Church partnerships are good things. It isn’t good for churches to be isolated and it is good for churches to share resources – such as money and people – as well as meaningfully pray for one another. We see church partnerships and associations in the Bible and they seem to be encouraged by Paul.

Not only are they good in principle, but church partnerships are necessary. They stop churches becoming odd and having theological and social foibles that just make them a bit weird. One way we get to see where we might be doing things in a bit of a wonky way is to engage with people from different communities, ethnicities, contexts and cultures. There may be some specific reasons why we do some of the strange things we do (and we might know they’re strange but think the reasons are strong enough and positive enough to do them anyway). But often, it’s no such thing. We just don’t realise we’re being unnecessarily weird or, worse, heading down errant doctrinal paths. We also may not realise what is missing, or rather who is missing, from our churches until we meet people with churches full of folk we’re missing. Church partnership and association is great for helping this. We can get help and support from people in very different contexts to reach all the people in our community.

But they can be necessary for small and poor churches too. Ultimately, little church plants and those of us in areas of high deprivation need church partnerships. We cannot sustain our ministries financially and we need people to come and join us to get stuck into the plentiful harvest fields that we operate in. If you lead a church that is freshly planted and only started with 5 or 6 people, you are clearly going to need money and people pretty sharpish to make anything happen. If you are an established church reaching a council estate or making in-roads with asylum seekers, you are reaching people with among the least means to finance ministry but who have some of the greatest need of financial support from the church. The most helpful thing larger and more affluent churches can do for us is to pray for us, send us money to finance the ministry and send us people to serve. And these are not one-off or short-term needs, but may be for the lifetime of such churches and require long-term investment and partnership from gospel-hearted churches.

But my aim here isn’t to make the case for church partnerships. I’m assuming you think church partnerships are a good thing already. I am just pointing out why they are so important for us. But often what we call a church partnership is actually closer to a link between two ministers. This is both unfortunate and decidedly less helpful.

In an ideal world, I would like my entire church to be involved in our church partnerships. I want our members to know the members of the other church. I want our members to think about how they personally can serve the needs of our partners. I want our people to think about how they can give to the partnership and not just receive from the other church. Most of all, I want some investment from our church members so that they are meaningfully praying for another church and have a vested interest in what happens there. It’s only that sort of vested interest that will get them thinking about how they can serve that way themselves.

But often our church partnerships aren’t like this. They can often be the result of two ministers being friends or meeting at a fraternal or something. For the record, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with partnership beginning like this or being established out of that. It is entirely natural for them to come about that way. But often they don’t really develop beyond that. The friendship might lead to a few invites to preach for one another between the pastors. The church might get the prayer letter and happily pray for whatever is going on in the prayer meeting. But none of the members are actively invested, none ever see the other church, none ever go there if passing or when on holiday, there just isn’t much of a link. And when the church change their partnerships it doesn’t raise more than a shrug and if the pastor moves on and the partnership goes by the wayside, that is pretty much expected.

But if church partnerships are really between churches, things shouldn’t fall apart when the pastor moves on. If certain churches are in real need of ongoing, long-term support – and both churches benefit from the partnership – we shouldn’t want it to just die with the pastor. The church should want to continue the partnership because they are invested in it. This is good for the church, it is good for each partner and it is good for the gospel. It is certainly better for trying to establish the long-term partnerships we want to see. If that is going to happen, we need to find real and tangible ways to encourage the investment of all the church members in the partnership.

At a minimum, that involves meaningfully praying for the partner church regularly and making their prayer needs accessible to the whole church. It may involve highlighting the financial support you are sending to them and why. It may be a matter for the church to think about sending potential workers and even voting on doing so.

But apart from those sort of things, encouraging visits from the membership (not just a preaching visit from the pastor) is good. Seeing the ministry in person is a good thing. Encourage your members to go to your partner church if they are passing for some reason. Encourage them to visit when they’re on holiday. Consider holding partnership prayer meetings – and if you can’t do them in person together, have one of the churches joining in on Zoom (or something) in a hybrid meeting. Consider taking some of your members with you if you are invited to preach rather than just going on your own so they can get to know the other church. There may be a whole host of other ways you can encourage this.

But the point is, we want to try and encourage our churches into partnership. It oughtn’t to just be between two pastors, but a real engagement and involvement of two churches together. This is better for the churches, better for the gospel and has some hope of outlasting the guy who happens to be in post today.