1. Spiritual Gifts and Missions
2. Spiritual Gifts and the Missions Field
3. Spiritual Gifts and Missions Teams
4. What is the ‘Apostolic’ and Why Is It Important?
5. The 5 Essential Elements of an Apostolic Leader
6. Indicators of an Emerging Apostolic Leader

In this series, we’ve discovered what the word “apostolic” means, given the 5 essential elements of an apostolic leader, and discussed potential indicators of an emerging apostolic leader.

In this final post, we’ll talk about how to partner with and develop these proven or emerging apostolic leaders.

We’ve previously given some very practical steps for how to network with believers, build relational trust, and filter for a potential NAV through a “NAV Process.” This includes introductory meetings, discerning if they fit the NAV profile, vision casting, participating in ministry together, and finally piloting a training with them and their group.

Hopefully by the end of this process, you have 1-3 good candidates to partner with. As you partner together, keep the 5 essential elements and the indicators in mind to help you discern if they’re truly apostolically gifted.

But what happens if it turns out that they aren’t apostolic? What then?

Then you’ve spent time either learning about what you’re really looking for and / or you’ve found a local partner who has the vision to pioneer and multiply but may need some help in certain areas to see breakthrough. Either way, it’s time well spent. We’d encourage you to shoot for an apostolic leader because it’s a gifting that God clearly uses to pioneer. If He grants it, great. But any and all gifts can be used for the Kingdom. Any believer can be given a vision for multiplication and may have a crucial role in it. 

You’ll still likely find other faithful, vision-driven local believers that want to pursue multiplication – you should absolutely work with them! It could be that one of them has latent apostolic giftings and needs more time for those things to emerge. And no matter what, these local believers will have much greater effectiveness as cultural insiders in making disciples than we will. They may eventually help you find an apostolic leader that leads to breakthrough by training other believers or through the harvest, like how Paul raised up Priscilla and Aquila as leaders in Corinth who eventually found and developed Apollos. We believe that it’s best if the apostolic gift is involved somewhere in the movement work – through the insider believer, the outsider partner, a movement coach, or through the harvest. He will lead you to these types of people in His timing! Until He does, keep praying, looking, and partnering with faithful disciple makers towards multiplication.

Partnering With an Apostolic Leader

Here are some things we would encourage you to do with an emerging or established apostolic leader that you want to partner with. Some may happen earlier or later in the process of ministry, but all are beneficial in pursuing multiplication, identifying emerging leaders, and developing and using the apostolic gift!

Pioneer Together. As apostolic leaders are called to pioneer among new peoples and places, the first step is to do pioneering work together! Whether entering and preparing new areas through prayer walking, sharing with the lost, or catalyzing others through training, apostolic leaders will thrive in a pioneering environment. You can follow a MAWL (Model-Assist-Watch-Launch) process if you’re working with a potential apostolic leader who has never engaged in pioneering before. You’ll quickly be able to gauge their faithfulness, capacity, and gifting in harvest and catalyzing activities like seeing a fish in water! During the early stages with an emerging leader, you may need to set the parameters and guide a little bit more, but the apostolic leader will intuitively and earnestly start to generate more of the initiation of pioneering activities. Encourage them to pick the target people or places to start harvesting, the groups to train, the tools to use, and help them to gradually refine the vision that the Lord has given them. The goal is to empower them to grow into their gifting, not for them to become cogs in our ministry machine – so empower them by letting them take the lead and make decisions!

Train in Multiplication Principles and Practices. Being in the pioneering environment will feel natural and exciting for the apostolic leader, but pioneering activity does not necessarily equate to multiplication activity. Train and coach the apostolic leader in multiplication principles and practices. It doesn’t need to be a formal classroom setting to train; simply sitting together in a tea or coffee shop and talking through these things with a potential apostolic leader is great! Walking through the apostle Paul’s journeys is probably the best tool in showing a combination of principle and practice. Telling stories of movement, reading case studies, and introducing apostolic leaders to movement sources can help broaden their vision from simply expanding the Kingdom to catalyzing a multiplication movement. It can also be really helpful to show a process of how multiplication can happen, whether the 4 Fields or T4T or DMM processes. We use this Multiplication Cycle that combines elements from different streams of movement to help our partners understand how to pursue multiplication. For the sake of simplicity, we generally lean towards biblical training and tools over movement-jargon types of curriculum, though both are needed and helpful.

The apostolic leader will differ from other types of leaders when engaging in a vision for multiplication – they’ll believe it can be done. It’s the faith gifted to an apostolic leader to believe that God can and will do this miraculous work in their field, where many others may feel resistance or hesitance that it can happen. As with the first point – try to empower the local leader to make decisions about what ways are best to apply these multiplication principles in their context. As the cultural insider who is a foundation and DNA setter, they will likely be far more effective in choosing multiplication practices for their context after some initial guidance.

