Building Leaders in Community

Healthy Leaders | Issue 52

Jul 11, 2025

Welcome to Issue 52 of Healthy Leaders. In this issue, we dig into the practical ways we can build leaders in community.

Hello friends,

Welcome back to our ongoing conversation on healthy Christian leadership and leader development.1

In our last issue, we talked about the transformational power of building leaders in community. Now it’s time for the nitty-gritty. How do we start doing this, realistically, in a local church context?

Here’s Malcolm with more:

A transformational learning community like the one Malcolm is describing here must be intentionally designed in order to be fully integrated into a local church. Let me explain what I mean by this.

Today, the idea of “church-sponsored theological instruction” is increasingly popular.2 While this represents a major improvement over the traditional “factory” institutions we talked about last time, it still doesn’t add up to the New Testament paradigm. The New Testament pattern is more along the lines of “church-integrated leader development.” Here are two key contrasts:

First, true leader development is not only a class lecture or a small group session that is “sponsored by the church” and that occurs in a room in the church building on Tuesday nights or all-day Saturday. Leader development needs to be integrated into the life of the church — which means that it is truly owned by the church, occurring across the life of the church, all week long.

This is a difference of process. If our purpose were merely to get the right information into the heads of our emerging leaders, then lectures followed by papers and small group sessions to discuss the information (with degrees at the end to prove the information was mastered) would be sufficient.

But if our goal is the building of the whole person, then a much more complex process is necessary — as we’ve said, we need a transformational collage of spiritual, relational and experiential as well as instructional dynamics.

An effective leader development process is not a neat series of courses but a fiery immersion in real-life, real-time experiences, reflecting the complicated and fundamentally difficult nature of Christian leadership, bringing deep heart issues to the surface to be dealt with, and compelling the emerging leader to look utterly to God for everything in his life and ministry. (Malcolm Webber, from Building Leaders)

We need a culture of leader development — shared beliefs, values, attitudes and actions — across the life of the church. We need parents building their children (Eph. 6:4; Deut. 6:4-9; 11:18-21), existing believers building new disciples (Matt. 28:19-20), older women building younger ones (Tit. 2:3-5), mature men teaching younger men (2 Tim. 2:2), people building people, leaders building leaders. Church-sponsored is not enough; leader development must be church-integrated or church-engaged.

Second, “theological education” of the mind is insufficient. The whole person must be built, with broad and deliberate attention given to the nurturing of spiritual life, relational capacity (including marriage, family, and relationships with others), character, vision and calling, as well as practical ministry capacities. The leader himself or herself must be built.

This is a difference of goal. The goal of New Testament leader development is not merely intellectual mastery of some biblical ideas, but rather transformation of life — the holistic building of the leader.

There are many powerful advantages of this biblical paradigm!

For instance, in our experience, when local churches rediscover the organic New Testament pattern of church-integrated leader development, it affects the church as much as it affects the emerging leaders. Here is a recent testimony from a church network leader:

When we followed Jesus’ leader development principles, the result has been a great flourishing of vigor and life in the church. All the members are functioning, building each other and growing together, thus bringing great growth and revival to the whole church.

Also, while church-sponsored theological instruction is usually accomplished in a limited time of training, church-integrated leader development is an ongoing, lifelong commitment to growing, serving and building together.

And finally, church-sponsored theological instruction usually revolves around the set curriculum (“one size fits all”), whereas church-integrated leader development can effectively respond to the individual needs and callings of the emerging leaders.

What about you?

A high-level leader who attended one our church-integrated trainings came to it totally broken. She had done immense damage to her relationship with God and destroyed many of her relationships with people. She was living devoid of joy and direction in life, succumbing to depression.

Within the loving community of the training, however, she was brought back to life!

I now feel loved and accepted. I am not alone anymore. I have been surrounded by the love of so many people here, and my closed heart has been totally set free.

What a gift of God community is! How could we ever think we could build anyone, let alone healthy leaders, outside of it?

We’d love to hear your experiences of community in the comments — the good, the bad, and the ugly. What has God done in your heart and life through them?

Until next time, we’re with you!

— Chris

Healthy Leaders

Building Leaders in Community

Healthy Leaders | Issue 52

What about you?

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