I didn’t start out to spend most of my ministry career in change leadership, turning declining and struggling churches and organizations around to join Jesus on mission. I started as a church planter—starting brand new things, rather than renewing and reviving existing things.
God moved me into change leadership when I was a church planting professor, and a small, struggling church near where I taught asked me to help lead a turnaround.
Through that experience, I fell in love with change leadership, discovering that God had indeed gifted me to lead change. Since then, I’ve been at the front line of change in large organizations, churches, and academic institutions, including the encouraging growth we’ve seen at Talbot School of Theology. I’ve also taught change leadership in many contexts around the world.
What do I mean by change leadership? This is a specific focus of leadership aimed at creating or accelerating progress by working through hindrances to growth, then stewarding truths and practices to facilitate growth. More about this below.
I’ve come to believe that change leadership is a key need in our day. We need far more growing Christians and growing churches. We need thriving families and healthy ministries. We need leaders today, but we need more. We need change leaders, godly and skilled leaders who know the why, what, and how of leading change. These are leaders capable of stepping into churches and Christian institutions to bring renewed hearts and renewed minds to meet the challenges of our time.
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In this series of articles, we’re going to start with the core question: Why should we consider the significance of change leadership in the first place? The answer comes from the beginning of God’s Word, and with God’s intentions for us from the beginning of creation.
Leadership Begins in Genesis, Not the Business Section
I could give you a bunch of unique and helpful definitions of leadership. John Maxwell famously said, “Leadership is influence…nothing more, nothing less.” Peter Drucker put it simply, “A leader is someone who has followers.” Such definitions are helpful, but they can make people think that leadership is mostly about reading books from the business section.
I’ve learned from those kinds of books, but we need to trace leadership back to something more transcendent. We need to start where the calling of leadership actually begins. Leadership is part of the purpose of God in creation.
God created mankind in his own image: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness’” (Gen. 1:26). This creation came with a mandate to “rule” and a blessing of leadership: “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth’” (Gen. 1:28).
This pattern shows up in the next chapter, when “the Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch over it” (Gen. 2:15). Theologians refer to this calling in these verses as “the creation mandate,” and it is, among other things, a calling to leadership.
People were made to lead through relating to one another and to the world, reproducing both through children and multiplication of influence, while subduing and stewarding the resources of the earth. It’s a huge reason why we exist in the first place. It starts in the garden. But it doesn’t stop there.
