Lecture

Tim has always wanted to serve in some significant way in his church, and now the opportunity has arrived. The pastor put out an all-points-bulletin appeal for somebody to serve as a youth sponsor. And Tim, a thirty-five-year-old computer programmer with a working wife and two elementary children, signed up. So there he is, he’s ready to go. He’s in ministry. From day one, the mix looked wrong and felt wrong. Tim was too far away from his own teenage years to have remembered what they were like. Actually, clear memory wouldn’t have helped since the cultural and sociological issues facing teenagers had changed dramatically in two decades. And furthermore, his own children were still too young for him to have any taste of what kids deal with in the teen years in today’s world. His wife, Susan, had not favored this extra family responsibility from the first time she heard about it.

The church apparently had no program of leadership development or training for the task, so Tim muddled through the best he could. The amazing thing is that he served as a youth sponsor at that church for nearly ten years. He didn’t quit. He didn’t make any parents angry at him, at least not very often. And he didn’t turn off any kids on the gospel and involvement in the church. So at first glance, Tim was an unlikely but documentable success; but no one noticed that Tim emerged from the ten years’ experience no closer to significant leadership ability than the day that he entered. Yet he had served faithfully and willingly and sometimes sacrificially. But because his gifts and abilities lay in something other than sponsoring junior high youth ministries, it disallowed leadership development. This is a very, very important principle here as we talk here in lecture 18 about the leader as recruiter.

Leadership development takes place only when one’s strengths overlap a given ministry situation. Probably in Tim’s case, we could probably identify some overlap. You know he was a kid once, as we said. And he knows kids, and he knows people who have junior high kids, and so on.

And so he did make a modicum of progress toward leadership. But as in all situations of this kind, the more those two dimensions overlap, strength of the person and situation of the ministry, the greater the level of leadership potential. The situation alone has no flaws in itself. There’s nothing wrong with being a junior high youth sponsor, nor does the strength of the potential leader. The point is that growth in leadership skills occurs only when these two important facets are overlapped.

Someone has suggested that we face three basic problems in helping people in the service of Christ through the church: misuse, disuse, and abuse. The first refers to putting people in the wrong place. The second refers to the many uninvolved Christians who throng our churches. And the last of the problem is overburdened workers. Why is there a leadership vacuum? Why do we always seem to be recruiting, especially in the church and mission organizations as well? Most of the answers are either spiritual or organizational. The spiritual problems direct attention to the individual Christian and that Christian’s relationship to Christ. The organizational problems focus on programs and processes which hinder rather than promote leadership development. For example, some Christians seem indifferent to their responsibility. Some choruses used in music ministry with children and youth give the impression that the purpose and the end of salvation is service, not according to the Scripture. The New Testament indicates that the believer has been brought to God through Christ in order that our lives might be a witness to Christ’s glory and grace. But service does form a distinctive part of Christian living. The dynamic message of Matthew 9 indicates the necessity of harvest laborers. It began in the days of Christ. It continues to the present. A Christian unwilling to share responsibilities for service demonstrates something of a deficient spiritual life and has not come to grips with the New Testament demands upon time and talent and being.

Another problem here is that some people lack confidence in their ability to lead. This problem could be organismic or organizational. If it results from an unwillingness to trust Christ and the Holy Spirit for effectiveness, then the cause points once again to spiritual inadequacy. If, on the other hand, people lack confidence because of confusion and chaos in the structure of our ministries or because we have not adequately trained them, then the problem becomes organizational. I think some people may lack consecration to the Lord. I don’t have time.

It’s a common excuse offered when the nominating committee begins contacting potential leaders. But everybody has the same amount of time, twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week. The difference comes in the priority use of that time. Sometimes Christians should bypass an opportunity to serve Christ in the church. They should spend additional hours to support a family or spend more time with the family in biblical parenting. That’s the case, okay. Let them do that. Encourage them do to that. Many times, however, time withheld from ministry ends up in some materialistic enterprise, or income produced may be wanted but not needed. So the attention and time of such people may have been directed to a life of self-centeredness and pleasure rather than Christ-centeredness and service.

I think some people misunderstand the task we ask them to perform. If we say, “Will you serve on the board?” a potential leader ought to direct a number of counter-questions to us: How long? How often does the board meet? What do I have to do? What other duties are expected of me? The necessity of role analysis, we’ve already talked about job descriptions, same thing. For all ministry tasks, it seems obvious. No leader can satisfactorily function in a given role unless she understands exactly what that role entails. And she should have this information before being asked to decide whether she will undertake the task. Some workers turn out to be misfits because they’ve not been placed in positions corresponding to their qualifications and interests. What is it Drucker said? There are no bad people, only people in the wrong place. Sounds like Tim and his youth group, the classic demonstration of the old Druckerian principle. Of course Drucker knows there are bad people. But he wants to emphasize that we leaders err repeatedly by confusing willingness with competence, putting good people in places where they don’t really belong.

