Designed to Lead: The Church and Leadership Development

by Eric Geiger

The Church is uniquely set apart to develop and deploy leaders for the glory of God and the advancement of the gospel. The Church is designed by God to create leaders for all spheres of life. Your church is designed to lead, designed to disciple leaders who are, by God’s grace, commanded to disciple people in all spheres of life.

The full extent of discipleship is the development of disciples who are able to lead and develop others, not merely people who gather together for worship once a week.

True leaders are servants who die to themselves so others may flourish. True leaders go forth, not for themselves, but for others. The Church, as no other group, follows the only One to die that others may forever live.

Most churches merely exist to keep running their programs and services. They are not developing leaders intentionally and consistently. When leaders emerge from some churches, it is often by accident.

leadership is always a temporary assignment—always. It is a temporary assignment because leaders do not ultimately own the teams, ministries, or organizations they lead. We simply steward what the Lord has entrusted to our care for a season. The brevity of life ought to birth urgency in us to develop others.

Biblical leadership development is to “find the faithful who will be able. Not the able that might be faithful.”

The world is longing for leaders who are filled with integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion. In essence, even the world’s research says that the world benefits from leadership that is Christian in nature.

No leader is omni-competent. The beauty of the body of Christ is that we need one another. For a pastor, or the people in a church, to view a pastor as omni-competent is to insult the body of Christ. “The body is not one part but many” (1 Cor. 12:14). All of God’s people are part of the body of Christ with an important function, an important role.

A church filled with people who insist that the ministry is performed by the pastors is a church filled with people who are failing to fully live out their identity as priests.

A church is a community of gifted people, not merely a community of people with a gifted pastor.

Leadership, like everything else in creation, can be used for destruction and selfish gain. But leadership, like everything else in creation, can and should be redeemed for God’s glory.

God’s precious first words to His image bearers were given to set in motion this fantastic commission: to lead creation in honoring God and to fill it with more image bearers. We were designed to cultivate, to care for, and to lead creation and creature alike to flourish according to God’s design and for God’s glory. Mankind was made to lead for the glory of God and the good of others.

God’s Church cannot embrace the indiscriminate pragmatism of contemporary leadership practices. A disturbing amount of leadership training being utilized today fails to stop and ask what God wants from our leadership. Even Christian education often promotes effective leadership habits and practices without ever challenging motivation or intent. This approach to development only reproduces a Christian-sprinkled approach to leading, and results in leadership that is self-sufficient and self-serving. Chillingly, our equipping can be all too much like giving murderers better knives.

authentic leadership is guiding others according to God’s character and for God’s purposes. Developing this kind of leader is one of the most crucial duties of the local church. If the local church doesn’t develop leaders for the Kingdom of God, who else can?

We lead by guiding others into joyful submission to King Jesus.

Some of God’s attributes and character are best displayed through management activity. For example, business and government leaders are some of the world’s most significant stewards of resources. This kind of leadership displays the wonder of God in a unique way. Throughout the Scripture, God reveals Himself as a kind, providing, caretaking Manager over His creation. Everything, all wealth and honor, is His, and He is the ruler of all things (1 Chron. 29:11–12). He has everything, yet He cares for the lilies of the field (Matt. 6:28). He manages to the detail of the lilies in the field!

Unhealthy church culture is ultimately a theological problem. Eventually, people behave consistently with their most fundamental beliefs. What the church community believes about God, themselves, and the world will drive the way they interact with each.

We will only produce tyrants and charlatans (albeit clothed sometimes like clergy) if our churches are not grounded in the lordship of Jesus over all things.

Instead of reactively scrambling to “fill a spot,” a leadership pipeline helps leaders think proactively about the future. If you do not have a leadership pipeline, you are likely approaching leaders from a reactive posture rather than a proactive one.