182: Leaders: How We Can Raise Them Ourselves

Many churches are experiencing a leadership deficit. There are too few biblical elders, too few deacons, and not as many people who know which spiritual gifts they’ve been given by the Spirit, what they are called to do, or what ministries  the Lord has opened up for them.

Many leadership teams are not in alignment with their pastor in doctrine and practice, nor are they in alignment with each other.

There are many fellowships — normal sized (50-200 regular attenders) — that believe they do not possess the resources to begin strong leadership development and equipping and training of the saints.

That's what this podcast is all about. It's going to help the equipping senior pastor do the work of equipping those whom the Lord is calling into leadership ministry positions. And, he doesn't have to have it all figured out. He can join others who are part of what pastor Donn Fisher of Calvary Chapel Raynham, Massachusetts is talking about in this episode. 

To contact pastor Donn Fisher, you can reach him at ccraynham@gmail.com (it goes straight to him). You can find out more about the school of ministry model in New England by heading over to http://neccsom.com.

There is a transcript of this podcast interview, which may be helpful to you with your notetaking.

Matthew 28:18-20. 

For Poimen Ministries, its staff, ministries, and focus, go to poimenministries.com. To contact Poimen Ministries, email us at strongerpastors@gmail.com. May the Lord revive His work in the midst of these years!

Transcript

SFTP182

Welcome to Strength for Today's Pastor, conversations with current senior pastors and leaders which will strengthen and help you in your pastoral ministry. And now, here's your host, Bill Holdridge of Hooyman Ministries. Welcome to Podcast 182.

Today we have Pastor Donn Fisher of Calvary Chapel, Raynham, Massachusetts, and we're going to hear from Donn about a school of ministry. What it is, why it's important, but specifically, we're going to be talking about an innovative school of ministry that Donn has had a very key role in putting together. 

So excited about having you with us, Donn, welcome and thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Bill. It's definitely a pleasure to be here. Yeah, pleasure to have you.

It was great to be in the Boston area a couple months ago, a few months ago, and connect. The weather is much better today, I'm sure, than it was back then. Yeah, yes.

Forty degrees warmer, Bill, forty degrees warmer. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself, Donn, where you pastor, how you were called into the ministry, and then we'll jump into the school of ministry discussion. Absolutely.

Great. So I'm actually a PK, a pastor's kid. I grew up in Illinois and Massachusetts, and I pastor a Calvary Chapel that is about halfway between Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island.

I've been here this year, will be 26 years as the pastor, two years before that as the youth pastor. I thought I was just going to be a youth pastor. That's kind of my call into ministry, was to work with teens, to work with youth.

I went from being a music teacher to wanting to be a music teacher into that. And while I was studying to be a youth pastor at Calvary Chapel Bible College in Twin Peaks, that's when the Lord changed the call on my life. And I pushed back against it, played the Gideon role, flipped the fleece, and He just kept confirming it.

And then, of course, you were joined at some point in your life by your spouse, who is your friend and helper in many ways, I'm sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.

My wife Elisa and I have been married for 31 years. We have four kids. Our oldest is going to be 30 this year, and our youngest is going to be 20 this year.

That's great. Well, it's an important calling and a unique calling to pastor in New England. I know that from speaking to New England pastors over the years and being at some of the huddles up at Lake Winnipesaukee and that kind of thing.

There you go. You said it right, Bill. You're like a native.

But I know it's a unique calling, and it's not an easy calling. So praise the Lord for enduring and hanging in there and believing the Lord for what He's going to do, not just for you, Donn, and what you've Donne in Rain M, but also for all the other New England pastors that are going to be listening to this. Be encouraged, brothers.

You are in an important field of ministry. Very, very important. Amen.

We thank God for that. Thank you for that, Bill. So, Donn, why is a school of ministry? Why has it become important to you? Tell me about the backstory in terms of what led you into this.

