Sue Mallory, executive director of Leadership Training Network, understands the importance of strategically structuring churches so that they can equip their members for ministry. But the bottom line is to focus on growing God’s people—one by one. I’ve adapted her article for movement building.
Six Key Elements to Leading Movements
1. Cast vision: The leader’s role is to cast the vision and educate (or re-educate) team members that THEY are the ministers.
2. Create the Strategy: The leader ensures the development of a plan to support the vision–a plan that is aligned to the movement’s core values.
3. Recruit and Develop a Core Team: The leader develops a core team to implement the plan, made up of people representing the gifts needed to accomplish your goals. Leaders develop, facilitate, empower and equip this core team to execute the plan and bring the vision to life.
3. Design administrative support systems to support or enhance all the existing movement building efforts. Leaders establish the value and the process for creating support systems. Like the foundation of a house, building a good system is hard work; it takes time and is essential to the stability of the effort. Systems are created to serve the people. The best systems are invisible.
4. Prepare your people for ministry. Leaders thinks of preparation in three ways:
- Assimilation: Systems of assimilation follows a person from the point of entry to the point of connection. Such systems assumes that many people are simply waiting to be discovered and invited into ministry.
- Biblical foundations: Biblical foundations are essential to changing the culture and growing mature Christians. You must be prepared to teach not only the biblical model of the priesthood of all believers, but also that every believer is uniquely gifted to serve.
- Discovery: Discovery is where the heart of the ministry is launched. To do ministry, to intentionally care for your people, discovery must be holistic. It is more than a gift inventory, more than a time and talent survey. It is also listening. It includes developing a process to interview, to have intentional conversations in order to hear each one’s story, their needs, and desires. There is no greater validation than being heard. It says you care about me as an individual. Gifts, needs, and talents can be captured in many ways, but never overlook the power of this type of personal connection.
5. Create connections into ministry. This is where you take all of what you know about the needs of the church and all that you have learned about the needs and gifts of the people and make the connections to places of involvement.. Connections are generally the missing link and the breakdown point in many movement-building system systems. Failure in connections can occur when there is a missing link in the system to facilitate effective matching, placing, and follow-up after the discovery process.
6. Equip all God’s people. The people have said “yes” to the call. What is in place to train them for success? Remember to train, train and train. When people commit to service, be sure your systems have built in a strong equipping and training components. Key elements in growing and equipping people are affirmation, feedback, evaluation, recognition, and last, but perhaps most important, reflection (giving people the opportunity to see how their service is tied to their movement’s vision and values).
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