Uneducated and ordinary

The second shift is the one that costs a congregation the least and changes it the most: ministry was never meant to be professionalized.

What the council noticed

Peter and John are hauled in front of the religious authorities — the trained men, the credentialed ones — and something surprises the room.

When they observed the boldness of Peter and John and realised that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognised them as having been with Jesus. — Acts 4:13 (OTB)

Read what the council actually established. Not that these two had been to school. They had not. Not that they held office. They did not. The only credential visible in the room was that they had been with Jesus, and it was enough to unsettle the professionals.

That is the workforce of the entire book of Acts. Fishermen. A tax collector. A tentmaker. A merchant who sold cloth. People whose qualification was time spent with Jesus and a willingness to open their mouths.

How we outsourced it

Nobody decided to professionalize the church. It happened the way most things happen — one reasonable step at a time.

Programs got better, which meant they got more complicated, which meant they needed trained people to run them. Standards rose. Volunteers were screened. Teaching required preparation most people could not give.

And every improvement quietly taught the congregation the same lesson: this is done by people who know how. Not by you.

The result is a building full of believers who genuinely love Jesus and genuinely believe they are unqualified to open a Bible with a neighbor. That is not humility. That is training.

The leader is not demoted

The correction here is not “we don’t need leaders.” It is the opposite of that, and Ephesians says it plainly:

And he gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some church leaders and teachers, to prepare God’s people for service, for the strengthening of the body of Christ. — Ephesians 4:11-12 (OTB)

To prepare God’s people for service. The leader is not the one who does the ministry. He is the one who prepares everyone else to do it.

That is a promotion of the congregation, not a demotion of the leader. His work gets harder, not smaller — it is far easier to preach well to two hundred people than to equip twenty of them to do what you do.

The sentence to keep

We are not trying to get people into church buildings. We are trying to get the church into people.

Recite this

Uneducated and ordinary. They had been with Jesus. That was the credential.

Try it this week

Find one believer who has told you they are not qualified — you probably know several — and do one study with them, badly, on purpose. Keep it simple enough that they walk away thinking I could do that. That thought is the whole point.

I will do one simple study with ________________, on ________________.