I'm going to give each of you a peace of paper. I want you to do me a favor, I want you to make a little tent like this and write your name on it and put it in front of you, and that will help me get your names down this week.

I'm going to be teaching you this week on Church Administration. Basically, I'm going to be teaching you about being a pastor. My course is going to have three parts: - The tools of pastoral ministry - The tasks of pastoral ministry - (and if we have time) the traps of pastoral ministry

Start by turning with me to 2 Timothy 2.

  1. Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. 1 Timothy 2:15

I like to build things out of wood. I'm not very good at it, but it is something I enjoy doing as a hobby. I have a workshop at my house and in it I have a bunch of tools.

One thing that is interesting is that if you study history, since probably Noah's ark they have had the same basic woodworking tools: - A saw - An axe - A chisel - A hammer - A plane - A workbench - An auger

If you can master those simple tools and know how to keep them sharp, you can build just about everything you could possibly want to make out of wood. But its not easy to master any of those tools.

The verse we just read called us preachers "workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word." A worker that is dividing something needs tools.

So we are going to talk about the tools of pastoral ministry this morning. Hopefully we can get through four or five of these lectures.

Now, I have a notebook for each of you to follow along in. I wanted to make this for three reasons:

  1. So that you can follow along in class and look up texts and read them.
  2. So that you can have this for your records.
  3. So that, someday, you can teach this stuff later on to your own students.

Let's pray and get started.