Focus on Apostolic Functions. Clinton’s Leadership Commentary on 1st and 2 Timothy has a number of very helpful articles around the Apostolic Function and Gift. He highlights 7 functions in particular:

1. Start New Ministries
2. Appoint Leaders
3. Establish Works (help newly started works to develop and grow)
4. Intercede for Works, both new and old
5. Combat Heresy
6. Resource New and Old Ministries
7. Test New Ministries for Validity

The last 3 functions – combat heresy, resource ministries, test validity – are probably later stage functions as opposed to the first 4 focused on starting new ministries, appointing leaders, and doing the work of intercession.

As we said in the post about indicators, an apostolic leader is likely to be a jack of all trades, multi-gifted in order to help the new ministry or work get off the ground. In a given week they might end up training, evangelizing, interceding, teaching, preaching, healing, shepherding, administrating ministry, leading worship, cooking food for the group, taking care of a believer’s kid, driving between multiple locations, answering the phone, helping a business, problem solving a strategic problem, encouraging a hurting believer, and 100 other things. As a leader of an emerging or multiplying work, they’ll have full plates! Your job as a Barnabas is to help them to focus. Spinning too many plates is one of the big pitfalls we see for apostolics, as their competency and the breadth of their vision drive them to end up doing everything.

As with any believer with a spiritual gift, they’ll be most effective when they can spend the majority of their time serving out of their gift instead of other things. Of course there’s some percentage of our time where we have to do things that we’re not gifted at – but honoring the Lord by releasing responsibility to other leaders is the role of an apostolic leader. Help them focus on starting new things, clarifying vision, investing in leaders, and interceding for the works! That leads us to…

Collaborate with and Release Authority to PESTs and Other Gifts. Again, one of the main pitfalls for an apostolic leader is to get caught up with all the needs of a new work and try to overcontrol everything by doing everything themselves. A critical component of an apostolic leader is to identify, appoint/recruit, develop, and release new leaders! Not just other apostolic leaders, but other Prophets, Evangelists, Shepherds, Teachers especially. These other gifts are greatly needed to establish and deepen the new works that the apostolic leader has started. Our post on the “Apostolic” covers some of the different functions of APEST leaders in a movement.

Many times a headstrong apostolic leader can butt heads with other types of leaders, especially shepherd/teachers who are particularly drawn to shepherd needs and grow maturity through teaching, which can feel slow to an apostolic leader. But a mature apostolic will be able to see their own limitations and know that Scripture teaches that we are all one body in need of each other (1 Corinthians 12). The apostolic really, really, really needs the other members of the body. A good way to see a ministry start quickly and burn out just as quickly is to leave it under the control of a fast-moving apostolic that never appoints other types of leaders to focus on health and depth.

Withdraw, Reflect, Listen, and Plan. With the apostolic leaders’ high proficiency, numerous responsibilities, and big vision, it’s likely that they will work themselves to the bone and straight to burnout. You as the Barnabas can play an intensely important role simply by reminding them and creating opportunities for them to do as Jesus did – withdraw to be with God (Luke 5:16). Many times, we’ll ask our partners to come meet us somewhere away from their place of ministry so that no one can knock the door down looking for them. We tell them to shut off their phone, and give them the first half of our time simply to rest and pray and spend time with God alone. We might spend the second half debriefing, hearing reports, training, and planning for future ministry, but our role is primarily to make space for them to rest in the Lord. In the whirlwind of busy ministry, the apostolic leader desperately needs to find the quiet space to reflect, listen to the voice of God, and plan and prioritize where they need to invest their limited time. These times are critical for them to evaluate and refine the vision they’ve received from God. When we cease to do this, we are doing ministry out of man’s power instead of God’s – and we’re guaranteed to fail one way or another.

Pulling our apostolic partners out of their ministry schedule for just a couple days of quiet, rest, and listening can make all the difference in seeing breakthrough in multiplication. But more than the strategic and ministry pieces, the apostolic leader desperately needs to focus on their intimacy and relationship and abiding with God. He cares so much more about our being than our doing. Allow them time and encourage them to hear from God for themselves and what He wants for them, not just the ministry.

Be a Friend and Encourager. Lastly, as the apostolic leader jumps into an emerging and thriving ministry, the list of problems, crises, needs, difficult people, conflicts, and burdens increases exponentially. Any ministry, and certainly pioneering ministry, can be extremely isolating and lonely for leaders. Not many will understand what they’re going through.

They need to first and foremost surrender those things to the Lord and find their motivation and peace in him. And they need a friend. Someone to listen to their frustrations, to be thoughtful in loving them, to point them to Jesus, to encourage them to persevere.

There’s a reason why Barnabas was called the Encourager. What a role he had in encouraging, supporting, empowering Paul. Without Barnabas, we don’t get the book of Acts.

