Posted on 27 Aug 2013 by Jerome Leng
Grace and peace to you! This is the first of five posts.
MTS is a pastoral apprenticeship program. Under the guidance of the Elder of CERC, you learn the demands and expectations of full time paid ministry (FTPM), the nuts and bolts of various ministries and your suitability to do FTPM for the rest of your life. Theoretically, if you can’t survive 2 years in FTPM, what makes you think you can survive a life time of FTPM?
MTS is meant to ‘authenticate’ the desires and gifts that one has for FTPM. Now, all Christians are called to serve God, let’s be clear on that! We are all prophets, priests and kings. But some are called to FTPM by our Lord Jesus because He has gifted such persons in areas of teaching, evangelism, pastoring and leading His people. This is a special privilege and one of great responsibility.
I did not enter into FTPM because I had some miraculous intervention or heard God’s voice audibly or experienced anything that can be considered ‘supernatural’. Too often Christians make the mistake of over-spiritualizing FTPM to the point where it exalts pastors to a ‘higher level’ of spirituality from the rest of the church and undermines the ministry of the layperson.
The heart of the decision to enter FTPM must be the Lordship of Christ.
What greater reason could there be? Many often justify their calling with the means by which they received their calling rather than the One who called them. The acknowledgement of Christ’s Lordship can only come when the Spirit opens our eyes to the word of the Gospel in the Scriptures. Our Lord has called us to be his people, to enter into obedient service, to bear our crosses, like him in his complete obedience to the Father’s will while he was on earth.
Jesus says in Matt 16.18 “I will build my church”. In Eph 4, we see him providing gifts to his people so that through the ministry of the Word by the “apostles, prophets, pastor-teachers”, the saints of God may be equipped for the work of ministry and for what purpose? “For the building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”
So, I had to ask myself these questions. Am I a Christian who acknowledges Christ’s Lordship over my life? Am I going to use the gifts that God has given me for the building up of His Church? What are my gifts? Has the Lord given me the gifts for the ministry of the Word? Are my motives, reasons, determinations aligned with my Lord’s desire to build his church? Do I love the church?
These are questions every Christian should ask, not just prospective FTPM candidates! MTS therefore, is merely the means of helping some Christians who may be gifted for the task of FTPM to work out the answers to such questions. MTS will test these Christians, whether or not they can hold together these truths in their hearts and minds and live by them, in their waking and sleeping, moment after moment, day after day, week after week, month after month for 2 whole years. Essentially, MTS is about training Christians to be thoroughly Christian.
This is what you actually do in MTS; you live out your Christianity. I made the mistake of speaking about what I do in a trite manner when I say, “I study and teach the Bible on a regular basis”. Sure, those are my tasks but what I actually do is conform my entire being to the reality of God’s Word and live by it in the power of the Spirit and call other people to do the same through the preaching and teaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the Scriptures for the eternal glory of God and the salvation of his people so that His church may be built up and as ministers of the gospel, we can be counted worthy for the gracious calling that we have received. This is my calling, my duty, my joy and my reward.
And so, MTS candidates, knowing that they owe the people of God the service of feeding the sheep out of love for Jesus (John 21), they must work hard in every way to equip themselves. As Paul says to Timothy,
“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth”. (2 Timothy 2:15, ESV)
So with regards to ministry, MTS is about learning to serve God by serving God’s people according to God’s ways. Simply, it’s about learning faithfulness to the exposition of the Scriptures and the shepherding of God’s people.
The basic assumption in MTS is that we don’t know how to serve God. We are ill-disciplined in our reading of the Scriptures. We are immature when it comes to trusting God because our sins and failures cause us to despair instead of always trusting Him in prayer. We are poor in expounding his words for our hearers when we preach or lead bible studies or conduct evangelism classes because we can’t read Scripture well, we are inarticulate and we lack understanding of people. We are often hypocritical in the way we care for our brothers and sisters in church because we lack genuine love. We are shallow with regards to the truth of God because our knowledge is lacking and our reflections don’t go beyond 2 sentences. We are often ‘dry’ because we fail to perceive God’s providence in all things when instead we should be abounding in joy and thanksgiving because God is with us. We lack the compassion for the lost simply because we are often more compassionate for the desires of our flesh. We’re idolaters, saved by grace, and slowly learning how to live according to God by his Word.
The goal of MTS is to weed out such attitudes and deceitfulness that we have practiced all our lives and be transformed by God. Of course, this is a lifelong process but MTS forces you to confront such sins much earlier so that you mature. A minister’s gift to the church is his faith and wisdom that God has nurtured in him over the years in the ministry. The MTS-er must come to realize this and so train in this direction.
This was my MTS.
