Guidelines for Church 01: Whose the Boss?

Have you noticed the Bible is often non-specific about certain things? It tells us clearly that by His stripes we were healed (1 Peter 2.24) but doesn’t tell us what to do about it! Some people are healed through anointing of oil, others through laying on of hands, others through a word of knowledge, others by standing on the Word. But the truth is that our healing is accomplished and we have to receive it somehow. But we need to pray and find out the somehow.

Why am I telling leaders this? Because the Bible is explicit that we need leaders. The local church should have leaders, and a structure, but we will need to pray to find out what kind of structure our local church should have.

Now one principle we must look at is – who is the boss of a local church? Now you could be superspiritual and say “it’s Jesus”, but what would that look like? Ephesians 4.11 says that Jesus Christ Himself gives five ministries to a local church – apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. So Jesus Himself calls these five. That is confirmed by Paul who told the Galatian church that as an apostle he was not chosen by men (a committee) or man (another apostle) but through Jesus Christ (this is Galatians 1.1).

Jesus appoints the fivefold ministry. Now read Ephesians 4.11 and you will not find an elder or deacon in there. Elders are chosen by pastors in a local church and so are deacons.

Now, here is the principle – the one who appoints is the boss. So the pastor of a church, his boss is Jesus. He has to answer to Jesus. If he is part of a family of churches, he answers to his senior pastor then to Jesus. But an elder has the pastor as their boss. A deacon has the pastor as their boss. They must answer to the pastor.

This seems to be in reverse in many churches where a board of deacons appoint a pastor then they are the boss of the pastor! I pastored like that, and I didn’t last long!

A pastor is tied by Jesus to a church, a local congregation, and he is the boss and the shepherd of that local congregation. He is responsible to Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ gave Him that position and tied him to that church. An apostle needs to come out of a local church and travel and establish and build up churches. Prophets travel too, to encourage the churches. Evangelists travel to preach the gospel and equip the saints to share the gospel. Teachers travel too and teach doctrines and give soundness to the church.

But it is the pastor who is wed by the Lord to a local congregation. It is a sacred and special calling and needs special honour. I currently function as an apostle and a pastor. I knew that would happen and I knew how to steward it years before it happened.

Now, in Acts 14.23, Paul appointed elders in every church. Paul appointed the elders, not Jesus. Elders are appointed by apostles or pastors in the local churches, so therefore the pastor has authority over the elder. That is the way around it should be. The elders should be teaching what the pastor says to teach, the elders should be supporting the pastor. Paul sent Titus to Crete as a pastor, and told him to “appoint elders in every city” (Titus 1.5). I am not writing this blog to outline what an elder is called to do, just to show you that a pastor should lead the elders not the other way around.

This pattern is the Biblical pattern, who appoints you is the boss. It’s the same with deacons, we can see this with Acts 6.5-6, where the apostles appoint the deacons. It says they chose! If they chose, then they are the boss.

This is a simple principle but if everyone adhered to it, it would eliminate so much confusion in the local church. Selah.

Just For Pastors 40: Do It All!

The evening before He was nailed to a cross, Jesus said to His Father “I have finished the work which you gave me to do” (John 17.4). I love that – that’s a prayer I want to pray the evening before I go to Heaven. I did it all Jesus – everything you gave me to do, I have done it.

Paul wanted to die early and not finish his race – and said he was torn between going to Heaven and staying on Earth, but what swayed him to stand up and believe he wouldn’t be martyred at this time is that he had not finished his course. Paul never lived the life he wanted personally – he lived for Christ, He wasn’t working for a pension and early retirement, he wasn’t living for the applause of men, he was living for his divine assignment. I had a season as a travelling evangelist, then a season as a pastor, now I am still pastoring but my primarly function is apostolic. It’s finding out each step, doing each step and completing each step, then we will complete the entire thing.

Finally, Paul finished his assignment, he told Timothy “I fought the good fight, I ran my race, I kept the faith”. When he went, he was ready to go because he had done all that God had called him to.

This is how we need to live our lives. We need to finish our course and run our race. We must complete our calling. Keep doing what you are called to do until it is done!

I see people in the wrong assignment all the time. I see pastors who should be travelling, I see evangelists who should be planting a church, often they change season quickly and repeatedly – and if you ask why – hey you were travelling, then you started a church, then you closed the church, then you were travelling again, now you are trying to start a media ministry, now you are planting a church again – and they will always say “I just feel the Lord leading me brother” – no, if God leads you to do something, you do it until it is done. You win, you beat the devil, you extend the kingdom, then you move on when the Lord leads you to the next phase, you go from faith to faith, strength to strength, and glory to glory!