Sure. That's a great question, Bill. So there were some guys, Calvary Chapel pastors here in late 2024, who basically were having a little bit of a conversation about who's up next, right? Who's the next pastor of your Calvary Chapel? Where's your next youth leader coming from? What about the next wave of church planters and worship leaders and Sunday school teachers and diaper changers and, I mean, everything within the church? And, you know, within Calvary Chapel as a whole, we have seen transitions from one, you know, the passing of the baton.

We've seen that go well in some churches, and we've seen churches that have really struggled with that. But definitely something we were feeling here in New England is we needed to be more intentional about it. And so that's what started the conversation about a possible school of ministry.

You said so much right there in that statement, who's next? And one of the things that we love to tell folks, Donn, is that if Jesus doesn't return before your life is over, somebody else is going to be pastoring your church. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So why not get them ready in-house, right? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yep. Yep.

Totally agree with that, Bill. Right. You Don’t want to be in a place where you're gone, and now the church is in a position where they're having to figure it out, and it's something they haven't had to figure out before.

Yeah. And also, another benefit of training someone from within is that we call it an organ reception rather than an organ rejection. Okay.

Jesus is the analogy of the pastor is like the heart and a body. He is the single most important individual, typically, in terms of the influence upon the church body. So will the church body accept the new heart when there's a new pastor? And it's easier for them to accept it typically, normally, when that person comes from within.

That's right. That's right. Absolutely.

And we're seeing that even modeled out here right now. Two of our churches have had a successful transition, but it's taken two or three years. But they've been very intentional about it.

So you use the word intentional. In some ways, that's a scary word for those of us that have been in Calvary Chapel for a while, because the Jesus movement was—it was not intentional. It was in the sense of serving Jesus, loving Him, and sharing about Him everywhere we went, but it wasn't intentional in terms of a plan or a specific way of doing anything.

Talk about that. Why is the word intentional an important word? Yeah, I can see what you mean by that question. So we Don’t want to be intentional to the point where we're leaving the Spirit and what the Lord is doing out of it.

By intentionality, I Don’t mean that I'm going to take somebody, you know, a young man from my church and say, okay, I'm intentionally making you the next pastor of this church. That's the Lord's responsibility. That's the Lord's calling.

But what I do mean is that we are setting up some things—parameters, intentional training, intentional acts of service—so that we can see what the Lord is doing in a person's life in advance of just, you know, throwing them out there to the wolves, so to speak, or to the lions, whichever, you know, and seeing if they sink or swim. There's actually a way to figure out the calling on somebody's life for any position of ministry before they step into that position. So that's what I mean by intentional.

Well, that's a great word. I remember being in a conference years ago that was about church planting within Calvary Chapel specifically, and David Guzik got up and gave a wonderful message, and he was arguing that Paul demonstrated intentionality in Ephesus. Not primarily through the school of Tyrannus, which went on for two years, but in leaving Aquila and Priscilla there and bringing them into that thing.

There was something there, and David was arguing for that, that that showed intentionality. There was effort. And then I think about, you know, if we have deacons in our church—you know, some churches don’t name deacons.

I'm a big fan of naming your deacons, but don’t just throw any Tom, Dick, or Harry up there and call them a deacon. You know, 1 Timothy 3 says that the deacon must first be proved, and then he can use the office of a deacon if he's been found faithful. And the bonus is that he will have great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus.

But there is a training. There is an observing, like you said. There's a watching.

That's right. And there's pouring into and seeing how a person is going to grow. 

Absolutely. And, you know, that sounds like a lot if it's all on the pastor, right? To have to figure all of that out and everything.

So I think that's where a school of ministry can assist with that. Well, what is a school of ministry, Donn? I mean, what is it? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a great question, Bill.

So when we started looking around, you know, I think Calvary Chapel has Donne well through the decades now. Certainly a school of ministry within Calvary Chapel is not unique, right? I think that even Calvary Chapel Bible College began at Costa Mesa as a school of ministry. I may be wrong on that.

