The necessity of lay leadership

Recently, I've been thinking of the necessity of lay leadership in the church. For starters, I began listening to a talk on "Mentoring Lay Leaders." The 2nd speaker, John Yates rector of The Falls Church, began by publicly repenting of his low view of lay leadership at the beginning of his ministry. He thought that really strong Christians go into ministry and the rest kind of "serve Jesus on the side." This is really just a pagan gnostic/Platonic picture of life, where the sacred and secular are divided into separate spheres, with ministry being spiritual and of greater importance, and any other work being secular and of lesser importance. Sorry for the run-on sentence.

To serve Jesus, you have to do it 'on the side' instead of actually serving him wherever you are. Fortunately our Reformed tradition has done everything it can to eliminate this faulty distinction, but sometimes people still think this way. This isn't the point of my post, however, so I shan't be touching on it further. Just FYI.

He challenged everyone on the importance of lay leadership. Then someone involved in church planting came to our session meeting on Wed with the intent of getting our elders on board with a presbytery wide vision of planting churches. One of the reasons why he found it so important for elders to become involved is that every great renewal movement of God has been the result of the Spirit moving in God's people. Not specifically clergy.

Getting back to the talk, Yates mentioned that most of the ministries in his church actually began by lay folks seeing a need and rising to leadership to address it. Couple that with someone more capable than I agreeing to lead our summer mission project, and two ladies bible studies starting up-not by pastor recommendations but by folks seeing a need and rising to it-I'm really jazzed up now.