The challenge I didn’t describe in my previous piece of developing leaders, and especially those nearest to my own heart—Ephesians 4 teachers, doctors of the church, pastor-theologians, or whatever you want to call them—was the challenge of recognising them.
How do you recognise those that you should invest time and energy into and ‘develop’ in the sort of way I was describing? That is the hardest part of it, I think, because we can only give so much time and there’s a fear that if we invest in the ‘wrong’ people we’ll be wasting our time.
You won’t be.
It’ll be good for you and them, even if you don’t get what you wanted out of it. If it grows your character and theirs towards the likeness of Christ, then it will have been worth it.
Part of the problem, I think, is that we look for fully finished people. We want the guy that already looks like an elder or a teacher or a prophet rather than taking the time to develop them. Some will emerge after a short period of development and others will take longer, that’s fine and not to be disparaged. Keep working with them, see what the Lord might gift you in that person.
Step one is the obvious one, you pray. You ask God to give you what you need, assuming that he will even if it doesn’t look like you were initially imagining.
Step two requires us to get beyond our own biases, not always an easy thing, and be attentive to who is in front of us. If we ask the Lord for someone to emerge then we can trust that he will put someone in front of us. Look for what Jesus is doing among your people in the next few weeks, see who might be there.
Step three is to test what our attentiveness picks up. We aren’t looking for people who are what we need, we’re looking for people who could be what we need. Are these people who volunteer for things already? Do they turn up early and leave late? Do they seem to love the church? Do they pray in a way which draws others in? Do they love the word? Is their character godly and increasing in godliness? Do they repent when they get things wrong?
You’re looking at this point not for gifting, though you might spot it, but for character. Godly people who God appears to put in front of you and are available are what you need, even if they don’t seem to be what you thought you were looking for. Work with godly people, find out what their dreams in God are, discover what they’re gifted at. Maybe it’s what you thought you needed, maybe it isn’t what you thought you needed; pursue developing their gifting anyway.
Keep praying, keep looking for godly character, keep developing those you can.
I love a good strategy. It’s important that we know what the church needs next. However, we can get so caught in our strategies to miss what the Lord is doing in front of us. Look at godly people, give them opportunities, see what their giftings are, see what their dreams are. There may be an alternative way of getting at your strategy using whatever their approach would be, or it may simply be that God wants you to do the thing that they would be good at either instead of, or as well as, the things you were proposing.
Think of it like a spiritual treasure hunt: what gold has the Lord hidden in his people and tasked me with uncovering. There will be lots of it. This might also help us ‘right size’ our own dreams and strategies: I’ve seen churches have grand plans but not the people they would need to pull them off. That means either that they would need to go whole hog on development to get those people, they’d need to draw them in from outside the church, or they need to change the scope of what they’re proposing to fit who God has given them. Instead, these churches can flounder and then not achieve the thing they said they wanted to do.
Of course, that’s very easy to say from outside where everything is clean and simple. Pastoral ministry is rarely clean and simple, and you have a thousand things to think about.
I’d like to suggest that we think about it this way: Glen Scrivener helpfully recast evangelism as pastoral care for those who don’t know Jesus and pastoral care as evangelism for those who do. It’s not as snappy but rethink leadership development in terms of pastoral care and evangelism—which is the same thing—by focusing on getting the person in front of you to be more like Jesus. That will grow you people you could do something with, and you’ll find out what by seeing what the Lord gifts them with.
You probably need a development plan too, you might need a programme, you may even need a course, but if you start with the people you’ve got and getting their faces before Jesus, you’ll get somewhere.
Of course that could get pietistic and have no action behind it, but that just means part of our usual evangelisation of our flocks should include figuring out people’s gifts and finding out their dreams, and then seeing if the Spirit pours oil on the fire that they have already.
The Lord does the work, but he invites us to participate. If we try to remember that he has given us who he wants us to have and he will gift his church, then we get to participate in seeing what wonders he has given to our local expression of his bride. It may not all the things we wanted or hoped for, but it will be what Jesus wants us to have for our good.
It rather takes the pressure off but keeps us working hard in his vineyard.
Photo by Elizaveta Dushechkina on Unsplash
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