But anyway, so there's all kinds of Calvary Chapels that have schools of ministry. So when we started talking and praying about having one here, that was the first thing we did is we started looking at other schools of ministry, ones that have been around for a long time. There's one up at Calvary Chapel of the Finger Lakes where Pastor Bill Gallatin was that's been going for decades now.

So what are they doing? What are they doing well? But we also looked at ones that existed at some point, but no longer existed. And we kind of tried to have conversations about, well, why not? And one of the things we definitely noticed is that most of the schools of ministries within Calvary Chapel are designed for the church that runs them, right? It's to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, right? From Ephesians 4 there within their church. And we just knew here in New England that if we were going to have a school of ministry, it needed to have that focus from Ephesians 4, but with a broader application.

Okay, well talk about the broader application then. I mean, why not a school of ministry just for Calvary Chapel Raynham? Great question. So I think part of that is just the time constraint on the pastors, right? Let's be honest.

It's great if pastors can be full-time, but Calvary Chapel as a movement has plenty of pastors who are bi-vocational, and some pastors who are not only bi-vocational, but they draw nothing at all from their churches. So we needed to keep that in mind, you know, here in New England, that not every pastor is full-time, not every pastor has the time, even the ones who are full-time, are they going to have the time for something like this? And so it became a thing of rather than having a single location for the school of ministry, we decided to use the technology that became so popular during COVID, you know, Zoom meetings and things of that nature, to be able to make every Calvary Chapel in New England a potential campus for the school of ministry. So that means rather than having students congregate in one place in a classroom setting, they get to go to their own churches, and each church kind of becomes its own classroom or its own campus, and then collectively they go on Zoom together.

And so what that looks like on a Thursday night, because that's when classes are, what that looks like on a Thursday night is rather than our teaching pastors seeing a screen with 30 different little pictures on there, like the old Brady Bunch or something, you know, they're just looking at half a dozen. They're looking at Calvary Chapel, you know, in Manchester, New Hampshire. They're looking at Calvary Chapel Raynham, and so on and so forth.

So how many churches are participating and are part of this particular school of ministry? So in our first semester, which just started this past January and ends actually in about 10 days, we have 30 students from six different Calvary Chapels who have taken part in the school of ministry. There’re two semesters per calendar year, but each semester we broke up into three modules. Each module is only seven weeks.

So students go for seven weeks on a Thursday night for two hours. They get two classes during that two hours, seven weeks on, one week off, seven weeks on, one week off, and so on. Two different pastors, two different Calvary Chapel pastors teach those two classes, and they also join by Zoom, which has, you know, so the Zoom and the way that we deliver it is what's unique.

It's not unique that we have a school of ministry. There's those within Calvary Chapel, but the delivery of it is different. And by doing it all via Zoom, it has allowed us to tap into just the wonderful depth and breadth of solid Bible teachers within the Calvary Chapel movement that we have all across the country.

And so we've seen, just in this calendar year, we've had Calvary Chapel teachers teaching the students here in New England from California, Michigan, Arizona, the New England states, New York. We have Texas coming up and so on and so forth. And it helps.

It helps to show, hey, we're part of something bigger, right? It's not only not just about our church. So this is a New England Calvary Chapel school of ministry, but this is also bigger than New England, what the Lord is doing in Calvary Chapel to this day. Wow, that's a great model.

And so how many units are there? How many semesters do you have? So it's a two-year program, two-calendar year program. So by the time students are Donne, they'll have taken 20 classes, and all of those are online, but they'll also have taken 10 seminars. So the classes are on Thursday nights.

The seminars are five Saturdays per calendar year. And what we did with that is we made those in person rather than via Zoom. You know, one of the questions we sometimes ask is, well, why not just let all the students log on from home? We found, we believe, and we found it now to be true, that there's something to be said for kind of gathering together, even if it's just at your church, even if it's just with one other student or five other students.

