Area #3 – Your Leadership Style
I am a student of growing churches! I don’t care what denomination they are, where they are located, or what the architecture looks like. If people are being reached for the Kingdom, I want to see what is going on. I’ve crawled on a lot of planes and made tons of phone calls, and the one thing that I’ve discovered is that hardly ANY of these churches are similar in leadership styles.
Now let me be VERY clear—godly leadership is ESSENTIAL for a church to have a Kingdom impact! (Look at what happened to the nation of Israel in the book of Judges when they didn’t have godly leadership!) But I believe each church must wrestle with the Scriptures and personalities that are present and allow the Lord to show them the best way to structure for maximum effectiveness.
Jesus addressed seven different churches in Revelation 2-3, and He addressed each one of them differently! He didn’t say, “Here is an org chart for all of you guys, here are some titles for key staff members, and here are some books to read on leadership development…”
What He did establish with each church is that THE CHURCH IS HIS, but He also addressed each unique issue the church was facing and then walked them through how to deal with it. And I believe He’s still doing the same thing today! No one knows how to lead the church better than Jesus! After all…it is HIS. (ANY leadership structure HAS to recognize this, or the church will become impotent!)
But when you establish how the church will be led, people will always point to another model that “is working” somewhere else. In this situation, try not to tear the other model down (unless it’s leading a church into the ground), but confidently explain that the church’s leadership has set things up the way they feel Jesus has led them to do so. That explanation works for some…and not so much for others. But at the end of the day, the leader(s) need to rest in the fact that they have set things up the way Jesus has led; after all, we are the ones who will be held accountable for it! (Hebrews 13:17)
