It Takes a Church to Raise a Pastor – Part I
All the associate pastors at Covenant Fellowship Church were at one point students at the University of Illinois and connected with Pastor Min. All the small group leaders in CRH were at one point members in CRH. Our vision is to train Kingdom Workers. We train and promote from within. We raise our own leaders and whenever we need more, we look inside our church. A number of people also go into ministry and become pastors at different churches.
There’s a Nigerian proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.” (from the Nigerian Igbo culture.) The idea is that raising, training, educating, and maturing a child is a whole community effort. The next generation of the village depended on how the current generation together raised their children.
I wonder if this applies to the Church. Is it a church’s responsibility to raise the next generation of leaders? Is CFC an exception or a model or just one of the different ways to do it? Currently my “home” church is having leadership issues. Our English Pastor is in limbo and we lack a senior pastor (as far as I know and from what our website says). Our youth pastor is a son of our retired senior pastor. We also have an English Ministry Assistant who is a seminarian who has been at our church for a number of years. However our associate pastors all come from different places. Should the church be responsible for training up their next generation of pastors rather than soliciting resumes or shopping around for other associate pastors?