📖 Pastoral Ministries — Unit 7: Discipleship and Equipping the Saints

Orientation

The faithful pastor will eventually leave his church. He will retire, move, fall sick, or die. The question is not whether he will leave, but what he will leave behind. A pastor who only preached great sermons leaves a congregation that misses his voice. A pastor who built a strong administration leaves a church that misses his organization. But a pastor who discipled — who poured his life into a handful of growing believers, who raised up teachers and deacons and elders and young men called to the ministry — leaves a church that is stronger after he is gone than it was while he was there.

This unit examines the pastor's teaching ministry beyond the pulpit. We will look at the biblical mandate of disciple-making, the Pauline pattern of Paul and Timothy, the levels at which a pastor teaches, the long view of generations, and the pastor's own continued growth as a learner.

I. The Pastor as Teacher

Paul's list of the gifts Christ gave the church in Ephesians 4:11 contains a phrase that often gets overlooked: "And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers." Notice that pastor and teacher are joined under one article in the Greek. Many scholars believe Paul is describing one combined office — the pastor-teacher. The man who shepherds is also the man who teaches. You cannot truly do one without the other.

The purpose of this gift, Paul says in the next verse, is "for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ" (Ephesians 4:12). The pastor's job is not to do all the ministry himself. His job is to equip the saints to do the ministry. A pastor who runs himself ragged trying to do everything has misread his job description. The pastor is a coach, not a one-man team. He teaches, trains, models, sends, and sends again. The work of the church is supposed to be done by the saints. The pastor's job is to equip them to do it.

I served as a seminary professor for about eleven years. That season taught me something I had only partly learned in pastoral ministry: teaching done well multiplies. A good lecture does not just inform a class — it shapes a future pastor, who will shape a congregation, which will shape a community. I have watched students from my classroom go out to plant churches, lead missions, write books, and teach the next generation of students. The teacher who teaches faithfully is not pouring his life into a single audience. He is pouring it into every audience that those students will ever stand before. That same multiplication is available to the pastor in his local church, if he will see his work as teaching ministry rather than as performance.

II. The Discipleship Mandate

The Great Commission is not a call to evangelism alone. It is a call to disciple-making. "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:19–20). Notice the verbs. Make disciples. Baptize. Teach. The Great Commission has three movements, and the third — teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you — is where most churches stop short.

Evangelism brings a person to Christ. Baptism marks the public profession of that faith. But discipleship is what happens for the next forty years. It is the slow, patient, week-after-week work of forming a believer into a mature follower of Jesus Christ. The pastor who only evangelizes leaves spiritual infants behind. The pastor who disciples leaves men and women who can stand on their own two feet, hold their own families, lead in their own contexts, and disciple the next generation themselves.

III. The Pauline Pattern

The clearest model of disciple-making in the New Testament is the relationship between Paul and Timothy. Paul did not just preach to Timothy. He took Timothy with him on his missionary journeys. He let Timothy watch him handle conflict. He let Timothy see him pray. He let Timothy fail, and he picked Timothy up. He wrote letters to Timothy when they were apart. He worried about Timothy's health. He treated Timothy as a son.

The single sentence in 2 Timothy 2:2 has shaped more disciple-making ministries than perhaps any other verse in the Bible: "And the things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also." Read that carefully. Four generations are present in one verse. Paul is the first generation. Timothy is the second. The faithful men are the third. The others Timothy's disciples will teach are the fourth. The pastor who lives by this verse is not just trying to grow his church. He is trying to set in motion a multiplication that will outlive him by a hundred years.

The Paul-Timothy relationship had four elements that every modern pastor can practice. Time together. Paul and Timothy traveled together for years. Shared ministry. Timothy was not a spectator; he was given assignments. Honest correction. Paul's letters are not flattery. "Be watchful in all things," he writes Timothy. "Endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry" (2 Timothy 4:5). And finally, spiritual succession. Paul saw Timothy not as an assistant but as the man who would carry the gospel after Paul was gone.

IV. Multi-Level Teaching

The pastor teaches at many levels at once. Each level is essential, and each requires a different posture.

The pulpit is one level. The pastor preaches to the gathered congregation. We have already devoted an entire unit of this course to that work. But the pulpit alone cannot disciple a person.

The Bible study or Sunday school class is another level. Here the pastor teaches a smaller group, where there is room for questions and discussion. The Sunday school class is one of the most underestimated discipleship tools in the modern church. Generations of believers were grounded in their faith through faithful Sunday school teachers — many of them not pastors at all, but laypeople who had themselves been taught well.

The small group in a home is another level. Here a half-dozen or a dozen believers gather for prayer, Scripture, and life-on-life sharing. The pastor cannot lead all the small groups in his church, and he should not try. But he should be in one — both to model what a small group looks like and to disciple the small-group leaders.

The one-on-one conversation is the deepest level. Coffee with a young man wrestling with a call to ministry. Lunch with a deacon facing a hard decision at home. A long walk with a woman whose marriage is fraying. The Bible study guide on the table, the Bible open between you, prayer at the end. This is where pastors are made. This is where deacons are formed. This is where future missionaries are sent.