Here again we face the old nemesis: conflict between organizational roles and individual goals. Christian organizations have to realize that people have personal and spiritual needs of their own. They have to be met. Although they might not be able to specify them accurately, goals must be satisfied. Listen, when the goals of the individual can correspond directly with the goals of the organization, we are on our way to developing an effective leader. I think some people are ill-prepared for ministry leadership. Secular business organizations spend millions of dollars recruiting new talent.

They assume that the organization’s progress and continued existence depend upon its ability to enlist and train and retrain and retain people who can competently perform the tasks which form organizational goals.

Many churches and ministry organizations, on the other hand, expect workers to walk through the door and ask to be used. We often give little concern to their capabilities. It would be foolish to turn down any volunteer, or so it seems. If Christian organizations want adequate staff, we must employ adequate methods to secure good people. This doesn’t undermine for one minute the essential call of God and the importance of prayer in bringing people into ministry. Indeed, sensitizing people to the call of God and praying clearly for them form a large part of biblical and spiritual recruitment. And you know what? Some people have never been asked. Their number may be small, but they’re out there.

I remember one time being called in by a local church to assist in leadership recruitment as a consultant. One of the tasks to be filled was the leadership of a nursery program. The pastor told me the committee had looked carefully over the church lists, asked three or four people, all of whom had declined. There was simply no one left. I looked over the list one more time, and I found a name that had not been assigned to any other ministry. When I asked about this woman, they said she surely wouldn’t be interested, and so she hadn’t been considered. I said, “Do you mind if I talk to her?” No, they didn’t mind. So I talked to her, and I got a totally different story. She was not only interested; she was delighted to serve this way. Why hadn’t I asked her before? But a brief orientation period, a little bit of training, and she understood the task; and she performed at a high level of efficiency.

Are there certain proper techniques for recruiting leaders? A single best way to recruit leaders, probably not. Christian leadership is best learned in principles adapted to a number of different situations. These principles culminate in specific techniques applied to varying situations to achieve satisfactory results. Now this is an eight-step formula. It’s no magic formula. It’s a pattern. But I have seen it increase leadership development in a number of churches and ministry organizations where it was put into place in one form or another. First conduct a need and task survey. Here again Volunteers for Today’s Church deals with this in detail, and I won’t go about all of that now. You have the need and task survey, the talent and ability survey.

These are considerably more important in a volunteer organization than they are in an organization which pays its staff and can go out and hire people for specific roles. Usually the human resources department of an organization picks up a lot of this information. And we wouldn’t have hired people in the first place if we didn’t understand the needs and they didn’t understand the needs and so on. It’s a little different when you’re working with volunteers.

Relate every position to the mission of the congregation or the mission of the organization. The early chapters or studies of our course are not just for pastors and missionaries. Every Christian must become familiar with basic ecclesiology. You have to understand our relationship to the collective body, to the ministries of that body in conformity with Ephesians 4, for example. We have to grow up in Christ through engaging in the process of mutual edification with other saints. We have no room in Christian organizations for self-focused entrepreneurs. The Christian leader dare not view a particular ministry as his own piece of work. Stewardship is not ownership. Discipleship is not lordship. Students in a Sunday school class belong to the Lord, not the teacher. Money in an evangelism crusade belongs to God, not the treasurer. But we shouldn’t be discouraged or disheartened because a ministry seems small. First Corinthians 12 teaches that the less attractive parts of the body are just as important, sometimes more important for bodily functions as those parts more pleasant to look at. It’s Paul’s point that he belabors in that chapter. Just as the human body has to have all the parts working together to function right, so it is with all the parts of the spiritual body.

I don’t need to bring up the idea of mission here again. Chapter 16 covered that. It must have been study 15, as I think about that. Every ministry post links its goals and its objectives to the central mission of our overall ministry. Continually review goals and objectives. Promoting and instructing a congregation in the church’s total ministry isn’t something that we do once. We use all the media open to us: sermons, bulletin boards, church bulletins, mailings, church newspaper, personal interviews, Sunday school classes, and casual conversation. The same holds true in a mission board or a college. Goal review intentionally tells people what our ministry really is. Its intentionally shows them the urgency of total unity and commitment to those ministry outcomes.

We want to enlist people to a common vision. The field of leadership studies is always had its buzzwords, and certainly vision is one of them today. We’ve already talked about it numerous times. Remember the King James rendering of Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It’s easy to remember that verse, and it’s easy to fit it into our overall pattern of study here. Miller argues that vision plus communication is the winning profile of leadership. Those who can articulate their vision, he says, become for God a fulcrum with which He moves the world. Calvin Miller’s treatment of vision as a singularity, the possession of a central dominant leader does not fit in with the philosophy of this study. And I am denying it despite the enormous respect I have for Calvin Miller as a pastor and as an author. Nevertheless, what he says about maintaining corporate and collective vision rings true in a team ministry situation.

