Each Wednesday, the BILD team has been meeting with our global church partners for a time of instruction and dialogue around church establishment and leadership development. Led by Michael Vos, this new cohort of executive education offered via Zoom delves into the Mastering the Scriptures Series (MTS), currently focusing on the Apostle Paul’s letters written to his network of churches in the New Testament.
Those in attendance are church network leaders and their emerging teammates who have been prioritizing their training to be able to lead, develop, and assess the leaders and churches within their civilizations.
Michael said the need for this training comes from a desire to help churches align their patterns with those of the New Testament teachings. The equipping process for these leaders will give them the opportunity to understand the “traditions” that the Apostles of the new covenant letters were urging their churches to follow, he said.
“We will gain this new perspective on their letters, which align our lives and churches to Christ’s teachings, which will provide the Spirit’s power that we have not seen nor been able to imagine,” Michael said in his invitational letter.
For 14 years, BILD has been developing these resources and renewing our minds with this new perspective, Michael shared, adding that this is the most significant equipping that will be done by the BILD global team since the introduction of the degree pathways 20 years ago.
He also urged leaders to prioritize this time and use these discussions as a way to align their own leadership and teams to the core patterns of everything that Christ taught us to do. This equipping process will allow everyone to gain the perspective of the role and work of apostolic leaders and their coworkers, while understanding how to build a complex network of churches that has elders that sustain and shepherd the churches, Michael said.
Each weekly session has a pre-recorded video that should be watched before Wednesday’s meeting. In the videos, Michael gives a summary of the session in the MTS booklet that will be discussed. As each leader then goes through the MTS session on their own before meeting, it is expected that they will come prepared to discuss what they are learning and understanding.
During each meeting, Michael invites two or three leaders to be “in the ring” with him. The call can see upwards of 50 or more leaders in attendance, and having a few designated leaders to share their work and dialogue with Michael keeps the conversation moving. During this time, these leaders share insights they have gained from Paul’s letters, their understanding of the core principles, and papers they have written from the session.
After this initial conversation, leaders are sent to breakout rooms based on civilizations to further discuss what they are learning with their immediate cohorts. The breakout sessions are led by BILD coaches and are a time for leaders to discuss the core ideas of Paul’s letters and how to use the framework of Paul’s letters to establish their churches.
During these discussions, leaders are drawing parallels between situations in their own churches and the issues Paul was addressing to the early churches. Being able to dialogue together has been helpful for making a plan of action to put the core principles into practice and implement them in their own churches.
After meeting in small groups, everyone joins back together in the large group with Michael to discuss what they learned in their breakout sessions. It is also a time for others to share work they have completed.
These global dialogues are an intentional time meant to spur conversation around the biblical traditions passed down from Jesus to his disciples and then to the early churches. These New Testament traditions are just as relevant in our churches today and are foundational to establishing strong leadership to oversee strong churches that will withstand the generations to come.