The Official Site of Andy Boucher

A couple of weeks ago at our church’s prayer meeting, the Lord led me to Jeremiah 6:16:

Thus says the Lord:

“Stand by the roads, and look,

     And ask for the ancient paths,

Where the good way is; and walk in it,

    And find rest for your souls.

             But they said, ‘we will not walk in it.’”

As I’ve thought through this verse, I thought about a lot of the conversations I’ve had in recent years about church planting and leadership. I love talking about the church and what a new church could look like. Yet, I find that many times, our efforts to repaint the church and reframe Christianity are trying to come up with new things that will catch the attention of the unsaved masses and disgruntled Christians. However, as each new church plant goes out, these new churches need to be more than vision and personality. They need to be more in order to insure that their churches grow and mature and put down deep roots and grow strong branches.

For a church to have depth and breadth of impact and longevity of ministry there needs to be a difference more than one man/one personality driven structure of leadership. I believe that the personality and the vision and the passion and the Scriptural basis and the guidance and the decisions of the church need to be deeper and broader than and need to rest on more than just several men and their wives. This is a problem that so many churches in America and the western model of Christianity have employed for millennia and a model that is troubled in its results because of its lack of biblical precedence.

I am convinced that in order for any new church to be more than a flash in the pan and a quickly approaching memory in the spiritual history of a city or community, that the leadership of the church needs to revisit the Scriptures asking the question, how do we structure the leadership of this church that God has called us to plant and how to we structure it according to the Scriptures—not according to the traditions and wisdom of man.

I think that as we seek to minister to our communities—whether with new churches or old that we need to find the old paths and the ways of the ancients and follow them. I believe that the best and most obvious, but often overlooked ancient path is that of the Scriptures. These next several blogs are things I’ve recently rediscovered in the Scriptures or that have been refreshed in my mind.