Church planting brings with it many advantages, the greatest of which might just be the proverbial “blank slate.” No institutional sacred cows exist; no man-made traditions wait like thieves in the wings. Rather, what you’ve got is total freedom to build and, hopefully, you create no thieving cows.

One of the first things I put on the blank slate of IDC was teaching my own job description. There is something of a symbiotic relationship between the pastor’s health and the congregation’s health. There are two reverberating and reciprocating axioms on this matter:

• Healthy pastors ordinarily fuel a healthy church.
• A healthy church ordinarily fuels healthy pastors.

That sounds about right, doesn’t it? So then the question for me became, “What are some ways in which I can help the church know what God says pastors must be and do?” Here are four things we’ve done the last two years, things God seems to have kindly blessed in abundance.

4 Ways to Do It

Teach. The first book of the Bible we preached through was 1 Timothy. I wanted our people to know what God said about how we ought to live together as a pillar and buttress of His truth. Furthermore, 1 Timothy got us set in the right direction from the beginning about faithful church leadership. We got to examine the qualifications of elders and deacons in chapter 3, and the biblical pattern of faithful ministry in chapter 4. We also used our Family Meetings (bi-monthly church member meetings) to teach on biblical leadership when we began to train elders and deacons.

We are about to have one open week in our sermon calendar between the completion of 1 John and start of Missions Month. What shall we do with that stand alone? Acts 6:1-7 here we come.

Pray. We pray frequently for our church’s leadership during corporate prayer times. We have a 6-7 minute pastoral prayer in every gathered worship and I often pray for our current church officers to be faithful in their work. I also pray each week for other churches and their pastors to be God-glorifying stewards of the gospel. Such prayer times honor the office and, by extension, teach about what’s most important in pastoral ministry. Additionally, 1-2 times each year we dedicate a corporate prayer night to pray for church leaders — usually those at other churches. This allows us to not only model unity, but model how members can best pray for pastors.

Discuss. About eight months into our church’s existence I had over half the men in our church read Thabiti Anyabwile’s Finding Faithful Elders and Deacons for our monthly men’s meeting. What encouragement came from the subsequent discussion! Our guys were instructed from another voice and were challenged to examine their own lives against the qualifications of Scripture. At this meeting I said something we’ve since adopted as an IDC maxim, “Desire to be qualified even if you don’t aspire to the office.”

Disciple. All the labors above constitute discipling for sure, but I’m thinking here of one-to-one discipling. Some great questions you can use in discipling men in the church is, “Do you ever see yourself being an elder or deacon in the church? Is there anything in your life right now preventing you from being qualified?” I think I got that from Mark Dever — it totally sounds like something he’d do. I’ve had incredibly fruitful conversations grow from those simple questions. Discipling’s aim is conformity to Christ and who does Jesus intend to uniquely represent Him in the church? Faithful shepherds.

Encouraging Health Together

Truth brings unity and freedom. Focusing on and shepherding unto the biblical truth surrounding pastoral ministry has brought untold benefits to our church. The most acute thing I can point to is the incredible amount of encouragement and prayer I get each week from our members. Their encouragements and prayers are saturated with concerns firmly attached to what God calls pastors to be. This in turn empowers us to shepherd them unto what God calls them to be as children of faith.

Till the soil of truth regarding pastoral ministry and watch God — in His own time and power — ignite health in your midst.

We started IDC with the conviction that weekly gathered worship is the central hub of a church’s life together. Here is where the ordinary means of grace are supernaturally dispensed. Here is where loving unity is established and constructed. Here is where corporate celebrations of God’s grace stir the soul. Here is where members are equipped and then commissioned as Christ’s ambassadors. All of that, and so much more, we believed down to the level of our spiritual gut.

The issue then became helping our members to see that wisdom and joy found in devotion to gathered worship.

