Where do you find yourself looking…for leaders?
- Are you focused on getting in good with the usual suspects so they’ll finally take you up on leaving their group and helping you start a new one?
- Are you spending time getting to know the healthiest members of your existing groups? Hoping they’ll sense God’s calling on their lives and step up to commit to attending your small group leader orientation?
- Maybe you’re desperately trying to convince an elder or deacon that they’re a natural shepherd.
Can I remind you of one of my core convictions? Don’t ever lose sight of the edges of your congregation. Don’t ever forget that some of the very best leader candidates are too new to your congregation for you to have spent a lot of time with them. The length of time someone has been attending your church shouldn’t be the initial hoop. And the truth is, once your church has grown beyond a certain size, you just begin to lose track of the potential leaders you’ve got.
I remember when I first started working with the small group ministry at Fellowship of The Woodlands (now Woodlands Church). In 2000, our leadership identification, recruitment, and development was still a very traditional format. There was no way we could keep up with the demand with an old school methodology. So…we began tinkering with the idea of a small group connection. We tried it, and it worked. It worked big time! Over the first 18 months, we launched almost 150 groups and sustained approximately 120.
We were elated by the response! It was truly amazing to watch the small group connection process, to see so many people get connected into a group. But…you know what was even more amazing? The process was identifying some killer leaders. Tons of them.
Time after time, we all acknowledged that we’d never seen that couple before. We’d never seen that woman before. We’d never noticed that man before. It happened so frequently that I began saying we needed to stop praying for God to send leaders and start realizing that He already had. They were already in the room
The biggest thing we learned was to keep our eyes on the edges. I hope you’ll never forget to look there. Because the x-factor is always near the edge.