Don’t quit when it is tough, fight. Do what God has told you to do and do what it takes to get it done. It will get hard, you will grow weary, you keep going. Take some rest if you need to, but don’t quit. Let’s finish our course, let’s run our race, let’s do it all.

AMEN!

Just For Pastors 39: Don’t Stand in the Way of Tongues

In our last post, I said that pastors must pray in tongues. Not only that, you must not stand against tongues in your congregation. 1 Cor. 14.39 says Do not forbid to speak in tongues. So many pastors, even whole denominations today, forbid speaking in tongues. When I was in a Christian group at my university, when I was studying computing, we were told to never speak in tongues.

I have heard of pastors telling people who speak in tongues in private to leave their churches and never come back, that contradicts Scripture. You should be encouraging everyone in your church to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues.

Just For Pastors 38: Pastors Should Pray in Tongues

When you are speaking in tongues you are speaking to God about things you don’t know about. Trust me – if your church is more than four people there are things happening in people’s lives and relationships and situations that you don’t know about. If you all your prayer for your flock is in English, you are very limited in your prayer. I pray for all of the Tree of Life Family in tongues every single day. I pray in tongues to ask the Lord what to preach on Sunday, I pray in tongues to ask the Lord to get the message into people’s hearts after I have preached it. I pray in tongues and I am speaking mysteries to God and declaring life over marriages I didn’t even know were in trouble, the Holy Spirit is dealing with doubts and offenses I didn’t even know people had! All pastors need to be able to pray in tongues, and need to pray in tongues for their churches!

Sometimes people try and diminish tongues and its vital importance for the church and for every Christian and they will say something like “well, we know there are no tongues in heaven”. No, and I won’t need to pray for the churches I am leading in Heaven, I won’t need to pray for sicknesses I didn’t know were coming on people, I won’t need to pray for someone who out of “kindness” (actually more likely, a need to know the gossip) takes a leader I stood down out for dinner, and all the offense on the one was being put on the other. I won’t need to pray for people who are lying and cheating secretly. I won’t need to pray for increase for people, or for people to just step out and give financially. I won’t need to pray for any situation I don’t know about or understand in Heaven.

I am a very busy man, and I am just a man, I do get tired. Especially when I travel, that is physically demanding as well as mentally. I often need to pray in tongues to revitalize myself and give me the energy to do what I do. Sometimes I pray in tongues for me for an hour or so to give me the energy and ability to pray in the tongues for a few hours. That’s how it works.

Just For Pastors 37: Do You Feel Led?

We have to be led by the inner witness. Paul was led by the Spirit to preach in certain places and not in others. If you have ever preaching in a place you weren’t led to, you may understand why!

The inner witness is an inner traffic light inside you that God placed inside you. It’s like an inner knowing, go this way, accept this invite, pray for this person, don’t pray for this people.

I am all for having a soul. Our soul is our mind, will and emotions. In our soul we can reason and feel, and I am all for that. We should be reasonable and we should be emotional. But as a pastor you need to be at the place where you know that your mind is not yet fully renewed, it’s not yet perfect, so your ability to reason is not yet fully operational. You can reason something and it is totally wrong. You can say “logically, this was the best thing to do, the best place to minister, the best way to handle this” but your logic could be faulty, and you might not even know. Logic can be infected because we live in a fallen universe and our minds are still a work in progress. Some people only live on the level of logic, but as pastors we have to be far more careful than that. There are people who have committed great sins, and when I have asked them how they ended up there, it seems logical to them. Reason is good but it must bow to the Word, and you must continually renew your mind.

Emotions are great too, but they are also less than perfect. You can feel things that aren’t real only too easily. We must never be emotion led! Now, when people are led by the Spirit, we often use the language of emotion, we say “I feel God is saying”, “I feel led to do this or that”, and that’s fine to say that, but again – we are leaders – we have to consider when I say “I feel good about doing this”, do I mean on an emotional or a spiritual level? Am I being sensual, carnal – this needs you to consider and think and pray. If the feeling comes from the spirit and not your flesh, all is well, but make sure it is.

