In planting a new church, how should the missionary provide for the continuing care of the congregation after he is gone?  Or, to put it another way, how do you know when you are “done” planting a church?  In not a small number of cases, missionaries in Thailand have established churches with a modus operandi something like this:  evangelize and disciple until there is a sufficient number of Christian believers such that there are people to lead various elements of Sunday worship service and there are more or less sufficient finances to rent a building and call a full-time Bible school educated Thai pastor to lead the church.  If these elements are mostly in place, then the church is considered planted and the missionary feels free to move on to a new location.  Often there are some kind of appointed or elected church leaders which may or may not resemble Biblical elders.  In many cases, I have seen a church committee which makes decisions about finances and church activities substituted for the Biblical model of elders, namely mature Christian men who govern and shepherd the congregation, bearing spiritual responsibility for the souls of the people.  If a missionary gets the number of believers up to level where the church won’t dissolve, and then calls a native pastor (whom a small church often times can barely pay), is this really the best model for establishing healthy Biblical churches?

It is always good to know that someone is speaking from experience and not just theory.  Therefore, following on from my previous post about Nevius’ thoughts on finding local leaders, I wanted to share Nevius’ account of how he and his missionary colleagues made the mistake of appointing elders too hastily:“Twenty years ago our mission in considering this subject reasoned on this wise: We are Presbyterians, and our churches should be organized from the first on Presbyterian principles.  If we cannot get men for elders as well qualified as we should like, we must take the best men we can find, men who seem sincere and earnest Christians, and who may develop in character and ability to fulfill the duties of elders by having the duties and responsibilities of this office laid upon them.  With these views and expectations several churches were formally and constitutionally organized.  It was found, however, in not a small proportion of cases that the elders did not, or could not, perform their official duties, and were an obstruction to any one else attempting to do so.  They were placed in a false position, injurious to themselves and the churches of which they had the nominal charge.  Some were hardly able to sustain the character of an ordinary church member and others were in a course of few years excommunicated.  We then took action as a Presbytery, determining that

Every missionary wants to develop indigenous local leaders so that an indigenous church may be established.  When there are not many local Christians to choose from, it can be difficult to find the right people, especially those that are Biblically qualified.  With many years of experience under his belt as a missionary in China, John Nevius had that following to say on the subject:

 

"It is only natural that missionaries should at first seek and employ many native agents.  They are anxious for immediate results, and home societies and the home churches are as impatient to hear of results as the missionaries are to report them.  No communications from the field seem so indicative of progress, and are so calculated to call forth commendation and generous contributions as the announcement that native laborers have been obtained, and are preaching the gospel.  While the missionary himself is for months or years debarred from evangelistic work by his ignorance of the language, a native agency stands waiting his employ.  His circumstances and his wishes add stong emphasis to the oft-repeated truism, "China must be evangelized by the Chinese." So urgent seems the necessity to obtain native assistants that if such as he would like are not forthcoming, he is glad to avail himself of such as he can get.  How many of us have thought in connection with some specially interesting inquirer, even before he is baptized, "What a capital assistant that man might make." (John Nevius, The Planting and Development of Missionary Churches, Monadnock Press, Hancock New Hampshire, 2003, p.21)

 

There is a church that my wife and I know well where almost none of the people on the church leadership committee are qualified to be there (this church uses a leadership committee instead of an elder board, deacon board, or some other form of church government).  Sure they are aware of passages like 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 that lay out the Biblical qualifications for elders but those requirements don't seem to be very important to them.  As in the time of Nevius,