Matt Pope mentors pastors from different denominations in Santiago, Chile.
When I hear these complaints – ‘our church can’t find anyone to serve’ or ‘no one has come to faith for a long time’ – where appropriate, I ask the following diagnostic questions:
- How is the pastor doing spiritually? Is he a praying man? (Is he praying each day for the church? Can he pray for more than 10 minutes at a time?!)
- Is he discipling people one-to-one in the church each week? Opening the Bible, applying it, showing them how to pass on what they are learning to others, praying with them etc.?
- Is the pastor actively engaged in evangelism?
If the answer to all of these is ‘NO’ – which is sadly more common than we’d like to believe, both here in Santiago and further afield, no wonder we are not seeing people saved and no wonder the church is not producing leaders who are producing other leaders.
I didn’t come up with these diagnostic questions. God did. More or less, the message of the pastoral epistles is choose the right pastor, a heathy pastor, with a track record of:
- Prayerfulness (1 Timothy 2:1,8)
- Teaching the Bible (Titus 1:9, 2 Timothy 3:2)
- Training up people in their churches who in turn train others (as church members or pastors) (2 Timothy 2:2)
- Evangelism (2 Timothy 4:5)
Do that… and under God watch this space excitedly and expectantly!
My role in Chile and further afield is to help pastors and future pastors do this, or do it better. What does that look like? A lot of coffees with pastors one-to-one or in groups talking, praying, encouraging. More formally, I do this work with Fundación Generacion (FG) and City to City LATAM (CTC). I am on the board for both ministries across Latin America and walk alongside many of the pastors they work with.
My role at FG involves pastoral support and raising funds for ministry training. FG’s focus is training pastors to develop a culture of disciple-making-discipleship in their churches. Because we really believe in the model, once trainees have found a suitable pastor mentor to be apprenticed to, we fund 50% of their salary (and 100% in Cuba). So far, FG is doing this in five Latin America countries, and we’ve just been invited to start in two more this year.
CTC’s aim is to grow city networks that can work together to plant, revitalise and grow healthy churches in cities. Why cities? Over 80% of all people who live in Latin America (at least 560,000,000) live in just 40 cities – that’s crazy, and a crazy opportunity!
And of those 40 cities, 10 currently have active CTC groups of pastors working together. This is what excites me more than anything else in these works: the lack of competition between the pastors and their churches. They are humble and non-territorial. Denominational differences don’t matter.
Their heartbeat is a real joy and desire to do whatever we can, with whoever we can and then watching what God will do as his gospel prayerfully spreads.
Wonderfully, there is a lot of overlap between FG and CTC, people and ministry-wise, and it’s a joy to work together so collaboratively for the sake of His Name. Alongside this busy, people-heavy, colourful ministry, as a family we seek to be good members at our local church, reach out to our neighbours, have fun and enjoy the beautiful yet chaotic city that we live in.
Finally – without God we can’t do anything. We need your prayers and his strength. Please do sign up to our prayer letter if you’d like to support us: