Before Jesus Christ was born, the greatest leader who ever lived was Moses. He was the leader of two-three million people, and those people were faithless, whining, moaning, complaining, cowards! That must have been hard work, exhausting. Moses was getting more and more tired, and the people were not getting good wisdom from him.
The problem was Moses was not raising leaders. But Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, said “Moses, start raising leaders. Have a leadership training programme, a conference, do something, delegate some of the easier jobs.” Moses did it and now he was not the only one carrying everyone. The other leaders made Moses stronger not weaker, and enabled all the needs of all the people to be met.
Raising leaders is vital to any church or business success. I believe the most important thing a leader can do is raise more leaders. That is true fruit. I have pastors and other people in Tree of Life who know a lot more than me about doing certain things, and it makes my life easier. We need to learn to do this.
The sad thing is there are churches not growing, businesses not growing because the leader is too insecure to enable other people to lead. You have to as a dreamer dream bigger than your fears. If your fears fill your imagination you will not raise up others. You might be scared someone might betray you. Jesus had a Judas and you will probably have one or two as well. But wasn’t it better to have the eleven and Judas than just Jesus on His own. Whenever a leader betrays me or lets me down, I thank God for the eleven, the ones who are still with me, still loving Jesus, still serving, still helping, still walking in faith and love!
I want to encourage every leader reading this to take a risk with people. I don’t mean a stupid risk and appointing someone with ego issues to be a preacher or elder, I don’t mean appointing someone who has not got your best interests at heart, but I mean someone who has not done it before, someone who does not feel big enough to step into your shoes, someone who has never produced before. They will soon catch up and as you believe in them, they will believe in themselves and you will have more leaders, and like Moses that will only do well for you.
People rise to the space you give them. It’s that simple. You need to:
- Provide emotional and spiritual support for people. Love them and convince them that they can survive.
- Train people – the more you train, the more people think you believe in them.
- Pay people more money. I know a lot of your people at first will be volunteers, but if you grow as a ministry to the point you are increasing, pay people as much as you can. Our highest expense every month is not TV bills, it is not venue hire, it is not even world mission – it is payroll, because I genuinely believe in people. (I believe in volunteers too, but that’s a different post)
- Equip people properly – give them the tools to do their job. Getting the right equipment to do your job is the most encouraging thing o all.
- Give people the people they need. Let the pastors appoint elders, with supervision of course, but let them appoint leaders too.
- Support people. Be there for them, give them a place to contact you and reach to you.
- Look ahead. Help people see where they are going, help them dream!
Inspiring and Challenging Dreamers 