Leadership Starts With The Self

Leadership means accepting responsibility, developing competence and facing the future with courage.

When we plant churches, our primary strategy is to start really simple and allow leadership skills to develop over time.

This strategy of starting small and allowing growth to come over time is intentional. Rather than requiring church planters to have all the necessary skills and experience as a prerequisite, they can develop those skills as they go. This widens the pool of prospective planters from a niche personality type to include almost anyone.

However, despite making the process as simple as possible, not every simple church leader is well-suited to starting a brand-new location. A simple church leader may have a tremendous track record of disciple-making but struggle under the unique burdens of leadership that come from beginning a new work in a new place.

What are the skills that separate a house church leader from a house church planter in a brand-new city?

Largely, the skills that separate the two are not disciple-making and evangelism, but leadership capacity.

It is this distinction between disciple-making and leadership that sets our campus pastors apart from our disciple-makers in terms of skills, expectations, and responsibilities. Our simple church leaders, missionaries, and disciple-makers are responsible for a specific community of disciples, but they do not bear responsibility for the whole. A disciple-maker’s responsibility is bounded by those they are reaching. A campus pastor, in contrast, has a long-term and unbounded responsibility for both the present reality and the future growth of the community.

There are many ways leaders interact with others, but leadership begins with an internal set of convictions that enable them to relate to others in ways that instill confidence. This internal sense of self starts with accepting responsibility, developing personal competence, and facing the unknown with courage.

1. Accepting Responsibility

Leaders accept full responsibility.

A leader takes responsibility for what happens under their care, both good and bad. While we provide all the support we can, there is no bailout option on the ground. The success or failure of a church plant ultimately rests on the shoulders of the leadership team serving there.

This does not mean they carry the burden of responsibility alone. A key dimension of leadership is learning to empower those within your care to carry the burden with you. However, leadership begins by owning the outcomes.

I recently asked one of our campus pastors what key idea he had learned that enabled him and his wife to become effective leaders. He responded, “I had to accept that I was driving the bus. No one else.”

2. Developing Personal Competence

Alongside accepting responsibility, leadership means taking responsibility for developing your own competence in the areas under your care.

By competence, I mean developing the technical skills necessary to win and keep the trust of those you lead.

In our context, these competencies include preaching, running meetings, organizing and scheduling, reliably showing up, managing finances, delegating, and many other day-to-day functions.

To use Tod Bolsinger’s analogy from Canoeing the Mountains, it is the development of these competencies that enables people to trust us “on the map,” with things they understand and circumstances that are familiar, so that they will trust us “off the map,” in unknown contexts and an uncertain future.

3. Facing the Unknown with Courage

It is when we face unknown situations that leadership becomes necessary.

If every situation is familiar and every decision is easy to understand, leadership is not really required. In those situations, leadership can often give way to management. Leadership thrives when navigating the unknown.

In uncertain environments, it is the strength and vision of the leader that inspires those who follow to move forward with courage. In church planting, we face many unknowns, along with challenges, setbacks, and uncertainty. A leader does not despair or shrink back from these challenges. Instead, they invite others to press into them with courage and conviction.

Leadership Flows from Formation

In every case where I have seen a leader thrive, they have intentionally cultivated all three of these internal convictions. Another way to describe this is developing a differentiated sense of self that is secure in Christ.

This security in Christ brings us back to disciple-making.

These three leadership convictions are not developed in isolation. Ultimately, they are rooted in our security in Christ. Strength of character flows from our formation in Christ and our confidence in Him.

While not everyone is called to be a great leader, everyone can play a part in developing great leaders by helping disciples fix their eyes on Jesus.

Note: For keen readers, you may notice the influence of ideas from Failure of Nerve by Edwin Friedman. It’s my favourite leadership book!

Note 2: I’ll be off for a week on holiday with my family as a part of our bi-annual sabbath week. No post next Monday!