming pastors. The idea was that it just isn’t happening that boys are growing up and surrendering to pastor a church or plant a church and pastor it. The detriment of this is that churches in the next generation won’t have replacements and there won’t be new churches, because there aren’t enough pastors arising from the next generation even to replace the ones that we have. What has happened and what is the problem? I don’t have the space here to explore that part of the equation, but I would say that a lot of the analysis I read is either wrong or misguided. I want to write from our perspective here at our church. Every Christian has responsibility for reproduction, fruit-bearing. Every individual believer should desire to reproduce himself. It’s like two parents having the 2.3 offspring required to stay even. An individual has to reproduce at least 1 and ideally 2 in his lifetime. If that happened, I believe everyone would hear the gospel. As this relates to a church, a pastor should reproduce his own replacement. That will happen here easily. I think we know that. However, there is at least one more thought—churches should also reproduce themselves. We’ve helped a lot of other churches reproduce and we’ve helped preserve already existing churches, but our church has not yet reproduced itself. It’s something we should think about. I don’t think it hasn’t happened due to lack of effort, but it should be a goal that we still keep in front of us.