The leadership baton

I have started reading The Leadership Baton and ran across this thought: "At some point, a leader believed in you enough to hand you the baton of leadership."

When I read that I immediately thought of the pastor who first asked if I had ever considered that God might be calling me into the ministry. We were traveling to a conference when I began sharing a thought I had about a sermon. That was when he asked about my sense of call. We discussed it as we drove to the conference and on the return trip. He talked to me about seminary, ordination, and some of what I could expect as a pastor. When we got back to the church he gave me a key to his office so I could use his library to study. Although I did not decide that God was in fact calling me into the ministry until he had left our church, Ron Williams was certainly instrumental in my becoming a minister. He believed in me enough to hand me the baton.

It has been my privilege to be able to encourage some folks to consider that God may be calling them into the ministry. I have also encouraged even more people to remain in ministry when they were going through rough times. These were individuals in whom I could see that they were being used by God. They were persons who seemed to have a passion to serve people and had gifts that God could use to minister to others.

One of the challenges facing the church today is that fewer people are sensing God's call on their lives. Fewer people today are entering pastoral ministry, and many leave soon after graduating from seminary. Even more troublesome is the difficulty in finding people to serve in smaller churches. I am convinced that one way to address this is that those of us in leadership must find others to whom we can pass the baton.

The quote above is true. Most of us are in ministry today because someone believed in us enough to challenge us to prayerfully consider if God might have a call on our lives. Now it is up to us to prayerfully look at people around us who might have the same call on their lives, and then we need to encourage them to consider if God is calling them to ministry. Who will be the next generation of leaders in our churches if we do not do this? To make the question more personal, who will be the next leader of your church if you do not intentionally pass the baton on to someone else?

In my opinion, our first responsibility is to win people to Jesus Christ and lead them into a life of discipleship. Our second responsibility is to raise up the next generation of leaders of the church. It is God who calls a person to this task, but we have the responsibility to help them identify that call and to encourage them to pursue it.