Small church pastors have heard it time and again. Every conference we attend, every denominational meeting we join, every book we read, and every fiber in our being tell us that, for our churches to be effective, we must have effective leaders. And since effective leaders don’t simply grow on trees, the only way to have effective leaders is to develop them. We all understand and acknowledge that. But we also understand that there are some serious obstacles to developing leaders, especially in the small church.Time, of course, is a critical obstacle. The small church pastor has countless demands on his time, from the mud that was tracked into the church by the kids on Wednesday to the water that seeped (or ran, as the case was this past Sunday for our church) into the church basement after the last rain, from the old woman in the hospital for probably the last time to the young couple seeking to get married. There simply isn’t enough time to formulate and implement an effective leadership development strategy. But there are all sorts of articles on how to overcome this obstacle, with suggestions ranging from committing 15 minutes per board meeting to holding an annual or semi-annual leadership retreat, to you name it.
Willingness is perhaps a bigger obstacle. Not on the part of the pastor, mind you, but on that of the leaders in the congregation. Simply put, there are a lot of people who come into church leadership with their own agendas. And even those who don’t have their own ideas about what the church should do are often not particularly interested in taking time to explore what their role in church leadership really is. They’re simply not interested in being developed as leaders. But again, there are numerous ways that we can work around this problem. Good leadership development programs will compel people to want to press further. You can always just do the leadership development at board meetings, whether they like it or not. And then, there is always the option to remove a leader if they absolutely refuse.
I think, though, that for me, the biggest obstacle in leadership development is something far more simple than either of these things. It’s not that our leadership team doesn’t appreciate the value of development; indeed, we hunger for it. And it’s not that we’re not willing to take the time to do it; indeed, we have set aside weekends for retreats and times at our regular board meetings for leadership development. Rather, it’s that we often don’t know what to do. Simply put, while an internet search for church leadership development will instantaneously yield nearly 1.75 million results, the vast majority of these are nearly useless.
Why? Well, I’ll give you three reasons. The first has to do with the sheer volume of results that are returned. Whether you’re looking online, in books, magazines, etc., there are all sorts of sources that talk about the importance of leadership development. But they don’t necessarily have any real materials available right there. What you end up with, then, is a search for a needle. But this needle isn’t in a proverbial haystack. As someone on one my wife’s favorite TV shows said the other night, it’s in a stack of needles. So you’re looking for one particular needle in a whole stack of needles. It’s simply overwhelming.
The second is that those that do have real materials available right there often charge a fee. Now, I am not particularly opposed to paying for leadership development materials, but when you pastor a small church, you become very conscious of how you spend every dollar. And since many of these materials are hundreds of dollars, the meager budget that I have available for such materials might as well be nothing.
And the third is that, even if you do find and/or pay for those materials, a large portion of them are undeniably geared toward larger churches with multiple staff, where “leader” translates to “paid ministry personnel.” In a small church, you don’t have that luxury, and so you have to adopt a dramatically different approach to leadership development. Frankly, a lot of the concepts don’t apply at all. And there are entirely different challenges involved.
So I’m stuck. I’m looking for some great leadership development materials to work through with our board this year, but I’m stumped. Thus the question (plea, really): do you know of any great leadership development materials that I (or any small church pastor) could use? If so, please leave a comment below. I will certainly welcome any insights! In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep plugging away. And I’ll post anything I come up with, too.
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