Home Pastors Articles for Pastors The 5 Essential Practices of Leaders Who Multiply Leaders

The 5 Essential Practices of Leaders Who Multiply Leaders

3. Disciple Multiplying

This is a shift in sharing, and if you want a quick slogan for this practice, it’s “Share it!”

You will begin to not only share what you know to help others follow Jesus but also share your life and invest in the development of leaders who do the same for other leaders. We see this in the life of Jesus as he spent three years primarily with 12 people (John 3:22).

To help you easily implement this practice, I will give you a simple tool called the “five steps of apprenticeship.” This tool has the power to multiply movements of disciple-makers. The only reason it does not is because people have not fully used it.

4. Gift Activating

This is a shift in blessing, and if you want a quick slogan for this practice, it’s “Bless it!”

You will not just ask God to bless the gifts he has given you but ask him to bless the leaders you have developed as you send them out at the end of their apprenticeship. The most obvious example of this is in Matthew 28:16–20; Jesus is turning over the leadership of the movement to his closest followers, and he tells them, in effect, “I have all authority and will use it through you as you go!

To help you pass along the blessing, I will give you a simple tool called “commissioning” (explained in chapter 8). This ancient practice of laying your hands on someone and asking God to bless them as you send them out is a powerful way to activate a leadership gift.

5. Kingdom Building

This is a shift in counting, and if you want a quick slogan for this practice, it’s “Count it!”

You are no longer only concerned with who is showing up at your thing; you count who is doing God’s thing!

Jesus told his followers in simple terms, “Seek first the kingdom of God” (Matt. 6:33 ESV). They heeded this admonition, and all that mattered was what God was keeping track of as the Jesus mission was being advanced around the world.

So that you can make this shift in counting, I will give you a simple tool I call a “hero maker’s scoreboard.” Lots of statistics are important and beneficial, but this simple scoreboard will have churches track only a few vital metrics and ask leaders to track only two key measurements. This scoreboard is designed to help you count what builds the kingdom.

With these five practices, God will use you to change the world. Each practice depends on your willingness to continually ask, “Am I trying to be the hero, or am I trying to make heroes of others?”

Here to Help You

The words hero maker may be a new term, but I’m so convinced that it comes straight out of the model of Jesus himself that our Exponential church multiplication conference is devoting the entire year of 2018 to unpacking how leaders can become better hero makers.

I warmly invite you to be one of the more than 10,000 people who join the in-person Exponential gatherings that kick off February 26-March 2 in Orlando, and also one of the 30,000 leaders who watch various sessions online. Find out more at exponential.org.

There is no better way to prepare for that event than to read and process Hero Maker with your leadership team (see HeroMakerBook.org for group-purchase discounts and free discussion guide).

Our prayer for both the book and the conference comes from Jesus’s promise: “…whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these…” (John 14:12, emphasis added). Could it be that these “greater things” will happen in direct proportion to the ministry mobilization that happens as more leaders today make heroes of others?

I recently interviewed Dave on Episode 169 of my podcast. You can listen here

This article originally appeared here.