Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church

by Paul David Tripp

Paul is not a painting we look at and wish we could be like; rather, he is a window to the awesome rescuing grace of the Redeemer.

Is your leadership community known for its humility?

How has impatience interfered with the ministry work God has called your leadership community to do?

In ministry leadership, it is impossible not to be dealing with sin and failure in some way. Somehow, someway, every leader you work with will disappoint you.

forgiveness is not to be confused with permissiveness, where you turn your head away from wrong and let it slide. When a leader responds that way, he doesn’t do so because he loves the one who wronged him but because he loves himself and doesn’t want to go through the hassle of tense and awkward moments that might result if he lovingly speaks truth into that wrong.

tenderheartedness is not natural for me, that I need a deeper commitment to kindness and a willingness to be quicker to forgive.

Is forgiveness producing the good fruit of personal growth and relational unity in your leadership community?

Are your leaders more apt to encourage than to criticize and to judge?

If 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.

Does your leadership community function as a protective community, giving one another sight where sight is needed, thereby protecting leaders from the deceitfulness of sin?

I am afraid that in the face of the wandering, failure, or fall of a ministry leader, many of our ministry communities are much more conditioned to get rid of such a leader than to work toward his restoration. Restoration should not be confused with being soft on sin. Gospel restoration never minimizes sin. Gospel restoration never values efficiency over character. Gospel restoration never compromises in the face of position and power. Gospel restoration never puts the needs of the institution over the heart of the person. Gospel restoration never compromises God’s ordained qualifications for ministry leadership. But a leadership community that has been tenderized by the gospel, so that its members are humbly aware of their own susceptibilities and the extent to which they are being forgiven and protected, is not quick to judge and separate but joyfully gives and does whatever necessary to rescue and restore this loved one who has given way to sin.

Does your leadership community have a track record of leader restoration?

We do not have to curse our weaknesses because our weaknesses are a workroom for his grace. We do not have to hide or deny our places of immaturity because God is able. Our limits and weaknesses are not in the way of what God can do through us, but our denial of limits and our delusions of independent strength are.

Ministry must always be done in humble, respectful, and submissive community because the gifts God has given us come to us with built-in limits.

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.

Humble leaders surround themselves not with ministry clones but with leaders who have gifts that they do not and are therefore smart in ways they are not and strong in areas they are weak. This kind of community will always produce a quality and longevity of fruit that won’t ever be produced by a domineering leader. It is unbiblical for any leader to tell himself that he does not need the full expression of the gifts of others in order for him to do the work that God has gifted him to do.

Being given a gift tells me about me in that I am not self-sufficient but rather needy and dependent. It tells me I have no ability to do God’s work without God’s gifts.

With ministry leadership gifts comes a weighty burden of responsibility. The size of your expectancy of yourself, the size of your responsibility, and the size of God’s righteous judgment are connected to the size of the gifts he has given you.

In reality, when God gives you ministry and leadership gifts, he is calling you to be willing to suffer. Because of your gifts you will suffer a kind and severity of temptation that others don’t face. Because of the public nature of your gifts, you will suffer dangerous adulation and harsh criticism. The demands of your ministry life will tempt you to neglect your personal devotional life. The attractiveness of public ministry will tempt you to neglect the private ministry of marriage, family, and friendship. You gifts will tempt you to be demanding, irritable, and impatient with people of lesser gifts or who happen to be in the way of what you want. You will be tempted to confuse your giftedness with your level of spiritual maturity. Yes, it is true: your gifts mean you have been called to suffer for the sake of the giver and what he intends to do through you (see 2 Cor. 1:3–11).

Limits are not a prison; they are a grace.

How many ministry families have been damaged because ministry work began to take up family time? So more ministry means the leader spends less than the needed time investing in his marriage, parenting his children, fellowshipping with his church family, and serving his neighbors.

The limits of time is yet another argument for ministry always being done in community, so that no single leader attempts or is assigned to do more than he can responsibly do while also giving proper focus to the other things that God has called him to. Are your leaders working too long and too hard? Are their assigned responsibilities setting up tension with other areas of life? Do you have a mechanism for monitoring this? Are your leaders worn out? Have you watched leaders burn out? Have you talked to wives or friends to see how those relationships have been affected? Are your leaders too busy to give adequate time to worshipful devotions, meditative study of Scripture, and a robust life of prayer? Is this concern a regular part of your discussions together as a leadership community? Do you provide Sabbaths of rest for your leaders? How often does the issue of time come up when you gather together? Is ministry and the desire for ministry achievement balanced with a commitment to relational and spiritual health in each of your leaders? As you think about God-ordained limits of time, what changes are needed in your leadership community?

