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Develop or Deploy

There's a whole lot of talk about developing leadership in the church world. Unfortunately, more talk than action.

Your own leadership style has more of a determining factor on your ability and inclination to develop others than their willingness to be developed. The 'run and gun' leader is motivated by results and usually looking for people to recruit that will help them accomplish the objective. This results in deploying leaders instead of developing leaders. The 'run and gun' leader usually does a great job of plugging the right people into the right areas. This doesn't mean that they are great at developing people. Usually, these newly recruited leaders have been developed by someone else and then recruited and then plugged in.

I once worked for a man who worked on the assumption that development happens by osmosis... just being the the environment. There is some truth to that. It really does help to be in the environment. However, if osmosis is the chief development technique, there will be no long term success.

Developing others requires us to:

1. Be focused on their growth, not our goals.

2. Be willing to grow them and let them go.

3. Understand that not everyone will grow like we know they could.

Developing leaders takes time and energy. It is, quite frankly, much easier to hire a person of competence and let them run. It's easier to find a leader that to develop one. What has God called us to do?

How the way I got saved can be a problem!

Years ago I was invited to tour the headquarters of Little Caesars pizza in downtown Detroit. As we were being shown the corporate facilities I was truly impressed. At one point we sat down with one of the executives and were given “the talk.” We were told the story of how Little Caesars began and how Mr. Ilitch (owner of Little Caesars and a couple of the Detroit sports teams) believed that there are 1001 ways to sell pizza. Now think about that, 1001 ways to sell pizza! How many can you name? The point is that there are many more ways to sell pizza than any of the current pizza companies have come up with.

I recently heard someone quote Craig Groeschel, Sr. Pastor of Lifechurch.tv, “If we are going to reach people that no one is reaching, we must use methods that no one is using.” I’ve been thinking…

One of the big outreach obstacles in the life of a church is the path that those who are already convinced took to get into the local church body. For example, those that came to a faith decision at a city wide crusade will tend to believe that that is how God wants everyone to come to faith. For those that came to faith on the street when someone walked up and shared God’s love with them, they will expect that street evangelism is the anointed means to the end. For those that accepted Christ in the living room of a believing neighbor, neighborhood relationships will be the way to share their faith. For those that came forward at the end of a Sunday service in response to an altar call, they believe that is the way outreach is supposed to take place.

We need to embrace the concept that Mr. Ilitch ‘preaches’ to the Little Caesars employees and keep thinking outside the box, searching for new ways to share the same unchanging message of God’s love. We can’t become so focused on the method, that we miss the opportunities to help others discover God and experience his power in life-changing ways.