July 24, 2014

ROADS

Many years ago the Holy Spirit led me into an appreciation of the key dynamics of church life that has served my local church well for more than two decades. I call the concept ROADS – Relationship, Outreach, Anointing, Doctrine, and Structure.

How the five dynamics relate to one another

Before I develop each of these dynamics, I need to comment on how they relate to each other as parts of a whole. All five dynamics need to be equally strong driving forces that energize the local church. If a church has great relationships both with God and its members, but gives little attention to outreach, then it will inevitably implode into a holy huddle. If it functions gloriously in the gifts and anointing of the Holy Spirit, but is light on sound doctrine, then it will most likely fly off into some form of charismania. If it gives much attention to doctrine, but little energy to anointing, then it will probably calcify into some form of religious legalism. Even if a local church is strong on relationships, outreach, anointing, and sound doctrine, yet lacks biblical church structure, it is unlikely to be able to sustain itself over time or to reproduce itself in kind. All five dynamics are needed in equal measure for a church to be healthy and effective.

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Pastoral Succession

Published in SATS ‘Pastor to Pastor’

During the 2012 Leadership Summit Bill Hybels spoke about how he and his elders had recently embarked on a leadership succession process. He mentioned that there are thousands of mega churches around the world who are currently led by pastors in their sixties. In his opinion, most of these churches are in for troubled times because few have considered passing the leadership baton and even fewer know how to do it. I have no way of gauging how accurate his information is, but one thing is obvious; leadership succession, like death, is inevitable. Therefore, all churches, big and small, need to give serious attention to how to transition from retiring to younger leadership.

I am 65 years of age and for the last two years or so I have been engaging my eldership on how we are going to transition the church when I retire. To exacerbate the situation, our other senior pastor is due to retire in two years’ time, just when I am planning to scale down my involvement. Because we are currently dealing with the realities of leadership transition I thought that it might be useful if I wrote an article for the benefit of other churches in a similar circumstance.

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Address at the 2012 Graduation of SATS

Leave a Comment / Articles, Published Articles / Christopher Peppler

If I asked you why you enrolled with SATS in the first place most of you would mention such things as; the convenience of being able to study at a distance, the excellent quality of the accreditation, or the fine curriculum and coursework. Some might even mention the fact that the academic faculty are so good looking. However, most of you would probably say that it was because we are theologically evangelical.

When SATS was founded, it was clear what the word ‘evangelical’ meant, but recently it has become so broadly defined that it no longer means what it used to. It no longer adequately defines our theological blood type. However, if you look at our website you will see that we define ourselves with the words; ‘We are Bible-based, Christ-centred, Spirit-led, distance and online learning specialists, accredited to the PhD level. The last part of that statement speaks to what we do, but the first part speaks to who we are; Bible-based, Christ-centred, and Spirit-led. These are the three foundational principles on which we build SATS some 16 years ago; the unique authority of the Word of God the Father, the lordship and centrality of Jesus Christ, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. We have tried to incorporate these three principles into the structure and content of our courses and assessment criteria.

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