Hello everybody and welcome to Into the Prey, Breaching the Chaos of the Church with Nick and Mary Franks. We're here together for the first time in a few months, and we want to, rather than giving a context as to why we've been doing these podcasts and on the videos much less, that will perhaps become clearer as we talk now. For those of you who have never listened to us before or seen us for Welcome, this is a podcast and a YouTube channel to try and help all of us to recognise the chaos of the church with the hope of breaching the chaos of the church. This is another way of putting Paul's refrain in Ephesians about the building up of the church in love, and that's our hope and prayer every single day, often through tears, and we'll touch on that in just a minute. What do we want to talk about today?

Um, we would like to talk a little bit about uh eldership and job specifications and adverts that are put up for employing elders in the church today and our thoughts around that.

Yeah, we want to talk about this scenario in which we would advertise, and that's a word that I think we'll come back to in a moment. We want to go through these very quickly, partly because a man over there has very kindly stopped mowing his hedge to help us to do this. Um, we'll come back to the to the specifics of what we would put into an advert were we to be advertising for a church leader. Now, don't don't don't switch off, listen to what we're trying to say, because although this is a hypothetical scenario, I'm conscious, and we've had conversations in the background privately, in one sense it may not be. At the very end, I'll explain what I mean by that in the sense of we want to frame this conversation about why the recruitment processes of either church elders, pastors, senior leaders, or church planters, revitalis, revitalizers, call cool people what you will, why the recruitment processes, the recruit the job adverts and so on really mirror a broken world, a broken recruitment world. It's hypothetical to show you from the Bible, and this is the key thought, there are key passages in 1 Timothy 3 and in Titus that give prerequisites, give requirements for elders, male elders, men in the church who are tasked under God to lead and to care and to cater for the church. What are the requirements? We should know those passages well. I trust that we do. But I think there are also other requirements that are not explicitly stated, and that if you were to refer only to 1 Timothy 3 or Titus, um you wouldn't necessarily think we're requirements for being a church elder or senior pastor or whatever. But we want to say that there are the conditions, and we want to do that by comparing and contrasting the normal run-of-the-mill job adverts for church leaders, church leader vacancies, with what we would put into uh an advert, and in fact, in effect, are hypothetically framing but also wanting to say this is this is what we I'm not explaining this very well, am I? Hopefully it'll become clearer. So so we're gonna begin by Mary reading a job advert that's live for a conservative evangelical church and not a flaky church that's like Premier Christianity advertising for an LGBT pastor for an LGBT church. It doesn't matter because I've done a video on that. I encourage you, please watch that video. You'll need an hour or so because I go through a lot of uh email correspondence that shows how rotten to the core premier Christianity really are. So we're not talking about a flaky, we're talking about a conservative evangelical church. Mario read that and then we'll comment further.

Okay, so this is the advert that was put up. We are seeking a pastor who meets the biblical qualifications for an elder found in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus. It is an essential requirement that the pastor be a committed Christian with his own daily walk with Christ. He will have a strong desire to continue to encourage the church in becoming committed and growing disciples of Jesus Christ by word and example. We are prayerfully seeking someone with these characteristics and skills. Have a love for God, for his people, and for his word, be able to communicate God's word to all ages, show Christian character in his own life situation and in dealings with other people, be evangelistic-minded, passionate about reaching the local community with the gospel, and be involved in the pastoral care of the church and the training, development, and equipping of the membership.

So we've just read, Mary's just read that, word for word, a job advert that attend to the penny. You see these adverts all the time. It's essentially an off-the-shelf job description, AI could have written that and possibly did. Again, just to be very clear, we're not trying to state that the requirements as laid out by Paul the Apostle in 1 Timothy 3 and in Titus and in other places are somehow insufficient. What we're what we're saying is that if you were to only go on those passages as to what would constitute a faithful elder or a faithful senior church leader pastor, there there are other characteristics, there are other spiritual traits that I think the Bible implicitly links to spiritual maturity and health, and that conversely, if they're not there, there's a question mark over the health of that individual. And that doesn't just go for men in church leadership. We firmly believe, and the Lord, this is an example of one of the things that we'll mention in a minute, the Lord has changed our mind on this, He's led us into a place of repentance about male and female roles within the church, and how not that we had a solid kind of worked through thought through conviction about females being in eldership, egalitarianism. Um we just didn't think. This is the thing, you there's an inheritance that we received. We were, this was our church context from the get-go, and there's this unthinking, and that's one thing that I would say um we hope we're hoping to help the church with in an ongoing way, is to be a bit more thinking about the things that we just frankly don't think there is a need to think about. So the Lord has changed our minds. We've repented and turned away and repented publicly for being involved in egalitarianism. Um, but there is a list now, and we're just going to go through this very quickly. We could spend 10, 15, 20 minutes on each of these. So to keep this short, all we're going to do is read the list. I'll read them now. And Mary, please chip in if you've got any uh thoughts as I go through them. There's about 10 or 15 of them, and it will take me about 90 seconds to read them. These would be the characteristics, the requirements that, in addition to the explicitly stated requirements of being a male elder, that we would see as an important characteristic within men. And not just in men in church leadership roles, but women in other church leadership roles or in in other areas of service.

