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I became absolutely convinced of the importance of growing leaders from a context, indigenous
leaders if you like, when I heard the story of an early church plant from one of the posher
Holy Trinity Brompton churches and they planted into a needy estate in Hammersmith. The three
teams were sent, three cell groups and a leader, and they all got deeply involved in the community.
It was fresh expressions strategy before fresh expressions were called fresh expressions
-- they listened, they served, community formed. One of the cell groups began a children's
ministry and they did it because the ramshackle old hall they'd been given as a base, they
were meeting in. There was a knock on the door, there appears this dad, 'I'm a single
parent, not much money, my kids' birthdays are coming up, please could we hold the party
here?'
The group said yes, the group suddenly realised it was a children's ministry they were meant
to provide. The dad who knocked on the door became the second leader of the church after
the planter moved. He came to faith and was the first one and came to leadership. What
the church planter told me was that during the time in that initial phase when they were
there they built relationship and goodwill with large numbers of people in the community.
When a local person became the leader, the goodwill began to turn into conversions and
real discipleship 'cos there was a local person there that they recognised as one of theirs
and that opened the door to the Kingdom.
If you're going to grow leaders in a fresh expression or any other sort of church, you're
simply going to have to prayerfully invest in people. They don't self-select, it took
Jesus a night of prayer with the Father before he came down and identified 12 and then you
see a three year ministry of prioritising investment in those people, of involving them
in his ministry, of sending them out to have a try, of debriefing them when they came back,
helping them to learn from their mistakes and I think that is the primary Christian
way -- not only just to make disciples but to grow leaders. If a fresh expression begins
with discernment, with listening to context, growing leaders from it comes from that same
process of listening.
If you want to grow leaders you can't be a control freak, you're not teaching people
to do exactly as you would do it and only when you're there to make sure that's exactly
what they do. You're learning to take risks, to trust people, to let them develop the gifts
they have -- not force them into having gifts that you have which means probably God will
re-shape the ministry you're talking about before your eyes as you see the people that
he's giving you. I'm always struck by the story of the call of Moses where God says
to Moses, 'What's in your hand?' He says, 'It's a stick' and God says, 'Just let me
show you what I can do with your stick'. Well sometimes the people that God gives us, because
of how narrow a model of leadership we have in our minds, seem about as useful as a stick.
But if they're God's gift, just watch what God will do -- not with a stick but with some
human beings who aren't like you.
If you're going to grow leaders for a context you have to start listening and trusting the
people for whom that is their context -- especially if you've come from another one, even if it's
just a contrast in style and culture and it's the same parish or circuit or something like
that. Don't trust your instincts alone about reading the setting; begin to identify the
people who seem to have a real wisdom about that setting, who seem to know it and as they
grow in faith have good instincts about it. Probably you're being shown some leaders 'cos
at the heart of leadership is vision, being able to read a context, knowing what is the
next thing to do. But it does involve acknowledging the fact that there might be some people nowhere
near as mature in Christ as you are who have better instincts than you about that place
and who God might be raising up as leaders.
There comes I think a key stage where you move from apprenticing, which is teaching
people some basic skills of Christian leadership, you are trying to be sensitive to context
but that's mainly what you're doing, it's show and tell, into something that's much
more a combination of mentoring and defending. You've trusted someone with some responsibility
and you need to trust them to actually exercise it and not be watching them all the time and
if you are releasing them to do something that you can't and that really is the vital
sort of leader we need, there's no point recruiting people who can do what you can do. If the
ministry's going to expand or engage with the context more substantially then you need
some people who can do things that you can't. You can't apprentice them for that 'cos you
can't do it but you can mentor them in the sense of seriously investing in their Christian
character and accountability and being vulnerable to them yourself about your struggles with
being a leader and a disciple. But if you're going to be a mentor I think you'll also have
to be a diplomat. Sometimes we have to interpret for and defend people who perhaps are at the
cutting edge of a fresh expression and the folk from our traditional congregation don't
understand. That new leader is probably not going to be able to explain very well, they've
never been trained to be cross cultural back into a world they don't belong to. But people
training leaders within the mixed economy have go to be 'bilingual' if not cross cultural,
explaining, defending, interpreting and sometimes doing some interpreting back. So I think you
start as an apprentice maker and you end up as a combination of mentor and diplomat.
Just as in disciple making the training of leaders is going to be messy, people have
got to be encouraged to take risks. Sometimes when they take risks they will make mistakes.
Sometimes we will take risks with people and some flaw in their character we didn't know
about emerges and they, in some way or other, let us down. Two things are essential -- if
we're going to mentor and encourage we must be equally willing to challenge and, if necessary,
exercise discipline. Overall leaders have a responsibility to protect the flock from,
if you like, the character flaws of new leaders making mistakes but we also need to remember
the cross is written over the top of all of this. This is about grace, about learning
mistakes and about new beginnings.
The Church of England has a category called Ordained Pioneer Minister; other traditions
and denominations may well have something similar. One of the changes in our (CofE)
regulations since September 2010 is that if you apply to be one of these pioneers you
don't have to be full-time paid. You can be self-supporting or you can be what we call
a Local Minister and this is really important for fresh expressions because as God grows
leaders in a fresh expression that fresh expression will want to celebrate the Eucharist, want
to baptise and within the Church of England at least that requires an ordained minister.
We can now identify the ministers that God is growing through fresh expressions at the
appropriate time and we should be making good use of the possibility of local ministers
being pioneer ministers as we try and grow indigenous leadership through fresh expressions.
You might wonder reading the gospels why did Jesus spend so much of his precious time with
that rather unlikely bunch of men and actually women - there were women travelling with him
full time and they show up better when it comes to the crucifixion than the men do - but
it was obviously a priority for him and if it was a priority for him it needs to be a
priority for us. Fresh expressions can fail because the founding leader moves on or the
initial team gets worn out, fresh expressions can just become events that we put on for
others and no ownership of the Gospel or what it means to be a Christian can be taken on
by, if you like, the local community with whom the fresh expression is engaging. It's
much, much more serious not to try and grow leaders who are appropriate to the local context
than all the frankly jolly hard work, sometimes disappointment, patience and frustration of
doing it. Growing local leaders is essential and God will give the grace for it but, just
like fresh expressions itself, it's not a quick journey or a quick fix.