I think Paul could call Barnabas a lot of things – mentor, advocate, co-laborer. My guess is when I get to ask him, he’ll first call Barnabas his friend.

How to Develop an Apostolic Leader

All of the above things will be great for an apostolic leader’s development in learning through doing. But there’s other ways to help them understand more about the apostolic gift that God has given them and use it effectively.

Study the apostolic. There’s plenty to study in the New Testament about the apostolic gifting, function, and ministry – basically anything about who Paul is or what he does will be informative. The book of Acts reveals much about the pioneering aspect and his letters give more insight into his own development, perseverance, and heart in being an apostolic leader. If you’re able, we’d recommend diving into some of the resources we listed in the 5 essential elements post. The more you can understand what the original model of the apostolic gift looks like, the better we can imitate it. It can also be helpful to read books and biographies about other pioneering leaders.

Interact with other apostolic leaders. If you’re able to, interact with other apostolic leaders. It’s hard to describe this but an apostolic leader is probably more used to resistance, hesitance, rejection from others around them when they begin talking about big vision and multiplication. Others can feel intimidated by their intensity or just the scope of their work. But when they’re in a room with other apostolic leaders that they trust, there’s a freedom and an excitement in getting to talk to others who get you. Others who won’t frown at their big ideas but encourage them and share their own experiences and ideas. It can make them feel like they’re not crazy – at least when they’re in a room of people as crazy as they are!

A couple of disclaimers in this – just because someone is an apostolic leader doesn’t mean they don’t feel insecurity or deal with comparison. Naturally when apostolic leaders gather the focus will be on ministry. But it’s a smart idea to bring the focus on God. Highlighting shared experiences and sufferings will draw out vulnerability and increase trust before you start trucking ahead on ministry topics. Creating safety in the room before jumping in to discussing ministry can help the interaction. Secondly, although we’d encourage apostolics to interact with other apostolics, there can be some intense friction in working together. We’ve had mentors advise us that apostolic leaders can probably agree or work together at a high, 30,000 foot perspective (let’s generally share tools, or have a semi-frequent coaching meeting together, or strategically parse out people and places to focus), but can step on each others’ toes when working closely together. The apostolic leader probably wants some freedom to pursue their own ideas, and working with another highly opinionated, highly confident leader might cause some problems. This isn’t always the case but just something to be aware of.

Find apostolic mentors. This is similar to the previous point, but finding an older, more experienced apostolic leader to mentor you, especially in personal development, can be a gold mine. Hopefully this mentor has experienced and gone through many of the pitfalls and problems that an apostolic leader faces and you can learn from their wisdom. Again, the apostolic leader will want freedom to try new things on their own, but they also will value a mentor’s wisdom and shared understanding of their experiences.

Develop other leadership skills. Since the apostolic leader has so many functions in establishing a new work, it can be helpful for them to also develop leadership skills that will support their gifting. Clinton lists out several including strategy, planning, change agent, leadership styles, motivating, inspiring, mentoring, organizational skills, team building, identifying and developing leaders, and communication skills. Even though an apostolic leader may do these things intuitively, equipping them with skills and frameworks to boost their efficiency is a good idea. Or focusing on shoring up weaknesses that they may have like shepherding skills can be beneficial.

Develop intimacy with God. Whether as an apostolic yourself or in helping your apostolic partner – focus on developing intimacy with God. Learn to hear the voice of God for everyday direction and decision. Being surrendered to God is an essential element for an apostolic leader, so practice the process of surrendering and receiving from God. The pioneering ministry has an avalanche of challenges and trials that we’ve noted repeatedly. At times, Paul mentions feeling “so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself” (2 Cor. 1:8). If God grants fruitful multiplying ministry, the challenges will also multiply accordingly.

Without this critical foundation of intimacy with Christ, the apostolic leader is guaranteed to fail. The Enemy is prowling to take out those that will greatly expand the Kingdom through isolation, sin, discouragement, and spiritual warfare of many kinds. Guard yourselves in His armor and through intimacy with Him. Fight to not allow ministry to become your idol. Fight to have Philippians 2 humility in the midst of ministry fruit.

It’s an example for all believers but especially the apostolic leader that we see Paul’s own dependence on the Lord grow over the years of his ministry, from being the least of the apostles (1 Cor. 15:9), to the least of the saints (Eph. 3:8), to the foremost of all sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). He constantly prioritized his intimacy with God, withdrawing to be with God as we see our Savior did.

If God’s pattern throughout Scripture and history is to raise up apostolic leaders to pioneer the least reached people and places for His glory, then there are people He has prepared in your field.

