Developing A Leadership Pipeline
Have you ever found yourself saying, “We need more leaders?”
Most pastors are facing that very struggle and their frustration is growing because they cannot seem to find a solution. Meanwhile, the shortage of leaders decreases the impact of their ministry and increases the stress on their staff.
The leadership pipeline process guides you through a framework to build an intentional leadership development strategy that will result in a continual flow of identifying and developing new leaders.
Join us as Mac Lake introduces us to this incredible leadership tool, The Leadership Pipeline!
Learn more about Mac and the Multiply Group.
Interested in church planting? Let us know!
Transcript
Andrew Estes 2:15
Awesome well welcome everybody to our webinar with Mr. Mac Lake here. I’m super excited that you guys have tuned in to join us. I’ve kind of learned about Mac and a lot of his information regarding the leadership pipeline over the last couple years got introduced to that Mac came out with a book last year that really kind of detailed out a lot of this stuff. And I’m really excited to just bring a lot of this content to Nexus and to a lot of our partner churches as well. So Mac, thank you so much for being here, man. Oh, so good to be with you. Awesome, awesome. Well, welcome again, Mac, you’ve just kind of give us a little introduction of who you are some of what you’ve done in the past. I know that you’ve been like a youth pastor, church planter, Leadership Pastor, all these different things. So give us a little snapshot of who you are.
Mac Lake 3:04
Yeah, what Andrew is saying is I can’t keep a job. So, I grew up in a little church in West Virginia, fell in love with Jesus fell in love with ministry, went to Moody Bible Institute, and then got into youth ministry realized how bad I was at it, and went to seminary, went to Dallas Theological Seminary, became an associate pastor after that plant to the church did oversaw multisite at Seacoast Church for a season and leadership development there. And then planted a church planting network and started an assessment training coaching process and then, of the past several years, I’ve started my own company about a year ago called multiply group.
Andrew Estes 3:49
Awesome, man. Very cool. Well, um, yeah, kind of kind of walk us through this, this, the genesis of what the Leadership Pipeline kind of looked like, I know that that kind of started in the marketplace, kind of tell a little bit of a story like that in your book, but just kind of give us an overview of how did this all kind of come to been?
Mac Lake 4:07
Yeah. So for me, I was a, I was hired by Greg Surrat at Seacoast Church, large multi site church. And it was my, probably my first second week on the job, something like that first month, and Greg handed me a book called leadership pipeline. And I always tell people don’t go by the book, don’t read it. It’s a very difficult read. It’s a book written for big corporations, you know, and I read it made my way through the book. And it transformed the way I looked at leadership development, because it gave a framework doesn’t tell you how to develop leaders. You know, the book doesn’t do that. But it gives you a framework that leaders can flow up through your church organization. And so Greg handed me the book and said, figure this out for the church. And and so that’s when I first started doing the study and leadership pipeline and fell in love with it. The power of the framework and the concept of it.
Andrew Estes 5:03
Interesting. How long ago was that?
Mac Lake 5:05
Oh, goodness, that was probably15 years ago.
Andrew Estes 5:10
Good man. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I haven’t read that book. I know that you mentioned that. But I tell you just kind of recommend this one is The Multiplication Effect that Mac wrote. This is probably the totally opposite of a hard read. Like, I love how many how short the chapters are. They’re just they’re really nice. very accessible for leaders to pick that up and implement. But um, yeah, man. So I’m super excited that you’re here to bring this content, why don’t you kind of walk us through? What is a leadership pipeline? And if this from the ground up, just kind of just give us a brief overview of them?
Mac Lake 5:46
Yeah, yeah. So let me back up for a second and just say, say this real quick. Thank you, everybody for being on here.Because I believe this is a season, a season where personal development for pastors is crucial. Our paradigms are being challenged because of what we’re experiencing with this pandemic, our paradigms of church are being challenged, our skills are being challenged. It’s just, here’s one of the things when COVID-19 here, and the church service, most church services shut down. I was doing a lot of webinars during that season, I was like, guys, here’s three things you need to watch. The level of engagement people are continuing to have with your church, and the mission of your church, the level of biblical community they’re experiencing, and the level and the degree which they’re serving. Because if we don’t, if we’re not careful, those three things are going to decline. And for some churches, that’s been the case, the engagement, they’ve lost engagement, they’ve lost a biblical community, small groups are disappearing, and empty bar serving. And so what this has done, it’s revealed a deficiency in our discipleship system. And it’s fascinating, Andrew, I ran an exercise recently with a group of churches. And I said, Alright, here’s what I want you to do. I said, I want you to write down in small groups, I want you to write down three to five behaviors, discipleship behaviors, that you hope your people are exhibiting right now, you know, since you’re not meeting on the weekends, what are three to five you hope they’re exhibiting in their life right now. And they created those and share those Now, let me give you a scenario.
