Identifying, equipping, and releasing leaders is critical to church health and growth.
Every church on a mission to make disciples and represent Christ must keep leadership development as a priority. Identifying, equipping, and releasing leaders is critical to church health and growth. While this is true of every church, this doesn’t happen the same way in every context. The demographics of your community make an impact on your leadership.
“Talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not.”[1] This saying is commonly applied to areas of poverty because this reality is more obvious there. It’s also true of various contexts where churches serve their communities.
Every church has people capable of leadership roles. But not every church is in a place where opportunities to develop as leaders happen easily whether within the church or in the community. Let me compare two very different contexts to illustrate.
Pastoring in Drained Communities
First, I planted an inner-city church in Buffalo, New York, among the urban poor. What I learned is that the demographics there work against the development of new leaders.
It's not because leadership potential is absent but is because either (1) the opportunities for leaders to be trained are rarer in these communities or (2) people who have leadership ability tend to migrate away from the inner city as they develop personally.
In other words, I found I couldn’t find many people ready to lead in the inner city. Yet I had to raise up and train leaders. When I did that, I also found that sometimes when I made leaders, they changed life skills and actually ended up moving away.
Many friends in urban contexts tell a similar story.
Redemption and Lift
In missiology, we call this redemption and lift. Donald MacGavran introduced the term in his book Understanding ...
from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/2V1RvZq
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