I firmly believe there are in- or near-culture believers that He intends to use to finish the Great Commission. If you’re reading this, and you have the heart to find these modern-day “Pauls,”’ then I believe you can be a Barnabas to them. Ask the Holy Spirit, have a heart to serve, have eyes to see these people, and He will lead you to them. Remember, it only takes one.

I’ll finish this series with an exhortation to the apostolic leader reading this or the Barnabas who will empower a national apostolic leader. Sometimes we feel the temptation to cut corners or skip over inconvenient things or treat people unlovingly in pursuit of the big vision. And we use the defense – “those people don’t understand us” or “it’s worth it to see more multiplication” or something of the sort.

Apostolic gifting without apostolic character produces apostolic malfunction.

Steve U.

What’s really happening is that ministry success and numbers and fruit have become our idol. Being overly busy is a badge of pride instead of a warning indicator that we are allowing our doing to overcome our being with Jesus. Increased isolation or surrounding ourselves with only others who enable us is explained off as being a contrarian, a pioneer, a barrier breaker instead of the truth that we’re not willing to humble ourselves and submit to a group of brothers and sisters in Christ.

Scripture is abundantly clear – the ends of ministry don’t justify the means. Being an apostolic leader doesn’t give us license to trample people, to steal and extract sheep, to be disingenuous about ministry numbers, to ignore clear discipleship and maturity problems in pursuit of the more and the faster. Unfortunately, we’ve seen apostolic leaders pursuing movement do these types of things repeatedly. I won’t attempt to judge their hearts, but there often is not a humility to even admit to these things or correct them. The very thing we claim to be effective at in catalyzing movements, the apostolic gift, becomes a testimony against the ministry we are doing and against ourselves.

Matthew 7 has a haunting statement from Jesus, that “on that day, many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not do… many mighty works in your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’”

My prayer for myself and to others reading this – 

May we keep our hearts tender before the Lord. 
May we always mirror the character and heart of Jesus to others in pursuing big vision for him. 
May we not twist the gift He has given to us for our own personal and selfish gain. 
May we not allow ministry to become an idol that keeps us from worshipping Jesus.

I’d recommend Andrew Murray’s books Humility and Absolute Surrender as regular reads to help us check our hearts. And about this specific topic of losing our way in pursuing movement, I highly recommend my friend David’s book, How to Pursue Great Works without Losing Your Soul.

Every believer, every gift can be used towards completing the Great Commission, but I believe that He means to use those with the apostolic gift as first in sequence to pioneer. My hope is that these few at the tip of the spear could be surrendered to Jesus and become who God has called them to be, leading to multiplying movements among the remaining unreached peoples and places of the world.

The world has yet to see what God can do through a man [or woman] who is totally yielded to Him.

Henry Varley

I: Be Barnabas – Intro + Mint’s Story
II: Why Be Barnabas?
III: Who was Barnabas from the Bible?
IV: Be Barnabas – What is a NAV?

V: Be Barnabas – How to Find a NAV?

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In our previous post, we introduced how a goer might start the process of networking and finding potential NAVs to partner with. Many times, goers will have some initial connections but find themselves stuck with the question – “How do I know who I should spend time with?”

So much of it is listening to the Holy Spirit about who we should spend our time with, but in this post we’ll share a process that our team created to filter through contacts, develop relational trust, and eventually partner closely with multiple different NAVs in our country towards catalyzing movements.

NAV Partnership Process and Scoreboard

As our team started networking with different national leaders, as well as asking each one if they could recommend 5 others to meet with, our list of potential NAVs quickly ballooned to 20+ leaders. And we were asking the question above – who do we spend time with? Who are the people that God has prepared to multiply and that we should invest in? We needed some kind of way to evaluate our fit with each of these leaders, and a process to narrow down who we should eventually partner with.

The image above is of the NAV Partnership Process Scoreboard. You can download the entire template with this link and start filling it in with your contacts. This is a great process to go through together with your teammates as well to share with them which leads you all have. Some of the goal-setting language is from the 4 Disciplines of Execution, which basically helps you to focus in on a goal to have the highest impact, and set up some processes around it to help you be accountable to the goal you’ve set. If this kind of thing floats your boat, there’s a shorter book summary you can read here, or just buy the book, but it’s not necessary to understand the NAV Partnership Process.

The process follows three stages, from bottom to top.

Identify Stage

The Identify Stage is largely where you’ll network with leaders and have initial conversations asking questions like we mention in the “How to Find a NAV” post. The three steps include:

1. We know each other – whether from cold contact at a church or an introduction from a mutual connection, the local leader knows your name and you have each other’s phone numbers, hopefully with a time to meet together in the near future. There might be certain leaders who you know about but you’ve never met, but we’d have a hard time counting them among our potential NAVs list if we’ve never even met them and they don’t know who we are!
   
2. Two-way vision cast – You’ve asked the all-important question, “What is the vision God has given you?” and have heard them share. And you’ve also been able to share about who you are, why you’re there, and at least some about your heart for seeing multiplication happen.
   