I want you to imagine for a moment that imagine I wave a magic wand and your your attendance is back up to pre COVID numbers, and you’re meeting every week and those sorts of things. And so just imagine that it’s January 2021, whew everybody’s back, got 100%. back. Now, fast forward, here’s the scenario. Fast forward to January 2023. Imagine that there’s an announcement made that, hey, something’s going on. I don’t know what it is. But all businesses, all churches are not going to be allowed together for a 12 month period of time.
What are you going to do between now and in January 2023, to prepare your people to demonstrate those discipleship behaviors? What are you going to do so that they are living the way you hope they live? When when the church isn’t gathering? And so it’s a fascinating exercise, because it gets us thinking about basics of discipleship. But here’s the other thing, we also have to be thinking about how we disciple leaders, because here’s the other thing I’m seeing happening, churches are getting that are allowed to return are getting 30 to 60%. Back attendance, not leaders are getting less percentage of, of their leaders. And so let me just draw this real quick. Yeah, I plan on sharing this, but I don’t have anything to show. But here’s, let’s say your church was running 200 people, and all of a sudden, your weekend services are down to zero, you know, and then when they do open them up, what happens?
It’s a scaled regrowth, your real growth is scaling. So you’re 30% then you’ll grow up to 60%. And hopefully, you’ll get back up to 100%. Okay, so if this is March 2020, and you know, this is March 2021, or whatever time you want to put on here, here’s the beauty of this. You still have the base of 200 people and the leadership base it took to run that you still have their names. church planter didn’t have that luxury. So somebody who hadn’t started yet but you have started and so if you have two people, you have 200 names, and you know who the leaders are. So what what this allows you to do is allows you to scale your leadership up now. For this eventual return of 100%. I’m working with a church here in town. And what they’ve done is they’ve taken what they call the coach level. And they have put coaches over leaders who are going, we’re not ready to come back yet.
And so 30% of their churches is returning. But many of their leaders were not ready yet. And so what they’ve done is they’ve put a coach over those a lay coach over those leaders, and they meet with them on zoom, they text them, they email them, they do equipping and training with him for those areas of ministries. So cool. Hey, we’re not gonna let leadership development stop just because church at meeting on the weekend. So this is why I say leadership development is crucial right now in in the life of the church.
Andrew Estes 10:50
Yeah, absolutely. No, I really appreciate that. I think that it’s, that’s definitely a huge weight to consider as we as we kind of move forward. And just really kind of reiterating, why is it so necessary to identify and develop leaders. And so I know that a lot of our guys and a lot of our network are probably unfamiliar with you and unfamiliar with what this idea of the leadership pipeline actually is. So as you’re as you’re talking about the need for this, I mean, you’ve you’ve kind of addressed a lot of these issues with your this incredible tool called the leadership pipeline that I’m, I’m kind of drawn to as kind of a vision frame junkie with a lot of Will Mancini stuff, there’s just very practical tools that are very powerful, very simple, easy to understand tools, but that are very powerful, that have a lot of depth to them. So once you just kind of walk us through just a first time introduction to what is the leadership pipeline? You know, you talked a little bit about why it was created, why it’s necessary already. But what is this leadership pipeline? And why is it important?
Mac Lake 11:50
Yep. Yeah, it’s good. It’s funny, you say that, because when I created this, I called Will Mancini senior and said, hey, what the framework you’ve created for vision frame tools and process, I think I’ve got something for leadership development, and I flew down to Houston showed it to him, he loved it. And so most churches, the way they, they’re organized, it, let me say this. Or let me set up with two things. Number one, ask any pastor, what is your leadership development strategy? So before we get to the the pipeline framework, ask any teacher and ask any pastor, what’s your leadership, develop strategy? Ask any youth pastor, any worship pastor, any whatever, you know, what is your leadership development strategy, you’re gonna get one of two answers. We don’t have one, or ours is organic, which means they don’t have one.
