CBMW leader articulates family-centered vision for SBTS leadership school

The School of Leadership and Church Ministry at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary will take a new approach to equipping students for local church ministry, but it will be centered around creation’s oldest institution—the family, new dean Randy Stinson—who also serves as executive director of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW)—told seminary trustees during the board’s annual fall meeting last week. Stinson was appointed dean of Southern’s School of Leadership and Church Ministry in August.

In recent years churches have fragmented families by segregating them according to gender, age or other categories, Stinson said. Southern Seminary hopes to change that by teaching future leaders how to integrate local church ministries in a way that builds healthier families and churches, Stinson said.

“Most local church ministries tend to act independently of one another,” Stinson said. “You have a women’s ministry doing its thing over here, and you have a men’s ministry doing its thing, and you have youth ministry and children’s ministry, and they tend to act independently of one another.

“Consequently, they tend to lack a unified vision. [When] everything is segregated by age or gender or in some other way, it inadvertently ends up fragmenting the way that the family should operate.

“We are going to seek to reinforce spiritual growth as it occurs as a family. This will be done by integration of various church ministries…in a way that they reinforce each other and keep a unified vision of how they are supposed to operate and what they are supposed to be doing.”

Stinson said the new vision of local church ministry will equip students to:

• Integrate women’s ministries in local churches with children and youth ministries so that older women are teaching and mentoring younger women in a Titus 2 mold.
  
• Coordinate men’s ministries that work directly with ministries to women, children, and youth to provide male leadership for families, widows, and orphans in a James 1:27 vein.
  
• Promote a philosophical unity between the various ministries of the local church to include unified views of marriage and parenting as well as a unified vision of gender roles in the home and church.
  
• Equip and encourage husbands and fathers to serve as spiritual leaders in their homes.
  
• Aim all local church ministries toward evangelism. “I see this operating in a way that there is a specific evangelistic component in all of this so that when a father recognizes that there is a young boy in the church that doesn’t have a father, “said Stinson, “he reaches out to that young man, so when he takes his boys to a ball game or a fishing trip, he is bringing this young man with him and in turn will eventually meet the boy’s father and will eventually have the opportunity to share the gospel with that father. The same thing would be true for women’s ministry in the Titus 2 format.”

Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. said the family-centered vision of church ministry is unique among Christian institutions of higher learning. Mohler is a CBMW council member.

“I don’t think we realize how revolutionary this kind of vision is,” Mohler said. “No other school on the planet is trying to do quite what we have just described here. There is something very unique that God has given us the opportunity to do here, and Randy Stinson is the man to do it.

“I believe that God created him for this purpose because when we were looking to the future of this school, to set its future in terms of direction, it was just really clear that the issue of family ministry was at the very heart of what we wanted to see take place in our local churches through this school.”