3. Fulfills NAV qualifications – this may take several meetings to discover and is somewhat subjective to your personal evaluation of each of these qualities. We expanded on what most of these mean in the “What is a NAV” post, but ultimately, it will be up to your insight, discussing with teammates and coaches, and listening to the Holy Spirit to decide if these potential NAVs fulfill the qualifications. And we’ll often use a red-yellow-green framework in evaluating, meaning green is that they clearly fit that quality, yellow is “we don’t know yet”, and red is a clear barrier.

A couple of things to note about evaluating someone’s NAV qualifications: don’t be too narrow in your interpretation of these qualities and cross someone out too quickly. We’ve given some short example stories of how different goers have found their NAV partners, and hopefully you’ve gleaned that partnership with a NAV can happen in a lot of different and unexpected ways. For example, some goers we’ve coached have initially excluded certain leaders because it wasn’t immediately clear that they were excited about CPM methodology. However, those national leaders had a desire to make disciples and plant churches. Be patient! Giving that vision for multiplication may be exactly the thing that God has you there to help them with! CPM approaches could be a relatively new idea for some leaders. If they are a clear red and have barriers to partnership in a certain area, then mark them as such, but it can take time to get to know someone’s heart after that initial meeting, which is why we encourage you to take this as a process.

On that note, a newer leader could also emerge as a NAV as you spend time with them. Even if they don’t initially have a big vision but have some outward focus, they could have their vision and faith stretched as you spend time training them and showing them God’s heart from the Bible. Or, they might have some dormant apostolic giftings that aren’t apparent and will come out when given an opportunity to enter the harvest and pioneer some new works.

On the flip side, be discerning with leaders who seemingly say all the right things initially. More than a few times, we meet charismatic leaders that are excited about multiplication, that seem excited to partner with us, and want to introduce us to a lot of people. But as we invite them to be trained or to implement some movement tools, they end up not actually wanting to for whatever reason. Just like in the Bible, sometimes God brings an amazing leader out of nowhere, and those that look shiny and charismatic have different barriers that keep them from embracing multiplication. As you meet people, continue to listen to the Holy Spirit’s guidance!

Access vs. Implementation NAVs

In the Identify Stage is also where we’ll mention that we will distinguish between two different types of NAVs – access NAVs and implementation NAVs.

As our team was looking for national leaders that had these qualifications, we started running into two different types of leaders that both fulfilled the NAV qualities but looked very different and were able to help us in different ways.

An Access NAV is someone who fulfills the NAV qualifications and is excited about the vision of multiplication, but may be too busy with current leadership and ministry responsibilities to begin directly implementing CPM tools. However, they will have influence over a large network and give you access to be able to train those under them. They are the gatekeepers who open the door to networks of believers, where you can begin training and looking for the Implementation NAVs that will practically engage with catalyzing multiplication. Many times, these access NAVs will be high-level leaders and pastors over a large church or a large ministry, be great visionaries and recruiters, and can be more obviously charismatic and experienced leaders. These types of leaders are essential to build relational trust with, as open doors from them greatly increases the trust you have with those you’re training and even provides a layer of filtering / recruiting from their influence that you wouldn’t otherwise have.

An Implementation NAV is a NAV who is willing to start implementing CPM tools and training, both personally and with those that they lead. They will not only come to a training, but begin to enter the harvest, share the gospel, make disciples, and plant churches. Sometimes these are newer or under utilized leaders who have the vision and faith to multiply, but have not yet stepped into a position with significant influence or have not yet been equipped to make disciples and multiply. Ultimately, you’re looking to find these Implementation NAVs who will dive in and do the work of multiplying disciples and churches!

As an example, the church network that we partner with has both of these types of leaders in different roles. After spending the first few years doing some simple disciple-making trainings with college students and casting vision with leaders, we finally met the head of church planting over their network, Pastor W. Since we had spent the time and relational investment gaining trust with other leaders in the church, we established trust quickly with Pastor W.

Pastor W had been in church planting ministry for longer than we had been alive, and he famously would run his cars into the ground and have to switch cars once every two years because of how often he would drive around rural areas visiting different church planters and church plants. He told us, “I know how to plant churches, and I know how to disciple people and send them out. But I don’t know how to get them to disciple others! In 30 years of church planting, very few of my church plants have been able to plant another church.” He had the vision, the gifting, and the experience that far surpassed anything our team could ever hope to have, but our small role was to bring some simple, biblical tools and come alongside Pastor W and the faithful church planters in his network.