So most churches do not have an intentional leadership develop strategy. And so nor do they have a definition of what leadership development is. And so when you don’t have those two things, then you hope to develop leaders, but you don’t have a strategy to develop leaders. Okay. And so in the leadership pipeline process, I share a framework that helps you begin to define and articulate what a leadership develop what your leadership development strategy is. Now, if you talk to most churches, and I do an exercise with churches, and I say, Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do that one of the, one of the early exercises I do when I’m working with them, I say, I want you to show me your structure. Okay, how’s your church structured? And so you might get a children’s director that oversees a nursery coordinator, and an elementary director, and the Wednesday night awana, program 20 leaders there. And then you talk to the student pastor and say, what’s your structure? Well, it’s me and a bunch of students. All right, and so everybody’s structure looks different. And it’s just a mess. And so what we do is we structure churches structure for function, but they don’t structure for development. So what that leadership pipeline says, is that every up I have a slide, but since I have this right here, I’ll just use this. Every every organization, and thus every church should have a structured pathway for development. Okay. I don’t like the term leadership pipeline. I use it to honor the guy who came up with a terminology but I prefer leadership pathway. And some people are uncomfortable with the hierarchical structure says it just put it on its side or flip it upside down. But But every every organization, every church should have a pathway where people are developed or a discipleship pathway. Down here. These are people who are simply learning to lead themselves. These are people who are volunteering in your church as a greeter and usher These are people
People who are attending small group or Sunday school class, whatever you have, it’s from this large pool of people that you’re going to get your leaders. And so some of those people and they’re going to flow up and they’re going to lead teams or they’re going to lead groups, they’re going to be children, or they’re going to lead students, but they’re leading somebody they’re not leading themselves are leading, leading others. Now, down here at the bottom, I put a box around this and call this basic discipleship. But now we’re beginning to disciple leaders. So when you after you learn to lead others, then you flow being learned to lead leaders. This is a huge missing piece of the structure. In most churches, this would be a volunteer role, where some churches called coaches, you know, hey, I need you to oversee three to five coaches, but now or oversee three to five leaders. But what you’re doing now is you’re you’re providing leadership for a group of leaders, okay? Some of those flow up, and they’re going to lead a department, they’re going to provide visionary leadership for departments. So the student ministry, group, ministry, worship ministry, and then some of those flow up and they’ll begin to lead the entire organization, lead the church. And so like I said, down here, this is basic discipleship. This is the discipling of leaders. And I draw a box around this and put church planting. This is where we get our church planters. This is how you raise church planters up from within, is you have an intentional pathway for development in your church.
Now, here’s what happens. If that takes somebody who’s in a small group, and I’m making them a leader. And they’re leading others, and then all of a sudden, they go, Oh, you know what, we need somebody to provide visionary leadership for our group ministry. And we jump them all the way up here, or, hey, you need to be a church planter. And we jumped them all the way up here. It undermines their development. They never learned the skills necessary to lead at these other levels. They never learned to use time differently, or they didn’t learn the values that are necessary in each each level of leadership. And so it undermines their development. When I was a sea coast, before we had this in place. We put a guy who was a great small group leader at a campus, and he oversaw a campus. And I couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get it. He just he struggled, struggled, struggled. And then I realized one day, oh, we jumped into levels are in the leadership pipeline. That’s why he’s struggling. And so this becomes a discipleship pathway for leaders in your church. Now, the beauty of it, can I share? Can I share two things on? On slide?
Andrew Estes 17:30
Yeah, possibly, you should be able to?
Mac Lake 17:32
Let’s see. Let’s see if this works here. Can you see that? So this is the leadership pipeline. Now, once you get this in place, what it does is can you see this full thing? What it does, is down here at the bottom, it defined this is so important, it defines the scope of leadership. So you can put the labels on these over here. So you’ll see team member, leader, coach, director, senior leader, you can call them whatever you want. I just got off the phone with a church. They’re calling this level team builder. I love that. Some of you might call coordinator. But what it does, once you get your language now down, it gives you the scope of leadership. I’m simply leading myself for participating leader, they lead a small team or group of people, Coach leads a small team of leaders to provide further equipping, encouragement and evaluation. Director provides visionary leadership for specific area ministry, senior leadership team provides visionary leadership for the church. So now I have the scope of leadership. Andrew, what happens a lot of times, we’ll put somebody up here, and we’ll call them our children’s director. But if you look at their, the way they function, they’re leading a small team, a small team of people, right, they’re leading small team, so they’re really not functioning at that level. So it helps us define the scope of leadership.
