At Oldham Bethel Church, our elders’ meetings are broken into two halves. In broad terms, the first half focuses on people while the second half focuses on practicalities. So we think through what might be affecting the people – and if there are things we might need to do for them or in response to whatever is happening – and then we think about broader church direction matters and pragmatic or programmatic concerns.
When it comes to thinking about “our people”, we’re immediately faced with a question: who exactly are the people we’re supposed to think about? There is a question about who “our people” actually are and then a follow up question about whether we need an eye out for anybody who isn’t “our people”. We have come to the conclusion that there are four groups of people we want to think about every week.
Church members
Our primary calling is to shepherd the flock of God given to our care. As we judge it, that is our church members. These are the people who occupy our primary focus. They belong to the church, submit to the authority of the elders and, therefore, have every right to expect some actual oversight, care and concern. When we talk about “our people” these are really the people we mean – those who are in membership of the church.
So, the bulk our our people-thinking centres on these people. We want to serve our members well. We want to care for their needs. We are called specifically to watch out for their souls. Every week, we want to think about the needs of our members and care well for them.
Regular non-members
As those who haven’t joined the church, there can’t reasonably be any expectation of specific care and concern from the church. These are people who have not submitted to the authority of the elders nor to the oversight and care of the church. There is no ability to enact meaningful church discipline and there is a significant difference between them and church members. Nevertheless, it is important for us to have some eye on this group of people.
We don’t really want anybody to stay in the position of ‘regular non-member’. We either want people to join the church, find another church in which they feel more comfortable (for whatever reason) or bring the person to the point of being a believer. We don’t want a large group of regularly attending non-members. We, therefore, need to think about this group (which exist on some level in almost every church) in order to help them move towards membership, to another church where they can settle or towards the Lord Jesus altogether if they don’t yet know him at all.
New faces
On top of the regular non-members, there are those new faces and visitors that you don’t see every week. On one level, there is no need to keep an eye on such people. Of course, we want to welcome them. But if we know they aren’t going to be there the following week because they were just visiting, there isn’t really any follow up to do.
But we keep track of new faces because there tends to be a pipeline to church membership. A pipeline, it bears saying, that always starts out as a new face. So, we want to make sure we are keeping track of visitors and new people because one or two visits may just turn into regular attendance and regular attendance is something we want to begin moving towards membership (as appropriate). So, we find it is helpful to keep track of new faces and visitors.
On top of that, just the very act of keeping track of anybody new puts the onus on us to actually welcome them when they come. We know it’s important to welcome people and keeping track in our elders meetings of new people who have come helps us to keep an eye out for visitors and make sure we are actually welcoming them.
Elders
The final group of people we look out for are the elders themselves. Who, if not us, will pastor the pastor? Who, if not us, will watch out for the elders? That isn’t to say nobody in the church will care and nobody will pray for us. We are sure that they do. But as elders, with oversight of the whole church, we also want to watch out for each other.
First, we want to make sure that we are continuing to walk with the Lord. We want to help each other to walk faithfully and ensure that we are not disqualifying ourselves and, worse, leading the church astray by our lifestyle and teaching. But second, we want to care for each other. We are more likely to keep pressing on if we are actually bearing each other up in prayer and taking an interest (and helping where we are able) with the actual things that are concerning us, even if they do sometimes feel a bit like minutiae. So, once we have thought about our members’ needs, then the regular non-members we want to move towards membership, and we think about the new faces and visitors we have seen, we spend some time asking each other what we need prayer for.