Biblical Eldership Resources (BER) has a vision for seeing a well-functioning biblical eldership model in widespread use among churches around the world. Our motto is: One generation of elders passing the baton of leadership to the next.
To facilitate this vision the team behind this ministry has the mission to motivate, train and mentor current and future church leaders to install and practice the Biblical model for local church governance, and to train the next generation of elders. Our resources not only provide teaching for existing and potential elders, but also provide elders with resources they can use to train the next generation of elders.
At the core, the New Testament teaches the need for a plurality of godly men, who are biblically qualified, and who actively lead, teach, protect and care for the people of God in the local church. Spiritual leadership and shepherding was never intended to be the office of one individual, but a team of qualified, Spirit-enabled men, working together using their various strengths and gifts—but all of godly character.
Elder Qualifications
This app is a convenient presentation of the biblical qualifications for elder, together with both shorter and longer descriptions/explanations. This can be a useful for studying the qualifications, but also can be used as a reminder in prayer for spiritual growth and maturity. This is useful for current elders to always keep before them the focus on character required for being effective shepherds of God’s people. But, also useful for potential elders and any Christian who desires to grow in spiritual maturity.
Easy to Use:
The main screen shows the groups of the qualifications. Various studies may list these groups differently, however after much study these groupings seem the most logical.
Tapping on any of the groups, will bring up the secondary screen, showing the specific qualifications in the grouping. The naming of these individual qualifications will vary according to the various English translations. We rely heavily on the NAS version, but use other translation where it is deemed more understandable or a better translation.
Tap on a specific qualification and a short “twitter” size description appears at the bottom of the screen (about 140 characters in length).
Tap on the “Full Description” at the bottom to get a longer description (max of 300 words).
At the end of each Full Description are a list of verses showing that most of the elder qualifications are character traits of mature Christian living in general, and not just the exclusive realm of elders. This reflects the fact that the character of elders should be simply the character of mature Christianity; the elders should be farther down the road to maturity that the congregation they lead and shepherd.
Finally, tapping on the “About BER” icon at the bottom of any screen will display a list of links to key areas of the Biblical Eldership Resources website and the BER social media pages.