A pastor must be deliberate about all four levels. The temptation is to live only in the pulpit. The temptation is real because the pulpit is visible, measurable, and praised. But the pastor whose teaching ministry is only the pulpit produces hearers who have never been disciples.

V. Raising Up Leaders

Every congregation has, somewhere in it, the next generation of its leaders. The pastor's job is to find them and form them.

The Bible has clear qualifications for the men who serve in the offices of pastor, deacon, and elder (1 Timothy 3; Titus 1). The faithful pastor uses these qualifications not as a checklist for hiring but as a curriculum for forming. He looks at his congregation and asks: Who could become this kind of man? What would it take? Then he begins the slow, patient work of teaching, modeling, correcting, encouraging, and sending.

Some of the most fruitful disciple-making I have ever seen happened in a place no one expected. I worked in a Louisiana prison for many years. One of the inmates who became a believer there was a man named Arthur. At one time he had been considered an outlaw at Angola — what some have called the bloodiest prison in America — and he once told me that he had even thought about throwing himself over a wall to end his life. But Arthur came to Christ inside those walls. The transformation was complete. He poured himself into ministry to other inmates, and he did it with a humility I have rarely seen in any pastor outside the prison. I used to tell people he was the greatest pastor I had ever met. When Arthur was eventually released, he kept right on serving. Not long ago he called me to tell me that he had become the head chaplain at Parchman Prison in Mississippi, the largest prison in the state. The Lord made that man into a leader of leaders.

That is what discipleship can do. The pastor who looks past surface appearances and sees what God can build out of an ordinary man, or out of a broken man, will end his ministry surrounded by leaders who never would have stood up if he had not invested in them.

VI. The Long View — Generations

A pastor must learn to think in generations. The young man you disciple this year will, in twenty years, be discipling young men who are not yet born. The young woman you teach now to study her Bible will, by the time you are old, be teaching her grandchildren the same way. The seminarian you mentor will, in a faraway city, build a congregation you will never visit. The pastor who only thinks one Sunday at a time will burn out by his fifth year. The pastor who thinks in generations will keep going for forty.

This long view changes how the pastor handles the slow growth of his disciples. He does not give up on the man who is still wrestling with the same sin three years later, because he understands that sanctification is a long road. He does not write off the deacon who is still rough around the edges, because he remembers that he himself was rougher at that age. He stays patient. He stays present. He keeps teaching, week after week, year after year, knowing that the harvest is not always in his lifetime.

Paul never met most of the people whose lives his ministry would touch. Neither will the pastor reading this. The pastor's job is not to see the harvest. The pastor's job is to plant, water, and trust the Lord of the harvest to do what only He can do. "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase" (1 Corinthians 3:6).

VII. The Pastor's Own Continued Learning

A pastor cannot give what he does not have. The teacher who has stopped learning is a teacher with nothing fresh to teach. The pastor who finished his last serious book the year he graduated from seminary will, by his fifteenth year of ministry, be repeating himself. His sermons will sound the same. His counseling will rehearse the same advice. His teaching will go shallow. His own soul will dry up.

The faithful pastor reads. He studies. He attends conferences when he can, sits under preachers better than himself, learns from theologians ahead of him, and is willing to be a student again at fifty as easily as he was at twenty-five. There is a kind of pride that thinks a pastor has nothing more to learn. That pride kills ministries.

I have lived enough years now to know this from the inside. I served in pastoral ministry. I served as a prison chaplain and warden. I served as a seminary professor for about eleven years. I now serve in another season of teaching at Chapala Theological Seminary. Every one of those seasons taught me things the previous seasons had not. The Lord is still teaching me. He will be teaching me until I see Him face to face.

Let me give you a small picture of how this works in practice. In my counseling classes I have been incorporating the methodology of John Drakeford, who taught for many years at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Drakeford himself studied under O. Hobart Mowrer, the psychologist whose work on integrity, confession, and personal responsibility shaped a whole generation of pastoral counselors. Trace the line out loud: Mowrer taught Drakeford. Drakeford taught me. I am now teaching the next generation of pastors. That is exactly the chain Paul described to Timothy — the things you have heard from me, commit to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. Four generations of teaching, woven into one classroom on the shores of Lake Chapala. The pastor who keeps learning keeps teaching with freshness. And the church that is taught with freshness keeps growing too.

Closing

The pastor's teaching ministry is the slowest of all his ministries. The pulpit gives him a thirty-minute response from the congregation every Sunday. The wedding gives him a single afternoon. The funeral gives him a single morning. But discipleship gives him decades. Decades to invest. Decades to wait. Decades to watch a young believer grow into a strong leader.

It is also the most lasting of all his ministries. When the pastor is gone, the sermons are forgotten and the wedding photographs fade and the funeral programs end up in a drawer. But the disciples remain. They are still teaching their families. They are still leading their churches. They are still raising up the next generation. The faithful pastor's voice does not stop when his pulpit ministry ends. It keeps speaking through every man and woman he ever discipled, and through every man and woman they go on to disciple after him.

"And the things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also" (2 Timothy 2:2). May every pastor reading this take that verse to heart, find his Timothys, pour his life into them, and trust the Lord to multiply what he could never multiply on his own.

— Dr. Wayne Cook
Chapala Theological Seminary

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