James Hoey has a vision for Melbourne. “We’ve got a 5 million person city with many empty churches and empty parishes that we just need more people to proclaim the gospel,” he tells The Other Cheek. So he’s taking a practical step – rather than run a church, the young pastor is running a Melbourne branch of MTS – the Ministry Training Strategy – that recruits apprentices to get practical experience of ministry.
For many that’s the first step towards a vocation, a sojourn at theological college and into leading a church. Hoey is MTS’s Victorian Partnership Developer, asking churches to take on apprentices and apprentices to spend a coiuple of years working at that church. He says he’s seeing the fruit of relationships formed before Covid. There’s eight apprentices at Victorian churches right now.
Hoe has high hopes for Melbourne “My hope is to see denominations not struggling to fill their positions in their churches, but actually going, we have too many people wanting to put their hand up for it and to be an exporter of gospel workers. I feel like in Melbourne, we’ve been an importer of gospel workers.”
“People high up in different denominations have chatted to me about, ‘we are going to be low on leaders.’ “What can we do about that?’ ‘Where do we get people from?’
“So I get calls and chats about, ‘Do you have an apprentice for me?’ To which I kind of go, ‘no, we’re trying to help you guys raise them up.” We don’t really have a pool of them that we kind of dish out. But there have been lots of conversations about church pastors now realizing, ‘Oh, I’m towards the end of my career. I’m getting to retirement age and there’s no likely successor.’
Hoey gives an example. “One of the Chinese churches I’ve been working with – the pastor is probably close to his sixties, if not already in his sixties. He said that he wishes that he would’ve got on to training people into gospel ministry earlier. Because he’s realizing [theres a question of] ‘now where are we going to get that Chinese pastor?’ or ‘where are we going to get that new English pastor – that they have been advertising for for more than six months.. So he’s resolved ‘Well, let’s start training people now.’ So he’s training someone in the English congregation and his hope is to have someone in the Chinese congregation soon too.”
Hoey is adamant. There is no shortage of jobs. there’;s a shortage ogf people, and he thinks that is not a Melbourne thing. “There is many people who need to know about Jesus, and there’s many empty churches, parishes, and that sort of stuff. So there is not a shortage of jobs. I think there’s a shortage of gospel workers and maybe a shortage of courage, and we need more church plants.”
Something that might be a Melbourne oissue however it the city’s reputaion as the capital of Austrlia’s most progressive state. But Hoey does not agree, when The Other Cheek asks that. “I think that’s actually given us a bit of a resolve,” he says. “Sometimes it’s helpful to know who your enemy is, and when we go, okay, that’s our enemy, the world’s against us, and let’s press on and proclaim the good news of Jesus. I don’t sense that there is a fear of, ‘Oh, if I become a gospel worker or a preacher and someone tapes my sermon and then this will happen.’ I haven’t really sensed that. If anything, it’s the lockdowns that have shown us how much lack of hope there is in the gospel that this world preaches. So I think Christians have really thought more about how they might use their lives for the glory of God.”
There’s no stereotpical apprentice. MTS is not just looking for Uni grads, ans people much older than a Uni graduate are welcome. He tells The Other Cheek something new – MTS has formed a link to Vocational Bible College in a stream for blue collar workers. That’s happening with the more established Sydney base of MTS. But Hoey wants to catch up.
And one final surprise for the Other Cheek. Hoeys said that Melbourne had a period of more femal apprentices than males – and when we spoke he was interviewing one the next Sunday.
So what should churches do to get apprentices? “We help the pastors look for people in their congregation. We run a program called Six Steps to Ministry Apprenticeships… If possible, putting aside money for it, a program to give opportunities for people to lead, invest into them, grow them, and see what rises to the top and where people’s get enthused by that.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
“You kind of see that Toby’s really worth watching, or Clara there, she’s really shown an interest in this maybe, and she’s got a bit of spare time. Maybe we encourage her to do more stuff at church.” And MTS;’s recruiting conferences can play a part.
Image credit: pxfuel