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Leadership Development in Your Church
By New Churches Team
Everyone is doing leadership development in some fashion. We approach development in the way we have been developed. Some people are doing an apprenticeship model. Some are using a classroom model. Whatever it is that you are doing from a leadership development standpoint make sure it aligns with your vision and values.
When you think about ways to roll out development that’s more systemized it can go one of two ways: department focused or a leadership pipeline strategy.
Department Focused Training
Many churches use this technique for training in which every ministry area trains in their own way and only trains their volunteers. But the larger you get, the more you begin thinking you need to centralize it. This leads to more and more classes and trainings that people need to attend. They are all taught by different leaders in the church. Volunteers who are serving in more than one area get inundated with training requirements. In many cases, ministry areas become very siloed which creates redundancies in volunteer training including multiple applications, data repositories, and expectations.
A Leadership Pipeline Strategy
What you want to do is provide clarity in your leadership development program. Getting down to one application, with addendum when necessary, means you can keep one data repository. When a person moves horizontally across ministries, they’ve already been through the application process.
Providing role descriptions that use the same template up and down the organization provides clarity. The core competencies are all the same for each level in the pipeline, no matter what ministry area they are serving in. This means that volunteers don’t need all new training when they move to a different ministry area. Across all departments what makes someone successful is 60-70% the same. Centralized training on that 60-70% can be done online then they can process the training information they received with other volunteers in their ministry area.
Development is for everybody, no matter where they are in the pipeline. Clarity on where you are going and taking people is important. The people in your pipeline will not develop without clarity.
Adapted from the New Churches Q&A Podcast Episode 466: How to Develop a Plan for Leadership in Your Church for 2020. Click here to listen to more to church planting, multisite, and multiplication tips.