Ferguson, Garner, and Kim: Training Leaders in the Church (Seminar)

17:58 I think part of the answer, John, is the answer to the previous question, that if good foundations are not in place at the beginning, actually may take quite a long time before that fact begins to appear. And I think this is a big country, students move vast distances to go to seminary. Many students are converted through a youth ministry or in college. And when I went to Westminster in Philadelphia in 1982-83, I made it my aim in every student who came to see me without telling him what I was trying to do to try and find out who had invested in this usually young man.

19:02 And I was kind of horrified to discover how many of them had had no personal investment, had never been near enough someone who was engaged in ministry to smell their breath. And I mean, I guess I felt that very much because I'd had the opposite experience that the man who was my minister when I was a student whom I was too shy to speak to until I'd been there 18 months. And I got to know him well, and one day he gave me… the first time he gave me something, I don't know if I've told you this, I said to him, this is the first thing you've ever given me. I said it with a smile on my face because he'd given me more important things. And I handed it back to him, I said, I need to get you to autograph it. He gave it back to me and he poked me in the chest and said, that's not where I want to write my autograph, that's where I want to write it.

19:59 And what impressed me then and continues to impress me was he meant it and he also knew that he had committed himself to my best future in a way that I knew that what he was saying was true. And I mean, I look back and I think I didn't realize at the time that that was an investment in me, not just there and then, but for the rest of my life. And I think that is something that we need to work on in the church, and those of us who are ministers need to work on, because it isn't just getting men from wherever they are now through seminary. If there are a lot of cracks at the beginning, they will eventually appear. And I don't know if anyone has ever done any study of this, but it wouldn't surprise me if somebody did, that they found that men who do not last are those in whom no one who has lasted, ever invested, so that they don't have the osmosis experience, the instincts of what ministry is really about.

21:18 I think another thing that we need to try and develop in our churches is what I've noticed in different ways in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries was a kind of characteristic of pastoral life, that the bonds that were forged were maintained. And I'm struck by this in the Puritan experience, how men heard each other preach and came together, and the group of men that, you know, been a big thing in my experience, the Murray McShane group. If I had the power, I would say to elders in a church, next time you have the Lord's supper, make it a five-day occasion, tell your minister that the church is willing to fund bringing in his three best friends from seminary to give them five days together. I would put more value on that than what I hear people speak about accountability groups.

22:24 I think growing strong friendships, far more important than that, and that as churches we should seek to invest ourselves in our own ministers but also to invest ourselves in the broader church by that kind of fellowship. And as I look back through church history, you see that again and again and again and again, different ways but the same principle that what will hold men is the strength of their bonds. And, you know, behind the scenes here, we are really, you know, we are very close friends who run into each other every so often, but the fact that we know the other is there is a real strength and help to us.