When God wanted His people delivered from an oppressive pharaoh, He used a leader named Moses. When He needed Jerusalem's wall rebuilt, He used a leader named Nehemiah. When He wanted His people to experience a golden era, He used a leader named David. When He wanted to build a temple, He used a leader named Solomon. When He needed a statesman-prophet, He used a leader named Isaiah. And when He needed a fearless church planter, He used a leader named Paul.
Throughout history, whenever God has needed someone to initiate, organize, and carry out an important project, He has called upon leaders. And since His priority from Pentecost to today has been to build redemptive communities that would flourish in the midst of resistant cultures, it makes sense that He would turn to leaders again.
After all, who's going to cast the vision of or creatively imagine the future for a biblically functioning community? Who's going to insist that the teaching and fellowship transform lives? Who's going to uphold the value of prayer, make sure the sacraments are honored, and insist that spiritual gifts are in use throughout the church? Who's going to coordinate ministries, establish small-group structures, lift high the importance of worship, and inspire the church to reach out to spiritually lost people?
That's right - leaders. Romans 12:8 gives unambiguous marching orders to every man and woman who's been entrusted with the spiritual gift of leadership - Lead, and do it with diligence.
Unfortunately, there has been some confusion about leadership in recent Christian history. Local churches generally haven't been directed by leaders but by teachers, and these two species have distinctly different behavior patterns and areas of emphasis. As a result, a lot of churches are well taught; very few are effectively led.
Please, don't get me wrong. The church needs great teachers. Preaching is the core ministry of the church, and lives will not change without powerful and Spirit-inspired teaching from the Word of God. Without gifted teachers, we might as well close shop, because they're critical to fulfilling God's vision for biblically functioning communities.
And yet there are distinctions in the way teachers and leaders operate. I'm not saying one is better than the other, only that their approach to ministry is different. For instance, when teachers stand in front of people, their chief desire is to accurately and compellingly communicate biblical truth in the hopes of impacting lives. But when leaders have the microphone, there's another agenda. Usually they have a purpose, mission, or cause that they want people to get fired up about.
Over a period of time, teachers tend to attract learners who agree that, yes, the communication and understanding of scriptural truth are crucial for believers in order to change their lives. Teachers educate and edify, which are both very necessary. Yet leaders inspire and motivate. They tend to pull people into action and involve them in the mission that they're spearheading. Leading is active, prompting people to leap out of their chairs and declare, "That's not just a good idea, it's a compelling mission for me to commit my life to!"
Also, it's common for teachers to become so immersed in their biblical studies and message preparation that they don't pick up on subtle kinds of corrective steps that should be taken in the church. Programs may be starting to deteriorate, the financial base can be slightly eroding, or the congregation's morale could be slowly sagging, but teachers might not quickly discern the need to take prompt action.
But when a person with a leadership gift walks around the church, mental warning buzzers go off all over the place. His or her mind is racing with thoughts like We need to pay more attention to this and We need to solve that and We need to get this back on track and We've got to figure out why we're still doing this when it's no longer working and We've got to start a new program to accomplish something else.
What's more, some teachers don't emphasize the importance of involving people in the thrill of doing ministry. Their intention is to make sure their congregation is being biblically grounded so people aren't tossed to and fro by different winds of doctrine, and this is essential. However, leaders put a high priority on making sure people discover, develop, and deploy their spiritual gifts and that they get elbow-deep in ministry themselves.
Do you see the difference?
For the most part, teachers don't naturally gravitate toward the strategic allocation of resources. While they know this is an integral part of ministry, it generally isn't an exercise they're passionate about. On the other hand, leaders look at the church's finite pool of finances and enthusiastically envision it as kingdom capital that can make the difference between a church stalling out or taking the next hill. As a result, teachers and leaders look at the church budget from entirely different perspectives. To a teacher, the budget can be sheer drudgery; to a leader, it's laden with opportunities.
Because God has entrusted me with spiritual gift of leadership, I tend to see everything through that lens. Sometimes I'll be walking through Willow Creek with one of our elders, whose strongest gift is encouragement. I may be mentally juggling a lot of leadership issues at the time, even down to the smallest detail of how the hallway's traffic flow is working, while her attention might lock on to someone off to the side who's emotionally hurting. She doesn't know much about strategy and resource allocation; I may not notice the person with the broken heart, if I'm not careful. In both cases, our main gift colors the way we perceive the ministry.
Of course, some people have a mixture of teaching and leadership gifts. I certainly don't want to pretend these are mutually exclusive. In my own case, my primary gift is leadership, my secondary gift is personal evangelism, and my third is teaching. But it's true that those with leadership abilities exhibit certain characteristics that are vital to advancing the church.