Keep the team spirit fresh. I regret that I came so late in my writings to a strong focus on team leadership. It certainly appears in Feeding and Leading and some journal and magazine articles I have written over the past ten years particularly. In both earlier editions of one book that appeared in 1969 and 1980, I did not place sufficient emphasis on the corporate and cooperative role of ministry teams, and I wish I had. Make the approach person-centered. Conveying crisis in a ministry indicates that the organizational structure and its recruiting policies have not functioned properly. Rather than a general call from the pulpit—hey, anybody interested in being youth sponsor please see the pastor after church—the appropriate board should send its representative to ask specific people for specific jobs for a specific length of time. We assume that board will consider their gifts and interests. One progressive St. Louis church has a member on the board of Christian education whose only responsibility is to seek out and contact potential church leaders. He makes the initial contact which marks that person for training and service in some appropriate church ministry. He takes people to lunch, visits in their homes, and talks to them about what it means to serve Jesus Christ. And the results of that kind of ministry are greatly rewarding.

We need to offer each potential leader a carefully prepared role analysis or job description. This outlines what we want the leader to do when she accepts a given position. We’ve talked about this numerous times. I don’t know that it needs to be reviewed here. Let me give you an example. We wrote this some years ago for a church vacation Bible school personnel letter.

There are two parts to it: what we expect from you and what you may expect from us. What we expect from you is willingness to serve, spiritual readiness to serve, preparation for service, and faithfulness in service. What you may expect of us is competent administration, training sessions, early and thorough planning, and guidance at all points. We would assume that both groups are praying for each other. It’s important not to hurry the candidate’s decision. If we really present an opportunity, the responsibility and need rather than a predicament, there’s no need to rush the decision. Potential leadership will be allowed to study the job description carefully and consider the matter in prayer before the Lord and then make a decision. If divine sovereignty works within the framework of our ministries, and it does, then we must view a leader’s response to the request after prayerful and intelligent consideration by church leadership as God’s will. We won’t nag him. Oh, come on, why don’t you do it? Oh, come on. That’s not the way to do it. This procedure is not really profound, by the way. It’s very simple. It can succeed in almost any size organization regardless of how limited the administrative structure. And if we follow it rather carefully or properly, it will provide more leaders who will approach their tasks with a greater sense of responsibility, a more positive attitude in service, and a willingness to accept and utilize the training that we provide.

What about philosophy of ministry? I’ve talked about this off and on throughout the course, and I will keep talking about it, because it really relates to this whole idea of leadership. Philosophy of ministry simply describes why we do what we do instead of something else. A church which decides to go to two services instead of open a branch church in a nearby town acts upon a philosophy of ministry. A church which conducts a highly concentrated and publicized annual missionary conference exhibits a philosophy of ministry. These various emphases and strategies come from numerous sources. Sometimes tradition plays a major role. The leadership of the pastoral staff and what they have found effective in previous ministry posts holds high profile in ministry philosophy. Competence and assertiveness of elders and deacons as they see the history and mission of that particular congregation is important. The interpretation of the mission statement which leads a college, for example, to refuse to organize a graduate degree program or to go ahead and do it all stem from a philosophy of ministry. Throughout our study, I’ve emphasized repeatedly the elevation and dignifying of leaders and volunteers. Satisfactory recruitment standards actually provide workers these necessary elements.

Incentive, why do people do things? What is the incentive? I think God’s people should want to serve Him. That desire, however, does not spring up automatically in the hearts of Christians, particularly the Christian whose level of maturity is somewhat slow in developing. It becomes our responsibility as team leaders to try to build incentive into the recruiting program. When the potential leader looks at ministry, she tries to determine whether or not she wants to be identified with it. If the standards are high and the requirements significant but reasonable, she may she may respond more positively than if it appears that she may be joining some kind of shoddy enterprise. Remember that competence and willingness business.

Second, improved efficiency, in any given leadership situation, some truant problems cause difficulty to the ministry. Perhaps nothing can be done about them without upsetting the whole program. What ought to concern us, therefore, is that these problems do not breed more problems. Mediocrity can only reproduce either itself or its retarded offspring, inferiority. Effectiveness in ministry ought to be always improving, but this can’t happen if people do not grasp our ministry philosophy.

Third, an evaluation guide, if we evaluate our ministry; people will have to be compared with some acceptable norm or standard. You can ask anyone to assume a task and then evaluate that task on vague and emotive measures yields a very distorted situation. I’ll come to evaluation a little bit later, and we’ll talk about this in detail. But evaluation always relates to objectives, and objectives ought to demonstrate clear indication of standards. And of course again always relate to the mission. At times it will seem that high standards and a ministry philosophy impede recruitment. But I think in the final analysis they will lead to better leaders and a higher opinion of ministry throughout the whole organization.

