16 Aug We Spent $20K On Leadership Development And Here’s What We Learned!

 

My name is Brian. I’m the founder of Ministry Library but more importantly, I’m a pastor at a growing church I helped plant a little over 10 years ago.

 

It took our church 4 years to break the 100 person barrier. In the last 6 years we’ve grown to over 1,300 in weekly attendance, we’ve planted 3 other churches out of ours, we’re planting our 4th this fall and we’re planning for the launch of our first campus.

 

Now it’s not all about numerical growth BUT…

God wants His church to grow numerically more than you do!

 

One of the turning points for us was discovering that the ability to develop more leaders would be one of our biggest barriers to healthy growth.

 

We knew we needed to learn how to identify and train up new leaders. So we decided to put our money where our mouth was and invest in our staff and key volunteer leaders’ development.

 

We spent just about $20,000 on two completely different kinds of leadership development experiences for our whole team.

 

First let’s outline the two experiences then let me share what I learned and how it WILL change your ministry.

The first experience was a team workshop at Chick-fil-a HQ, and it was as cool as it sounds! It featured top leadership consultants Tony Morgan and Mac Lake.

 

The workshop focused on how to build a leadership pipeline. A leadership pipeline is a systematic and scalable process for identifying, developing and deploying leaders.

 

Mac did a great job of leading us through questions that helped us come to our own answers. He didn’t just hand us the answers. The team workshop included teaching, group discussion, evaluation, and team exercises.

 

The second was a popular three-day conference that had different tracks for all major ministry areas. You’re probably familiar with this style of leadership development so I don’t need to go into too much detail.

 

HERE’S WHAT $20,000 TAUGHT ME

 

1. Developing leaders can be expensive and time consuming.

This type of leadership training for our whole team was not something that could be a long term solution.

It took way too much money and way too much time, not to mention the fact that all our key leaders had to take time off work and we weren’t getting our normal work done!

 

2. We didn’t have a leadership problem. We had a development problem.

There are tons of leaders sitting in all our churches. We have entrepreneurs, managers, directors, executives and people with raw leadership potential already in our churches.

 

The reality is that 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. Our ministry was 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 it’s time on large gatherings and maybe 25% on leadership development.

We were doing ministry backwards!

 

What would happen to your church if you invested more into developing leaders?

 

 

5. Knowledge without context can’t be properly applied.

The conference was like drinking from a fire hydrant. We wrote tons of notes, took back a few books but we didn’t really apply much.

Why?

Because knowledge without context can’t be properly applied.

 

So the conference was way too much information and not enough application. The workshop, on the other hand, gave us much less content but allowed us to evaluate, process and apply what we were learning to our context.

In the end the workshop had a much bigger impact on our church because we applied what we learned!

 

I remember leaving the workshop feeling excited and passionate about leadership development.

I also fell in love with the way in which Mac lead us through the application of what we learned.

 

That’s why I created Ministry Library.

I wanted to provide pastors with a system for developing their top leaders that would save them both time and money.