As I've looked through the Scriptures at those who throughout history have been unmistakably strong leaders, I've noticed certain behavior patterns and attitudes that they hold in common. Each of these eight characteristics has important implications for the local church:
1. Leaders have the ability to cast a vision.
People with the spiritual gift of leadership have a God-given capability to imagine a preferred future for whatever kingdom-related enterprise they're leading. For instance, Jesus stood before a crowd of people and said, "Someday the church is going to be like a city on a hill that cannot be hidden." One day He walked up to Peter and said, "I see a future for you. In fact, I can envision you becoming something that even you can't imagine. And so from now on I'm going to call you Rock."
Leaders stand up in front of congregations and say, "Do you know what we need to become? A biblically functioning community!" Then they go down the list of what constitutes a loving, serving, worshipping, praying, outreach-oriented, God-honoring fellowship of believers, and people want to come flying out of their seats to sign up!
Why is that? Because God has created human beings to respond to a worthy vision when it's passionately presented by a gifted leader.
2. Leaders have the ability to coalesce people.
People are not only dying to hear an exciting vision but they're also hungering for someone to discover the unique contribution they can make to that cause. Leaders have a talent for drawing people out of the bleachers and onto the playing field and then making sure they're in the right positions for producing the maximum difference for the kingdom.
Nehemiah is a great example. He cast a vision for rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem by essentially telling his followers, "The city of God is going to be strong and fortified again! We're not going to be the embarrassment of the world anymore. We're going to go rebuild the wall and city!" And a whole bunch of people exclaimed, "Yes! Let's do it!"
Then Nehemiah mobilized them and put them into strategic positions. His plan demonstrated leadership brilliance: he assigned families to rebuild the portion of the wall adjacent to their home. After all, people will be motivated to build a terrific wall if it's going to protect their children and themselves. So Nehemiah efficiently got everybody organized into effective units to fulfill the vision that he had cast.
Part of leadership is assessing the character, skills, life experiences, temperament, personality, and spiritual gifts of each member of the team that are available to accomplish the task at hand. Then once people are assigned to appropriate responsibilities, watch out! People flourish when they're freed up to contribute to a plan's success.
3. Leaders have the ability to inspire and motivate people.
Those with leadership gifts have a supernatural sense of when to encourage other people and cheer them on. Intuitively they know how to reignite someone's spark of enthusiasm when it begins to flicker.
For instance, when people step offstage after participating in our services, they walk very close to the area where the speakers sit. I've noticed over the years that if I'm sitting there with people who are pure teachers, they're usually so wrapped up in the sermon they are preparing to deliver to the congregation that they barely notice the vocalists or actors who leave the stage and file past them.
But when people with leadership gifts sit there, they can't help but call out, "Great job! Thanks for serving! Nobody could have done that like you!" Frankly, leaders just can't stop themselves. Why? Because they have a heart to inspire and motivate others.
4. Leaders are able to identify the need for positive change - and then bring it about.
It's not enough for leaders to have an innate sense of when corrective steps should be taken in an organization. They also need God-inspired insights about how to change course without causing a mutiny by the crew - or killing the helmsman!
For instance, many times pastors will attend a Willow Creek conference and become enthused about bringing some new ideas back to their church. That's fine, except in cases when they return home and try to instigate massive modifications without first casting an appropriate vision, laying a foundation of new values, and thinking through how to manage the transition. The end result can be a disaster for both the pastor and the church.
Gifted leaders have the spiritual savvy that's necessary to introduce reasonable change at a pace that a church can assimilate.
5. Leaders establish core values.
Leaders are constantly defining and honing the unique set of values that undergird their organization and keep everybody on track. The apostle Paul defined such values when he said to the other leaders of his day, "If you want to hang out in Jerusalem and build churches for the already convinced - yea, God! But I want to go out and build churches where Christ is not yet known."
Paul didn't eliminate any biblical imperatives, but he recognized that a distinct value for his ministry was to develop a church among the spiritually lost. Today leaders need to determine what values are especially needed to find that thumbprint God has for their own ministry.
In fact, establishing these core principles is so important that I'll be devoting an entire chapter to the values that Willow Creek's leaders have identified as central to accomplishing our mission.
6. Leaders allocate resources effectively.
Once a vision is described, a gifted leader begins to strategically assess what resources are available to achieve that God-given, preferred future. Leaders look at such resources as money, equipment, square footage, staff, volunteers - even time - and they begin to plan how all of them can be put to maximum use. Few things upset a leader as much as resources being frittered away when they could have been leveraged for kingdom gain.
Much of the time spent by Willow Creek's management team is devoted to ongoing discussions about how to make better use of the resources we have. Those sessions, instead of being draining, actually energize these leaders. They emerge with confidence that they've done their best to squeeze the most ministry out of whatever they have to work with.