Andrew Estes 18:58
Yeah, and you even you even mentioned, go, Joe, put up that first slide. Just real quick, just to overview. Real quick with the the text in there. You talked a little bit about in your book with even smaller churches, and a lot of our context are maybe 200 people or less, a lot of the churches and even when you’re starting as a first church plant, I mean, you don’t have you know, six or 700 people to start with, and you might not have every one of these. Can you talk just briefly about I mean, so you have the the leading self that’s kind of the bottom, you’re a volunteer, leading others. I mean, you might be leading worship, or you might be teaching in the children’s ministry, and then it kind of works up from there. When you’re talking about a much smaller church. What What does that look like? I think you mentioned there’s only there could be only like three, maybe four levels of a smaller church?
Mac Lake 19:44
Four levels. Yep, four levels. So a church plant I always tell them, that they they should start out as a four level but build the fifth level in and be ready when the growth happens, or the development happens and so you have a choice to make? Okay? And the choice is the lead leaders level and lead a ministry area? What am I going to put there? Am I going to make? Let’s use the term? COACH and director? Okay? Yeah, I put somebody over children’s ministry as a church plants, we don’t have, we might have 12 kids, right. And we might have two leaders. So am I going to call that person, my children’s coach, or my children’s director. If I call them children’s director, I recognize that this role is isn’t is not functioning right now. But it’s one we want to build in. But a lot of times I recommend, go and call them your children’s coach. So that when you grow, and you’re ready to put somebody on staff, and this is not the person, or you find somebody can lead it as a volunteer better, and it’s not this person, then you just bring in a director. So for church planning, I’d say hey, yeah, have a small group coach, have a children’s coach, worship coach. And then as we grow, we might add that director level later.
Andrew Estes 21:05
Yeah, good, good. And this is I mean, this is simple, because it’s something that naturally kind of happens, but it’s not intentionally. There’s no intentional time or energy kind of put into it whenever you’re talking about because a lot of churches will have volunteers. And then there’s somebody that’s on staff that’s like, overseeing all the volunteers. But then when you get to that maybe even in the small group setting, you have small group leaders that are leading others naturally. But then there’s somebody that’s coordinating all of that, and there’s leading your small group leaders. I mean, so this is kind of naturally in place for a little bit. of for Yeah, for a tiny bit. But yeah, kind of going forward from there. What is you we’re going to going to go a little bit farther down your, your slide stuff.
Mac Lake 21:48
Yeah, so let me show you this. This is one of the things I help churches build when they go through the process. So this is a one page snapshot that a pastor can have. And it’s every single position that is that, that it takes to run the church. Now what you’ll notice is the language is aligned. We have an so small, I can’t see it. But you know, it’s it’s leaders, all the language across this as leaders. And then every ministry, here’s the language or small group, coach, children’s coach, preschool coach, whatever it is, we have coaches, all the languages aligned across here. The language at this level is directors. So this level, all the positions we have are called directors. And and so you align your your language, and that’s one of the powers of the leadership pipeline. You mentioned a church plant. I literally got off the phone call 10 minutes before you and I jumped on. So let me show you this. Um, this was an actual coaching session. Okay. Let me let me show you what I did with this particular church.
We have labeled their levels. This is a church plant that runs 200, pre COVID, 200. Okay. They have team members and participants, leaders, team builders, they do not have this level of functioning yet, but it will be called director. So the two of them, the two senior leaders are functioning at this level, but they’re also functioning at the at this level as well. So senior leaders are here in here in the meantime, so, um, they have I went through with them, it’s okay. How many children? do you have? 28? How many Helpers? do you have? 12? I mean, leaders, she has zero. I mean, team builders. Yeah, zero right now, they just lost that person. Okay. Now, how many people are in small groups? 100. Okay, how many leaders do you have? We have 10. How many team builders Do we have one. Okay, that’s, that’s not bad. But we need, we need a one to five ratios. So you need two of these. And so you need to work towards developing another one of these. Over here. We have 10 people on the worship team, zero leaders and one team that are leading the whole thing. Okay, here’s what it tells me is you’ve put somebody in this position, that’s a do or not a developer. So this person needs to begin to develop a two to three people at this leader level, and etc. So what it does is you can see in this church plant, they have 1-2-3 levels, if four levels really, that they’re functioning with that I’m trying to build them towards five. And then what they do is they take the names, they take these numbers, and you begin to put names in and that’s when it gets powerful.
