Rediscovering Leadership (eBook)

Identify, Develop and Multiply Leaders

Steve Murrell, William Murrell (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
272 Seiten
Every Nation Resources (Verlag)
978-0-9967629-5-3 (ISBN)

Infos

'Where do I find more leaders?' Every leader of a growing organization asks this question. And though we know we need more leaders, few of us know how to create a culture of leadership development. Formerly released as The Multiplication Challenge, this new release recounts how Steve Murrell and Every Nation rediscovered four leadership multipliers that solved the leadership shortage of a growing church and global mission organization. The principles and stories in these pages will help you identify potential leaders, develop current leaders, and multiply future leaders!

William Murrell is the academic dean and professor of Church History at Every Nation Seminary, and the lead pastor of All Saints Church, Nashville, TN. He has graduate degrees in history from the University of Oxford (MSt) and Vanderbilt University (PhD) and teaches and writes on the history of missions and Muslim-Christian relations. William and his wife, Rachel, have a daughter and three sons.

Textauszug

INTRODUCTION

When 5,000 is Greater than 75,000

September 2009. Two dozen key leaders from our church, Victory Manila, were having an off-site strategy meeting to plan for the next decade. As we looked at the five-digit number on the whiteboard, most of the leaders in the room seemed to accept our new faith goal with a sense of excitement.

75,000.

Even though a month had passed, we were still riding the wave of momentum created by our church’s twenty-fifth anniversary event. Just four weeks prior, we had been face-to-face with over 30,000 Filipinos at the celebration. Today, we were face-to-face with a huge number on a whiteboard.

75,000.

Victory Manila’s anniversary celebration was held at the Smart Araneta Coliseum, a.k.a. the “Big Dome,” which was the largest indoor arena in the Philippines at the time. (Araneta was also the site of the famous Ali-Frazier boxing match in 1975—the “Thrilla in Manila.”) So many people registered for the anniversary event, we had to run two back-to-back services in the 16,000-seat arena.

The anniversary celebration in the Big Dome was all about looking back at the past twenty-five years. Our strategic meeting in that small conference room was all about looking ahead and dreaming for the next twenty-five years. Specifically, we wanted to upgrade our discipleship process for Victory Manila—to figure out how to more effectively engage our culture and community, establish biblical foundations, equip believers to minister, and empower disciples to make disciples. (We call it the Four Es.)

At the time, more than 37,000 people were attending our weekend worship services across thirteen Metro Manila locations. Now we were looking ahead—to the number on the board.

75,000.

While everyone seemed excited about those five digits, I was not. As I looked at all those zeros, something felt wrong. I wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong, but something was definitely wrong.

I don’t really set goals, and my leadership style has always reflected this fact. In the first twenty-five years of Victory Manila, we had never set a numerical growth goal. Not even once. And strangely enough, we had never had a year when we didn’t experience numerical growth. We had experienced twenty-five consecutive years of numerical growth, but had no growth goals.

After living and pastoring in Manila for over two decades, my role in Every Nation (our global movement) had changed, and I had begun splitting time between Manila, Nashville, and Every Nation churches around the world. In my absence, the Manila leadership team had decided to try some faith goals, and I tried to go along with it. I had equipped and empowered my team to lead, and now they were leading. But something still seemed wrong with this faith goal.

Finally, it hit me. The problem wasn’t that we had a goal. I could live with a goal even if it wasn’t my natural inclination. The problem was that number: 75,000. But why was it problematic? Was it too small? I have often had to repent for thinking too small. Maybe God expected us to think bigger.

CELEBRATING THE WRONG NUMBERS

Seventy-five thousand wasn’t the only number that we looked at that day. Our team had prepared statistics on every aspect of our Metro Manila church—number of locations, number of services, total attendance, financial giving, baptisms, small groups, pastorto- member ratio, youth service attendance, children’s ministry volunteers, scholarship programs, and more.

As we examined our numbers, all of which seemed to be growing, my eyes fell on one set of numbers that had flatlined over the last four years (and was even showing hints of decline).

As you can see on the chart, from 2006 to 2009, our Metro Manila church attendance had grown from 23,900 to 37,200. We had added over 13,000 people, but we had only started 239 new discipleship groups.

