HAVE YOU BEEN TRAINED TO FAIL?      Part 2

In my last article I discussed the possibility that many ministers may have been TRAINED TO FAIL.  My premise was that you may have been trained to fail if you have been taught to do ministry rather than to train others to do ministry.  I shared five common ingredients in growing healthy churches.  In this article I want to try to answer the question: How can you build an effective leadership team and maximize ministry in your church? The following six steps are proven and effective: You may have been trained to fail if you have been taught to do ministry rather than to train others to do ministry.

1. Identify the influencers in your church.  First begin by identifying the influencers.  These individuals may have offices or hold titles, but in some cases, may not.  Never-the-less, influencers are the ones to whom others look for decisions. Write down their names and rank them on a scale of 1 to 10 as to their influence within the church.

2. Select and recruit people with character potential. Look for important traits such as humility, teachableness, willingness to serve, loyalty, and responsiveness to spiritual authority. Individuals with this kind of character undoubtedly love God and their fellow man and will be prime candidates for training, discipling and replicating others just like themselves.  Never recruit someone to train who is not willing to train someone else.  We a called to be leaders of leaders not leaders of followers.

3. Orient them toward leadership in general.  Begin at the beginning.  Don’t assume that your potential leaders know anything about leadership—that they know what you know about leadership.  It could be helpful to begin by exposing them to a personal assessment process in order to gain an understanding the basics of true leadership.  Assessment could include a spiritual gift(s) assessment, a personal profile assessment (DISC), a team dimension profile, and a behavioral profile.

4. Once you have your list of potential leaders intentionally take time to build relationships with them. Don’t make the mistake of totally ignoring or excluding others in the process, but be intentional and focus on developing potential leaders.  Take them with you when you go out to minister, i.e, visitation, hospital visitation, witnessing, etc.  Watch their reaction to ministry opportunities.  See if you can detect a passion in them for a particular ministry.

5. Involve them in ministry.  After you assess their spiritual gifts, place prospective leaders in apprentice positions where they can observe and practice ministry whether directly under you or some other established leader in the church. In these kinds of settings they will experience valuable opportunities to assume responsibilities as they are being trained and supervised.

6. Release them in ministry. After people have been assessed, oriented, equipped, and involved in ministry, deploy them. Permit them to take the full load as leaders and ministers.

Jesus took a handful of men and transformed the world. He did so by pouring Himself into them and training them. Then He sent them out to do even greater things than He had done. Jesus knew the secret of minimizing maintenance and maximizing ministry.

Next time I want to look into the theme: Every Member a Minister.

Steve Brown           Part 1 of this Article
District Leader    (To comment on any part of this article, please scroll down.)