Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church

by Paul David Tripp

Achievement Principle 1: A ministry community whose time is controlled by doing the business of the church tends to be spiritually unhealthy. 2 Gospel Principle 2: If your leaders are going to be tools of God’s grace, they need to be committed to nurturing that grace in one another’s lives. 3 Limits Principle 3: Recognizing God-ordained limits of gift, time, energy, and maturity is essential to leading a ministry community well. 4 Balance Principle 4: Teaching your leaders to recognize and balance the various callings in their life is a vital contribution to their success. 5 Character Principle 5: A spiritually healthy leadership community acknowledges that character is more important than structure or strategies. 6 War Principle 6: It is essential to understand that leadership in any gospel ministry is spiritual warfare. 7 Servants Principle 7: A call to leadership in the church is a call to a life of willing sacrifice and service. 8 Candor Principle 8: A spiritually healthy leadership community is characterized by the humility of approachability and the courage of loving honesty. 9 Identity Principle 9: Where your leaders look for identity always determines how they lead. 10 Restoration Principle 10: If a leadership community is formed by the gospel, it will always be committed to a lifestyle of fresh starts and new beginnings. 11 Longevity Principle 11: For church leaders, ministry longevity is always the result of gospel community. 12 Presence Princi...

I only have one thing to offer: the right-here, right-now truths of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The gospel is a living identity for all who believe. We have become something in Christ, something that is glorious and new and filled with new potential. Good gospel theology doesn’t just define for you who God is and what he has done; it also redefines who you are as his child.

the gospel is meant to be a new set of glasses that every believer wears and through which he looks at life.

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.

Jesus is saying, “As you go, you can bank on everything I have promised you because I rule every place where you will need those promises to be fulfilled.” God’s promises of grace are sure because his sovereignty is complete.

Because of the completeness of Christ’s authority, the inescapability of his presence and the surety of his promises, we don’t have to be afraid of examining our weaknesses and failure. The gospel of his presence, power, and grace frees us from the burden of minimizing or denying reality. The gospel of his presence, power, and grace welcomes us to be the most honest community on earth. We are not cemented to our track record. We are not left to our small bag of personal resources. Because he is his best gift to us, our potential is great and change is possible. And so it is the gospel of his presence, power, and grace that gives me the courage and hope to write about a very important place where change needs to take place. May the same grace give you an open heart as you read.

The gospel, which is our hope in life and death, also sets the agenda for how we live, relate, and lead between the “already” of our conversion and the “not yet” of our final home going.

I want to suggest that if you really do want your relationships to be worthy of the gospel you received, then you will value humility, gentleness, patience, forbearing love, and peace, and if you value these gospel characteristics, you will ask yourself, “What would my leadership community look like if we truly valued these things more than positions, power, achievement, acclaim, or success?”

Humility 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’s about being more motivated to serve than to be seen.

2. Dependency 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. Dependency means acknowledging theological understanding, biblical literacy, ministry gifts, and ministry experience and success do not mean that I no longer need the essential sanctifying ministry of the body of Christ. It means confessing that as long as sin remains in me, and that apart from restraining grace and the rescuing ministry of those around me, I continue to be a danger to myself.

3. Prepared Spontaneity If you acknowledge the presence and the seducing and deceiving power of remaining sin, you will also acknowledge that everyone in your leadership community is still susceptible to temptation and is still at risk.

4. Inspection 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.

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

5. Protection We all sin, but we don’t all sin the same. For reasons of history, experience, gift, biology, and a host of other things, we aren’t equally tempted by the same things. You may be susceptible to the temptations of power, while someone else may be susceptible to the temptations of pleasure, while I may be tempted by the lure of material things. This understanding of the variegated seductions of sin and the different way they impact each one of us is vital to the long-term health and gospel fruitfulness of every local church leadership community.

Hebrews 13:17 speak with a motivational clarity: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.” Leaders are responsible to protect the souls of those who are under their care. The words here are both specific and provocative.

If we are to be protected, we need to be known at the level where temptation is its most powerful, the heart.

6. Restoration One of the most beautiful, hopeful, and encouraging gospel themes that courses its way through Scripture is the theme of fresh starts and new beginnings. 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. Grace means out of the ashes of sin, leaders can rise because the Savior has resurrection power.

The church is in desperate need of a leadership community whose function is not just structured to achieve with efficiency but is more deeply shaped by the comforts and calls of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As in every other relationship of human life, if you look at your leadership community through the lens of the gospel of Jesus Christ, it will transform your expectations, your commitments, your behavior, and the way you respond to difficulty.

Remember that the gospel of God’s grace teaches us that lasting change of heart and hands always takes place in the context of relationship, first with God and then with the people of God.

Achievement Every leader leads while being in desperate personal need of the full resources of God’s grace.

Yes, we should be ambitious for the expansion of God’s kingdom of glory and grace, but we must also recognize that as long as sin still resides in our hearts, achievement is a spiritual war zone that is not only littered with pastor or leader casualties but has reduced many who are still in ministry to the ranks of the walking wounded. Hear the cautions for us in the spiritual history of Israel, as they tasted the success and affluence of the promised land: It was I who knew you in the wilderness, in the land of drought; but when they had grazed, they became full, they were filled, and their heart was lifted up; therefore they forgot me. (Hos. 13:5–6)

Consider, for a moment, the radical nature of the qualities that God says in 1 Timothy 3:2–7 make for a long-term, faithful ministry leader, the kind of leader every influential church or ministry needs: Above reproach Husband of one wife Sober-minded Self-controlled Respectable Hospitable Able to teach Not a drunkard Not violent Gentle Not quarrelsome Not a lover of money Managing his household well Not a recent convert Well thought of by outsiders

First, in a general sense, God wants pastors and leaders to be successful because he loves his kingdom and his bride, the church, but in God’s estimation, long-term faithfulness that produces fruit in ministry is rooted in humble, godly character. A second thing that 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.

