NEW BLOOMFIELD — Jim Shaver, 67, and Ryan Ebersold, 27, treasure their mentoring relationship here at Providence Baptist Church.
“He jokingly calls it broadcasting seeds of knowledge,” Ebersold said.
Shaver, the 12-year pastor at the church with 100 active members, said he is blessed to have a former pastor like Ebersold on staff now as an associate pastor.
“I try to teach him something or at least present something to him every day that I’m around him,” Shaver said.
When Ebersold came on board in September, Shaver told him he would be able to preach 10-15 times a year.
“It’s different because at (his previous church) I preached every single week,” Ebersold said. “It really gets me geared up to preach.”
Shaver sees it as a true opportunity to multiply the impact of the pulpit ministry in terms of the amount of shepherding that can be accomplished.
“He can do a lot of things that I don’t have time for,” Shaver said. “He can expand my ministry, and he’ll get more comfortable with that as he gets more experience with that.”
Shaver has a heart toward encouraging young pastors who may be serving, for better or for worse, in “family” church settings (sometimes called family chapels) that consist of maybe 10-25 members.
“Young guys are out there by the droves in smaller churches, and if they could get some training perhaps they would be ready for a church my size,” he said. “A lot of young pastors leave the ministry because of failures in their first churches. We’ve got some examples of that just south of the river here in recent years.”
And Ebersold said it is worth noting that the young pastor in a mentoring relationship is not always the one teaching the older one about new cultural things.
“It’s funny because there’s kind of a stereotype out there that most older guys around Bro. Jim’s age would not know a lot about technology,” he said. “He knows more than I do. He’s teaching me a lot more about the iPad.”