7. Leaders have the ability to identify entropy.
In other words, leaders have a sixth sense that allows them to spot something that's beginning to fall apart, before others can realize it. The subtle deterioration of a ministry, or a fraying of morale that would be imperceptible to most people, virtually shouts out for attention to the gifted leader.
For example, in the early 1990s many people would have said that Willow Creek had a world-class small-group ministry. But those of us with leadership gifts had a God-given ability to peer behind the facade. We concluded that even though our ministry was working effectively according to most standards, it was not functioning as optimally as it could be. Certain needs were going unmet. Too many leaders were burning out. The system was stifling growth.
As we moved to address those issues some people exclaimed, "Hey, if it's not broken, don't fix it!" We had to respond. "You're right, the wheels haven't falled off yet. But they're starting to wobble, and we want to repair them before the crash."
Through the planning and hard work of some very talented leaders, we retooled that ministry. As a result, today we have a stronger, healthier, larger, and more efficient small-group ministry. In fact, by the beginning of 1995 we had nearly eleven hundred groups actively operating, and five times as many group leaders as we used to. Soon we will have ten thousand people active in small groups.
The reason can be traced back to leaders who looked beneath the attractive veneer and concluded that the system wasn't as effective as people assumed it was.
8. Leaders love to create a leadership culture.
Unfortunately, many churches these days are crippled by insecure pastors who want to be the hub around which the whole church revolves. They need to be involved with every decision. When capable and spiritual people step forward and offer to take over certain responsibilities, they get pushed away. Sometimes they're even given that ultimate insult, "You're just a lay person."
Consequently, churches end up with a lot of very gifted people sitting in the pews each Sunday with their hands dutifully folded in their laps. Meanwhile the pastor complains that he's exhausted and overworked. Clearly that's not the biblical paradigm!
Actually, the scriptural approach is for pastors to help people discover their spiritual gifts, to equip people, mobilize them, encourage them, and unleash them so they can advance the ministry. One of the best contributions that pastors can make to their church is to create a leadership culture in which others can lead, cast a vision, and organize volunteers around different parts of the ministry. Then the role of the senior leader is to work with the other leaders to make sure everyone is contributing to the vision.
Often when my secretary sends me a fax while I'm traveling, she adds this note at the bottom: "Things are running smoothly at the church." That doesn't threaten me; it fulfills me! I love to release leadership to the appropriate people, both staff and volunteers. I celebrate when they find their niche and flourish. It encourages me to see them own a chunk of the church with enthusiasm and creativity.
I enjoy it so much that sometimes I secretly think it must be illegal. But it's not illegal; it's biblical! (See Ephesians 4:11-13.)
THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
God gives leaders these eight qualities for a reason: so they can prayerfully, diligently, and humbly steward His treasure, the church. But I suspect that some of you have been reading this chapter with a lump in your throat. Uh-oh, you're saying to yourself. Here I am in a leadership opposition, but if I'm honest, these distinctions aren't really true for me. I don't think I have any leadership gifts. Now what do I do?
First of all, don't panic. First Corinthians 12:7 says you have at least one spiritual gift. It could be teaching, mercy, evangelism, encouragement, administration, or one of the other gifts. Whatever it is - celebrate the way God wired you up! Thank Him for it, because each gift has incredible value in His economy. And second, do your utmost to put your gift into play for the benefit of the kingdom. You'll be more fulfilled when you're contributing in an area that fits who you are, and your church will be better served when a spiritually gifted leader is at the helm.
But if you are a leader, then lead - and do it with diligence! Cast an inspiring, God-centered vision, create a succinct and compelling mission statement, carve out an effective strategy, help craft a set of biblical core values, and do your best to measure the results to make sure you're staying on track. In fact, I'll help you by devoting the next few chapters to going through these critical leadership functions, one at a time.
Don't squander the abilities God has assigned to you! You owe it to the kingdom - and to yourself - to put your leadership gift into action.
I remember going for a long, wet stroll in a part with one of the Willow Creek Association's board members during a break in a leadership conference in Cardiff, Wales. At the time, the association was in the midst of navigating some high-stakes challenges, and it seemed as if the more we talked about the issues, the faster we walked.
Finally I said, "These problems are huge, aren't they?"
"They sure are," he replied. And then he added something very revealing. "But don't you just love seeking God's wisdom and figuring out how to solve them?"
I had to smile. That's no teacher. That's no gifted mercy giver. That's no shepherd. That's a leader! I went back to my hotel room thanking God that we have spiritually gifted leaders charting the future of the Willow Creek Association.
And all around the world, churches desperately need people like him to be freed up to follow the directive of Romans 12:8 - Lead, and do it with diligence!
