Watching Ben Pfahlert
I am currently reviewing hours and hours of material recorded by Col Marshall interviewing leaders who have been involved in training apprentices in ministry. There is some marvellous pragmatic stuff from Ben Pfahlert, current national director of the Ministry Training Strategy (MTS). He says that it is actually efficient to add two years to your training for ministry before going on to enter theological college. It may look like a waste of time to spend six years in training (instead of four) before you even hit your first long-term paid ministry role, but Ben's point is that many pastors drop out of ministry over the years, and a good number of them (in his observation) dropped out because they didn't really know what it was going to be like before they started the long process of training for it. A two-year MTS-style apprenticeship will give you a pretty solid idea of what it will be like. I also appreciated what he said was the big lesson he learned as a ministry apprentice: that it's God job to fill the ministry holes—whether Bible study leaders or others—and so the best response is not to panic but to pray.
The material on these recordings is pure gold. There's wonderful practical and theological thinking from Tara Thornley, Joshua Ng, Phillip Jensen and a heap of others (I'm in there too). Col Marshall is also one of the best interviewers I have ever heard. The mountain of material here will certainly repay the efforts of trainee and trainers in watching them.
I have the job of ensuring that this material ends up well-indexed and well-edited. We hope to make it accessible, as well as link it to the MTS training manual I'm working on with Col Marshall. But the process is going to take a while. I believe that, by the time we've finished working on this resource, we're going to have something that will be of extraordinary benefit for our generation of gospel workers.
I also hope that Col will keep interviewing and adding to what we have.