There's something about being in the room and learning together that beats sitting at home in your living room. Even though you could, you know, wear your pajamas and be online at home, there's just something to be said for gathering together. But with the Saturday seminars, we wanted to get everybody together in person.

And one of the really cool things that happened with the seminars, there's two things. One is that we rotate who hosts it. So any Calvary Chapel in New England can host a Saturday seminar.

They don’t have to have students in the School of Ministry. Their pastor doesn't need to be teaching in the School of Ministry. I'll use the word intentional again, Bill.

We want to be intentional about blessing all of the Calvary Chapels in New England, not just the ones who are somehow participating in the School of Ministry. And so the seminars are in person for all of the students. And in addition to that, we've intentionally chosen topics for the seminars that are appealing not just for School of Ministry students, but to the greater Calvary Chapel congregations as a whole.

So we open them up to the congregations, not just the School of Ministry students. Wow. Well, that's quite a reach.

That's quite a reach. So what about the practicality of observing the folks in ministry and how they're progressing during their two years in the school? How do you do that? Absolutely. Absolutely.

That's a great question because we didn't want it just to be all academic, right? It needs to be practical. That's what makes the School of Ministry different than a Bible college, definitely different than a seminary, you know, is finding that balance of the academic and the practical. And so we built things right into the curriculum.

No student is allowed to or is accepted into the School of Ministry without their pastor also being on board with them being a part of it. One of the requirements, you know, and again, we're not inventing things here. I'll use the word stole.

So we stole things from everyone from Calvary Chapel Bible College to Calvary Chapel University to a church planting school that happens at a Calvary down in Mexico and whatnot. But one of the things for sure I remember back from the Bible college is we had the M199, which was eight hours a week. We needed to serve in some capacity on the campus.

So we built, we just call it M101, Ministry 101. Each student needs to be serving in their home church. Now what's good about it is that a lot of the School of Ministry students are already serving, but how we tweaked it was you need to be serving in your home church at the discretion of your pastor, which means that there may be a time when the pastor says, hey, I know you've been doing youth ministry for the last two years, but we have a lot of youth leaders right now.

We have a bigger need over here. And they've got to go serve in that capacity, you know, because that's what ministry is, right? Ministry is not just serving where you like to serve, where you've kind of found your groove. Sometimes you have to do other things.

So that is one way, we call it part of the pastoral practicum, which is exactly what you just said, is how do pastors monitor their own students in the School of Ministry? So one way is the Ministry 101. Another way is that every module the student needs to be following with Pastor Chuck on the old Chuck tracks. Some of us remember doing it on cassette, some of us on CD, now they're on MP3.

But the students over the two years have to follow along with Pastor Chuck through the Chuck tracks. We don’t have them do all of them. We allow them to select some and then we mandate some.

But at the end of every module, they turn in a very brief, like two-paragraph personal application paper. So it's not, oh man, I loved Pastor Chuck's story when he was in Leviticus chapter 13 about, you know, it's not that. It's how are you taking what you heard and applying it to your life and ministry.

So we do that with the Chuck tracks. And every module the students also choose a book off of a required reading list. There's a list of 30 or so books that the New England Calvary Chapel pastors came up with and students need to pick a book, read it in seven weeks, and again turn in a short two-paragraph personal application paper.

And those do not come to us at the School of Ministry. All of that only goes to their pastor and it allows the pastor to monitor their own student's spiritual growth through the program. That's a great idea.

So the pastors are really buying into this because they're wanting their students that they send to the school or part of the school, they want them to be equipped, obviously, but they're investing in it in the sense of pastoral oversight and pouring into them themselves as well. And we had to find that and we're still working on it. We have to find that place where the School of Ministry doesn't become a burden for the pastors.

It's not meant to give them a bunch more work, right? And so they can kind of pick and choose their own involvement as far as teaching a Thursday night class or a Saturday seminar or whatever the case may be. But definitely monitoring their own students is a big part of it. And now that we've been in it for a semester, we've been able to circle back to the pastors and say, hey, can you share with us what you're getting from the School of Ministry? What are you seeing? Because we want to be able to be encouraged, hopefully, but we also want to know how can we improve, right? What needs to be tweaked? And we've really given a lot of leeway to the pastors themselves.

