Then he came back. Quietly. Sat in the back. Started attending a men’s Bible study. Started asking questions instead of giving answers. Started apologizing for his past behavior.
Two years later, Mike was back on the board. But he was a different man. He’d been broken, humbled, and rebuilt by God’s grace. And when conflict arose in meetings, Mike was the first one to call for prayer, to assume the best, to seek unity.
That’s what maturity looks like. And it’s only possible when we stop enabling immaturity.
What Needs to Happen
Pastors need to stop being afraid. Stop avoiding the hard conversations. Stop making excuses for immature behavior. Stop filling leadership slots with anyone who’s willing. Your job isn’t to keep everyone happy—it’s to build mature disciples and protect the flock.
Church members need to examine themselves. Before you criticize someone else’s immaturity, ask: Where am I still acting like a spiritual infant? Where am I demanding my way? Where am I treating the church like it exists for me? Am I the kind of person I’d want leading this church?
Churches need to invest in discipleship. You can’t demand mature leaders if you’re not producing mature disciples. Build a pipeline: teach people to walk with Jesus, grow them in community, give them small opportunities to serve and lead, mentor them through failure, and gradually entrust them with more.
The Call to Maturity
Here’s what we all need to remember: “We shall all stand before God’s judgment seat. It is written ‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee will bow before me; every tongue will confess to God.’ So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God” (Romans 14:10-12).
One day—maybe sooner than we think—we’re going to stand before Jesus and answer for how we led His church. For the immature person in leadership, that will be a rude awakening. But it will also be a rude awakening for the pastor who was too afraid to confront them. And for the congregation that enabled the dysfunction because it was easier than doing the hard work of discipline and discipleship.
From time to time, each one of us will receive a disappointment in the church. We won’t get the program we wanted, the position we expected, the outcome we lobbied for. Nothing tells the story about our maturity like the way we handle our disappointment.
Will we storm out? Withhold our giving? Gossip to anyone who will listen? Or will we trust that God is sovereign, that His ways are higher than ours, and that His church doesn’t rise or fall on whether we get our way?
Let us grow up into maturity. Let us be strong in the Lord and thus be able to help others coming behind us. Let us build churches where character matters more than convenience, where discipleship trumps desperation, and where we measure success not by slots filled but by lives transformed.
The church doesn’t need more volunteers. It needs more disciples. And if we’re serious about that, we have to stop pretending that immaturity is acceptable in leadership.
It’s not. It never has been. And by God’s grace, it doesn’t have to be.
