Effective Leader Development Is a Complex Collage
Healthy Leaders | Issue 50
Welcome to Issue 50 of Healthy Leaders. In this issue, get our your art supplies: it’s time to design!
Hello friends,
Welcome back to our ongoing conversation on healthy Christian leadership and leader development.1
Building someone effectively, whether they are your own children, young leaders or new disciples, is a complex, challenging process that takes a long time and requires a lot of blood, sweat and tears.
This is because both you as the builder and the person you are building are complex humans, living in a complex world. The process of building even one leader — let alone twelve, as Jesus did — resists simplification.
But just because it is complex doesn’t mean it is impossible. All it takes is a little creativity, and a whole lot of dependence on God, who makes the impossible possible.
Here’s Malcolm with more:
“The key to design is to clearly define.”
During one of our design courses in Nigeria, we started off the second day of training with a learning experience on forgiveness.
The move of the Holy Spirit was so strong that many of the pastors attending began to confess to holding deep and bitter grudges against people they knew. Together, they resolved to forgive. After this experience and the teaching that accompanied it, we turned our focus to personal designs and program designs, asking the question: what will we do now?
This was not just a devotional before the teaching. It was an intentional choice by our trainers to show the participants a clear example of transformational design, complete with spiritual, relational, and experiential elements surrounding the Bible teaching on forgiveness. With this learning experience under their belts, the pastors who attended could start designing for the growth of their churches in earnest.
Now I know I have been preaching all these years just to entertain people, with no clear transformational goal in mind. May God forgive me. I will follow this 4D transformational process to design my Bible studies and messages for my church going forward.
This is what we mean when we talk about a complex collage. This is what leader development is! Here’s another example of the same thing, this time for servanthood:
We’ve been talking a lot about this sort of context in the last few issues of Healthy Leaders, and that’s for good reason. If it isn’t clear yet, we believe that 75% of building healthy leaders relies on the transformational context you design for your transformational content.
This happens most naturally and effectively not in a classroom, but in a lifestyle of leader development. We need to be with the leaders we are building in order to build them, and our emerging leaders need to see our teaching come into play in the context of our lives!
“As I’m going through experiences, responsibilities and pressures, I must know that I’m not doing it by myself, but there are others who are with me, committed to me, affirming me, encouraging me, and praying for me … I know I need to endure; you taught me this well. But I need to see it. I need to be with you when you go through some terrible fiery sufferings. I’ll watch you endure. That’s how I’m going to remember. That’s how I will really get it.
So please take me with you sometimes. Let me watch you as you do leadership stuff. I love your teaching, but I need to see you actually do it!
As I walk with you and as we do things together, I will learn more deeply what it means to be a leader. I will watch you as you make difficult decisions in hard situations. I will watch you as you pray for the people you are serving, and when you weep for them. I will be with you when you are patient with people. I will be with you when you correct those who are wrong. That’s how I will learn to do it myself.” (from A Letter From an Emerging Leader)
What about you?
Think about the people you are building right now. How are you building them in the context of real life? Do you take them along with you when you have ministry that needs doing? Why or why not? How can you do it more?
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
Until next time, we’re with you!
— Chris
Recommended Resources
Video: How to Build Servant Leaders
Core Model Brief: Summary of the Principles of Healthy Leader Development
Book: Building Leaders
For more resources, visit our website.
Thanks to our friends at Fifty-Four Collective for putting together a comprehensive set of video courses for growing healthy organizations, starting with this series of courses on leadership by Malcolm. We’ll be using some of their videos and some of our own. Be sure to check out what they’re doing!