By Michael Fletcher
EMPOWERING LEADERSHIP
By Michael Fletcher
It happened again. As I sat at my keyboard to write this chapter, I saw an e-mail from a pastor of a large and fastgrowing church I had met while mentoring a group of pastors on leadership development. The contents of the e-mail were familiar:“ We need to learn how to create a leadership-development culture in our church. May my team and I travel to your church for one day to learn about this?” Yesterday, I spent considerable time on two phone calls about the same topic: how to build better leaders faster. The first was a conference call with a number of pastors who, at the end of the phone call, requested a two-day meeting for their group. The second was with the facilitator of a group of top churches of a certain denomination. This is routine, and it has absolutely nothing to do with me.( Trust me, I’ m not being humble. I wish I were humble.) It has everything to do with what I am calling the leadership crisis.
According to a World Economic Forum survey, 86 percent of respondents say there is a leadership crisis in the world today. There simply aren’ t enough trained leaders to meet the political and economic challenges the world is facing today. In a recent Forbes magazine article, leadership author Mike Myatt outlined this leadership crisis and actually called for a new leadership movement to solve the problem. Beyond economics and politics, a simple search of the Internet yields numerous articles predicting a leadership crisis in nursing, public school principals, pharmacy, higher education, and so on. And this leadership crisis is not just a secular problem. Ask any pastor. We simply have more needs inside and outside the local church than leaders to meet those needs, and everyone feels it. As I travel the world( our network of churches has operations in sixty-three countries), consult with churches here in the United States, and serve as a mentor with Leadership Network, it seems everyone is asking the same question:“ How do we train better leaders faster?”
Growth requires that we add new leaders. Continual growth requires a continual supply of leaders. The megachurch and multisite movements have proven this point. Additionally, leaders in smaller churches understand that, to move forward, they have to develop a growing team of leaders. The problem
36 • Solutions