Andrew Estes 24:38
Right. Yeah. And you mentioned that I think I was on a call with you, at some point in the in the past where you kind of did that type of thing. And you you did that if putting names in and initially when when your church planting, like the senior leader or or some of the launch team is in like all of those spaces and you just have to kind of work yourself out of that role. Gosh, it kind of reminded me of, I don’t know if you’ve read the E myth revisited or something like that, but that one of the exercises they talked about in there was kind of create your org chart. And you have to drop your name in everywhere that you would create your your ideal org chart. And then you’re slowly working your way out of it. It’s the same, the same type of of process there.
Mac Lake 25:20
I did that with my church plant 20 years ago, 22 years ago, I did that with my church plant. Before we started, I recruited seven key leaders to oversee seven ministries. And I said, Guys, I need to know what roles are going to function underneath here. And they defined all that just like that chart I showed you a while ago. And then, from day one, we were able to say, Hey, we have 67 positions available in this church. And it’s so helpful, and we knew who were in those positions, how many we needed. And what we said is we said we’re going to be a church of this size, you always have to be thinking future. If you’re a church of 200 today. And numbers aren’t the big thing. I mean, you may always be a church at 200. But developments essential if you plan on growing or if you plan on multiplying either one. And you have to do development if you’re going to multiply or if you’re going to add. So if you say let’s say you’re a church of 200, and you go out, we always want to be 200. But we want to multiply church plants. Okay, great, then what do you want to start that church plant with? Well, we’d like to start them with 50 people. Okay, what are we doing to develop those 50 people up from within to send them out? And so or if you got no, we want to be a church of 300. Okay, well, then, how many do you need, and you work through your numbers? And you’ll see how short you are. And now you know what your development goals are. I worked with a church this weekend, and and one of the things we worked through was, what are your one year leadership development goals? What do you currently have? What do you need a year from now? Let’s use this chart, work through the goals and left and they’re very clear about how many how many they here’s the funny thing, this this church planner I was working with while ago. We need so many leaders, we need somebody I said, let’s put it on paper, when we did the burden lifted off his shoulders didn’t need near not near as many as the weight he was feeling. This is so helpful.
Andrew Estes 27:27
Yeah, that’s awesome. I’m thinking, um, one of the the tensions that you kind of talk about in your book is, you kind of have to choose your pain. Whenever you’re whenever you’re walking through a process of developing something like this. And you’ve even mentioned it or you’re a doer, or a developer, and doing it is, it’s one of those things like if you want to get it done, right, you want to do it your way, you don’t want it to fall through the cracks, like people just gravitate towards us doing it themselves. We talk about just choosing that pain of a lot of times, that’s really difficult, like just trying to like being having all those burdens and having all that stuff just on your plate, but but walking through the pain of you know, what is it going to take to actually develop people, that’s hard work to go in there and spend time talking with people and meeting with people and developing them and all that type of stuff. It’s also hard work. But you just have to choose which one that is. I love I love that when you talk about because I think when a lot of people say like we need more leaders, some of that conversation kind of stems from we just need more volunteers, right? Like we just need to fill holes, we need warm bodies to to set up chairs to play on in the worship team to run sound to teach children’s or whatever. How do you how do you shift that mentality from like, we just need warm body volunteers to how does maybe even this play into when whenever you have higher level leaders in place? How does that actually attract more, maybe more volunteers and actually solve that problem?
