Effective Leadership Is Dynamic and Empowering

By amazon Wednesday, November 6, 2019 Comment Edit

Bill Gates thinks successful leaders will be those who empower others. I believe that this applies to church leadership as well.

Years ago, I served a short stint as a church planting professor and ended up being a church revitalization pastor.

I was young, but still had a few years of church planting experience and was ready to dedicate my time to teaching others how to do the same. During my time there, however, I got a call from an established church, asking me to be their interim pastor. Not ready or able to dedicate myself to serving as their full pastor, and learning that their church was looking for someone to revitalize what had become a dying congregation, I stepped into a role as a transitional teaching pastor.

Essentially, I was walking alongside 35 (mainly senior adult) people helping them consider how to bring their church back to life. Their church used to have over 200 members, but it had dwindled down and they were open (and even ready) for change.

The bigger issue, however, was that their church had been declining for a long period of time, which meant that it could take an even longer period of time to bring it back to life. We had to really analyze what had been going on in the church, identify areas of potential change, and find ways to actively change the habits and routines of the church.

It quickly became the hardest job I’d ever had— harder than church planting, I think. In a humorous way, this made sense, of course: It’s always easier to birth something than to bring it back from the dead.

The reason that it was such a challenging job was because it required consistent and effective leadership. We had a good portion of the church people committed to being leaders, and we quickly formed smaller leadership groups that were assigned different tasks, all with the goal of revitalizing the church. The process of determining ...