Article
Your Church Should Be Stronger Than You
Why Church Planters Must Reduce Control to Grow Competency
One of the most common questions I get asked at the church I lead in Appalachia is, “Why do you have so many pastors?” I usually jovially answer, “Because of my incompetence.” (The benefit of elder plurality is another article for another day.) That subtle self-deprecation actually holds a lot of truth. I’m not saying that I’m unqualified for the office I hold or that I’m bad at what I do, but I do believe that my church is much more competent than I am.
Church planting is an interesting endeavor. It’s inherently entrepreneurial, but when done right, it is also deeply spiritual. This means that a neglect of either entrepreneurial or spiritual emphasis might leave your young church in the ditch on the road of growth and sustainability. Conversely, overemphasizing one of them is just as dangerous. Leaning only on theological instinct and spiritual disciplines can unintentionally neglect strategy and critical thinking. God wants our minds engaged in this church-planting work. But purely relying on strategy and pragmatism leaves out the most competent Person in our church—the Holy Spirit.
As planters begin a new work of engaging an area with the gospel and making disciples, their young church inevitably looks like them. It’s always remarkable to me when I know a planter or lead pastor, and I meet a pastor they have developed. I’ve often noticed how they use a lot of the same vocabulary, and even their speaking mannerisms are eerily similar. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? In the learning process, we begin to look like our model or example. And in a larger sense, the whole local church can really begin to look, sound, and feel like the man God used to plant it.
And eventually, that natural tendency becomes a church’s most limiting ceiling. Your lack of administrative ability eventually becomes your church’s organizational culture (or lack of one). Maybe your preference for deep community produces a lack of evangelistic fervor. Your church looks like you, but it should be better than you.
Diversifying Leadership
Church planters must seek out leaders with abilities and strengths that complement their own.
Scripture is filled with this principle. Moses needed Aaron and Hur to complement him, and he needed Jethro to instruct him in leadership structure. In Acts 6, the apostles employ a group of men with completely complementary skills to serve the Hellenistic widows. The apostles themselves are an expression of a team with very different backgrounds and abilities.
One tempting problem is utilizing leaders who will compliment us instead of complement us. It strokes our ego to have leadership around us who are fans. But it serves the church better to have leadership around us that challenges us and has a vastly different set of giftings. To grow a church beyond our own competency, church planters must diversify the leadership team continually, compensating for their own inabilities.
The point of view for the church planter ought to be a house of glass, not a house of mirrors. If he has surrounded himself with yes men and held onto control, in every direction he looks, he sees himself. He lives and works in a house of mirrors. This is a maddening existence that will eventually drive him to ministry insanity, burnout, and difficulty.
But if he has rightly diversified leadership, he will look around him and through each co-leader see a vast and varied expression of Jesus’ bride. He sits in a house of glass and is able to look through each co-leader to see the strengths of the church that he never could have produced on his own. He sees a biblical expression of the body of Christ, strengthened in ways that only God gets glory.
Removing the Bottleneck
The reason many churches stall out in growth is an issue of control, and oftentimes it’s not even a sinful intention. It’s not that church planters are always trying to have their hands on everything. Most of us want to genuinely empower others and free up our availability. But it is a problem when pastors want control of everything. Another problem with the same effect is when church members feel like they shouldn’t be in control of anything. Both of these issues produce a pastoral bottleneck that really inhibits effective ministry.
The solution is helping our church members understand that the ministry belongs to them. Leaders’ jobs are, “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ,” (Ephesians 4:12). The larger a church grows, the less dependent it should be on one man, because the collective expression of gifts, creativity, and ability in that local church has grown vast and varied.
Eventually in the church planting journey, we are forced to stop micromanaging. If every ministry decision must run through us or be approved by us, we bottleneck our church and slow our ministries down. Instead, we ought to entrust and empower faithful saints to do the work, truly believing that they will be able to do things that we cannot.
I went to my first NFL game last season and watched a 40-year-old Joe Flacco lead the Cincinnati Bengals to a victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers, who were led by the 41-year-old Aaron Rodgers. They jokingly dubbed the game the “Icy-Hot Bowl,” as it was the highest combined ages of two starting quarterbacks in NFL history. These men both possess a skill that earns them millions of dollars—an ability to put the ball exactly where it needs to be. And for them to be able to continue doing that job, they don’t put their own bodies where they don’t need to be, like underneath a stack of NFL defenders after quarterback sneaks. These guys hang back and play to their strengths.
The best church planters are like aging NFL quarterbacks. They know what their skills are, and they know what to stay out of. They run plays that highlight and employ the skills of others.
Pastor, your job is to lead a team, not build a following.