After casting vision for CPM, Pastor W was excited and immediately gave our team access to two of his best church planters who he said we should start piloting with. One of those was Mint, who was a pretty new church planter but had started as the church secretary! We share more about Mint’s story in our first Be Barnabas post. Initially, it wasn’t clear that Mint was a NAV, but Pastor W was clearly an access NAV and we were excited to start piloting CPM implementation in rural areas. But as Mint’s fruitfulness went from one church of 15 people to 5 house churches of 80 people in 6 months, we started to realize that she was an implementation NAV! As we had the opportunity to empower her and cast vision, the latent apostolic giftings and big vision that the Lord had given her had an opportunity to come to the surface! Fast forward a few more years and she is currently the regional leader of church planting over the least reached region of Thailand, and has discipled and sent out church planting teams to 11 other provinces!

In short, both access NAVs and implementation NAVs are important. An access NAV gives you access to a group of believers to train, and an implementation NAV will begin practically using CPM tools to catalyze a movement.

Develop Stage

After the initial Identify Stage, you want to continue investing time and getting to know these potential NAVs in the Develop Stage, where you’re developing trust and relationship and trying to identify the best candidates to partner with. You may not know if a potential NAV fulfills the qualities you’re looking for until late into the Develop Stage.

4. Two-way ministry involvement – this simply means that they’ve come to a ministry thing that you’re doing, and you’ve gone to a ministry thing that they run. For you, it could be as simple as attending the church service or a small group at their church. For the potential NAVs, it would be something like coming to a training you’re running, or going out into the harvest together. This step is important because it helps you see if there’s actual commitment to multiplication in what they do in these ministry settings, as opposed to potentially saying the ‘right things’ in a coffee meeting but not being willing to implement.
   
5. Willing to pilot with us – If you’re 80%+ sure that they fulfill the NAV qualifications, you’ve prayed and listened to the Holy Spirit, and you’ve been in some ministry settings with them, then you can offer to run a pilot training with them and / or the people in their network. We highly recommend a pilot training or even a series of pilot trainings, because this is truly where you’ll be able to see if this NAV or their network is the right fit to partner with. If there’s significant buy-in, engagement in the harvest, and even initial multiplication fruit, you know it’s a good sign that they are the people you’re supposed to work with! If there are significant barriers, then at the end of the pilot, you can have an honest conversation with the leader about whether it’s right to continue on or not. In this step, you should offer a pilot training, explain to the leader what the training will look like, how long it will go and how often you will train, and what kind of expectations you’re expecting from the group that’s being trained (e.g. enter the harvest x amount of times, try to obey the goals that are set from the training, etc.). For our team, we offer a pilot of 4 trainings that happen once a month, that each last about 3-6 hours depending on the context:
   • Training 1 – God’s Heart for Multiplication (Matthew 28), Multiplication Cycle, Entry (Luke 10), Simple Sharing Tool (411)
   • Training 2 – Abide in Christ, How to lead someone to faith, Discovery Bible Group Tool
   • Training 3 – Review, New Believer Discipleship, Baptism Tool
   • Training 4 – Simple House Church Training, Team Meeting (3/3s), Vision for Multiplication

This training outline is where we’ve landed after probably hundreds of trainings over the last several years, and has gone through a lot of different innovations from the amount of time (over 10 or 12 weeks vs. once a month), trainings in an afternoon vs. a 3-day training camp that includes going out into the harvest, and many different topics! Figure out what works for you, but in general, it’s important to start with a vision for multiplication and tools for entering the harvest and sharing. From there, it depends on what the Lord decides to do with the group! If you’re interested in taking any of our training or tools to use in your context, please reach out and let us know at contact@missionsleaders.com! There’s also a ton of other CPM tools available, some of which you can see on our Resources page under CPM.

6. “Bought-in” and willing to partner – After the pilot trainings, it should be pretty clear whether this is a good group to partner with and continue training. Even if there isn’t a lot of fruit, you can usually tell if the group is excited to make disciples and obeying, or if there’s a lot of push-back and it may be time to move on for now. Part of it is just practical – if you’ve given them initial training and they haven’t done anything with it, it doesn’t make sense to train them with tools further in the process. If they’ve tried things and they’re not effective, then it’s a good idea for you to bring different tools and approaches to try to address these barriers.

Partnership Stage

Finally, after you’ve completed the pilot trainings and evaluated them with the leader, you can mutually decide to partner together towards catalyzing multiplication! The entire NAV Partnership Process will take more time in the initial stages of your ministry, especially as you’re continuing to improve in language and learn cultural cues. Again, the timing of things is dependent on the Holy Spirit – you could meet your key partner in one of your first meetings, or it may take several years of training and networking to meet the right partner. But hopefully, this process gives you and your team some clear focus and potential steps to find and filter for a partner.

As you find an initial NAV to partner with, hopefully as you invest time with them, your relationship and trust with them and your vision for multiplication will grow! Especially as they begin to see fruit, they will connect you with other leaders and networks and you’ll operate out of the trust they give to you through that connection. The process of subsequent trainings and partnerships will probably go faster.