And the church generally. I think these things are not they're probably essential in order to be spiritually mature enough to lead a congregation of people. But these are also things that I think the average Christian should be um maybe displaying in some aspects of their lives, um, and certainly be growing in as we mature in our faith.

So again, think of the context of this advert that Mary just read out. This is a literal advert, it's live at the minute on online, and the second line of it says for this advert, it's essential, it's an essential requirement that the pastor be a committed Christian with his own daily walk with Christ. Now, of course, that is a requirement, but don't you see the ridiculousness of that? It's like a brain surgeon being interviewed by a panel of medical experts and saying to this potential new brain surgeon for their hospital, so Dr. X, tell me why why would we give this job to you? And Dr. X responds by saying, Well, because I've got I've got um I've got a degree in medicine. I'm a qualified doctor. It's so it's so basic that it should really go without saying that a candidate for a place of brain surgery in a hospital is already a qualified doctor, in the same way that I think if we're having to state in a job advert for an elder or a senior pastor or anyone in a place of leadership or pastoral care, whatever it may be, that the that the pastor is a committed Christian with his own daily walk with Christ, do you not see the ridiculousness of that? So we rather are asking the question: why is it that that there are no other characteristics ever mentioned in these jobs? It's not just that they're hardly ever. I've never once read a job advert that we're about to give you an example of now. Never once read one. And if Mary and I were in a position in the future to need elders, and in fact we are in a position now, this is the part of the tension of this podcast. We are in a position where we need there to be a sense of others being gathered together. But it's not because of an advert that we're putting out that that'll happen. It's it's the answer to the prayer that we pray every day of Psalm 106, verse 47, that the Lord would gather us. But that when that would happen, and perhaps why this this is why this isn't just a hypothetical exercise, in in the economy, if I can put it like that, of the kingdom, this is actually a live moment that whilst for this podcast, this is a hypothetical scenario, in another sense, it's actually a very live current need. If anyone approached us and said, um, we'd like to think about planting a church with you, what this would be what we say. So without further ado, these are the things that I we together would um, these are the things we would say, and we've talked about, okay, I'm just gonna read through them. So think about the one we've just read, the that the person is a committed Christian with their own daily walk, their love for God, love for people, etc. etc. We would say a person who is able to describe personal cost associated with that with their stand for the gospel, a person who is able to describe personal cost associated with their stand for the gospel. You can see why each and every one of these points is worthy of a 10-15-minute podcast in and of itself. We can't do that. I'm gonna read them twice, each one by one, and then we'll finish. Secondly, a person who is able to describe personal repentance and specific examples of their change of mind recently. We've just done that. We see that as an important thing regarding egalitarianism. Thirdly, a person who is able to describe relationships as well as estrangements, someone who has reference points for both relationship and estrangement, a person who is able to describe their urgent burden for the lost. Yes, that's different from having an off-the-shelf tick-the-box exercise for evangelism, a burden for the lost. What are you doing daily at the moment with that regard? Next, a person who is not popular with everyone, a person who even has enemies, a person who has been ostracized, a person who stands for doctrinal clarity, and whose stand has been personally costly, a person who can describe turning down an opportunity to alleviate pain, ultimately declining it out of conviction. I'll read that again, it's really important. A person who can describe turning down an opportunity to alleviate pain, but ultimately who declined that out of conviction. Next, a person who is calling the church to repentance as a body and not only individual members, a person who is willing to relocate, to be disrupted, including their family, their children, and their job. A person whose testimony is radically different post-2020 compared with pre-2020. A person who sings, praises God every day, and finally, a person who weeps for the state of the church and the glory of his name. If we were and I was in a conversation with another man about leading a church, I would be having conversations about those points. We'll put them into the show notes so you can read them. I'm sure some of them will have piqued your interest and caught your ear more than others. But this is what I would be having conversations with. And let me tell you another thing before we finish, Mary will have something to say, I'm sure, is that because I have conversations with people about those points, and because I want to go there and talk about this, this, and this and in respect of church leadership, there is often a silent withdrawal, or there is a more vociferous kind of explosive response of anger because you're challenging this kind of off-the-shelf mentality to what is a supernatural reality, which is planting a church, leading a church. It's a supernatural reality, and we've become so accustomed to that just being another kind of run-of-the-mill thing, hence the way that we often try to re-recruit and um reproduce what we've always done. And maybe you could share something about that just quickly to close about the way that the Lord's led us to understand about what church planning is and what it's not.

