Pathways, not a pipeline
I’ve just returned from holiday, a trip that took us high up into the Atlas mountains. It’s perhaps the second most ‘off the beaten track’ place I’ve ever been, the top spot belonging to a trip through the Kalahari desert in my teens. But I’m closer now to sixty than sixteen, so this recent trip is right up there, and it’s given me a lot of food for thought.
On our first afternoon we set off on foot, hiking from the small town where we were staying with friends into the surrounding hills and villages. We followed a wadi, a dry riverbed, upwards for a while before turning off to climb even higher, making our way along steep dusty paths winding up through what we were told were fields: arid patches of bare mountainside where it was impossible to believe anything could grow. Once the rains come, we were told, those fields will provide desperately needed food, but on this day it all seemed both dead and deserted.
Dropping back down a little from these high altitude ‘fields’, we passed a tiny oasis (a well surrounded by a few olive trees with a solitary donkey tied up nearby), and then rounded a hill to find ourselves on the edge of a village that seemed to tumble down the hillside.
Now we found out why we’d seen no-one on our path so far—there was a wedding going on, and that’s where everyone was! We passed and greeted a group of women who had come from the wedding, and then went on our way along a track to the next village, and then another.
Each village is a small cluster of low, square buildings: a few rooms off a central courtyard, a few recently built, some very ancient and dilapidated. Picturesque in the photos but desperately poor in reality. From time to time we’d pass someone and our friends were greeted warmly; they seemed to know everyone we met, although we still seemed to be miles away from the town where they live. By now it was getting very late and I worried how long we’d have light once the sun had set.
And then suddenly we were back! We’d hiked a long way and felt miles from where we’d started, criss-crossing wadis, climbing and dropping and skirting around villages. But it had all formed a giant loop in the end, and we came around the corner to find ourselves back home. We thought we were beyond the back of beyond, but here we were: back at the house, and drinking tea on the roof a few minutes later.
That hike, and the way it ended, brought to my mind the realities of Christian ministry—not quite Pilgrim’s Progress, but perhaps you get the idea. Ministry is not a neatly tarmaced modern motorway, where we confidently plot out our route and expect to get to the destination predictably with technology that navigates and accurately estimates our arrival time.
It’s much more like a hike that criss-crosses a varied landscape. There are many different starting points and a web of different routes we might follow. The terrain varies over time: sometimes easy but often steep; occasionally hostile yet punctuated with oases of beauty and encouragement. There will be tough climbs and sudden descents and hard yards and breathtaking views. There will be some fellow workers who walk alongside us for long parts of the journey, and others we’ll encounter just briefly but wonderfully. And we don’t necessarily know how far we are from our final destination, though it may be just around the next hill.
A lifetime of ministry will bring unexpected detours, disappointments and debacles, and for most Christian leaders life is pretty unlikely to turn out the way we might have hoped or been given to expect in our 20s.
For the past few years Crosslands has had a catchphrase: “Pathways, not a pipeline”. We adopted it to express our recognition that routes into and through gospel ministry are as varied as the people God calls to himself and the places they find themselves in.
And this perspective brings with it a set of assumptions about what ministry training, or what we sometimes prefer to call ‘formation’, should look like. Today’s church needs a rich ecosystem of training options that meet people at different points along their paths: equipping them without extracting them; forming without formularising.
I was recently quoted in Evangelicals Now as saying this:
“If you look back through the history of the church, we can see that raising, equipping and sustaining church leaders has always been a challenge – and one that has required constant innovation in training for each generation. Today, the ‘pipeline’ model of ministry recruitment and training that worked well for 30–40 years is broken… But if you widen your gaze, there are signs of something different that is working, and it looks more like a network of pathways than a standardised pipeline. Many churches are thinking much more flexibly about how they raise up and train leaders. People with a variety of gifts and backgrounds are participating in a wider range of ministry leadership roles, often bi-vocationally.”
Starting wisely and continuing well in ministry matters much more than getting from A to B quickly. And it’s our privilege at Crosslands to help equip and sustain so many men and women as they navigate through ministry, from first steps into service and leadership to a lifetime of fruitful ministry. Whether you’re wondering where to start, or needing help to prepare for a steeper climb ahead, we’d love to walk alongside you for a while.