"Leaders Training Leaders" Has Failed as a Church Growth Strategy

Leaders training leaders is a pretty common strategy within the leadership world. I heard it again recently on the John Maxwell podcast. However, it has also been popular in the church world - including more conservative evangelical churches.

In terms of the church, the idea is that if the pastor is fairly unselective on where (or specifically who) he focuses his time then he can do all kinds of good work to grow the church - evangelistic outreach, Bible studies etc. and in doing so he may well be used to bring growth to the church. However, the growth will be additive (for which read slow). In contrast, if the pastor wants to be effective and bring multiplicative growth (for which read fast), then he should focus on raising up more leaders. This appears to make sense, if you do it right you will raise up more and more people to do the work and stimulate the work.

I first experienced this idea in the church in the early 2000s and I have to admit was immediately concerned. I think it could be a useful corrective. I do think the Bible encourages us to raise up leaders for the church (e.g. 2 Timothy 2:2; Titus 1:5) and it may be the case that as churches we had taken our eye of the ball.

However, it needs to be held tight with the more general exhortations. We are all to be disciples who make disciples (as we find in the Great Commission, Matthew 28:16-20). And leaders are (I think primarily?) there to equip church members not other leaders for works of ministry and so build the church to unity and maturity (Ephesians 4:11-13). I think most of those who encouraged leaders training leaders would agree entirely with that, but...

My concern at the time was that we seemed to focus on the training leaders on the assumption that it would trickle down. I increasingly wonder if the "trickle down" approach is always a mistake. It seems to me it never happens unless it is intentional. What we did was train leaders to train leaders to train leaders etc. The problem was we multiplied leaders, but not disciples.

I think that approach has really come home to roost. In, say 2000-2010, the focus on training leaders meant watching out for as many people as possible who might be leadership candidates. We then poured into them via training schemes in churches, with gospel partnerships and so on. Then for those who were appropriate they went off to Bible college. In my time at Oak Hill I think we had some of the largest numbers training for all kinds of ministry there had been - at least for a long time.

It seems to me three problems flowed from this:

1. There were no jobs for all these leaders. Often we had trained up very competent and quite talented people who would have been "successful" in their previous field. Then we dropped them into a church scene where the few (and that's another blog in itself!) returned to the big training churches to have successful "careers" preaching, writing and speaking at conferences and the many went on to difficult and often not very "successful" ministries. They either left ministry, stopped being faithful or struggled. The many who struggle on are repeatedly wishing for some mature disciples to come and help their struggling churches, but they don't come (perhaps because they aren't really there).
2. The church didn't explode with growth because the model actually took the focus away from making disciples. If you like we trained leaders who have no followers! For the plan to work, I think the large churches training leaders probably needed to be really successful in training and sending mature disciples with them. It simply wasn't enough to send a church plant with one leader and 30 people every few years if you were sending 2 or 3 people to college every year! The maths didn't add up and so the pipeline was ill-conceived.
3. The problem with the model is that you trained leaders who were good at training leaders, but you didn't train evangelists and disciple-makers (and maybe we selected the wrong people for leadership in that light?). Now this is an overstatement, of course. But you certainly weren't training people to go into the kind of ministry which they were then forced to take on. Unsurprisingly, most of us weren't very good at it!

My understanding is that there are now far fewer people in either church-based or college training. There are various reasons for this, but I wonder if a key is that it was a boom and bust strategy and there's a degree to which things are returning to a kind of equilibrium.

The interesting thing listening to that John Maxwell podcast was that the hosts picked up two stages of leadership. Before you go on to leaders training leaders, you need to build something that is worth passing on to other leaders. You need to do the hard work of additive growth before you can move to multiplicative growth.

This was, I think, the gap in the strategy. I wrote a while back about the decline of the evangelical church in the UK. The key to changing that is that we need healthy churches that are maturing as leaders train all the church to use their gifts in making disciples. I think this will be slow and we will almost certainly see pretty steep decline first. The reason for that is that is probably that we need more disciples before we need more leaders and that will take time. Just pity the generation of leaders facing impossible jobs.