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January 20, 2021

Succeeding in Church Planting

By New Churches Team

Setting Your Priorities

Most church planters are not successful because they lead the opposite of Jesus. In the Gospels, we see Jesus often trying to get away from large groups of people. He would actively seek out smaller groups of leaders. Church planters, on the other hand, often try to get away from leaders to instead be with the crowd. As a church planter, it is important for you to prioritize your time so that you are spending it in ways that provide the highest kingdom return on investment.

Jesus didn’t make himself available to everyone all the time. He was intentional about developing a few, leading himself, and nurturing himself then he made himself available to the masses. There is an order to that sequence, and church planters should apply it to their own calendars. If you don’t plan your day and week, your week and day will plan you. So be proactive in setting your priorities and planning your calendar around them. You should be initiating ministry, not reacting to ministry.

Create Process-Oriented Goals

You should set process-oriented goals. Those are habit-oriented goals. The great thing about process-oriented goals is that you can feel successful regardless of what the scoreboard is doing, if you are being faithful to the process. Live according to your priorities, maximize your time, and do things with excellence. The numbers may ebb and flow, but as long as you are being faithful to the process, you will find success. If you are doing your part of the process, you can leave the rest to the Holy Spirit.

Raising Up Leaders

When raising up leaders, you need to always look at the four Cs. We get in trouble when we overemphasize one of these at the neglect of the others. You must evaluate your leaders in all four areas.

1. Character – Are they coachable? How do they respond to being told no?

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Home > Blog > Leadership Development in Your Church

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.

Home > Blog > 3 Keys to Raising Women Leaders in the Church

3 Keys to Raising Women Leaders in the Church

By Ed Stetzer

Raising up women leaders should matter to all of us, but it requires an oft-lacking intentionality.

Women make up more than half the church, and God has gifted both men and women for his glory and for his purposes. People from different theological traditions will have different pathways for ministry, but none exclude the opportunity for some level or place of leadership.

Believing something is different than doing it, however. We need to proactively plan to raise up women leaders, to call out their gifts, and to give them an opportunity.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Years ago, I worked at a place where my wife Donna would later express felt like the movie “Stepford Wives,” where all the women had to fit the same mold. There was only one way to be a godly woman, and not much space for leadership development.

Donna said, “That’s not who I am.”

I said, “That’s not who I want you to be either.”

A gifted woman leader with whom I later served experienced similar challenges. “It seems the only way I’m allowed to use my gifts is in a narrowly confined set of expectations,” she observed. “They don’t seem to be driven by Scripture, but seem to be more driven by a kind of subculture.” Looking at many of the settings she had been in, she was right.

How, then, do we raise up women leaders and allow them to lead? I once had a peer who was great at developing leaders, both men and women. But one relational aspect of this was that he loved sports and would play with a group of other leaders in the morning before work.

Those leaders were all men. It was a good thing, not a bad thing, but it raised a question from my team.

One day, two of the women leaders on my team came to me and said, “I can’t really go play that sport with him. Can we find a way to have that kind of community?” So, we created a women’s mentoring and networking group.

We spent our time reading books about leadership and networking. Many of those women have gone on to be higher levels of leadership at that organization or at other places.

Through these and other experiences I learned some keys to raise up women leaders. I am still learning—and I am often learning from women how to do it even better. However, I believe there is also a responsibility that we have as male leaders to give voice and opportunity to female leaders.

Voice Your Confidence in Women as Leaders

It is key to be able to say, “I really see in you some untapped leadership potential.” A leader sees the potential in others that they often don’t see in themselves. For example, the Apostle Paul was one of many people who worked to identify and encourage leadership potential in Timothy (1 Tim. 4:14).

I now have a leadership community at Wheaton College. Here’s what I found from the men and women in this context. First, men more frequently assume, “I should be a part, I should be a leader.”

Women (at least in my experience) often need to be invited to think of themselves as leaders. I can think of one leader to whom I said, “Would you consider being a part of the leadership community?” She said, “Do you really think so? Do you really think I have some leadership capacity?” I said, “Absolutely you do. Everyone around you sees it.”

Whereas many men might think, “Well, of course you invited me,” we often need to voice that reality to women. They need to hear from someone that they perceive to be a leader either by position or by expertise. Give women a greater sense of confidence to step into that leadership role.

Value Women as Leaders

Church subcultures can be a strange thing. Sometimes there are rules, written or unwritten, that keep some of our best women leaders outside of conversations. You need women at the table for all significant conversations that have to do with life and ministry. There are ways you can do that in your theological tradition.

Make sure women leaders have not just a seat at the table, but also a voice. Celebrate their leadership in your gathered times of worship on the weekend. Make sure you have more than just one up front on stage.

Give women a place in front of the congregation, exercising leadership in whatever roles are appropriate for your tradition. If you voice it to them and you value them as leaders, it will ultimately create opportunities for women to lead.

When we look throughout the pages of Scripture, we see opportunities were either taken or given with women in leadership. This was in a culture thousands of years ago that was far more anti-women than in the world today.

Acknowledge the Need for Women Leaders

Sometimes the way we raise up (or don’t raise up) women seems more like cultural dismissal of their gifts than biblical conviction, regardless of what we might believe about women and teaching. God has gifted women, and if you know that, then show that.

Sharon Hodde Miller, a gifted leader I have had the privilege of encouraging, received a PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and studied this very topic for her dissertation. She explains:

“One of the things I discovered in my doctoral research on women who are called to ministry, is that every woman I spoke to could pinpoint a person who had named her calling or her gifts. This makes so much sense to me. We are made in the image of a God who used His words to create. Whenever we identify someone’s gifts, no matter what those gifts may be, our words have a power to them. You might even say our words create leaders.”

Let the women in your church and ministry hear you tell them, “You are gifted and you can lead.” Let them see how you value them.

Then, see how God uses those leaders in powerful and God-honoring ways.