Mac Lake 29:00
Yeah, yeah. So when you look at that leadership pipeline, one of the things we have to recognize is when we’re when we’re moving some somebody to the next level, we’re we are increasing their scope of leadership, I’m increasing their scope of spiritual responsibility. That is so important. That’s why I say I don’t want somebody who’s been a small group leader all sudden to go plant a church. They’ve not led people spiritually at these levels. And so when we just have a, you know, plug the seats and get people doing these tasks mentality, we don’t have a development mentality. We’re going to miss people’s calling. There are people who who be called into full time ministry perhaps, or called to serve the church in a more significant way from a spiritual leadership. And we don’t see it, we miss it. Therefore, these people mature to a certain level and then eventually they look at and go, yo, hey, by the way, we’re leaving the church we’re gonna go to another church. Why? Because they have a vision somehow got stirred inside of them that our gifts will be utilized there will be appreciated there. And maybe they’ll, I mean, I was just when somebody’s reading and they’re like, Man, I’m 39 years old. And, you know, we talked about leadership pipeline, but man, I’m not empowered, I’m not moving on, you know, and that person will guarantee that person would gone within six to 12 months. Because nobody’s looking at them and going, how can we develop this person? How can we get them in the next level? How can we increase their spiritual responsibility, and disciple, this is thing, it’s, it’s decided the church does a decent job discipling new and young believers, we, we don’t disciple leaders, we don’t disciple leaders. Now. I’m thank God for the day, when a pastor of my church in Dallas, Texas, looked at me and said, show up in my office every Tuesday, I see something in you. I did not see myself as a leader. I was not a terrible leader. He saw something in me said show up in office every Tuesday. And we’ll give you something to read something to listen to bring your questions, and we’re going to talk it through, and I’m going to help you learn to lead. And he began to disciple me in leadership that changed my life changed my life. Otherwise, I would still be running around as a Dewar.
Andrew Estes 31:27
Yeah, for sure. Can you I want to do two things, I want you to kind of walk us through some of the practical steps of like, what does it take to, to to identify and then develop some of this stuff. And I know you offer coaching, and even online courses and all that type of stuff. And we can drop some of those resources in the chat here in a little bit. But I want you to talk about just some of the very practical steps like you’re already saying, like you need to name and have a very consistent naming of what those are. From worship ministry to children’s ministry to small group Ministry of just naming like, what is a leader? What does a coach What does a director and just using the shared language, but what what are some of those next steps of once you’ve identified the places? What then happens?
Mac Lake 32:15
Yeah, let me share let me screen share something with you. I’m gonna give you a big picture, and I’m gonna hit this. Okay.
Andrew Estes 32:22
Yeah, no, no, there’s a ton of content, man I appreciate.
Mac Lake 32:26
And honestly, you know, I hesitate to share this part because I’m always fearful. It can be frustrating, but this is the big picture. Okay. So when I take a church through the process, I want you to imagine you have somebody named Joe. And Joe says, I want to, and you, I want to be in ministry. I want to I want to plant a church one day, and you go, yeah, this person, I think they have the calling. Okay. Well, here’s what structure does. When you define the levels of your structure and you you’ve named them and they’re aligned across every ministry. Now Joe knows regardless of what’s what ministry he’s in, he knows his next step. So people would come to me at seacoast and I would say I want to be a campus pastor. I’d say great. Are you are you in a small group? Yeah. Are you leaving smuggler? No, well, that’s your next step. But I want to be a campus pastor. No, no, no, no. Your next step is learning to be a leader. Okay, so that’s, that’s why structure is important. The next thing is system system is a onboarding and training process, highly intentional onboarding and training process. And that’s how Joe flows from one level to the next. Most churches have an onboarding process for team members do not have one for the rest of the pipeline.
The next thing we cover is content. So what are three to five competencies to be a leader, a team member with three to five competencies to be a leader, a coach, a director, a senior leader. So now what we do we have specific skills or competencies, and it gives you a defined discipleship pathway of specific skills you’re going to train those leaders in. And that’s how Joe grows from one level to the next. And then last is people this is where we put the names in. And it’s a fun exercise, you put the names in and you put an arrow up for everybody, it has potential to move the next level, and asterik by anybody that probably doesn’t, but you don’t want to lose them. They’re great at that level. And you put a cross beside any name of somebody that might be called into ministry. And so this is the this is the big picture of the pipeline, and I work with churches for you know, eight to 12 months to help them build this out. That’s what the ecourse the on on site consulting all does that I mean, it takes time to build this out.