A Uniquely Ordinary Struggle

Since its inception in January of 2013 IDC has assembled each week at a local Baptist church on Saturday nights. Gathering on Saturdays at 5pm has been a unique struggle. There is no shortage of competition for our people’s attention on Saturday nights—more so than on Sundays mornings, I think. About six months into the church’s life I began to notice a pattern with our members: the majority seemed to be gone half the time. Things are not always as they seem, so we spent the next six months keenly observing our attendance patterns, lest my assumptions be misguided. Our examination of the sheep revealed the average member was missing 22-26 weeks out of the annual 52.

Corporate health and unity can’t survive when most family members are gone six months each year.

We needed to get to work.

Putting a Plan into Place

At a Family Meeting (our bi-monthly members’ meeting) we communicated the pattern we’d observed and tried to address it biblically. We said,

We don’t want you to feel as though we are looking over an attendance list in a legalistic fashion, merely checking off who is present and not present. Hebrews 10:24-25 says, “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” In light of this verse, one of the things we covenant to as a church is, “We will not forsake the assembling of ourselves together.”

What we want to do is encourage all of us to examine our orientation toward Saturday night. We are not expecting every member to get a “Perfect Attendance” ribbon at the end of each year, instead—because of Hebrews 10:25 and our church covenant—we want to encourage you to an ordinary prioritization of gathered worship. Here is where God promises to meet his people in the fullness of His mercy and grace. The corporate gathering is also the ordinary place where Christian discipleship and unity occurs. To be gone from gathered worship with great frequency means not only missing out on this “atomic power” of discipleship, but it also means putting your soul in a dangerous place. As Hebrews 10 says, commitment to corporate worship keep us close to Christ as we await His return.

That simple discussion got us headed in the right direction. To fuel growing affections for gathered worship we focused our efforts in four areas: shepherding, preaching, praying, and discipling. In other words, pastoring with a particular concentration.

Shepherding. Part of our elders’ shepherding work is a monthly check-in, normally by phone, with every member. On Sunday afternoon one elder sends out a breakdown of that week’s shepherding contacts. He gives a list of names, their contact info, and attendance pattern over the previous ten weeks. Thus, whenever a family has been absent for something like six weeks out of the last ten the elder is able to have that shepherding conversation with awareness. God has been very kind whenever these conversations have happened. He’s allowed our shepherding on this matter to be received for what it is—loving encouragement, not overbearing oversight.

Preaching. I’ve yet to preach a sermon on obedience to or do an exposition of Hebrews 10:24-25. I probably won’t. Rather, whenever the texts warrants it, I try to show how its truth bears on our corporate life together. I want to, through God’s word and Spirit, awaken our sense to the treasure of corporate worship. Instead of saying something like, “You must come to corporate worship,” we’d rather say, “Oh, do you see the power and joy found our weekly meetings? Do you see how God loves to meet with His people? Why would you want to miss out on fuel for happiness in God!” I hope our teaching stirs affections of delight more than adherence to duty.

Praying. The elders pray often for God to grant our church a degree of joy in weekly fellowship that creates palpable longing to be with God’s people. In the pastoral prayer I will sometimes pray for us to have growing eagerness to gather with the congregation. We have prayed along these lines at our monthly corporate prayer nights as well.

Discipling. We encourage small group leaders particularly to be conduits of Christlikeness in modeling and exhorting faithfulness to gathered worship.

Small Steps Still Mean You’re Moving

How then are we doing after almost twelve months of striving in these four areas? We still have so far to go. Yet, small steps are visible. At a recent elders’ meeting we talked about a member who had voiced concern over another sister in Christ who’d been gone for quite a while. And she’d taken it upon herself to reach out to this other member. We rejoiced in a small group leader who sat down with his group at the start of this year and humbly exhorted them to renewed devotion in gathering with the church each week.

We can get discouraged at the small steps or we can minster with gladness because of them. Small steps are indeed movement.

Where in your ministry do you see tangible steps in the right direction? Faithful plodding brings God glory no less than stupendous leaping.