is, very few have a well-thought-out
leadership-development pipeline, and
even fewer have a true leadership-
development culture. To fill the roles of
staff, churches simply hire from other
churches. Therefore, when it comes to
building the leadership potential of the
individual members of the church, most
churches are too busy scrambling to
find volunteers to fill slots to even think
about leadership development on this
level. The church cannot afford to simply
pilfer one another’s staffs and ignore
the massive leadership potential in the
pews. Eventually someone is going to
have to train some new leaders!
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT ON TWO
LEVELS
The local church must concern itself
with training leaders on two levels—staff
and members—and the second can feed
the first. Hiring pastors and key staff
roles from within is the very best policy.
If you use the character, chemistry, and
competence metric for hiring staff, it only
makes sense to hire almost exclusively
from within. Since the person was built
inside the house—discipled, mentored,
trained, developed—the character of the
individual is well known. Further, leaders
in the house likely had their hands in the
formation of that character, since true
leadership development includes the
often messy but necessary interaction
of life upon life. Leaders trained inside
the house grow up breathing the culture
of the house. You don’t have to send
them through a ten-week “learn our
DNA” program; they are a product of that
culture. They don’t just know your vision,
38 • Solutions
they are part of it. They own it. When
leaders are built inside the house, their
gifts and callings become apparent, their
strengths and weaknesses obvious. You
are able to evaluate them by what you
have gleaned from personal observation
as it relates to their competency, not just
what you read in a résumé or discerned
from a few interviews. Simply put, you
know what you’re getting when you hire
from within. One very powerful benefit
from hiring almost entirely from within
is what we call the upward draft. When
a church member is in a key leadership
role and then brought onto the paid
staff, the change creates a vacuum
of sorts and pulls other leaders up to
fill that former position. This, in turn,
creates another vacuum, which pulls up
others into higher roles of leadership.
In one ministry role after another, this
readjustment goes all the way down
through the ranks.
“
When leaders are
built inside the house,
their gifts and callings
become apparent,
their strengths and
weaknesses obvious.
A true leadership-development culture
feeds off the excitement created by the
upward draft. This is especially true
when the role being filled is a pastor or
director slot. The people in the church
are being led by someone they think of
as “one of us,” and the idea that one day
that could be me becomes much more