To answer the question at the beginning – “how do I know who I should spend time with?” – we asked other experienced movement practitioners this same question almost every time we had an opportunity. This is an important question because as a movement practitioner your most limited resource is your time.

One experienced worker told us, at the beginning, as you network with a lot of people, be willing to spend at least some time with anyone who would obey something. Even if that was as simple as sharing a testimony, or obeying an “I Will” statement from reading the Bible, some sign of obedience meant that it was worth it to explore if they were the Faithful, Available, Teachable (FAT) type of person that he should invest in. In my opinion, a new believer that is FAT and obedient to the Word is honestly preferable to a charismatic leader that says all the right things but isn’t willing to do anything.

As people see more fruit and multiplication moves forward, you should focus your time on the most fruitful while being willing to help everyone else. It’s somewhat counter-intuitive, as many times leaders tend to want to help the lowest common denominator and don’t give the fruitful few the help that they need. Chapter 1 of the classic book, Master Plan of Evangelism elaborates on this, that Jesus selected from his followers the 12 Apostles (Mark 6:13-17), and even within them spent focused time on the three, Peter, James, and John. As Coleman points out, “Jesus devoted most of His remaining life on earth to these few disciples. He literally staked His whole ministry upon them.”

All it takes is finding one faithful National Apostolic Visionary leader that God has prepared in order to literally change the eternal trajectory of an unreached people or place. Are you willing to invest the time, effort, and servant-hearted posture to find these men and women that God has prepared? Even if it takes years of time, countless coffee meetings, and dozens or even hundreds of trainings and times modeling going out in the harvest to find this leader, will we stake our whole ministry on a single NAV that God wants to use to catalyze a movement?

Part 1 – Leadership Foundations Overview

Part 2 – Why are leaders needed?

Part 3 – How do I discern if I’m a leader?

Part 4 – How do I develop as a leader?

In Part 4, we talked about different ways that you can develop on your pathway towards becoming a team leader. One of the most important aspects of that is forming a personal development plan, or PDP. It’s critical for your own development as a leader, and it’s also important that leaders know how to develop other people.

Develop Towards Maturity

We’ve come back to Ephesians 4:11 a few times in this blog, and we think it also speaks to personal development.

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ… we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

Ephesians 4:11-16

One of the main goals that Christ has in giving leadership giftings to the church in verse 11 is to equip the saints for the work of ministry, which will lead to the building up of the body of Christ. But in addition to that, there’s a goal for each of us to grow towards maturity and fullness and to grow up in every way into Christ. Leaders equip, not just for the sake of the ministry, but to develop those they lead into being more like Jesus.

One quick note on the difference between learning and developing. Leaders should be constantly learning and gathering knowledge and wisdom that will help them to lead well. But development happens when you actually have progression in who you are as a person and as a leader – whether in character, giftings, or competencies. I might learn a fact or an idea from a book I read, but until I can apply it, until I can internalize it, use it, and it actually affects how I live and lead in Christ-like maturity, it’s a fact that I learn and not something that I’ve developed in.

How to Form a PDP

In this post, we’ll walk through how to form a personal development plan, either for yourself or with someone you lead. In order to form a development plan that’s effective, we do a personal evaluation on different areas of our lives, ministry, and leadership. This is the personal evaluation form that we use on our team annually, and from this evaluation we can form a PDP.

As we’ve noted in other posts, we believe the inner spiritual life and character components hold more importance than skills or even giftings. When forming a personal development plan, we try to focus on one character / abiding aspect and one competency / skill / gifting. Any more than 1-2 things and you end up not really progressing in anything – it’s a principle of focus, in development and pretty much everything else.

Many people tend to think you need to develop primarily in weaknesses, and it’s true that sometimes addressing a weakness is important because it’s a core character issue or competency that you need to have. But development plans can be really great to help you grow in your strengths and giftings as well.

Personal Evaluation

We made this personal evaluation form during our first term in Thailand and have tweaked it over time. It’s split into 4 sections:

1) Abiding, Spiritual Walk, Character, and Attitude
2) Cross-Cultural Adaptation
3) Personal Time and Work Management
4) Ministry Skills

There’s an additional leadership evaluation for those in leadership positions on our team. To create this evaluation, we looked at various biblical frameworks like 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, as well as personal review and evaluation processes from churches, ministries, and professional development sources. Lastly, the ministry skills section would depend on your team’s ministry approach, so ours reflects a ‘Be Barnabas’ CPM focus.

In each section, you’ll evaluate yourself in the various aspects. Then, at the end of each section, you’ll give open-ended responses to what in the section was a primary area(s) of strength, primary area(s) of weakness, primary area of growth + development, and other comments. This allows the person doing the self-evaluation to draw out the important points in each section. At the end, you’ll take all the information together and form a PDP.

