The Final Four of the blogging tournament I’m in has begun. This week’s challenge is to blog on the idea of leadership development. This has been a particular challenge for me as you will read below. Leadership is far more challenging than I ever imagined and the effort to train leaders in the church is daunting. However, whether daunting or not, it is a matter that requires thoughtful attention. What I have come to believe about this topic is stated below, but I encourage you to drop by the host blog and read the other responses….and a vote for me would be nice. Click here to read and vote!
OFFICIAL ENTRY!
Leadership – According to trusted experts everything rises and falls on leadership. If that’s true, that elevates the need for leaders within any organization to a very high level of importance.
However, I believe leadership identification is a larger challenge than training. Training leaders who aren’t leaders only causes frustration. Identification is much harder than it would appear to be. I believe ther are two significant hurdles to proper leadership identification:
- A Desire to Work and Succeed – Most people attracted to a church plant want to see it become “successful”. It is new and fresh. The possibilities are enormous. There is a willingness for many to put their hand to the plow and do whatever needs to be done. The challenge is that many put their hands to plows that should be held by someone else.
- Few “True” Leaders – Peter Drucker in “Effective Executive” laments that we seem to be getting to the point where we are searching for a “universal genius” and universal geniuses have always been in scarce supply. According to Drucker, “we will therefore have to staff our organizations with people who at best excel in one ability. And then they are more than likely to lack any but the most modest endowment in the others.”
Putting people in wrong positions is bad for both the individual and for the church. And simple availablity or willingness to help does not indicate leadership. We have struggled through this question for a couple of years. I have no magic bullets and more questions than answers. I can say that God will bring the gifts that we need into the church. Spiritual gifts are key, so I would counsel, based on our own struggle, to start with identification through gift assessment first. Then pray for wisdom and discernment.
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