#19 - The Trellis and the Vine

This book by Colin Marshall and Tony Payne is quite popular among Christian pastoral circles right now. It has been heavily endorsed by some pretty well known pastors.And I had high hopes for it when I started it. It had some good moments throughout. However, it left me unsatisfied. Possibly my expectations were too high. Possibly the endorsements were too strong..."The ministry mind shift that changes everything" is the subtitle. Everything? Needless to say, I am not changing everything about the way I approach or think about ministry.

Nevertheless, there was much good in the book. The premise is rather straightforward (to me) - Christian ministry is making disciples. It is Gospel ministry. It is evangelism. It is teaching. It is discipling. It is the vine. The trellis is the program that helps the vine grow better. We don't want to spend our time making beautiful trellises and neglecting the vine. And this vine work is the work of every Christian, not just the pastors and/or elders. The first several chapters expound on this.

It's a great metaphor, but would anyone really disagree with this? I would hope that every Bible believing Christian would support making disciples over running church programs. I would hope that every pastor and elder would support growing disciples rather than growing programs. The key to me is how? How do we do that? And more specifically, how do we do that in a church context with multiple ministries sharing multiple people?

I understand this mindset in one context of ministry, say a youth ministry or a small group Bible study. Teaching, discipleship, counseling, training all can take place in that one context very easily and fulfill the mission of making disciples. But what do we do when one person is in a small group Bible study, serves in the youth ministry and children's ministry, and goes to another pastor for counseling? You could have 4 separate leaders or elders or pastors, discipling / counseling / teaching that person with 4 different perspectives, sometimes seeing 4 different aspects of that person's life. How does that work? How should that work? How can that work better?

The authors did concede that ministry can be messy and that their various paradigms of training and disciple making were fairly simple and needed to be adjusted to specific ministry contexts. Granted every church situation is slightly different and it would be nearly impossible for any book to give specific paradigms that fit. But I was hoping that they would at least give a model or several examples of how macro ministry in a multiple elder/pastor church situation would work. I think this is a fairly common situation in Bible teaching churches in America.

I guess I have a passion for the structure of disciple making ministry and for developing a trellis that will foster the vine. What does it look like? How does it expand? How do you adapt it to an already existing vine that is growing in many directions? Unfortunately, my questions went unanswered. The answers that were given were good and biblical - be an example, be relational, develop others to work the vine, etc. But the glaring question for everything seemed to be - how?

Nevertheless, this was a good book. I just wish it would have been better.