April 2, 2001
Laity essential to church starting
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___WACO--Church starting is too big a job to be left only in the hands of seminary-trained, ordained ministers, conference leaders told a group of Texas Baptist church starters.
___Specialized seminars about lay-led churches and equipping the laity as church starters were offered at the "Light Up Texas" church starting conference March 22-24 in Waco. The Baptist General Convention of Texas Church Starting Center sponsored the three-day event.
___"Some of the best church planters in the world today are not ordained pastors," said Charles Brock, a 20-year veteran church starter in the Philippines.
___Brock maintained he does not believe in "lay-led churches," but it depends on how the term "layman" is defined. If "layman" means someone who is unskilled and untrained, then no believer should remain a layman more than six months, he asserted.
___After six months of instruction, every believer should be ready to assume the role of a full-time minister--though it may be without salary or credentials, he said. "I am speaking of the realized priesthood of every believer."
___Trained laity can assume leadership of new congregations, but that requires a return to a New Testament understanding of church, Brock said. Too often, he said, Christians allow buildings, budgets and salaries to become barriers to church planting.
___Brock, who now is president of Church Growth International in Neosho, Mo., called on churches to "unleash" their lay members and equip them with usable tools for church starting. Unnecessary complexity "limits kingdom expansion," he maintained.
___"If we are going to have a significant church planting movement, the strategy, methods and tools must be simple enough that an ordinary, Holy Spirit-filled believer can do it," he said.
___"It's amazing what people can do if they don't know--and we don't tell them--that they can't."
___Training new leaders from within a church start is an essential part of church starting, Brock said. This can be encouraged through simple, inductive Bible studies that the church starter guides, handing off leadership responsibilities to participants as soon as possible.
___"I believe in the rapid transferal of leadership," he said.
___Otto Arango, pastor of Iglesia Bautista Getsemini in McAllen, outlined the basic approach he has taken the last five years in equipping lay church starters through local, church-based training centers.
___"The purpose is not to enlarge the brain but to facilitate the laymen immediately becoming involved in ministry," Arango said. "It's a way of helping to wake up those who have been called."
___In the last five years, more than 3,000 laymen have attended the training centers, and they have started at least 235 new churches.
___Any training for laity needs to be practical, contemporary, contextualized and relevant, not theoretical and abstract, he suggested. Arango does not recommend formal examinations.
___"The test is the student's ability to use the material in ministry," he said.
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