If they look at the required reading list and they don’t see a book that they want on there, then they can add that for their students. One pastor said, well, I think all the students should need to go to Israel at some time over the two years. Okay, that's cool.

That's not something that at the School of Ministry that we're going to push on every student. But if you want to require the students in your church to do that, then you can make that a requirement. So we're trying to just kind of give a template covering courses, covering seminars, covering personal application, and then the pastors have the room to tweak it.

So as we circled back to the pastors and said, what are you seeing? What are you noticing? How is the School of Ministry helpful to you and how? We've gotten more answers back than we thought, not in the number of answers, but just more different responses than I think we thought. Helpful responses, I hope. Yes, all helpful responses.

I think definitely, I think we could split them into two, maybe three. One is that there are pastors who say, look, we are already noticing an increase in service within our church. Praise the Lord, right? And you hope they're not just doing it because it's required, right? Because serving helps you find your gifting and, hey, I think I have this gift, and well, no, maybe I don’t, right? So that's been one area.

Another area has been discipleship. We definitely have pastors who say, you know what? I have people in my church that I would love to have the time to disciple deeper, and I just don’t. Or sometimes they might have some women in the church who need to be discipled, but they don’t have the older women ready yet to do that.

So that's something that has been a perk for the School of Ministry as well. Well, you bring up the subject of women, so that leads me to another question. Are you including, at this point, women to join the School of Ministry, or is that something later, or what are your thoughts? Yeah, no, we are absolutely—we've Donne that from the beginning.

It's both for men and women, and there's really two reasons for that. There is no promise upon completion of the School of Ministry that we are making any student a pastor, assistant pastor, youth pastor, missionary, or anything else. We're just providing the tools to move people in that direction.

But how that plays out is between them and their own pastor, right? So that's kind of what we're doing with that. So right now, we have about a 50-50 split. We have students between ages 18 and close to 80, and we have about a 50-50 split of men and women.

One of the exciting things that happened in just the fourth month of the School of Ministry is one of the women in the School of Ministry was asked to teach at a women's retreat up in New Hampshire. And she was so excited about it and so like, wow, I don’t think I would have said yes if I didn't have some backing, you know, and some confidence built up with the School of Ministry. I think one of the things that helped, too—and I forgot to mention this as part of the pastoral practicum—one of the things that we do is we call it Biblical Teaching 101.

So once per module, every student needs to be given the opportunity to teach for five to ten minutes—that's it—by their pastor in their home church. We don’t dictate where or what that looks like. You know, it could be to children.

It could be to teenagers. It could be in a staff meeting. It could be at a men's or women's Bible study.

Every time we've Donne it here at our church, it's looked a little bit different. But the point of it is to get them used to teaching the Word of God, even in bite-sized pieces. To get them used to, how do I develop it, right? How do I begin it? That's why we did the Inductive Bible Study as the first seminar, which you were out here to lead for us.

How do I develop a teaching, even if it's just a short devotional? And so on and so forth. So that's another way for pastors to be able to monitor their own students. That's great.

You know, I'm sure it's true with you as well, but my hope is that pastors would allow this idea, school of ministry slash equipping, to get into their blood. I mean, big time, full-on part of their bloodstream. All the nutrients go into every part of the body.

Because I see a lot of pastors, and you mentioned bi-vocational pastors. We have no idea, and most people don’t have any idea, that most pastors in the world are not fully supported financially. Most are bi-vocational.

And so they're supporting themselves. So there's a lot of work to do, but they can still be an equipping pastor. But you just have to learn to say no to a lot of things that you are inclined to want to do, or you feel guilty if you don’t do it.

You know, it's not good that we should use, that leave the Word of God to serve tables. That's what the apostles said. It's just not a good move for the church.

