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.

very often, behind the failure of a pastor is a weak and failed leadership community.

Could it be that as we have become enamored with corporate models of leadership, we have lost sight of deeper gospel insights and values?

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.

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.

Dependency means living, as a leader, as if I really do believe that my walk with God is a community project.

It means acknowledging that every leader needs to be led and every pastor needs to be pastored.

You know that sins, small and great, will infect your community and obstruct and divert its work.

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.

Fresh starts and new beginnings are a hallmark of the rescuing, forgiving, restoring, and transforming power of God’s grace.

Grace means we are not held to our worst moment or cursed by our worst decision.

Do our leadership communities function with a gospel-driven, restoration mentality?

God’s saving grace ignites in the hearts of all his children a radical shift in ambition. Where once our thoughts, desires, words, and actions were motivated and directed by our ambition to achieve our definition of personal happiness, by grace they are now shaped by our ambition for the kingdom of God to achieve all God has designed for it to achieve. Where once we were ambitious for what we want, we now are ambitious to do the will of God.

Thankfulness to God for what he had done had begun to compete with pride in accomplishment. Less and less time was invested in fellowship and worship during leadership meetings, and more and more time was spent analyzing the stats and strategizing goals. Leaders progressively separated from the body of Christ and became less candid, approachable, and accountable.

Increasingly staff members were afraid of doing anything that would get in the way of corporate achievement. So few pastors and staff had the courage to confess to personal struggle or ministry failure. Staff that didn’t achieve or who questioned decisions or values were quickly let go.

Could it be, in your leadership community, that there are signs that the glory of achievement has begun to replace the glory of God as the most powerful motivator in the hearts of your leaders and of the way leadership plans, assesses, and does its work?

this leader-quality list presses in on us is that ultimately God is the achiever; our calling is to be usable tools in his powerful hands. Because we are not sovereign over the situation in which we minister, because we have no power to change people’s hearts, because we are often in the way of instead of being part of what God is doing, and because we cannot predict the future, 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 laziness and unfaithfulness are failure.

How does your leadership community define failure, and how does that shape the way a leader is viewed whose work has not produced the desired results?

In achievement-focused leadership communities, leaders tend to be afraid of confessing weakness or admitting failure. They tend to deny both to themselves and hide both from their fellow leaders.

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

in local church ministry it is much, much easier to build church stuff than it is to build people.

When this central calling is replaced with institution building, potential disciples get turned into consumers.

The church is not a vital part of their lives, like an organ or a limb of one’s physical body. Instead, the church is just an event they attend, stepping out of their lives to do church stuff and then stepping back into their lives when the event is over. A disciple has no such separation in his thinking. For him, being part of the body of Christ is an identity that doesn’t just define a set of gatherings he attends but redefines everything in his life. Everything about him—his relationships, his work, his time, his money—is being transformed because he is part of the transformational community of disciples called “the church.”

We have the power to build church stuff, but we have no power whatsoever to build people. When it comes to people building, we are completely dependent on transforming grace.

ministry achievement becomes dangerous when it turns potential disciples into consumers.

The church is a community of unfinished people living in a broken world and still in need of God’s forgiving and transforming grace. The church isn’t meant, for either leaders or those being led, to be comfortable; it’s meant to be personally transformational.

In church leadership it may be that achieving goals may be more spiritually dangerous than dealing with obstacles in the way of failure.

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.

God doesn’t call us to ministry leadership because we are able, but because he is.

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

How esteemed are times of leadership prayer in your community? How often do you go away for a day or a weekend just to pray together? Have ministry experience and success made your community all the more dependent on the Lord? Do you have extended times of worship together?

I was granted the right to be absolutely honest about what I was going through, and I knew that I would be greeted with grace.

There have been seasons when you fantasized about doing something else or at least doing what you do somewhere else.

If you have given yourself to building people, you have accepted the call to suffer for the sake of the gospel.

Everyone in your leadership community needs everything the church is intended to provide.

We must ensure that we do not view ourselves above the need for the gospel in daily life. We are not immune. In fact we may be in greater danger because there is a bigger target on us.

Today there will be pastors and leaders who lose their heart and their way in the middle of the hardships of ministry, and many of them will lose their way because they are not warned, encouraged, confronted, supported, and loved by a group of leaders who function as a community of grace.

What often beats us down is meant by the Savior to be a tool to build us up. What would make us want to quit is meant by him to strengthen us for the battles to come.

So your core leadership community must be a pastoral community where leaders are carefully and intentionally pastored and where strategies to pastor the pastors are held in as high a regard as missional strategies.

How can we better pastor he pastors?

We should look not first at the corporate world for our formative values and ways of operating, but to the right-here, right-now truths, identities, and wisdom principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

building and nurturing a spiritually healthy leadership community is like planting a garden. For a plant to flourish, it must be planted in nutrient soil; it must be watered regularly and weeded constantly, or it will not have what it needs to grow, bloom, and produce fruit. So it is with every church or ministry leader. Every leader needs to have his heart, life, and ministry firmly planted in the right-now nutrients of the gospel of Jesus Christ, so that he gets his identity, meaning and purpose, inner peace, and sense of calling from the gospel.

their gatherings are not just for the purpose of financial, missional, and strategic planning but to nurture gospel confidence and commitment in one another.

This is an aspect I want to see as a staple in our staff gatherings.

As leaders, we don’t just work to develop cooperation with and confidence in one another along with functional unity, but we work to draw one another ever nearer to the Savior. We are doing more as a leadership community than nurturing healthy ministry relationships that result in missional cooperation and productivity; we are also nurturing in one another a deeper devotion to the Savior. The most powerful protection from the dangers that every leader faces is not his relationship to his fellow leaders but a heart that is ruled by deeply rooted love for Jesus.

Would your leaders say that yours is a community that has nurtured their growth in grace and therefore their gospel productivity?

Does the thought of leaders regularly confessing their faults to one another, so that they may receive the rescue of the powerful prayers of their fellow leaders, sound radical or impractical to you? It is this kind of rescuing and protective candor that only the gospel of Jesus Christ makes possible. A church or ministry leadership community simply cannot do its work if leaders are silenced because they are afraid of what others will think of them.

Fear of looking weak and needy will rob us of the help we need for spiritual health.

Communities where leaders fall are often communities in which humble confession is not only not encouraged; it is silenced by a whole range of unspoken fears.

One of the sure signs of a spiritually healthy leadership community is the degree to which heartfelt, humble, honest confession is not only possible but a regular ingredient of the life and work of that community.

Do the members of your community fear being honest about their sin, weaknesses, and failures, and, if so, what changes do you need to make?

Pride causes boasting to replace confession, and shows of strength replace requests for help. The long-term health and gospel productivity of a church or ministry leadership community are directly related to the humility of the members of that community.