Encounter’s approach to church leadership is an apostolic model, which is different from the pastoral model that is often found in the church today. Jesus provided a clear vision for servant leadership in Luke 22:26. Unfortunately this commandment has almost always been viewed through the lens of the pastoral gift. A pastor is gifted at gathering, caring and keeping, while an apostolic leader leans more towards gathering, training and sending. Both are good. Both are from God. Both are necessary.

The modern church has mostly focused on and elevated the pastoral mindset and minimized the importance of equipping and empowering people to transform their spheres of influence. We believe Encounter is a church where people will grow stronger, use their spiritual muscles and multiply spiritually. Our vision is to continually raise up sons and daughters to become mature fathers and mothers.

We believe the primary job of a leader is to develop people, not just feed them and care for them spiritually, but to actually help each person mature into their unique destiny, calling, and ministry. Ministry does not mean just within the church – it includes serving others in the home, our jobs, and in our community. We strive to encourage and empower every person to be a minister for God in whatever environment they occupy.

Our passion is that every person who calls Encounter their home will move forward in their spiritual journey to fully accomplish the ministry that God has for them.

Through his letters to the first churches, Paul expressed strong ideas about women in leadership. The key to reconciling his messages is understanding the specific culture he was addressing.

Paul’s strongest and most frequent instruction about women was directed to the churches influenced by Greek culture. Specifically, the three letters that seem to strongly limit women (1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and 1 Timothy) are all written to churches in Greek cultures. Paul’s epistles which addressed Judaic or Roman cultures were extremely liberating toward women and a clear contrast to the other letters.

Greek culture was the stronghold of a heavily sexualized polytheistic religion in which women were central to the non-Christian worship ritual. It’s easy for Americans to overlook this fact because we were taught “Greek Mythology” as simply that: mythology. But this was not mythology to those new believers in Greek culture; it was the darkness they were walking away from. For instance, the chief spiritual forces of Corinth and Ephesus were two of the most well-known and important of all the Greek deities and both were expressly “sexual goddesses.”  Corinth worshiped Aphrodite (the goddess of love, lust, passion, procreation) and Ephesus worshiped Diana/Artemis (the goddess of the the moon, the hunt, and fertility). And both were “sexual goddesses.”:  Corinth worshiped Aphrodite (the goddess of love) and Ephesus worshiped Diana/Artemis (the goddess of fertility).

To make a “clean break” from the pagan system of Greek religion, Paul was explicit and firm about limiting the authority of females in these new Christian congregations. To the Roman cultures and the Jewish cultures there were no limiting instructions regarding women. This is fascinating because in these cultures women were categorically silenced, oppressed, and treated as property. The status quo here is the opposite of Greek culture. You can picture the outrage of cultural and religious leaders in Jewish and Roman cultures when Paul writes:

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

“I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae.  I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been the benefactor of many people, including me. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my co-workers in Christ Jesus. They risked their lives for me. Not only I but all the churches of the Gentiles are grateful to them. Greet also the church that meets at their house” (Romans 16:1-5).

We believe that Paul was not attempting to make categorical commands that should apply down the ages or across all cultures. Instead, Paul was acting as a shepherd tasked with leading individual congregations out of the darkness within their prior cultures and religions.