It's not a good move for us. It's not a good move for the people. The best move is that we stay in our lane, and we pray, and we minister the Word of God.

We equip. We do that. I'm hoping that that's going to be a major outcome of this school of ministry movement, which is starting to become a thing.

Yeah, I totally—I hope it does, Bill. I hope it does. I agree with everything you just said.

And I think a healthy school of ministry is not trying to take away from what a pastor does. Right? It's just to come alongside and to make up the difference in some ways in areas where pastors may feel that they're falling short. And it's one of the reasons—I mean, seven weeks to get through the book of Genesis, for example, or the book of John.

Boy, you know, that's hard. So we call them surveys, right? It's a survey of Genesis, a survey of John. And somebody might say, well, we're Calvary Chapel.

How come you're not taking them through those books of the Bible verse by verse? And the answer is because we're not their pastor. The students in the school of ministry, they have a pastor that they're sitting under where they're hearing Genesis verse by verse. They're hearing the gospel of John verse by verse.

They don’t need to get it again in the classroom. They need to get an overall picture of the book. So we're not trying to replace pastors.

We're not saying that Calvary Chapel pastors are not doing a good job and they need to send their people to the school of ministry. We are very serious about coming alongside of the ministries that the Lord is moving in and blessing in within the Calvary Chapel movement and just assisting them. And a pastor can let us know, hey, I want to use the school of ministry for this.

Great. Or another may say, well, I want to use it for a different reason. That's great.

But they're both using the school of ministry. And that was exactly the point of developing it. Donn, I can't tell you how much I appreciate how this has come together.

The Lord has really led you and your team to think through these issues. How can you make it a centralized thing in terms of vision and focus and outcome, but yet decentralize it so that the local pastor is actually involved with his own congregants and his own members that are part of that school? I think it's brilliant. That's right.

What's going on is so great. I commend you for it. I think it's wonderful.

Amen. Amen. Thank you, Bill.

Praise the Lord. Yeah. So let's talk about the end game.

I mean, it's nice to be able to measure things to see if what we're aiming at, we actually hit the target or not. And I know that when the Calvary Chapel Bible College was started years and years ago in Twin Peaks, the goal was a general statement, you know, training young people in the Word of God and that they might be effective living in their Christian life and that kind of thing. But it wasn't beyond that.

That's what it was Donne. And then the CBI campuses have become more and more common in the United States and also internationally. And they changed it.

They made the metric a little more specific, domestically and internationally. So what is the metric or the way you're going to measure, you know, I'm going to use the word success. It's not a bad word.

It's just measuring outcomes. Measuring outcomes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question.

I'm going to cheat a little bit, Bill, and say, you know, we don’t completely know yet. Right. We're one semester into this.

It's been a successful semester. We've got pastors lining up to teach through the spring of 2027 without any repeats from all over the place. So there's definitely, I think maybe part of it is what you said before.

It's the local pastor buying in, so to speak. Right. Looking at this and saying, OK.

But then them observing their students. So I think ideally, if we say, look at where are the next wave of Christian workers coming from, it's going to take us, what, a year, two years, maybe a little bit longer. But we should be seeing people moving through the School of Ministry into some of those very positions that we're talking about.

Right. And so I think that will definitely be a metric for us. It's easier to mark the academic metrics.

Did they turn in their paper? Right. Were they in class? Did they attend the seminar? It's harder to mark the spiritual metrics. So we're really going to rely on the pastors who have students in the School of Ministry.

We'll be in regular communication with them, you know, but we're relying on them to get back to us and say, wow, here's how the School of Ministry is blessing us. Here's what we've seen in the people in our church. That's the best metric, is the spiritual metric.

Not how many students are in the School of Ministry or how many churches are participating, but what is the Lord actively doing in the lives of those people, pushing them into some kind of ministry. OK. There you go.

So that's a very specific metric and an important one. It's a school of ministry. It's a school of service.

