Now it’s not all about numerical growth BUT you need to know that God wants his church to grow numerically, more than you do!
One of the things we discovered early on in our growth was that the ability to develop more leaders would be one of our biggest barriers.
We spent a massive amount of money on two completely different kinds of leadership development experiences for our whole team.
#1- A Team Workshop at Chick-Fil-A HQ, and it was as cool as it sounds!
#2- A popular three-day Conference with different tracks for all major ministry areas.
HERE’S WHAT $20,000 TAUGHT ME
1. It was really expensive and time consuming.
This type of leadership training for our whole team was not something that would be a long term solution. It took way too much money and way too much time.
2. We didn’t have a leadership problem. We had a development problem.
There are tons of leaders sitting in all our churches but only 2% of churches have a system for developing leaders. The more we focus on developing others, the more we’ll grow in a healthy and sustainable way.
3. Leadership Development is the biggest barrier to growing a healthy church.
God did not call US TO DO ministry. He called us to equip OTHERS TO DO the work of the ministry. The more ministry we do as pastors the less opportunity we create for growth.
4. Modern ministry is backwards.
If you look at Jesus’ ministry, he spent 75% of his time developing leaders and 25% on large gatherings. The modern church spends 75% of their time on large gatherings and maybe 25% on leadership development. We were doing ministry backwards!
5. Knowledge without context and application is useless.
The conference was like drinking from a fire hydrant. The workshop, on the other hand, gave us less content but allowed us to evaluate, process and apply what we were learning and in the end, had a much bigger impact on our church.