Barnabas File

As part of the requirement for graduation, the five students in Central Seminary’s 2014 Women's Leadership Cohort in Nashville must complete a Capstone project.   Three of the students are nurses, one works in the health care field, and the other is an educator.   Of the five projects, three consider opportunities for the church to minister to older adults.   (The others address mental health education and breast cancer awareness in congregational settings.) Churches often emphasize ministries with youth, young adults, and families as an investment in the future, but older adults contribute to church health and provide significant opportunities for meaningful ministry. One of the students cited a typology of older adults used by Walter Schoedel in an article in the Concordia Journal . He describes three groups of older adults based on their independence, interests, and matches them with ministry opportunities. The Go-Go's are independent, ac...

Former TCBF Coordinators Ircel Harrison and Terry Maples  with  present Coordinator Rick Bennett (right) If you are like me, most days you receive one or more appeals to fund some organization. Usually we know little or nothing about those organizations.   Let me share a request today for one that is important to me personally, one you probably know something about and whose mission may impact you and your church. Recent actions of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Governing Board related to hiring have been disappointing to many of us.  The Hiring Policy itself is a very positive step, but the implementation plan adopted is discriminatory.  This has harmed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship movement in many ways.  Some conservative churches and organizations who reject the openness of the Hiring Policy will no longer support the Fellowship, while progressive Baptists and churches who love and embrace all people feel that their...

When we consider New Testament scriptures relating to the work of the church, we usually interpret the terms applied to leadership as specific offices when we should actually think of them as functions.   For example, consider Ephesians 4:11-12 in The Message translation: “He handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor-teacher to train Christ’s followers in skilled servant work, working within Christ’s body, the church, until we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ. ” What we interpret as offices are really gifts that have a function in the Body of Christ to develop or equip mature believers.  These various gifts embody some of the skills we use in coaching, walking beside people as they discover, define, and pursue what God has in store for them. We are seeing these coaching skills b...