My first four years in full-time ministry were 48 months of pastoral overload.<\/p>\n
I was 29. I had a seminary degree in hand and a heart full of ministerial dreams. It didn\u2019t take long to realize that, even in my 250-member church, I was treading water in the deep end of the pool.<\/p>\n
Some weeks, I faced more responsibilities than I could possibly accomplish, more problems than I could ever solve. So when I read this statement by Howard Hendricks, it leapt off the page: \u201cGod is not calling you to do the work of ten men. He\u2019s calling you to equip ten men to do the work He\u2019s called them to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Equipping<\/em>. It\u2019s not just a pragmatic essential for pastoral survival; it\u2019s also a biblical requirement. Ephesians 4:11\u201312 says, \u201cAnd he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, equipping the saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ.\u201d<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t new information. Countless books and DMin projects have been written on the topic of equipping. A quick survey reveals four basic approaches to the topic, most of which affirm the general teaching of the New Testament.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Are we over-programming or over-complicating what is actually required to help men and women learn to \u201cspeak the truth in love\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":688,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[328],"class_list":["post-54136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-discipleship","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/688"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54136"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54138,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54136\/revisions\/54138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}