Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church

by Paul David Tripp

The gospel of Jesus Christ is meant to be your life hermeneutic, that is, the means by which you understand and make sense of life.

human beings don’t live life based on the facts of their experience but on their interpretation of the facts.

Humility means that each leader’s relationship to other leaders is characterized by an acknowledgment that he deserves none of the recognition, power, or influence that his position affords him. It means knowing, as a leader, that as long as sin still lives inside you, you will need to be rescued from you. Humility means you love serving more than you crave leading. It means owning your inability rather than boasting in your abilities. It means always being committed to listen and learn. Humility means seeing fellow leaders not so much as serving your success but serving the one who called each of you. It means being more excited about your fellow leaders’ commitment to Christ than you are about their loyalty to you. It’s about fearing the power of position rather than craving it. It’s about being more motivated to serve than to be seen. Humility is always being ready to consider the concern of others for you, confess what God reveals through them, and to commit to personal change.

isolated, individualized, independent Christianity never produces good fruit.

every leader needs to be led and every pastor needs to be pastored.

Inspection means that we invite people to step over the normal boundaries of leadership relationships to look into our lives to help us see things that we would not see on our own. It means inviting fellow leaders to watch for our souls.

we are still able to swindle ourselves into thinking that we are okay when we are in danger and in need of help.

every leader must be willing to live under loving, grace-infused, patient, and forgiving biblical inspection.

long-term faithfulness that produces fruit in ministry is rooted in humble, godly character.

we have no ability on our own to achieve ministry growth or success. We are called to faithfulness of character—character, by the way, that only God can produce in us, and God is sovereign over the miracle of redeeming grace and the expansion of his kingdom.

True failure is always a character issue. It is rooted in laziness, pride, lack of discipline, self-excusing, failure to plan well, lack of joy in labor, and failure to persevere during hardship.

Failure is not first a matter of results; failure is always first a matter of the heart.

It’s failure when I have not invested my God-given time, energy, and gifts in the work God has called me to do. Ministry lazi...

In ministry, success and failure are not a matter of results but are defined by faithfulness.

Faithfulness is what God asks of us; the rest is entirely up to his sovereignty and the power of his grace.

Denial of weakness is never a pathway to good things. We all fail somehow, someway every day.

Hiding, denial, and fear will keep a ministry community from spiritual health, and the lack of spiritual health will prohibit the ministry longevity

Do your leaders feel free to confess to personal weakness and failure, knowing that when they do, they will be greeted with grace?

Church leadership is a people-building ministry; to function any other way is both unbiblical and dangerous.

If you take credit as a leader instead of assigning credit to the one who sent you and who alone produces fruit out of your labors, you will praise less, pray less, and plan more. Leadership communities are in trouble when they assign more power to their planning than to their prayer.

achievement as the dominant measure of leadership is dangerously single-focused and imbalanced and gives a false view of the condition of those in a leadership community.

in the lives of failed leader after failed leader, the failure was more a matter of character than productivity.

prayerlessness in a leadership community is always a result of putting credit where it is not due.

Your leadership community is in trouble if your leaders are more excited about a strategic planning meeting than a prayer meeting.

Sadly, achievement can turn humble servant leaders into proud, controlling, and unapproachable mini-kings.

What often beats us down is meant by the Savior to be a tool to build us up.

just like the garden plant that looks healthy but continues to need to be watered, so every leader, no matter how influential and spiritually mature, needs ongoing spiritual care from the community of leaders that surround him.

either we are denying our sin to ourselves and hiding it from others, or we are admitting its presence to ourselves and confessing it to others.

If we are afraid to confess sin before what should be the most spiritually mature community in the church, we are sadly living in a state of functional gospel amnesia, no matter how robust our theological grasp of the gospel is.

nothing can be known, revealed, exposed, or confessed about us that hasn’t already been covered by the life, sacrifice, and victory of Jesus. There is no dark thing that lives beyond the reach of God’s grace.

Hiding sin is burdensome. Manufacturing nonanswers to probing questions gets exhausting. Acting as if you’re okay when you’re not...

of the most dangerous, yet seductive, temptations to pride in leaders is the desire to appear to fellow leaders and those they lead as being more righteous than they actually are.

The gospel calls you to run to God for rescue because your greatest problem is you.

waiting is never just about getting what you’ve been waiting for but, more importantly, about the good changes in you that God produces through the wait.

the more I am bathing my heart in the wonder of God’s forgiveness of me, the more willing I am to forgive others.

Too many of us are quick to forgive in ourselves what we struggle to forgive in others.

sin blinds, and it does, and if sin still remains in us, and it does, then, even as ministry leaders, there are pockets of spiritual blindness in us. So it is vital that we all forsake the thought that no one knows us better than we know ourselves.

If you’re a leader, you don’t know everything, you can’t do everything, you aren’t completely mature, and you don’t have inexhaustible energy. You are not just a package of strengths, gifts, and experiences; you are also a collection of weaknesses and susceptibilities.

The eye has been specifically designed for sight, and because it has, it has no ability to pick up objects. The design determines the limits.

Every leader needs to humbly assess not only where he is gifted but also, and as important, where he is not.

Pride in one’s own giftedness coupled with devaluing the gifts of others is a recipe for leadership disaster.

I can’t take credit for my gift precisely because it is a gift. My giftedness doesn’t make me worthy of human deference, affirmation, or submission, because my gift doesn’t point to me but to the one who has given it to me.

Limits not only reveal his wisdom; they also express his love. Limits are not a prison; they are a grace.

every leader is a person in the middle of his own sanctification. No matter how long we’ve been in ministry leadership, no matter how well trained, no matter how theologically mature, we are all still in need of future spiritual development. We all have blind spots.

Each of us has character weaknesses. We are all still in need of the rescuing, convicting, transforming power of the gospel.

it is my experience, as I have dealt with fallen or lapsed pastors, that around them was a weak or dysfunctional leadership community that failed, in pastoral love and care, to protect that leader from himself.

It is, however, about humbly admitting that between the “already” and the “not yet,” we are unfinished ministry in a broken world. There is temptation all around us, and we still have areas of susceptibility in our hearts. We are still capable of craving what we should not crave. We are still tempted to give way to things we should resist. Even in gospel ministry leadership, we all are capable of being full of ourselves and forgetful of God.

A leadership community is spiritually safe and prepared for a long-term and productive life of ministry only when what is important to God is not just theologically important to them but also functionally important.

Failing to be patient, self-sacrificing, tender, loving, forgiving, humble, serving, gentle, faithful, and kind is a failure to lead as an ambassador of the Savior King who sent you.

Here is the inadequate logic: “Look what this great man has done for God; should we really tarnish his ministry?” So a leadership community accepts what it should not accept, is silent when it should speak, and is passive when it should act.