Before I surrendered to the call of vocational ministry, I was preparing for a career as an industrial engineer. After high school, I enrolled at the University of Arkansas to study engineering, and I completed an internship at a manufacturing facility that produced approximately 200,000 Craftsman wrenches every day. That’s a lot of wrenches. (I still don’t know where they all went.)
One of the most important concepts in industrial engineering is efficiency. A facility like that depends on countless people and processes working together. Every person has a responsibility, and every part of the operation contributes to the finished product. You can have excellent equipment, quality materials, and talented employees, but if people aren’t fulfilling their responsibilities, the entire operation suffers.
God eventually had a different direction for my life, and He called me into pastoral ministry. But I’ve often thought about how that same principle applies to the local church. Obviously, a church isn’t a factory, and people aren’t machines. Ministry is about people, relationships, and spiritual transformation, not simply productivity. Still, there is an important similarity: every member has a role to play, and the church is healthiest when every member is faithfully fulfilling that role.
In this series, The Six Jobs of a Pastor, we’ve considered the pastor as shepherd, preacher, and leader. Now we come to a responsibility I believe is among the most important, and perhaps one of the most neglected: the pastor as equipper.
Equipping Is Part of the Pastor’s Calling
In Ephesians 4:11–12, Paul explains that Christ has given leaders to His church, including pastors and teachers, “for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” Think about what Paul is saying. The pastor’s responsibility is not simply to perform the ministry of the church. It is to prepare God’s people to participate in it.
We have sometimes developed a model in which the pastor and paid staff do most of the work while everyone else attends, supports, and occasionally volunteers. That isn’t the picture Paul gives us. The work of ministry belongs to the entire body, and Christ has gifted His church with leaders who help believers serve.
This doesn’t mean a pastor stops personally ministering to people. Shepherding, preaching, and leading remain essential. But a pastor who does all the ministry himself, no matter how faithfully he works, is not fully accomplishing what Ephesians 4 describes. One of the greatest contributions a pastor can make is not what he accomplishes personally, but what he equips others to accomplish. If everything in the church depends on the pastor, the church is not functioning as Christ intended.
Doing Ministry or Developing Ministers?
One of the great tensions pastors face is the choice between doing ministry and developing people who can minister. Sometimes it’s simply easier to do something ourselves. We know what needs to happen, we know how we want it done, and we know we can probably accomplish it faster than we can explain it to someone else. I’ve certainly felt that temptation.
But getting something done and preparing someone else to do it are not the same. Delegation assigns a task. Equipping develops a person. If I hand off a responsibility because I don’t have time, I’ve delegated. If I invest in that person, help them understand the purpose behind the work, provide training, and give them room to grow, I’m equipping. The task may get done either way, but the long-term results are very different. One approach focuses on completing today’s work. The other prepares someone for tomorrow’s ministry. Equipping usually costs more time up front, but the investment is worth it.
Every Member Has a Ministry
Something I truly believe and teach as much as I can is that every believer has been uniquely designed by God to serve Him. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul compares the church to a body with many members and many functions. Not everyone is called to preach, lead worship, or teach children. But everyone has a part to play.
I appreciate the SHAPE approach Erik Rees developed in S.H.A.P.E.: Finding and Fulfilling Your Unique Purpose for Life. It encourages us to consider five things about a person:
- Spiritual Gifts: How has God gifted this person to serve?
- Heart: What passions and burdens has God placed within them?
- Abilities: What natural talents and learned skills do they possess?
- Personality: How has God uniquely designed them?
- Experiences: How can their life experiences be used to minister to others?
A pastor (shepherd) who knows his people well enough to help them answer those questions is doing far more than filling volunteer slots. Churches always need people to greet guests, teach classes, and serve in children’s ministry. But equipping goes deeper. It helps people discover how God designed them to contribute to His work, and when they serve in line with that design, they tend to be both fruitful and fulfilled. Serving becomes more than an obligation. It becomes part of their spiritual growth. A healthy church doesn’t simply have people attending its ministries. It has people participating in its mission.
Equipping Requires Investment
I grew in my understanding of equipping during my years as a youth pastor in Orlando, Florida. From early in that ministry, I wanted to develop a student-led student ministry. I didn’t want teenagers simply showing up each week to take part in something adults had prepared for them. I wanted them to see that God could use them to minister to their peers.