Now the one of the big things that that we have to Oh, and here’s here’s the chart, this sort of shows what it would look like moving people up and putting names on there and circling the names of those who could be your trainers who could help decide Leaders shouldn’t always be the staff. leaders should be reproducing leaders. So that’s the big picture. Yeah. But but in practical terms, this has hit me so strong recently. I was in, I was in I was with a large crowd the other day and I said, How many of you have taking taken a public speaking course? Every single person in the room raised their hand? Then I said, How many of you have taken a course on how to ask questions? One person, and I was shocked. discipleship is not about dumping information. And here’s the problem. When we do leadership development, we think if I was training, let’s pretend I was training you Andrew and, and I have the this philosophy of Okay, Andrew, you need to know how to delegate, here’s how you delegate, oh, by the way, you need to know how to manage your time. And here’s how you manage your time. And, oh, you’ve got to care for the soles of your leaders. And here’s how you do that. And I dump all that. You’re not retain hardly any of it. But if I have a dialogue with you, it’s using what I call the triad of development, knowledge. Hey, Andrew, read this article on how to manage your time and the scripture passage, read that article, answer the questions. Okay. Now, after you read the article, practice it, I’ve given you two to three assignments to put it into practice. And after you put it into practice, let’s get together and talk about let’s see what you learned.
So Andrew, I did this in front of a group of lay leaders I do I do a training called How to have disciple making discussions with leaders. So they asked me, in the middle of this thing, they said, Hey, would you show us what’s it look like? I said, Okay, yeah, to have you come up here. I got two volunteers walked up, spontaneously. And I said, I’m going to train them for 10 minutes. And so they gave them a mic. And I stood there for 10 minutes, and I fired questions about a specific about a specific competency. So said, I’m going to teach you this one skill. And I just started asking them questions, who’s the best person? It was on time management? I said, Who’s the who’s the best time manager, you know? And they both answered and asked follow up questions. Why? Why are they so good? What makes them so good? What do you want to emulate about them? Okay, hey, what does scripture say about time management? What do you see? How do you see Jesus managing time? And they answered that, so Okay, well, if Jesus did that, how would you score yourself ABCD or F against that standard? And we talked about that? One of the biggest mistakes that people make in managing time, and they answered that and we create a list. Okay, which one’s your biggest mistake? Which one are you best at? And then Hey, what’s your next step? What do you need to do this week to manage your time, the way Jesus wants you to manage your time? 10 minute conversation. Both of those guys walked in, walked away going, man, thank you for that. Thanks for now, I could have walked up on stage and taken 10 minutes and said, Okay, everybody, tonight, I want to teach you how to manage time, there are three keys to managing time. Before I do that, let me tell you a funny story. Hahaha. Okay. Now point number one is this. Here’s the scripture to illustrate it. Oh, and here’s a serious story to illustrate. Now. Point number two is this. And I could have done the same thing for 10 minutes would not have near the impact, not nearly that one of the guys in that group came up to me afterwards.
Thank you, I didn’t know what topic you were going to choose. And you will not believe that’s exactly what I’m wrestling with. And now I’ve got action steps to go home and apply. We got to work. So we’ve got to learn how to stop talking and start asking more questions to help it and the goal when we do when we ask questions. The goal is not discussion. That’s that’s a misconception. The goal is not discussion. The goal is discovery. I was asked pushing those guys and ask them questions, because I want them to discover what their next step is as a spiritual leader. And that’s leadership development.
Andrew Estes 39:11
Yeah, absolutely. Now that’s really cool. Because I’m reminded of just a lot of the discovery Bible study methods that are used in you know, disciple making movements all over the place. And they’re not geared around teaching. They’re geared around, you know, questions like, what does it say about God was the same about man, what are you gonna do about it? And it’s just a question based environment. And that’s just something that Jesus models like, people come up to him and he asked questions like, What do you want? Do you want to get better? Like, what do you all these different thing? No, that’s, that’s fantastic, man.
Mac Lake 39:42
when we use a lecture base, here’s, here’s here’s the problem. When we use a lecture base, we make an assumption that everybody’s skill level is the same and basically at point zero, so whenever I’m asking disciplemaking questions, one of the early questions I ask is an assessment style question. To get them to a set, I do a thing of one of them. My model is how to encourage the soles of your leaders. And so I’ll ask them, Hey, how would you score yourself on a scale of one to five? How would you score yourself as an encourager? Oh, five, okay, why do you say five? What makes you get it? Oh two, okay, I could have two different people that I’m discipling in the same moment. And I’m gonna ask this one different questions than this one. Because this one said, there are five, I got to find a way to push them to make them even better at it. And then this one, I get to help them take some small steps and improving. And so you can’t do that when you’re just a zero base assumption and lecture. And then the other thing about this approach that I teach is basically apprenticing approach is, when we do a lecture based approach, we never test for comprehension or competency. We don’t know.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai