How Do Churches Develop Leaders?

How do churches develop leaders?

Ask a room of pastors what they need most and the answer usually isn’t money. David Ashcraft of the Global Leadership Network told Shane Stacey about a study where 77 percent of pastors and church leaders named leaders as their greatest need. He also told him about a church that raised enough money to open seven new locations at once. They had leaders for three. They opened three.

Most of us have a picture that pops up when we hear the words leadership development. A class. A binder. A pipeline. In this episode Shane, co-founder of Clarity House, joins Danielle and me to talk about why that picture keeps letting us down and what Jesus did instead.

How did Jesus develop leaders?

Mark 3:14 says Jesus appointed the twelve “so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach.” Being with him came first. The assignment came second. A lot of churches run that order backward. We throw someone into the deep end and hope we cross paths.

The New Testament word for disciple, mathētēs, means learner. The closest picture we have today is an apprentice, and the goal of an apprentice is to resemble the master. Jesus said a student who is fully trained “will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40). Students in his day followed a rabbi so closely that a blessing grew up around it: may you be covered in the dust of your rabbi. They weren’t only hearing the teaching. They were watching how he prayed, how he settled arguments and how he treated people who interrupted him.

Jesus also broke the pattern. Rabbis took applications and picked the top of the class. Jesus walked up to fishermen and said, follow me. He taught the crowds, sent out seventy-two, poured into twelve and took three up the mountain. By John 15 he was calling them friends. When the council in Acts 4:13 looked at Peter and John, they saw uneducated, ordinary men, and the only explanation they could come up with was that these men had been with Jesus.

Our friend Dave Rhodes describes the two sides this way. The hinge moment of discipleship is when someone answers the question, can I trust God? The hinge moment of leadership is when they first realize God can use them, and they start asking, can God trust me? Jesus was developing both at once.

How did the church drift from apprenticeship to the classroom?

For most of church history, leaders were formed in households long before they were formed in schools. Paul told Timothy to pass what he’d heard on to faithful people who would teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2), and the early church lived that chain. John trained Polycarp. Polycarp trained Irenaeus. Decades later, Irenaeus could still describe the place where Polycarp sat when he taught. Augustine’s clergy at Hippo shared a house, a table and their money, and about ten men from that household became bishops.

The guilds trained everyone the same way: information, then imitation, then innovation. Learn to do it like me, and then you can learn to do it like you. In colonial New England, Joseph Bellamy trained dozens of young ministers in his parsonage in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Methodist circuit riders like Francis Asbury learned on horseback, riding between preaching appointments with someone more experienced. The Congregationalists, who required college-educated clergy, went from about 20 percent of American church members in 1776 to 4 percent by 1850. Over the same years the Methodists went from 2.5 percent to 34 percent.

Then leadership training moved back into the classroom, right as medicine was moving the other way, into residencies. The church learned a lot from the leadership boom of the 1980s and 1990s, and the leadership pipeline itself came out of corporate work at GE. Much of it was good. But we now have more leadership books, podcasts and conferences than any generation in history, and leaders are still the top need. Development turned into content delivery. Training turned into orientation. Most of us can name our programs. Fewer of us can name five people our church has developed in the last five years.

What does apprenticeship look like today?

Nobody’s walking from Capernaum to Jerusalem with Jesus anymore, but we still use apprenticeship everywhere else. Shane’s list is five words: proximity, practice, productive failure, personalized feedback and progressive responsibility.

He makes proximity concrete with a golf lesson. Picture fifty people on a driving range and one coach. If you’re number thirty-seven in line, you’ve swung thirty times before anyone looks at you, and every swing rehearsed the wrong muscle memory. A lot of church leadership training works the same way: a hundred people in a room and nobody close enough to see what you’re doing.

His whitewater kayaking guide did the opposite. West would stop and tell him what he was doing right so he’d keep doing it. Then he’d name one thing to try next. They’d run it three or four times, in slow motion, talking it through out loud. Shane admits it helped that he thought he might drown.

What’s the difference between training and orientation?