Yeah, that's right. So that's what you'd expect with that type of a metric. That's good.

And that's similar to the CBI. The CBI campuses domestically were formed to develop students into staff-capable, staff-ready workers, servants within Calvary Chapel churches. Right.

Which is fantastic. Yeah. It's a fantastic outcome.

Now, internationally, the CBI campuses have a different metric because it's a different world. And that is, there's a great need for churches to be planted. So the metric is, how many churches are being planted? How many are part of a church-planting team to go out and plant in a brand-new area that doesn't have a Bible-teaching, Spirit-filled and Spirit-led church? Right, right.

And we see the School of Ministry being both of those things, right? Yeah, yeah. Christian service in your own church as well as sending out church planters, maybe internationally, but even here in New England. I think one of the things that makes a School of Ministry in general different than a Bible College or CBI is that even with the CBIs, there's a residency requirement at most of them, right? Yes, that's right.

You're moving there, you're living there. You know, here in New England, when we look at the students we have, they're married, they've got kids, they've got full-time jobs. Is somebody in their 30s who's married with two kids that God calls into ministry, they're going to get discouraged and bummed out because where are they going to go? Where are they going to go to get the training? They're going to have to move their entire family, quit their job.

So there's a place for Schools of Ministry, not just here in New England, but all over the place to help fill that void. Yeah, I totally agree with you. You've opened the door to a lot of people to get equipped in a serious way, in a way that they wouldn't have gotten equipped otherwise.

Absolutely, Bill, absolutely. And the way we did it, too, we developed a template, like I said before. But I honestly believe—so I have a friend who's a Calvary Chapel pastor outside of Phoenix, and I've told him, you know, there's several Calvaries in that greater Phoenix area.

This is something that they could do. I could share with them the template. I would even go out there just to be able to go to Arizona again, you know, and just, here's the template, and here's what we did, and here's the movable parts, and here's the parts we suggest aren't movable.

But you could get a group of Calvaries in other locations all across the United States or in regions that could do this kind of a thing, because of the template and because of how it's being delivered. That's what makes it unique, is how it's being delivered. Ah, fantastic.

I'm excited, because I think this is going to spread, definitely going to spread. It's another tool in the tool belt. Yes, absolutely.

It really is. It really is. Equipping the saints for the work of the ministry.

You know, I look at that Ephesians 4 passage, it's of course in Ephesians 4, chapter 4, verses 11 through 16. I look at that passage, and it's clear what the responsibility of the equipper is, you know, to raise up and, you know, and heal broken bones and then give them the tools they need. It's clear.

But what's the responsibility of the people on the other end? What's the responsibility of the congregant? And the responsibility of the congregant, as he or she faces that passage, is simple. Get equipped. Yes.

Yes. Absolutely. The equippers are doing their thing, so I got to do my thing.

I got to get equipped. And if every believer, and this was Paul's goal in Colossians 1, him we preach, warning every man and teaching every man with all wisdom that we may present every man perfect in Christ or complete in Christ, they weren't going to stop until everyone went through the school of ministry or whatever it is, you know what I mean? They got equipped. So the congregant gets equipped, and the pastor-teachers, they equip.

Right. And that middle verse of Ephesians 4 that you were just talking about, Bill, the one that's the most familiar to us in Calvary Chapel about the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ. When I talk to pastors, I kind of divide that initially about the school of ministry.

I just split that verse in half. You know, how can the school of ministry help you to equip the saints for the work of ministry? And how can the school of ministry help with the edifying of the body of Christ with your church? Right? And so they may have people who—and this happened even with inductive Bible study. When we did that seminar out here, we had not had that seminar out here in, I don’t know, a decade, right? And so it wasn't just the school of ministry students tapping into it.

It was pastors going, man, I know other people in my church who would benefit from that. All right, great. Now we're edifying the whole body of Christ.

