I have been thinking, since the gathering of the MTS Network Coordinators back at the start of winter, that MTS needs to deliberately put energy into finding pioneers and team leaders, not just finding and training anyone and everyone. We need to do both, of course, but much more thought and energy ad emphasis could be put on the unique things about finding and training the pioneer and team leaders.
I have been amazed how many big evangelical churches have associate pastors or uni pastors doing all the MTS apprenticeship training. It's one of the thing that gets handed off by the senior minister as the church gets bigger. (Crossroads Canberra is an exception here).
This seems to be a really bad idea. If associate pastors train apprentices, I reckon you are more than likely to only ever produce associate pastors. At the very least it sends that sort of message.
I wonder what set of investments, emphases, training materials and events MTS might focus on in order to ensure that we are raising up pioneers and team leaders?
