Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church

by Paul David Tripp

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

I am afraid that one of the reasons the ministry leadership community is broken is that we have idolized domineering leaders who fail to recognize the limits of their gifts, who disrespect the God-given gifts of fellow leaders, and who have been allowed to think that they are smart, gifted, and strong in ways that they are not. So they try to do what they were not designed by God to do, they try to manage what they were not designed to manage, and they try individually to do what will only ever be properly done in respectful community with other equally gifted leaders. Pride in one’s own giftedness coupled with devaluing the gifts of others is a recipe for leadership disaster. Independent, domineering leadership is functional denial of what the Bible teaches about both the nature of the body of Christ and the gifting of those called by God to lead it.

perhaps we should view our gifts as a call to be willing to suffer.

Here’s the scary reality. In ministry, the way you pursue your idols is by doing ministry. This reality should be in the thoughts and conversations of every ministry leadership community. Take prayer, for example. You would think that prayer is the most purely Godward act in our lives, but even prayer becomes something entirely different when our hearts are out of balance.

If in a leadership gathering, you rehearse your prayer before you speak the words, that rehearsal is not driven by your worship of God but by something else entirely. God hears the rehearsal!

A leader whose heart has been captured by other things doesn’t forsake ministry to pursue those other things; he uses ministry position, power, authority, and trust to get those things.

If your leadership community functions as a gospel community, then your humble confession of personal areas of susceptibility won’t be dangerous because it will be greeted with mercy-infused understanding, intercessory prayer, and strategies for help—all fueled by confidence in the presence and grace of the Savior.