POSTCARDS
PHIL OLSON
Leadership Development for Effective Outreach In my March/April column I wrote that congregations need to leave the safe confines of their church walls and “hit the road,” reaching out to the hurting world around them.The best way to do this is to develop leaders capable of breaking through those walls. Much has been written about leadership development within the life of a congregation, but I’ve not seen much material concerning how we identify, recruit, and train ministry leaders for local outreach mission. So I’m going to take a stab at it. Apart from the first one, the following items are not necessarily sequential but are to be viewed as components of a plan. Begin with prayer (this may sound obvious, but it’s a frequently overlooked and undervalued factor in missions work). Pray that God would raise up gifted people, open their hearts to heed the
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call of the church when it comes, and create a balance in leadership—men and women, younger and older, those new to the church and old-timers, a good mix of temperaments and races and gifts. Offer a discernment process. Include opportunities for congregants to discover their spiritual gifts, learn about their personality profile, and fill out time and talent inventories. Follow this up with a personal interview by members of the deployment team. Create leadership incubators. I call this the ministry of small jobs—assigning small yet important tasks to parishioners to learn how they might handle bigger ministry responsibilities. But don’t leave people alone; encourage current leadership to develop apprentices. Emerging leaders need to exhibit proven competencies before being moved on to other tasks. View all committees/teams as learning communities in which participants will gain insights about the Christian faith, life, ministry, and their own spiritual formation even as they serve. Select “in-sync” leaders.Who’s getting a grasp on the mission, vision, core values, and bedrock beliefs of your congregation? “Hire” them! Mentoring or coaching of rising leaders can be either formal or informal. The method doesn’t have to be confined to an office or classroom.As a matter of fact, the mentee doesn’t even have to know he or she is being mentored.The key is that mentors know why they’re in a relationship with the developing leader. Some of the seven guys I meet with (two are long-distance relationships via phone) know they are being mentored (either they or I have initiated the involvement), others don’t—but that doesn’t matter.The important piece is intentionality: purposeful conversations. We also need to train leaders. Most churches do not train their leaders except through on-the-job training. Even the best of “natural” (if there is such a PRISM 2004
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thing, and that’s a matter of debate) leaders needs education and continuing education. Such education can be in-house: classes, workshops, seminars, one-on-one meetings, even your own conferences. For each of these venues, you can either use mature leaders or bring in outside resource people.The latter can be especially helpful, since no church has cornered the market on leadership skills. Don’t overlook outsourcing that can come from other churches (pastors and lay ministry leaders), denominational staffs, and educational institutions. The latter can be religious or secular; I once brought in a specialist from the local community college to deal with people’s number-one fear, public speaking. Additional educational possibilities include scheduling guest preachers or professors, providing a theologian- or missionary- or scholar-in-residence, enlisting the help of training coaches (Network 9:35 offers a diverse team of coaches to assist your congregation— email me at phil@esa-online.org to inquire), and bringing in a musician who also has a teaching ministry (check out Ministry of Money’s Bryan Sirchio at www.sirchio.com). A booming pedagogical tool is the Internet. Most educational institutions and some ministry organizations have distance learning available online. Check out the Eastern School of Christian Ministry at www.ebts.edu/online.htm, as well as other Network 9:35 Partners’ offerings: www.nacsw.org, www.chalmers.org, and www.forministry.com. Speaking of distance, get away from it all by checking out the options away from your congregation’s campus. Offer leadership-training taste tests, whether they last an hour (seminar), a day (conference), or a weekend (training event). You can also dig in by sending emerging leaders on short-term mission trips, congregation or ministry staff exchanges, Continued on page 33.