That didn’t happen overnight. It took time, training, encouragement, and a willingness to give students real opportunities. And yes, sometimes it got messy. But by our second or third year, the students were facilitating nearly our entire midweek outreach service. They greeted guests, hosted the service, ran sound and lighting, followed up with visitors, led worship, and often even preached. They weren’t just attending youth group. They were doing ministry, and as they served, they grew. Some discovered abilities they didn’t know they had. Others gained confidence in areas where they had felt uncomfortable. Not everything was done perfectly, but perfection wasn’t the goal.
Some of my greatest joys in ministry have come from watching people I invested in continue serving the Lord years later. In all three churches where I’ve served for significant periods, as youth pastor or lead pastor, there are people now serving in full-time ministry. That is incredibly encouraging. But I don’t want to measure equipping only by how many enter vocational ministry. The person who faithfully serves Christ as a teacher, business owner, parent, or volunteer is no less important to the body of Christ.
Paul understood the value of this investment. In 2 Timothy 2:2, he told Timothy to entrust what he had learned to faithful people who would be able to teach others also. Paul invested in Timothy, Timothy invested in others, and those people taught still more. That is how ministry multiplies.
Equipping Means Letting Go
One of the greatest obstacles to equipping is control. Pastors often have strong opinions about how things should be done, and we struggle to release responsibility because someone else may not do the job as well as we would. Sometimes they won’t, at least not at first. But how will people develop if we never give them the opportunity?
Equipping means providing clear expectations, appropriate training, and ongoing encouragement, while accepting that people will occasionally make mistakes. It would have been much easier in Orlando to have adults handle every part of our youth services. They might have run more smoothly, with fewer mistakes. But our students would have missed the chance to discover and develop their gifts. Sometimes a pastor’s desire for excellence can quietly become an obstacle to someone else’s growth.
That doesn’t mean we abandon standards or accountability. It means recognizing that developing people is itself a ministry objective. And sometimes someone we’ve equipped will eventually do something better than we ever could. That should bring us joy, not insecurity. Our goal isn’t to make ourselves indispensable. It’s to prepare others to faithfully serve Christ.
When Every Part Does Its Share
Paul concludes this section of Ephesians by describing a healthy, growing church. The body grows as it is joined together, “according to the effective working by which every part does its share” (Ephesians 4:16, NKJV). I love that phrase: every part does its share. Not just the pastor, not just the staff, and not just the handful of faithful volunteers who seem to carry every responsibility. Every part.
Notice the result. Paul isn’t describing a church that merely accomplishes more tasks or operates more efficiently. He’s describing a church growing toward spiritual maturity, unity, and Christlikeness. That is the ultimate purpose of equipping. The goal isn’t more people doing more things. It’s helping God’s people grow as disciples of Jesus through meaningful participation in His work.
That brings me back to those 200,000 wrenches. A manufacturing facility functions well only when its people work together, each fulfilling a responsibility. The church is infinitely more important than a factory, and its work has eternal significance. But the principle holds. God has designed His church so that every member has a meaningful contribution to make, and He has entrusted pastors with helping prepare them to make it.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply, How much ministry am I accomplishing? Maybe the better question is, How many people am I helping prepare for ministry? The pastor’s responsibility is not to do all the work of ministry. It is to equip God’s people so the entire body can grow and serve together. That is the responsibility of the pastor as equipper, and it is worthy of our very best.As pastors help believers grow and serve, they must also stay alert to the dangers that threaten the church. In the next article, we’ll examine the fifth job of a pastor: Guardian.
Click here to read The Six Jobs of a Pastor, Part 1: One Calling. Many Responsibilities.
Click here to read The Six Jobs of a Pastor, Part 2: Shepherd
Click here to read The Six Jobs of a Pastor, Part 3: Preacher
Click here to read The Six Jobs of a Pastor, Part 4: Leader
Click here to read The Six Jobs of a Pastor, Part 5: Equipper
Click here to read The Six Jobs of a Pastor, Part 6:
Click here to read The Six Jobs of a Pastor, Part 7:
Click here to read The Six Jobs of a Pastor, Part 8:
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