BUILDING A CHURCH
What they did not teach you in seminary
By Stanley Jebb
309 pages. £9.73 (Amazon)
ISBN 978 1 541 052 741
After over 40 years in pastoral ministry, Stanley Jebb has sought to offer some of the wisdom he has gained along the way for the benefit of the wider church.
After an opening section on what it means to build a church, why some good preachers fail, and how this begins to work out in practice, the majority of the book is given over to ‘tools for building’ – an alphabetically arranged collection of thoughts and experiences on a very wide range of issues from administration to intercession, children’s talks to early rising, infant dedication to purposeful pastoral visitation.
Thoughtful ideas
Stanley Jebb clearly has a lot of thoughtful ideas and wisdom to offer in all kinds of practical areas of church life, and he is prepared to helpfully challenge ‘the way things are done’ in many conservative Free Churches, to make us think again. For that, this book is very useful. It does not attempt to be comprehensive, but rather is a series of observations that, it seems to the author, are not usually covered in the training that seeks to equip men for ministry.
It does also feel rather patchy, however, and perhaps reflects the author’s particular concerns more than the relative importance of the issues themselves – church discipline is dealt with in just over a page, whereas arguing against exclusive psalmody receives five pages of attention! The author’s views on alcohol should be considered seriously, but don’t really merit the eight pages they receive. Then there are sizeable entries on ‘cessationism’, ‘gifts of the Holy Spirit’ and ‘Holy Spirit experiences’, all arguing for a cessationist position. But as a book to dip into, you will find many nuggets of helpful wisdom for navigating the many practicalities of ministry.
