presbytery.

Each month, ten or so pastors meet in and around our city for prayer, studying the Word, denomination business, and since this is South Asia, food.  Every three months, the full group of forty pastors from farther abroad gather.

Until stronger leadership is developed, this Presbytery (meaning group of elders/pastors) is huge, spanning three states and four languages.  In the future it will divide by region and language to facilitate church growth and multiplication in each place.

I always enjoy spending time with these brothers.  I taught from 2 Timothy 1, on the Spirit of “power and love and self-control.”  If you think about it, Timothy’s Ephesus assignment is not unlike the context of these pastors.  Timothy was a young pastor of a young church plant in a city marked by materialism, demonic influence, sorcery, syncretism, rampant idolatry, and violent protection of deities who were as much political and commercial figures as they were religious.  Welcome to South Asia.

And yet, like Timothy’s Ephesus, God is doing “far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Eph 3:20).  One of these planters led people to Christ in six villages in six months.  Most recently a family became Christians and want to start helping him reach their churchless region.  Another planter grew his own church while starting two new works that meet in homes in our city.

Yet another planter pastors a small congregation of twenty-five women and children not far from our home.  The reason he can’t keep men in his fellowship is because he keeps discipling them, giving them a vision for Christ’s kingdom, and sending them to seminary to train to be church planters.  Here’s a staggering statistic – he has one man in training to be a church planter for every five members of his church!

Of course, these are the highlights.  Other pastors plow hard, rocky soil waiting months or years to see a new believer come to faith.  Still others have had to abandon works where persecution is too intense.  God is at work in all of it.  His kingdom is at hand.  And we rejoice.