So, over recent years, as we've looked at different opportunities in the Lord, if you followed anything, you'll know the different areas that the Lord has led us through to reject certain things and to see them for what they truly are, particularly the ecumenical order of the church at the moment. Um it's really been an eye-opener, actually, just to see the way in which the church as a whole approaches bringing in elders and bringing in leaders of the church in the same routine way. Um which I think sadly just means that if you look at the church and you go to websites, videos, you listen to people, you feel like you're listening to the same person often when you go to lots of different churches. And it feels like this method of essentially copying the worldly way of doing things results in quite a strict sort of uniformity. And particularly when you head into different denominations, um you do end up with the same type of person for different categories within the church. And you know, as you were just saying, this idea of the supernatural nature of the church really does seem to be missing. And yeah, just that sense of something out of the ordinary happening isn't there. Like we see the same thing again and again and again, and in the end, it's it's a sort of self-fulfilling thing that we end up in the same place all the time because essentially we've decided how we want things to be, and we're not are we really prayerfully, as the advert says, are we really prayerfully taking things before the Lord and asking him, is this how you want it to be done? Is this how the person that you have in mind? Are we doing this right? Um yeah.

I think more pointedly than that, though, I there's another example of where I think the Lord has led us in repentance. Maybe two years ago, I can't remember, maybe less than that. Our attitude towards, maybe if it wasn't even with that much confidence, it was the same as what we're now realizing is is faulty and and an error, which is this attitude of just go ahead and plant a church. Um, we've had people say to us in the last year, in the last 12 months, quite seriously, why don't you just what are you waiting for? Just start a church. As though the supernatural reality of a church being planted, being birthed, was just a matter of strategy. Strategy, yeah. Just our own willingness to start something. And of course, of course, that happens all the time. People start churches all the time. So we've we and and maybe this is the first time we've publicly said this, and so if that's the case, then fine. But I want to say publicly that I do repent, we do repent from that attitude, which is that um, and and it's not though it's not as though we've ever tried to plant a church, we've been in a posture of waiting for the Lord for a long time, which in and of itself is a conversation as to why that's so unusual. Um we don't un we don't understand the planting of a church anymore to be something that we can do. In other words, the Lord has shown us that far from it being just a question of us cracking on and doing it and making some logistical kind of strategic plans and putting it in place, making an announcement, getting some branding. It's I think it is, in the words of Martin Lloyd Jones, it is a reprehensible thing that before the Lord. And rather, if you think about the way that Peter went to Cornelius' household, the supernatural element of that, in other words, the Lord God Almighty gathered Peter by his living spirit to Cornelius' household, and he did the same the other way from Cornelius' household to Peter, is an evidence of the Lord gathering, and of course that was about the ministry of the Holy Spirit. It wasn't so much to do with a planting of a church, but I think you probably could say that after that happened, there was a church there, if if there were men installed and and uh so on. So I think we've said enough. But to finish, I want to implore you, please read the recently published confession that we've released, which details in very specific terms that we simply would not have been able to a year, two, three years ago, because the Lord has led us into an ever-narrowing path which will be scorned upon by many church leaders. Your attitude towards church gospel unity is far too narrow. We don't believe it is. We believe that the Lord has led us along this path, not to be more narrow as in more judgmental, less loving, or harsher, but to be clearer about what false doctrine is from true doctrine. And of course, that's one of the main emphases of Paul's final writing to the church the the clarity around that which is false and that which is true.