Eventually, our group discussion shifted from how to grow to 75,000 people to why we only had 3,573 small groups. Why were we growing explosively in weekend worship attendance, but decreasing in weekly discipleship groups? We were not only failing to equip and empower more disciples to make disciples, but we were also losing some of the people who had already been equipped.

As we looked at this seemingly isolated leadership void, we suddenly began to see leadership shortages everywhere—worship, preaching, children’s ministry, administration, and technology, to name just a few. Our church had grown considerably over the last few years, and just about every department was feeling the growing pains. Our leaders, whether paid staff or key volunteers, were stretched thin, and we didn’t have any reinforcements in sight.

The realization of our leadership shortage came quickly and erased all the enthusiasm that had carried over from our celebration the month before. That September, we realized that our growth had drastically outpaced our leadership development. We were quickly multiplying disciples, but only slowly adding leaders. We were in trouble, and suddenly, we knew it.

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT MAKING DISCIPLES

A few years ago, I wrote a book about small-group discipleship that was based on my experience as a clueless missionary and church planter in Manila. The book was originally titled Accidental Missionary. My American publisher changed the name to WikiChurch.

If WikiChurch told the story of how Victory Manila grew from 165 to 52,000 people, then this book tells the story of how Victory Manila “shrank” from a goal of 75,000 to a goal of 5,000 (or simply, how we rediscovered the importance of leadership development).

WikiChurch began with a story about the twenty-fifth anniversary of Victory Manila, the church my wife and I helped start in 1984. That evening, as I looked out at the crowded arena, I asked myself, “Who are all these people and where did they come from?” In the book, I then proceeded to look back and tell the Victory story—where we started, who we started with, and how we gradually grew from a group of 165 college students to a church of 52,000 (in 2011, when WikiChurch was written). We grew because we mastered the “same ole boring strokes”—our Four Es— of discipleship.

A WikiChurch is a church that, like Wikipedia, empowers volunteers to contribute and participate in the mission of the organization. Wikipedia’s mission is the rapid and widespread dissemination of encyclopedic information. In the case of a WikiChurch, the mission is the rapid and widespread dissemination of the gospel. This goal can only be achieved when non-professional Christians (electricians, lawyers, students, etc.) are equipped and empowered by the professionals (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers) to make disciples.

As obsessively focused as we were on making disciples, for a brief season, we forgot that we also needed to develop leaders. Accidentally and gradually, we became less intentional about identifying potential leaders, developing current leaders, and multiplying future leaders. This oversight resulted in a leadership crisis that threatened to derail everything we had worked so hard to create for over two decades.

It’s very possible and very common to make disciples and not train leaders. A church can be effective in engaging culture and community, establishing biblical foundations, equipping believers to minister, and empowering disciples to make disciples—and still be reluctant or negligent in identifying, developing, and multiplying leaders.

Thus, there is a need to discover leaders already in your midst.

Why?

Because there’s a difference between empowering people to make disciples and trusting people to lead. If we want to have healthy churches, we need to do both. And we need to do both well.

I’m not suggesting that everyone is called to a leadership position in the church. And even people who are called to leadership positions have different levels of talents and gifts, as Jesus indicated in the Parable of the Talents. (See Matthew 25.)

THE PROBLEM WITH RAPID GROWTH

I do believe that every church and every campus ministry can and should grow stronger, larger, and more influential. If we are faithful in making disciples, Jesus will build his Church. There are many reasons churches don’t grow. Believe it or not, one reason some don’t grow is that they don’t really want to grow—because they know that growth causes problems.

The church in Jerusalem grew very rapidly after Jesus’ ascension and quickly began to experience the problems that come with church growth. Here’s a quick summary of their growth from the first few chapters of the book of Acts:

“In those days Peter stood up among the brothers (the company of persons was in all about 120) …” (Acts 1:15).

“So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls” (Acts 2:41).

“… And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47).

“But many of those who had heard the word believed, and the number of the men came to about five thousand” (Acts 4:4).

“And more than ever believers were...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.12.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
• ISBN-10: 0-9967629-5-7 / 0996762957
• ISBN-13: 978-0-9967629-5-3 / 9780996762953