So we're equipping certain people for works of service, and we're seeking to edify the entire body of Christ. Yeah, and then there's another phrase in that passage, until we all come into the unity of the faith and to the knowledge of the Son of God into a mature man. So what you've also Donne with the school of ministry is you've linked believers from churches all over New England together, like you were saying before.

The word's getting out. There's something that the Lord is doing in these churches called Calvary Chapels, which is our tribe, and we're part of that. And it's so helpful, encourages everybody.

Everybody thinks they're all alone, and they feel all alone until they realize they're not all alone. Right. And that is definitely a way the Lord is using the school of ministry.

And here again, I'll use that word intentional. We said, you know what, whether a Calvary Chapel gets directly involved with the school of ministry or not, we have said to them, look, if you have an event that your church is doing that other Calvaries can tap into, we want to help you promote that. And so that has happened.

It's been happening since the very beginning, since our very first Saturday seminar. We announced several other events that other churches were doing, and it just became, okay, there's a bulk email that goes out, but this was like, you know, a slide about it, right? And you're hearing from the pastor about it. And now we're to the point, Bill, it's pretty cool, where we're doing the same thing with mission trips.

There's a section of our website that's called Upcoming New England Events, or something like that, where we're promoting all of these events. But in addition to that, we've said to churches, hey, do you guys do missions trips? And do you ever have like open slots on your missions trips? That we could put it out to the other Calvary Chapels here in New England and say, hey, this church from New Hampshire, they're going to Kenya in 2027. They've got five open slots.

Anyone else want to go? And it's been cool to be able to do that. And it's just a way, like you said, to bring the churches together. Oh, amazing.

There's so much more we could share, Donn, but I think this has given everyone a taste of what this School of Ministry movement is in New England and what it can be. And I know you're in your inaugural stage, but you're already seeing fruit. You're already observing it in people's lives, which is the most exciting thing in the world to see that growth.

That's great. Absolutely. So what are some resources that you might be able to offer? I know that the School of Ministry has a website, and you told me that they can actually go to that website and learn a lot about what we've just said.

Yeah, absolutely. So that's the main resource for sure, Bill, is the website, which is just every letter for what it is. So it's neccsom.com, that's N-E-C-C-S-O-M dot com, or you can just Google the New England Calvary Chapel School of Ministry.

And that will show you the student schedule. It will explain how we deliver classes, where we do it. I think you can even see the other churches that are involved in it right now.

You'll be able to see bios on who the first and second semester instructors have been. You can see what other events are coming up in New England. I mean, there's just, like you said, everything we've talked about, they'll be able to get added on there.

Okay, great. Now, I asked you before we went live here if this is okay, but you're going to make your email address available to anyone who wants to dig deeper and have personal contact with you. So can you give that email address? Yeah, absolutely.

My personal email is ccraynham@gmail.com. That's CC for Calvary Chapel. Raynham is the town I'm in, @ gmail.com. And that comes right to me. And I love talking about the School of Ministry.

I love talking about what the Lord is doing in and through Calvary Chapels in New England and everywhere else. And so I would be happy to have any conversation that anybody wants to have about School of Ministry or about whatever. Okay, appreciate that.

Donn, I appreciate your openness. It's going to be helpful. 

So we are so thankful to have had Pastor Donn Fisher with us of Calvary Chapel, Raynham, Massachusetts, who is part of and a key part of, really, starting this School of Ministry in New England.

And so thanks for joining us and listening to this podcast. Thank you, Pastor Donn, for taking this time to share with our listeners. And may the Lord be glorified in expanding His work of equipping saints for the work of ministry.

It's really exciting. Amen. Amen.

Thank you, Bill, for everything you're doing with this podcast and assisting us pastors for the glory of the Lord. Oh, yeah. You're welcome.

So all of these things, the website for the School of Ministry, as well as Donn's email address, those will be in the show notes for this podcast. So if you didn't get a chance to write everything down, it'll all be there. Again, thanks for joining us and look forward to our next time together on Strength for Today's Pastor.