Let me give you an example. You could wake up in the morning and feel really out of sorts. Your body feels sick and tells your emotions to feel sick as well. At that point, as a born-again Christian, your spirit should led the way and say “listen carefully, I am not moved by what I feel, I know I am healed by the stripes of Jesus”. Then your logic kicks in “well, if I was healed, then I would be healed, so that cannot be true”, so then you need to transcend logic and live by faith – “the Word says I am healed so I am healed” and live from your spirit. That is what I mean when I say “I feel led”, I feel led to follow the Word, to live by faith and listen to the Holy Spirit.

I hope this helps you! Grace and peace!

Just For Pastors 36: You Need Some Discernment!

In my last post, I said pastors need power. It’s true, but you also need some wisdom to use that power. I know many people who have operating in the gifts without wisdom and ended up failing. There are satanic counterfeits of the Spirit of God and His gifts.

The only way to avoid being deceived and getting into a mess is to stay in the Word. We need to be full of the Word and full of the Spirit.

Part of the wisdom we need when it comes to the gifts and power of the Spirit. What happens is we are in a meeting, we are the pastor, and someone is operating in the gifts – one of our elders, a worship leader, a guest speaker – and you are thinking like this – “I don’t know what it is, I cannot say what it is, I cannot define what it is, I don’t have words. I know we must not stand against the Lord’s anointing, I know we shouldn’t judge – but this is not right, this is not God, this is not what should be happening in my church right here, right now, or ever” – that is discernment. It really is at that deep a level, it’s a pastor’s intuition and pastors – listen to me – trust your intuition. I have gone against my intuition several times (and sadly I have gone against my wife’s intuition too) and it has never ended well. If it doesn’t feel right to you, and you are walking with God, you are at peace, and you are not envious or foolish or backslidden, it is absolutely what you feel it is. The Holy Spirit is letting you – the pastor of the church – there is something wrong with this situation and you need to do something about it.

Discernment may be the most important supernatural weapon you have as a pastor do not neglect it.

Just For Pastors 35: You Need Some Power!

Pentecostal Power: Lessons in Spirit ...

Public speaking is undergoing a real resurgeance. People are watching TED Talks, top comedians can pack out the largest venues in the UK faster than Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift! People do enjoy listening to others talk.

But with us the kingdom of God is not just a matter of talk, but a matter of action – and we have to have power – the power of the Spirit when we minister. We should be moving in the gifts of the Spirit. We need to be baptised in the Holy Spirit, flowing in the gifts and seeing supernatural things happen when we minister.

I have just ministered in Indonesia for the first time. They invited me back as soon as I had finished my first session – not because I preached an especially remarkable sermon, although I thought it was rather good, but because several people were healed, then I gave a word of knowledge for someone in the room that was exceptionally accurate to his situation. In the evening service, more people were healed and God gave me another word of knowledge that again was exceptionally accurate and ministered life to someone who desperately needed it.

It’s not just about talking, it’s about power. There has to be power! Acts 1.8 says you shall: “receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you and you shall be witnesses unto me… unto the uttermost part of the earth”. Notice carefully that it says that power makes us witnesses unto Jesus, not witnesses for Jesus.

What’s the difference? If I am a witness for Jesus, I get into the pulpit and I tell you some nice stories about what Jesus did 2000 years ago 3000 miles away and you all nod and clap and we all go home and had a nice service. But as a witness unto Jesus, I do what He did in His name, with the same power He had, the power of the Holy Spirit. You cannot do it without the Holy Spirit and His power. But we need more supernatural in the church. Not spooky, but supernatural.

There were meetings in the past century in the UK where people had words of knowledge, saw great healings, saw great miracles. We need to go back to those days. We need to return to the days of Smith Wigglesworth, the days of the early Pentecostals, the days of George and Stephen Jeffries. We need supernatural meetings.

Now in that environment, some people go weird, some even open themselves up to the demonic. Recently a well known “prophet” has been exposed for using Facebook to find out information about people, in previous years another used a radio piece in their ear, and people go “wow, this has to be God”, and when it isn’t, they back off from the supernatural. But the copies are just copies of what is REAL. There are real gifts of the Spirit, there is real power to the Holy Spirit.

Now listen – we must as pastors have the gifts, but we must NEVER build our lives and ministries on a gift. Kenneth Hagin used to tell his contemporaries “You have all built your ministries on your gifts, but I am building mine on the Word, so I will still be going when you are all gone” – and that turned out to be totally true!

