4 Steps To Start Moving From Teaching A Crowd To Equipping The Saints

Teaching requires two things: a competent instructor and receptive students. Equipping and discipling require much more.

So, my last blog post stirred up a lot more response than I expected.

In The Biggest Mistake Teaching Pastors Tend to Make – And How To Correct It, I encouraged pastors to move from being a teaching pastor to an equipping pastor, based on the Pastoral Prime Mandate of Ephesians 4:11-12.

But what I didn’t do, as pointed out by several readers, was give any ideas of how to do that – which was simply due to the limitations of time and space. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a short blog post.

To remedy that, here are a handful of previous posts that give you a few “how to’s”, (which I have also added to the end of the previous post).

• The Best Way To Avoid Pastor Burnout? Equip The Saints
• Mentoring Is Better than Curriculum: Seven Steps to Better Discipleship
• Five Simple Steps to Mentor New Believers (Without Overworking the Pastor)

And now, in today’s post I’ll lay out a simple (you might say simplistic – and you’d be right) breakdown of four essential elements we must do to move from being a teaching pastor to an equipping pastor.

This list is not exhaustive. That can’t be done in a single article, or even a single book, for that matter. But they can serve as a starting line for those who want to move beyond teaching into discipling. Read More