How Do I Progressively Develop Leaders?

Have you had this experience? You have a church member who has a great heart, is very influential and loves to serve in the church. You think to yourself, “This is a potential leader.” Many pastors aren’t sure what to do next and default into placing someone like this in the most needed leadership role, often with no training and poor results.

In last month’s newsletter, I wrote about developing leaders. Specifically, I challenged you to complete Step 1 and come up with your own definition of a leader that sounds something like this: 

A leader is someone who leads a specific group of people to accomplish God’s specific purpose(s) for that group of people.

I also suggested that you complete Step 2 and come up with the 5-7 skills of a developed leader. Here are a couple of the skills that I think are important: vision casting, team building, administration/organization. If you missed last month’s article, you can read it here. 

Now that you have your list of skills. Let’s talk about the different levels of leadership in your church. The lowest level of leadership is for the individual. It is simply for the person to lead themselves into God’s purpose for him/herself by discerning personal vision, managing personal organization, etc. The highest level of leadership is the lead pastor role. That role requires the same qualities as the lower levels but to a much higher degree. For example, it requires significantly higher ability in vision casting, team building, administration/organization (and probably some other abilities).

Step 3 is to look at your leadership structure and articulate the 4-6 different levels of leadership. It will look something like this:

Level 5:            Leading A Church

Level 4:            Leading a Department or Ministry

Level 3:            _________________________

Level 2:            _________________________

Level 1:            Leading Self

Take a look at your leadership structure and determine what is the lowest level of team leadership (Level 2). There are probably several leaders, in more than one ministry, who lead at this level. Perhaps they lead an usher team, or a decorating team, or a sound team. Next consider those who lead at the next level (Level 3). Perhaps they lead part of the children’s ministry or part of the men’s ministry. Continue this process until you have identified the 4, 5 or 6 levels of leadership in your church. 

Identifying the different levels of leadership is essential for leadership development. Once each level is identified, it becomes much easier to clarify the training necessary for each level of leadership.

Hope this is helpful. Next month, we’ll talk more about the actual leadership training.

Our goal in all of this is:

to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Ephesians 4:12-13

~ Eric Oleson