Paul wrote to a church that was having the gifts abused and all sorts of problems because of the carnal use of the gifts, and he didn’t say “Stop it with the gifts until you all grow up”. No, he did not. He said, “Desire eagerly the gifts”. And despite what some fools may say about the gifts for being for yesteryear, we should be desiring them today, in our services this weekend. We should be operating in power! AMEN!

Just For Pastors 34: Don’t be a Copycat Clone

Sons of God should be led by the Spirit of God. You need to spend time in the Word and time praying in the Spirit, praying in tongues, so you can learn how to follow the Spirit of God, not something else.

I have lost count of how many times people have come to me and said “We need to do this, Pastor, in my last church we did this”, or “Mega Church A is doing this and that, we should do this and that”, or “can we sing these songs from Mega Church B”, or “I went to this conference and this happened, you must do this”. I get bought the shirts of the pastors they want me to look like, and the teaching sets of the pastors they want me to sound like! It’s absolutely true.

But I am not a clone, I am me. I have my own spiritual DNA and God has called me to do what I am called to do. Tree of Life Churches should look like Tree of Life and not some other church down the road. I am not going to start this or that because God told someone else to do it that way. I have to hear from God, and if God tells me to do something I will do it.

You cannot just go and start a church, you certainly cannot just go and start a Bible College, you cannot just go and start a ministry. You need something from God that is supernatural. If He does not tell you to do it, you cannot expect Him to help or pay for it. So many pastors are struggling financially because they are not asking God how to do things! There is no excuse for pastoring on a natural level, just doing marketing courses, begging for money, not listening to God, not studying the Scriptures. This is why so much is not working in our country. People actually think doing three years of Bible College is sufficient to run one! It’s ludicrous! You need experience of fivefold ministry to raise up fivefold ministers!

What we do has to be supernatural – and the most important level of spirituality is being shown things to come. You have to have a vision from God and you have to learn how to communicate that vision to people. There are different ways to communicate and different ways to fund raise and different ways to deal with problems – so you have to seek the Lord for your situations and your church and your ministry. You cannot just do what someone else has done and expect results.

We need to be led by the Spirit and we need to operate in the power of the Spirit. I’ll talk more about that next post!

Just For Pastors 33: Watch Out for Fake Pastors In Your Church!

I have had several people tell me over the years that they know more than pastoring than I do, but somehow none of them have ever pastored. We had a so-called prophet come to one of our churches and prophesy over me that God had called him to be my pastor and I should pay him double what I pay myself for him to pray for me daily and tell me what to do. I said if you know that much, go do it – go plant a church.

Guess what he did – guess what they all do – he tried to start a little Bible study in the church, get people to come and gather around him, even asked them to give him money. He wanted to be a teacher, but not a leader, he wanted a group but not responsibliry.

Paul said to the Ephesian elders and pastors that people would turn up in their churches and try and draw away disciples to themselves. So it shouldn’t surprise us when it happens! It’s in the Bible. Even this week, someone who left the church offended over a year ago, was contacting people in our church and trying to persuade them to leave. Why are they still concerned? Because they are immature and foolish. Why haven’t they joined another church? Because they cannot. Why haven’t – if they are so holy and so glorious and so anointed –

People like that need to be removed from the church or repent. Their inability to respect and honour leadership will infect the rest of the church. A small group should be a road into the church, with an elder or leader who is sanctioned and submissive to church leaders. These unofficial, unsanctioned groups are cul-de-sacs – dead ends that have no life and nowhere for people to go, and are being used by a tiny person who is trying to manipulate a ministry through sneakiness rather than stewardship. These are not people you as a pastor can afford to be influencing people in your church.

Selah.

Just For Pastors 32: Feed The Sheep

I want to let you know something – I have in the last 28 years of ministry often preached on the same topics again – faith, love, prayer, all sorts of things. But I have never in the last 15 years preached on the same notes again. God led me to stop doing that. He said – Ben, if you preach on it again, study it again because when you study it again, you will get more revelation on it, and a new dimension of understanding.

I like preaching fresh, I like preaching like a homemade meal, not like a fast food burger. If I am not hunting the Word for fresh information, how can I present it to others.

Pastors, if you are not in the Word, you will become a parrot, preaching other people’s messages, your old messages, and the sermon illustrations will be from other preacher’s lives and from the TV. Nothing wrong with a little of those, but you need a testimony, you need life, you need to study the Word.

Not everyone has to do it exactly like I do it, but if you are preaching something fresh, study it fresh and watch what happens.