Spreydon Baptist Church 1960-2000 - Knox Centre for Ministry and ...

and wondered if they were helping people avoid ‘the uncomfortable
experience of growth.’ He also felt that by requiring
the energies of the staff to be put into the congregations it
meant their primary focus was on pastoral care, rather than on
the specialist ministries needed to develop mission at the
growing edge of a large church. In particular for the first time
there was no one on the staff whose primary focus was on
‘equipping and calling out of people in evangelism.’ 39 This
tension between the demands of congregations and need for
specialist ministries, particularly in relation to staff resources,
was an issue that was to be raised many times over the next
few years.
I would want to make one strong affirmation and that is I
believe God has led us into both models of the church that
we operate. That is the large church built on specialist
ministries and the mother church/daughter congregation
model. I don’t think the answer is a wholesale abandoning
of either of these. What we have to do is to get them both
to work so that the kingdom is being extended. 40
A new way of developing leaders was introduced, with
the congregational leaders and other new staff members being
taken on as interns, spending four days a week working for the
church and one day a week studying with the local branch of
the Bible College of New Zealand. 41 It was an initiative that
was to anticipate a major trend in the training of pastoral staff
in the 1990s, with a move to local churches developing part-
39
These issues were raised in a report by Murray Robertson to the elders
in February 1986.
40
Robertson. ‘Whither Spreydon?’ Report of July 1987.
41
Developing out of this was the Bible College of New Zealand’s Ministry
Internship Programme, now one of the major providers of Christian
Training in New Zealand.
23
NZJBR 9, Oct. 2004