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. Where in your leadership community have you become more focused on doing than on being?

1 Corinthians 3:7: “Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”

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.

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. 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?

Faithfulness>results

Achievement becomes dangerous when it silences honest leader communication. Because of what God has done for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ, our leadership communities have been freed to be the most honest communities on earth. We are free to confess weakness because Jesus is our strength. We are free to confess failure because all of our failures have been covered by his blood. We are freed from taking credit for what only God can produce. We are free to respectfully disagree with one another because we get our identity and security from our Lord and not from one another. We are free to confess wrong attitudes toward and actions against one another because grace allows us to reconcile. We are freed from the allure of power and position because we have been freed from looking horizontally for what can only be found vertically. And we are free, because of Christ’s work, to talk about these things and confess how we struggle with them.

Hiding, denial, and fear will keep a ministry community from spiritual health, and the lack of spiritual health will prohibit the ministry longevity that is a necessary ingredient in realizing long-term results. Do your leaders feel free to confess to personal weakness and failure, knowing that when they do, they will be greeted with grace?

The Savior is the people-building achiever who uses us as his tools but works in his own way and on his own time. What are you seeking to build and how will you know that you have achieved your goals? It really is true that ministry achievement becomes dangerous when it turns potential disciples into consumers. How has the way you have built the church and the way you think about your job as leaders influenced the way your congregation thinks about the church and their relationship to it?

We can’t allow ourselves to be so intent on achieving great things for God that we develop negative attitudes toward the messy people of God who are intended to be the objects of the ministry to which we have been called. God knew that if he placed his church in a fallen world that it would be inefficient and a bit chaotic. But the mess of ministry is God’s mess, a mess that drives leaders beyond the borders of their own wisdom and strength to rely on the presence, power, and promises of the one who sent them.

The church isn’t meant, for either leaders or those being led, to be comfortable; it’s meant to be personally transformational.

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.

This is a temptation that every leadership community faces, particularly when God has granted that community success. There are two things that need to be observed here. First, God doesn’t call us to ministry leadership because we are able, but because he is. Second, as leaders we should not fear weakness, because God’s grace is sufficient. It’s our delusions of strength that we should fear because they will keep us from seeking and celebrating that very same grace.

Yes, we should assess whether leaders are doing their jobs with discipline, faithfulness, and joy. And, yes, because we are passionate for the gospel and the extension of God’s kingdom, we should be on the mark, working to achieve. But we must not esteem doing over being. Think of the beloved leaders whose ministries imploded; almost never were these leaders set aside because they failed to achieve. Rather, in the lives of failed leader after failed leader, the failure was more a matter of character than productivity. Has leader productivity caused you to fail to ask questions about the deeper spiritual health of your leaders?

Perhaps every church leadership community should post James 5:1–18 as a constant reminder and warning. Fruit in ministry is the result not of our wise planning and diligent execution but of the loving operation of God’s rescuing and transforming grace. He produces the fruit; we are but tools in his redemptive hands. He calls us to himself, conscripts us for his work, produces commitment in our hearts, gives vision to our minds, empowers us to be faithful and disciplined, brings people under our care, softens their hearts to hear the gospel, produces conviction and faith in their hearts, empowers their obedience, transforms their lives, and calls them into his work.

The one who called us goes with us. The one who called us will empower us. The one who called us will convict us. The one who called us will protect us. He opens the eyes of our hearts to dangers we would not see without him, but he does so not as our judge but as our Father and friend. May we approach him with confidence, with cries for help, with confession where we have wandered, and with a commitment to be good soldiers in this battle. And may we remember that he fights for us even when we don’t have the sense to fight for ourselves.

I was surrounded by an intimate, loving, encouraging, protective gospel community. 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. My blindness was greeted by a community that sought to give me sight, free of condemnation. The community around me was patient and understanding. Fellow leaders took me to breakfast or lunch and lovingly preached the gospel to me. Arms of mercy were wrapped around me and would not let me go. I didn’t see it then, but I do now: this community protected me from me in a way that was loving, kind, honest, and encouraging. With all the endless demands of ministry leadership, these leaders took time with me without making me feel like an interruption. This may be an overstatement, but if it is, it’s not by much: without the ministry of that leadership community, I might not be in ministry today.

Institutional achievement is not the Redeemer’s ultimate goal but a means to a greater, more glorious goal: the rescue and transformation of his people. 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.

Rather than achievement forming how the leadership community forms itself and operates, the gospel does.

It’s the gospel that tells us who leaders are, what leaders need, how leaders should relate to one another, how the leadership community should function, what its values should be, how it will deal with disappointment and failure, and how it will identify and nurture future leaders.

There should be no more powerful influence on leadership formation, mission, community, and methodology than the gospel of God’s grace. The gospel is profoundly more than the grace of past rescue and future hope. It is both of these and much more. The gospel provides a lens for us to look at and understand everything that we deal with in church and ministry leadership while also providing guidance as to how we should do everything we are called to as leaders in Christ’s church. If we are called to gospel mission, we must, as leaders, be a gospel-drenched, gospel-functioning community. Let me suggest in some detail what that looks like.

A Gospel Community Is Nurturing

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. Even though he is a leader, 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.

That weeding work, for all of us, is a community project.