Sermon prep. An extended hospital call. Two funerals and a wedding rehearsal in the week. A board meeting that could have been held on Monday but was scheduled on a Thursday. And in between there were a hundred little emergencies that couldn’t be postponed to some other time but had to be dealt with today. How would all that be integrated into a strong new leadership curriculum? That’s the disconnect that has been fatal for most development plans: not because pastors aren’t interested in their development as leaders, but because the curriculum was designed by someone with margin and imposed on someone with none. The curriculum must be based on the life a pastor actually leads, not the life a curriculum designer thinks he should lead.
We begin with the constraint and not the curriculum.
Most leadership development programs are created in reverse. They start with a curriculum written up in books or conferences and try to shoehorn a pastor’s life and ministry into it. Let’s try something different: design the curriculum around the rhythms and constraints of a pastor’s schedule. Jesus did that in training the Twelve. He didn’t send them off for a leadership development isolation tank, but he added to their responsibilities as he sent them out into the communities where he was ministering (Luke 9:1-2; Mark 6:7). That’s not to say that he didn’t teach them, but their primary learning was experiential: they were given assignments to practice leadership as they served others.
What “Low-Barrier, High-Impact” actually means?
But a program that fits into the pastor’s daily schedule will have three characteristics. First, it is relational and not transactional. It will be in a group of peers and not in one-on-one pastor development experience he has to work out the time for. Second, it will be measured in years not weeks and months. Leadership formation is a long game, and a program that fits into the pastor’s day to day will respect time and allow him to learn at a sustainable pace. And third, it will be with the leader and not away from the leader. A pastor development program which requires a sabbatical elsewhere has already failed. If the pastor has to choose between developing as a leader and looking after the needs of the congregation, that forced choice means the program has already failed, since a pastor should never have to choose between the two in the first place.
The Bridge Builder Model: Development Built for the Long Haul.
EQUIP’s Bridge Builder is one of those long-term development programs. It is designed to work with a pastor’s leadership team for years at a time, building leadership capacity in drips and drops rather than expecting the leader to sit through a week or two of didactic instruction. Another thing about good programs: it’s a long-term relationship in which a pastor’s leadership development is baked into his routine work and rhythms. The pastor will miss out on one week of big-picture leadership teaching, but he’ll get a lifetime’s worth of peer accountability if you get his leadership team on board. Same for your congregation. As a pastor learns to lead his people, they are developing as well. They are being led. A solo pastor development experience where some abstract notions are held up as ideals to aspire to but which don’t really matter to the day to day reality of a pastor’s leadership is going to be disappointing. If you want to create a pastoral leadership development program for a pastor to be able to live and work as a pastor in the calendar that actually works, you have to develop his staff and volunteers alongside his own development, not instead of it.
5 Things to Look For in a Schedule-Realistic Program.
When you are looking at a pastoral leadership program, these things have to be kept in mind.
Modularity: Can the curriculum be scheduled in modules that fit around the busy schedule of a pastor?
Cohort Accountability: Is there peer-based coaching rather than a solitary experience?
Application > Accumulation: Does the curriculum focus on depth over breadth? Is it more about helping the pastor think about and apply some concepts and get some knowledge and perspective than giving him a general overview that he doesn’t have time to take in?
Seasons: Does the program take into account the pastoral ministry calendar and the pastor’s need to pace himself, or is it designed to be undertaken in a single intensive burst early in the fiscal year?
Team Building: Can the different components of the program be leveraged to create a leadership team around the pastor as he undertakes it, or will he be taking it solo without any support?
Leaders who create leaders build it into the system.
A healthy church is a growing church. That means there are processes for spiritual leadership to emerge and for those leaders to lead. People who know that say that healthy leadership development cannot be done as a stand alone effort, but rather the way that mentoring is combined with strategic leadership and the whole leadership life cycle for the church and people who are in it, too. A pastoral leadership development program is one of them. And done well, it takes into account the time and energy of the pastor and enables him to lead his congregation, as well as the leadership team, for years to come. When your church is ready to build that type of leadership development system you can find resources and tools to help at iequip.org.
