Reformed Baptist Seminary invited Pastor Ted Christian to serve as one of five lecturers for its recent module on Church Ministry. In the lecture below  Ted explains how the church’s vision, mission, and strategy are grounded in its identity.

There’s certainly no shortage of books on how to lead a church.  If you’d just take the time to browse through some of them you would likely find the following plan offered: sharply define your church’s unique mission and then make whatever changes that are required to pursue it.  On the surface this seems very intuitive and doable until we ask, “What is meant by sharply defining your church’s mission?” 

For the recent winter module on Church Ministry, Dr Gonzales was tasked with lecturing on the topic of "technology and church ministry." In the first lecture he provides a biblical and theological framework for understanding technology and its relation both to culture and also to the church. Then, in the second lecture, Gonzales surveys various modern technologies used to facilitate ministry outreach, discipleship, community, and worship.

I'm a fan of the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. It's basically a modest revision of the famous Westminster Confession of Faith and the Savoy Declaration. As such it serves as an excellent compendium of Reformed theology with a Baptist ecclesiology. But, as I've argued elsewhere, the Elizabethan English of these great 17th century confessions makes them less accessible to 21st Americans.

Longevity in pastoral ministry is at an all-time low. It has been recorded that 50% of ministers starting out will not last 5 years, while only 1 out of every 10 ministers will actually retire as a minister in some form.[1] Most pastors say the ministry is completely different than what they thought it would be like before they entered the ministry. These facts reveal the disheartening trend in pastoral ministry: that pastors do not last.