How important is recognition? Elevating and dignifying Christian leadership includes genuine demonstration of appreciation for those who have served. There are some very obvious benefits in a thorough appreciation program. People feel noticed. They can see that leaders are not taking them for granted but rather thank God for the work they do. Second, potential leaders can see that we really do consider ministry important enough to recognize publically. Third, the total organization is made aware of the importance and centrality of volunteers.

Each member may not be invited to some special event, but the announcing and carrying out of such gatherings serves as a reminder that ministry happens by design not by default. A number of methods demonstrate appreciation for volunteers: the usual appreciation banquet, dedication service at the beginning of the year, personal letters from the leadership team, periodic notes of appreciation in the church bulletin, special elections such as teacher of the year, deacon of the month and that kind of thing, a public wall chart that shows who has taken responsibility for what ministries in the church, free transportation and expenses to special seminars, appreciation picnics, giving of gifts, regular and sincere personal thank you given by the senior pastor or the principal or the district superintendent or some officers.

So the recruitment and enlistment of workers and teachers in ministry organizations depends upon the alleviation of spiritual and organizational problems. When we raise spiritual standards and immaturity gives way to maturity in Christian living, the innate conviction of dedicated lives will solve almost any spiritual problems we face in recruitment. Now again, let’s go back to what we said earlier. There are organismic problems and there are organizational problems. It is futile to try to solve organizational problems with organismic answers. If you have a middle management person who is not functioning on the job because he does not know what to do and yet is a dear, wonderful Christian brother who prays for others and sacrificially lives his life, it is not going to help that person to pray more. Forgive me, but it’s not going to help. He needs training to do the job, or he needs reassignment to a job he can do. Organizational problems require organizational solutions. Organismic problems like immaturity require organismic solutions like, perhaps in this case, more prayer, more Bible study, or greater devotion to the church and to Christ. All of these things are extremely important, and we need to recognize them dramatically.

What does all of this have to do with Tim? Let’s get back to where we started, Tim and his junior high youth group. Two keys dominate this study. Let’s not lose sight of them. First of all, leadership develops only when a person’s strengths fit the ministry situation in which he or she is placed. Leadership develops only when a person’s strengths (you can read their gifts, skills, training, interests), I’m bundling them all together to call them strengths. Leadership develops only when a person’s strengths fit the ministry situation in which we place that person.

Second, in recruiting and retaining leaders, willingness will ultimately drive out competence if we focus only on the former and ignore the latter. In recruiting and retaining leaders, willingness will ultimately drive out competence if we focus only on the former and ignore the latter. We find good people and we hold onto them because of the general leadership climate in which we invite them to serve. That is really the key. The key is not specifically in the training program. That’s important, and we want to talk more about that as we go on with our course.

But let’s remember that the big, broad picture here is recruiting and retaining leaders because of the kind of leadership style that you and I demonstrate, because of the team leadership approach, because of the decentralized leadership philosophy, because of their opportunity to feel part of something significant in the work of God. I cannot tell you how true it is that most Christians who serve in specific posts in local churches do not have the big picture. A Sunday school teacher may very well know the requirements of that particular Sunday school class and might even relate that class more widely to the department in which he or she serves, but to somehow put that in perspective in the broad picture of mission and objectives and goals and action steps for the church’s ongoing vision, that’s not happening in most cases. The reason is because most of us as leaders have not taken the time to really focus on the kind of environment in which these people serve, the kind of spiritual and professional leadership climate in which we invite them to serve. We find good people, and we hold onto them because of the general leadership climate in which we invite them to serve. Remember Tim? Tim liked what he saw. He enjoyed his ten years with the kids in the youth group. The fact that he made little progress in leadership was not his fault, it was ours. Recruitment done correctly is not necessarily easy, but it is certainly possible. We enhance recruitment, and we enhance retention dramatically by a serious and a professional commitment to the training of leaders whom we have begun to develop and in whose lives God is clearly working.

Let’s not lose sight of the other word here, I sort of tacked it on, retention and retaining. Every college leader, every seminary faculty member and administrator knows that retaining the students you have is a whole lot less expensive and a whole lot less trouble than getting new ones. That’s also true in leadership, especially volunteers. So it’s not just a question of going out and finding people; it’s keeping the good people we have. And that’s very important especially if we have poured the proper amount of development and training into their lives so they have really begun to catch on to the leadership patterns that God has given them and to use their gifts and their strengths and their abilities and their skills in the service of the Lord. It’s a wonderful challenge, and it takes our best skills and strengths to do it well.