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We must help leaders within our church see their potential to shape their spheres of influence for others to be served and blessed according to God’s design.
While leading in society is one key aspect of cooperation with God’s Kingdom advancement in the world, the local church is God’s primary means of accomplishing His mission.
We should be provoked to think deeply about the purity of our churches and the faithfulness of our leaders. These awesome realities must drive us to a deep conviction for developing the next generation of church leaders.
There is nothing more foolish or careless than to trust what is most precious into the hands of the unprepared. As we equip and encourage leaders for God’s Church, we must develop leaders who are: Models of Character Guardians of Doctrine Shepherds of Care Champions for Mission
Leadership for the Kingdom of God requires leaders who live like sons and daughters of the King.
Without superlative character across the leadership teams of the local church, we can expect the opposition of God, “who opposes the proud” (James 4:6 esv). That’s just plain scary.
Being a model of character does not mean being a person of perfect character. Rather, modeling character means living a life of significant victory and regular repentance with regard to sin.
If God calls a man or woman to lead in His Church, then He will supply the grace to walk in a manner worthy of the calling.
A local church will not be led for the Kingdom of God unless her leaders are consumed by a passion for the Word of God. The leaders of God’s Church are men and women submitted to God’s Word and lovers of God’s Word.
Leaders who do not see themselves as people of the Book will falsely offer life in their own opinions and practices.
There will always be a spectrum in “ability to teach,” but the requirement for leadership in the church (especially that of “elder” or “pastor”) is not contingent on the source of a person’s income.
Every leader we entrust with a title is also entrusted with the health of the church.
What good is it to collect masses of people if our leaders have nothing but empty, powerless words to offer? The gospel of Jesus is what is at stake here (Rom. 1:16; 10:17; John 17:17; Titus 1:9; 2 Tim. 2:15).
If so, we must develop the kinds of leaders who are ready to ferociously guard the flock with sound doctrine.
“A person should consider us in this way: as servants of Christ and managers of God’s mysteries” (1 Cor. 4:1).
We want leaders in our church who want to lead God’s Church.
Therefore, when we develop leaders of God’s Church, we are looking for the right motivations, not just the right profiles.
Among all the metaphors God could have used, He chose “shepherd” to describe Himself as a leader and to describe the leaders of His Church.
As we train leaders for the Church and for the Kingdom, we must be looking for and developing loving shepherds, not cattle-driving ranchers. The commitment is so great that effective shepherding often comes at great personal cost for the leaders.
No—the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost! If we want to follow Jesus, He is on the move. He is on a mission to the lost.
If the leaders of God’s Church are content to only enjoy the Kingdom, rather than build it, the Church will likely follow them to apathy.
The leaders of God’s Church must believe and live knowing He will get all that He paid for.
The Christian leader is he or she who is indwelled
by the Holy Spirit and is obedient to God’s leadership to embody His calling on their life in every sphere of life they find themselves.
The Church has been uniquely designed to develop the leaders God intended for His glory and the good of mankind.
For your church to be a leadership locus—to continually develop and deploy leaders—you first must be deeply convinced and convicted of this reality. If you are, let’s move on to culture.
Flowing from conviction, God has established a culture for developing leaders who advance the Kingdom of God.
Campaigns, sermons, and programs are not driving behavior anymore; convictions have seeped into the collective worldview of church.
What power there is when the conviction to develop leaders becomes part of the culture of a church! The playing field is radically changed when everyday people begin to think that being developed to lead God’s mission is the normal life for God’s people.
We must get underneath the visible layer of culture, beneath even the stated beliefs of culture, and go all the way to the invisible assumptions held by the church.
Church culture is formed through the actual beliefs and resulting expressions for a local church about creation, the identity of the local church, and how the local church interacts in the world.
In building the foundation, it is important to see both the belief and the resulting expression of that belief in the following three categories:
The Realities of Creation: core beliefs that provide the basis for understanding the creation we exist in.
The Household of God: a set of beliefs that form a paradigm for understanding the identity of the local church.
The local church is portrayed in Scripture as the household of God2—thus the most appropriate way to think about the interaction of church members is that of members of God’s household, coheirs of His inheritance, and brothers and sisters under the care of God the Father.
As the “sent” people of God, the Church is the instrument of His mission (John 20:21).3
Beliefs about truth, time and space, and the nature of humans all greatly impact the cultures leaders cultivate.
When we look to the Scripture, it won’t take long to see that the people of God are a people who believe that God has revealed Himself to mankind and that mankind has the capacity to understand God’s revelation. These simple truths are central to a church’s understanding about reality and truth.
The saints of God have an epistemology that relies on divine revelation.
Christians hold and trust these truths because their assumption is that God reveals truth and this revelation is found within Scripture.
The Church is not judging whether the Scripture is truth, but is rather judging the truth of everything else on the basis of Scripture’s truth.
Without God’s Word as our authority, there is no mission or mandate for the Church at all.
Only a conviction that God’s Word is true can keep the Church moving forward according to God’s design.
The Church of God will continue to be faithful to her mission to multiply disciples and leaders as long as she trusts in God’s Word.
Ministry Urgency (time and space):
Urgency for leadership development is built on three convictions concerning time and space: the shortness of this life, the length of the next life, and the view of physical space.
To be a church culture that commits itself to the task of developing leaders, a sense of urgency must permeate the air and an appetite for wise risk must be viewed as a signpost of faith.
While our lives are short here, we must recognize that the length of the next life is everlasting.
Jesus reoriented the Church’s perspective on space when He reversed the picture of the Kingdom from moving toward Jerusalem to moving out from Jerusalem to every people, tongue, and nation.
As people indwelled by the Spirit of God, the gospel of Jesus is no longer just a “come and see” faith, but now, also, a “go and tell” faith.