Shane’s line: “Most of what we call training is just teaching 2.0.” A three-hour session before someone starts serving is orientation. It shows people the tasks and how the system works. It doesn’t build their competence.

Breakthrough training, the way Clarity House describes it, has three parts. Content still matters. There are things you need to know, though we probably need less of it than we think. Competency means naming the actual skill and giving people a chance to practice it where someone can watch. A coach gives feedback up close. And when the skill carries over, it pays off twice. Learning to ask good questions as a small group leader helps you as a parent, a friend and a coworker.

Timing matters too. At the foot of the Mount of Transfiguration, nine disciples tried to drive out a spirit and couldn’t. Afterward they asked Jesus why. He told them this kind only comes out by prayer (Mark 9:29). They hadn’t needed that answer before. Now they were ready for it.

Where will our next leaders come from?

Shane’s diagnosis is that a lot of what we call development is really leadership placement. We look at our congregation, decide we don’t have leaders, and go hire someone another church already developed. Every search firm is fishing in the same small pool of people who have already raised their hand. Shane calls that the red ocean. The blue ocean is sitting in your congregation, full of people with real potential who haven’t been formed yet and haven’t been asked.

One denominational team in the Midwest started asking pastors a question Shane’s friend Ryan once asked him: do you believe that inside every pastor is a residency? In about three years they went from five or six active residencies to 139, with 154 residents.

It starts with names. Shane’s test: “If you can’t name names, it’s probably not happening.” Start with the senior leader naming one or two people. Then sketch a leadership org chart, separate from the staff chart, that shows where you need leaders and leaders of leaders. You don’t have to fill it yet. You just need to know its shape.

How good does someone need to be before we hand it off?

When Shane was a teenager, his pastor Rudy gave him his first talk: ten minutes at Christmas. Shane doesn’t remember the advice Rudy gave him. He remembers that Rudy thought he could do what Rudy did. Rudy gave responsibilities before titles, brought a few students along when he spoke or led, asked their opinions, let them fail, and coached them afterward.

Shane says leadership development lives just above the cringe factor. Danielle pushed back on that, since excellence has been a core value for a lot of churches, including ours. Maybe excellence means the person doing it is doing their best. Craig Groeschel’s version: if someone can do it 80 percent as well as you, with the potential to do it better someday, give them the shot.

You know the feeling of crashing on the couch after a Sunday and thinking, I can’t believe God used me. When you do everything yourself, you keep that feeling for yourself. Somebody else needs the chance to feel it too.

What’s one thing I can do this week?

Before Sunday, pick one meeting or task already on your calendar, invite one person to come with you, and spend five minutes afterward asking what they noticed.

That’s the whole experiment. One meeting on your calendar and one name.

Frequently asked questions

What is leadership development in the church?

It’s the work of helping people grow into leading others, through real assignments, close relationships and coaching along the way. Classes and content are part of it. They can’t carry it alone.

How did Jesus train his disciples?

He called them to be with him first and sent them out second (Mark 3:14). He taught the crowds, invested more deeply in smaller circles, sent them out in pairs, and debriefed with them when things didn’t work.

What’s the difference between delegation and development?

Delegation is about getting a task done. Development is about the person and the task. The ministry still matters, and so does who the person is becoming while they do it.

Why do churches struggle to find leaders?

Often they’re looking for people someone else already developed. The people with potential are usually already in the congregation, and nobody has asked them yet.

What does “just above the cringe factor” mean?

It’s Shane’s line for how good something has to be before you hand it to someone who’s still learning. Good enough that it isn’t painful to watch, with a coach close by to help them improve.

About Shane Stacey

Shane is the Co-Founder of Clarity House and has served in and alongside local churches as a pastor, coach and consultant for the past 25 years. Before joining Clarity House, Shane served as the Executive Director of Denominee, where he helped over 40 denominational and network teams lead with greater clarity and synergy. Shane also had the honor of serving as part of the national team for the Evangelical Free Church of America, where he consulted and coached church teams in building a disciple-making culture that flows from a disciple-making way of life. Shane lives in Minneapolis, MN with his wife Heather.

Links & resources

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Raising Leaders the Way Jesus Did