Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church

by Paul David Tripp

So as long as there are artifacts of sin still resident in our hearts, we will be vulnerable to the temptation to make life about us—what we want, what we think we need, and what makes us content and comfortable.

Instead of mourning the suffering and death of the great one, they argued that they were great. Instead of being brokenhearted at the thought of Jesus’s humiliation, they were focused on their own exaltation.

A leadership community that has developed a culture of grumbling is, because of that, in spiritual danger. It is simply hard to willingly and joyfully serve the master you don’t trust in the way you once did, no matter what your formal theology tells you about his wisdom, goodness, and faithfulness.

Church life was not designed to be comfortable.

the mess is intended to yank us out of our self-sufficiency and self-obsession to become people who really do love God and our neighbors. God puts broken people next to broken people (including leaders), not so they would be comfortable with one another but so they would function as agents of transformation in the lives of one another.

We fantasize too often about taking a break.

As a leader, you are not called to mastery; you’re called to servanthood.

The master who called you didn’t live the entitled life of a master but the life of a suffering servant.

I struggle to love people who critique my love.

The call to a life of joyful servitude and willing suffering is itself a grace.

The more a leader has himself in focus, the more he thinks about how ministry inconveniences him, and the less he will experience true joy and lasting contentment.

The pathway to freedom is servanthood, the pathway to greatness is slavery, and the pathway to deep and lasting joy—joy that people and circumstance cannot take away—is denying yourself.

an isolated, independent, separated, and self-hiding Christian life is alien to the Christianity of the New Testament.

No one is so spiritually mature that he is free from a need for the comfort, warnings, encouragement, rebuke, instruction, and insights of others.

It made me wonder how leadership communities function together in such a way that allows members to be practically unknown and to suffer alone.

A spiritually healthy leadership community is spiritually healthy when it is a safe place for struggling leaders to speak with candor and hope.

Does your leadership community welcome confessions of weakness and struggle?

It is quite possible to be committed to leading robust gospel ministries and yet be denying the same gospel in your leadership community.

Hiding in fear, silence, denial, defensiveness, and a vacuum of humble candor is more of the culture of broken Eden than of victorious Calvary.

A gospel-shaped leadership community will be a confessional community, where leader honesty is a not only a constant protection but encourages a deeper and deeper dependency on God. Confessing communities tend to be humble communities. Confessing communities tend to be worshiping communities. Confessing communities tend to be praying communities. Leaders who confess tend to be tender and kind when people they are called to lead mess up and need to confess.

In a confessing leadership community, leaders’ pride shrinks and worship of God grows.

If ministry has come to define you, the gospel won’t.

The gospel promises us that the good things God calls us to will produce good in our lives, even if that good looks different from what we hoped for.

Do we fear loss of a leadership position more than we fear giving sin room to do its evil work in our hearts and lives?

We’ll never stop interpreting, because we were wired by God to search for meaning and understanding. We all have a deep desire to make sense out of life. All this was wired inside us by God to drive us to him so that he would live at the center of the way we understand ourselves, understand life, and make sense out of our circumstances.

Because identity is the ground of how we make sense of life, it is both a spiritual war and one of the ways the gospel gives us back our sanity and security.

It is incredibly ironic that the fruit of a leader’s identity in Christ is what tempts him to look elsewhere for identity. Somewhere, without a conscious rejection of his gospel theology, he has exchanged the stability of vertical identity for the instability of horizontal identity. Because he has made this exchange, his heart is exposed to a variety of ministry idolatries (e.g., knowledge, power, control, position, success, acclaim, lifestyle ease), and he is not the same person and does not function in the same way that he did in the early days of his ministry.

When you look horizontally for what you have already been given vertically, the things you look to will always fail you.

Because a leader needs his ministry position to give him what it was never meant to give, he needs to see himself as more essential than he actually is.

No leader can cause people to hunger for the gospel. No leader is a change agent; rather, every ministry leader is a tool in the toolbox of the one who alone holds the power of change in his hands.

He does not need to be in control, because he does not need the things around him to go well for his heart to be firm.

Leader restoration is not a romantic dream of people who don’t really understand how deep and serious sin is. Restoration gets at the heart of the gospel that we have given ourselves to. And even if sin necessitates a leader’s removal from his position and ministry duties, turning toward him with grace is always right.

What you know about the public persona of a leader does not mean you do not need to be concerned about his private life.

if sin still remains, and it does, then every leadership community needs to be committed to and prepared for restoration.

Restoration is much deeper and more foundational than doing what is necessary to quickly get a leader back into his ministry position.

Jonah’s problem was Jonah, so to be restored to God and his call, Jonah needed to be free from his bondage to himself.

Restoration never minimizes the damaging reality of sin, but while it takes sin seriously, it also believes in the power of restorative grace. It believes in God’s power to turn a heart and rebuild a life. Restoration isn’t motivated by seeing how fast we can get a leader back into the ministry saddle; it’s longing that the lapsed leader would know spiritual health of heart and life. Restoration is not about turning away from a ministry leader, even if he needs to be removed from his position and ministry duties, but turning toward him with grace that takes both sin and restoration seriously. Restoration is but another area in which we are called as leaders to take our ambassadorial calling seriously.

We cannot be so protective of the institution, the church, that we discard leaders and members of the church as if they’re broken and no-longer-needed commodities.

I was the primary gospel spokesman, but I needed to have the gospel preached to me.

Every leader needs the ministry of other leaders in order to grow to the kind of maturity that will allow him to lead well over the long term and end well. Every leader needs leaders who will stand in his way when he is about to choose the wrong way. Every leader needs other leaders to speak truth to him when he can’t seem to speak those truths to himself. Every leader, in order to lead long and well, needs fellow leaders to help him see sin that he is too blind to see if left alone. Longevity is the fruit of spiritual maturity, and spiritual maturity is the result of longevity, and both are the fruit of gospel community.

God is working to produce oaks of righteousness, so every leadership community should be working to produce the same in each of its members.

The culture around us tends to lack patience and an esteem for long-term process, and I’m afraid we’ve begun to lack patience too.

if any leader in any leadership community is going to become spiritually mature so that he can experience the fruitfulness of ministry longevity, he must be blessed by a gospel community of leaders who patiently work for and contribute to his maturity.

Spiritual maturity in the life and ministry of a ministry leader is about being humbled by the gospel, made courageous by the gospel, and infused with sturdy hope by the gospel.

you cannot grieve what you do not see, you cannot confess what you haven’t grieved, and you can’t repent of what you haven’t confessed.

I had become a presence amnesiac. Here’s what I mean. I was so busy being present that I had lost sight of the awesome encouragements and important protections that are only ever found when a leader keeps his eyes focused on the glory of the presence of the Lord.

We ministry leaders are given way too much credit for the results of our ministry, and we should all resist it. People tend to think that we have way more power and wisdom than we actually have.

When a leader forgets the powerful and gracious presence of the Lord, he also forgets who he is and what is his as God’s child. Vertical amnesia always leads to identity confusion.

effective, long-term ministry leadership takes courage. You will face opposition. You will endure accusations, misunderstandings, and questions about your qualifications. At times precious relationships will be strained and family burdens will weigh you down. Physical illness and weakness might at times make ministry look impossible, and you’ll feel weak and unable, not up to the task God has assigned you. The enemy will taunt and tempt. At times your work will bear no visible fruit. You will be tempted to fantasize about an easier place or ministry. There may be times when you feel undervalued and underappreciated. At times you might feel overburdened by trying to balance family ministry with your gospel ministry, and it seems you’re not doing either well.