Pastors Learn From One Another

Dan Roels, a Christian Reformed Church (CRC) pastor from Holland, Mich., recalls the night when he and William Quinonez, pastor of a church in Guatemala, needed to rush a woman whose diabetes was out of control to the hospital.

Roels, pastor of Montello Park CRC, was in Guatemala as part of a pastor-exchange program, which its coordinators refer to as a “learning circle.”

The learning circle exchange is a part of Global Impact, a program offered through Christian Reformed World Missions. Its first go-around of pastor exchanges recently finished.

What Roels remembers of that night was how he and Quinoninez  held a vigil, each serving as a quiet presence for the woman being treated for diabetes. They couldn’t go into the emergency room because only one visitor — in this case the woman’s son — was allowed.

Roels says he learned an important lesson that night of what it meant to simply be there with his fellow pastor and wait for word on the woman’s condition.

“It meant being incarnate representatives of God’s presence . . . It meant ministry.”

This and other stories of learning and shared ministry from the learning-circle program are exactly what Mark Charles was hoping for when he helped to start the exchange program, which is formally known as the Global Discipleship Network (GDN).

“The whole point is to pair pastors in peer-to-peer relationships. This is about teaching from the context of doing life together,” said Charles.

His vision for creating a multi-culural learning community among church leaders, said Charles, came out of his attendance several years ago at The World Christian Gathering on Indigenous Peoples conference.

As he worshipped with other conference attendees, he said, he saw the beauty of diversity in the church and the necessity for celebrating it.

Since a different cultural group led worship at the conference each night, “every night was a different look into the vastness of God’s character through the eyes of a different tribe, culture, and language,” he said.

After the conference, Charles further developed a vision for these learning circles as part of his own work to establish relationships with church leaders around the world.

He eventually came up with the idea of learning circles of pastors who meet to teach, mentor, and disciple one another.

Relationships, not books and tests, form the base of their learning, said Charles.

“(I envisioned) a learning environment dependent upon one thing, and one thing only — the development of biblically-based, racially reconciled, diverse yet equal relationships,” said Charles.

Last year all of the pastors in the learning circle met together in Haiti for orientation and to help kick off the exchange program.

These pastors are being asked to bring another pastor into their homes and into their ministries in order to establish one-on-one relationships that cross cultures.

By the end of five years, all of them will have hosted, visited and learned from one another. Pastors from overseas are identified with the help of ministries that work closely with Christian Reformed World Missions.

“These are not guest pastors. The goal is for them to learn as much as possible from the pastor in another culture,” said Charles.

The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship has helped to fund the start-up of the program. But funds are needed to allow the first contingent of pastors to finish the program.

“I love what we are doing and am excited about being involved in something that has the potential to bring so much healing and reconciliation to the Body of Christ,” said Charles.

The first circle has been a Spanish language one with members from Michigan, Florida, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Central America.

Like Dan Roels in Holland, Felix Fernandez, pastor of Newheart CRC Orlando Fla., also brought a lesson home with him from his time with  another pastor — in this instance with Pastor Bernardino Wilson in the Dominican Republic.

It was a Tuesday night and a Bible study was about to start in Wilson’s church. Fernanzez remembers looking at Wilson who seemed non-plussed, even though he would soon have to be leading the group through Scripture.

But then, says Fernandez, he realized why Wilson was so calm.

Wilson wasn’t the one who was going to be teaching that Bible study or any of the three others about to start in the church on that night in the Dominican Republic. 

“He had trained those leaders to take up the work of teaching and training the rest of the members in the church.  And that’s when God taught me:  When the pastor does less, the church can do more.”

For more information on the Global Discipleship Network, call Albert Hamstra, CRWM’s director for Global Impact, at 616-224-0717 or email Mark Charles at:
[email protected].