A spiritually healthy leadership community always does its work with God-designed limits of time in view.

The church is sadly inflicted with lifestyle diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and fatty liver.

think we must talk about stewarding physical health in our leadership-community conversations.

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.

as sin lives inside you, you will struggle to keep things in your life and ministry in proper balance.

In the fear of not getting things we think we need, we work longer, try harder, control more, delegate less, and take more credit. Good godly habits get left behind in our ministry drivenness. Necessary relationships are not properly maintained. Private worship becomes perfunctory, if not abandoned altogether.

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! Such a prayer is not an act of worship but a means of aggrandizing yourself in the minds of those who will hear you pray. You want to appear humble, contrite, worshipful, grateful, and theologically informed, not to God but to the other people who are in the room.

This side of eternity, it’s loving to assume a struggle of heart balance (Creator vs. created) in the members of your leadership community, and because you do, to look for signs of imbalance. A war of desire and motives still goes on in all our hearts and will only cease when our Savior has welcomed us into his final kingdom.

He does not look for his identity in his role as leader but rests in his identity in Christ.

She is known more for joy than complaint.

Her ministry is shaped by the promises of the gospel and not by the “what ifs” of an anxious heart.

This is not an exhaustive list but a sampling of areas to lovingly look at as you commit to mutual leader care.

By the time the church or ministry blows up, the leaders who pilot it are not what they once were, and they do not value what they once did. Most often, this movement occurs in small increments over many years, so small and slow changing that it is hard to notice.

So it is very important that, as leaders, we are always committed and open to asking values questions of ourselves and to being lovingly confronted when there is reason for a fellow leader to personally ask those questions of us.

Leaders who have character, lead with character, model what is truly important, and encourage the same in others.

A leader who is not self-controlled can’t say no to himself because he values what he wants more than he values what God wants for him.

“Is there anyone in our leadership community whom we have quit holding accountable because of his ministry effectiveness?”

Esteeming bigness and greatness over humility and godliness means you have functionally walked away from your ambassadorial commission.

for the believing community, the most powerful and seductive idols are the ones that are easily Christianized. His words are a pointed warning to everyone in ministry leadership. Here’s how we go astray: a ministry leader pursues agendas other than his ambassadorial calling by doing ministry. 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. Every leadership community needs to understand that ministry can be the vehicle for pursuing a whole host of idolatries. In this way, ministry leadership is war, and we cannot approach it with the passivity of peacetime assumptions.

First, you know the leader has changed because if he had been in the early days who he now is, he would never have been called, hired, or appointed to this leadership position. Second, the changes did not occur overnight. They happened in bits and pieces over a period of years. This means that there are not only many evidences of a shift taking place in his life, but a growing body of evidence of a shift in heart sensitivities and heart allegiances. So it seems right to ask again the question I began this paragraph with.

Few leadership communities say that they have come to value performance over character, but performance becomes the logic behind not dealing with issues of character.

It’s not just that one of their leaders has changed; the entire leadership community has changed, and in many cases, they don’t seem to know it.

Many more leaders fail because they have lost the battle for their heart than because of shifts in their theology or view of the gospel. In fact, it is often the case that theological wandering is but a visible symptom of a heart that has already wandered.

A spiritually healthy leadership community is always watchful and alert to the spiritual dangers of life in a fallen world and life as a church or ministry leader.

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.

I am very concerned when a leadership community has no time for and gives no place to honest and protective conversations about the spiritual war, inside us and outside us, that is the regular life of every leader in every church and ministry everywhere.

We cannot allow ourselves to deny evidence that a leader is under spiritual siege or has been deceived into stepping over God’s boundaries because we are afraid of uncomfortable relational moments, questions about our motives, or pushback we may receive. We cannot let ministry busyness excuse the fact that we are not keeping one another alert and safe.

Ministry leadership is not a fortress against spiritual attack; it’s the front line.