Passing the leadership baton

Probably the one thing that brings me the most pleasure these days is training future leaders. This past Saturday I taught the first class of a course I teach in our Church Leadership Institute on "Personal and Family Health." This term we have six students. Some are already serving as bivocational ministers; some are considering such a call while others in the class plan to continue as lay leaders in their churches. The course examines the challenges of ministry and how to maintain balance in the various areas of life that makes for a healthier life and ministry. I look forward to teaching this course each year because it addresses an aspect of leadership that is often overlooked.

For the past several years I've had the opportunity to lead a number of workshops for various denominations. Most of these workshops have focused on bivocational ministry, small church health, and transforming the small church. Some are scheduled for one-day events. Others are scheduled for multi-site, multi-day events. More than once I've done the same workshop in four different cities in four days in order to reach the greatest number of participants. I usually sleep well on the way home when these are over, but I am always energized by the opportunity to help equip current and future leaders.

A couple of years ago I was asked by a university to teach an on-line course on "The Healthy Church." I had taken on-line courses, but I had never taught one. I was impressed with the amount of work that went into the preparation of the course material and how it would be presented on-line. I think we had sixteen students enroll in the course. It was an intense time, but I loved every minute of it. Again, it was the excitement of training future leaders for our churches, being able to interact with them, respond to their questions, and listen to their concerns. Unfortunately, with a DMin and not a PhD not many of these opportunities are available to me due to the accrediting agencies preferring the PhD for instructors. Still, I would not have traded teaching that course for anything, and my prayer is that I helped at least one student as he or she moves forward in ministry.

As a denominational leader I sit in many meetings where the topic is the lack of great leaders for our churches. One of the aspects of our region's vision is to grow healthy leaders. Unfortunately, for many of us in these positions this has been talked about more often than it's been done. About 10-11 years ago we developed our Church Leadership Institute (CLI) in an effort to do that in our region, and since then we've had over 230 students taking classes with many of them completing a two or three year program of study. But, with over 300 churches in our region we need many more involved in such training. I often think if only ten people from each church in our region completed our CLI program it would have a tremendous impact on our churches and on our region. We now have a team looking at how we can do more to intentionally develop leaders in our region,and I think by the first of next year we will have implemented some new ways to do that.

What is your church doing to develop leaders in your congregation? Most churches are doing nothing intentional about leadership develop and wonder why they struggle to find excellent leaders. As the authors of The Leadership Baton: An Intentional Strategy for Developing Leaders in Your Church write, "The answer to the shortage of church leaders is...restoring the church to the center of leadership training....When the church is actively fulfilling its mission of raising up leaders for the harvest, nothing can stop it. The answer is church-based leadership development."  I would challenge you to become intentional about developing the leaders you need in your congregation.  Bivocational churches in the future are going to find it much easier to raise up men and women to serve as pastors from within their congregations than it will be to find some person from the outside to serve in that capacity, but the time to start developing these leaders is now.  Our churches also need to focus on developing their lay leadership if they are serious about becoming more effective in their various ministries.  The key word here is intentional and the time to begin is now.