Below, we’ll have screenshots of the evaluative categories for each section and I’ll provide a few comments about it. The entire PDF form of the self-evaluation is attached at the end.

Abiding, Spiritual Walk, Character, and Attitude

In our experience, pretty much all of these things are critically important to either an individual goer’s health on the field or how they affect the team. If we were to highlight perhaps the top risk 5 areas that, if unresolved, could send your people home from the field, we would emphasize: abiding, humility, freedom from bondages, health in singleness / marriage, and living out of identity. Each of these is a huge topic, and there are a variety of resources that exist to help a goer develop in health and freedom before and during their time on the field. If there’s any of these areas (or any of the following sections) that you have specific questions about how to address, please let us know at contact@missionsleaders.com. We’d be happy to help consult!

Cross-Cultural Adaptation

These are aspects of cross cultural adaptation that are particularly important in the first 1-2 terms. For your first term of 2-3 years, the first two sections – abiding and health, language and culture – are the main goal. We had a very experienced missions leader give us great expectations and advice before launching that has remained true and that we’ve also set as an expectation for teammates that we transition onto the field. He told us, it can take up to 7 years on the field on average for goers to even begin doing the right things to pursue CPMs. If at the end of your first term of 2-3 years, you are loving Jesus, healthy in your marriage or singleness, have learned some language, and have even a few local relationships – that is great success.

It reframed success in the first few years for us, because with all of our passion and urgency and emphasis on seeing multiplying movements among the unreached, we can sometimes be a little over-enthusiastic in starting the ministry and not setting good foundations of health, language, and cultural adaptation.

After the early season of focusing on language and culture, when you start getting more into the ministry, the ministry skills and spiritual gifts will probably begin to take precedence over the cross cultural parts.

Personal Time + Work Management

For us, this section tends to be the least prioritized compared to the other sections, unless there’s a glaring weakness in a person’s reliability as a teammate and co-worker. Many of these are what would be called ‘permission to play’ type of requirements – good teammates need to embody these basic aspects in order to be effective contributors to the team and the ministry, and healthy in their own rhythms. Sometimes, missions teams can recruit people right out of college who haven’t been in a working environment before. This can lead to some misunderstanding or entitlement to think that support raising or being in ministry means you don’t have to come to meetings prepared and on time, communicate in a timely manner, or report to your supervisor. So this section helps us as leaders and them as teammates know that these things are expected.

Ministry Skills

As explained in the screenshot, this section is a bit different from the previous 3. Because we believe that there are a variety of giftings and skills within each teammate, we aren’t necessarily claiming that every teammate needs to be excellent at every ministry skill. Instead, we have a scale from basic awareness to expert, defined above in the screenshot.

There should be basic competency in some of the areas that every teammate needs to engage in ministry. For example, since our team focuses on training local partners to make disciples, every teammate is expected to be able to give the basic training, as it is the bread and butter of what we do. But some teammates are more proficient or gifted at training and they might get more opportunities to exercise those giftings, whereas some other teammates may be less proficient, and get to specialize in some other areas. How much you specialize depends on how your team is built and what stage of ministry you’re in, among other things. Generally, in the first 2 years of ministry, everyone on the team tries their hand at doing everything so that they can all obtain some basic competency in each area and explore where God has gifted them. Every year, we’ll continue to do personal evaluations and PDPs, and ask the question – where do you feel the Holy Spirit is asking you to focus your giftings and contribution? We’ll also do this in conjunction with a ‘SHAPE’ retreat (Spiritual Gifts, Heart, Aptitudes, Personality, Experience) where we look at the different giftings and skills on a team to allow people to specialize and synergize as a team.

We’ll have a future post on how to do a SHAPE retreat and one on spiritual gifts. But as it pertains to personal development, spiritual gifts are a critical aspect! They are gifts that Jesus himself gave to you through the Holy Spirit to edify the body and expand the Kingdom. As leaders, identifying, developing, and using those gifts personally and on our team results in Spirit empowered ministry!

Leadership Evaluation

The last section would be only for those in a leadership position on our team – team leaders or sub-team leaders. Our definition of a leader is a man or woman who receives vision from God to influence the people of God towards the purposes of God, and we tried to help our leaders evaluate those aspects in this self-evaluation.

_______

When filling out a personal evaluation, people tend to fall into one of two pitfalls – either greatly overestimate themselves and pretend that they’re good to perfect in every area, or to underestimate themselves with either a low view of themselves or fake humility. Although it’s important for leaders to be able to give feedback into a teammate’s development, personal development has to be personal. Our belief is that a PDP formed through honest self evaluation and personal buy-in will be much more effective than leader directive PDPs. So this evaluation allows each teammate to be honest with themselves about where they are strong and weak, where they can grow, and how they can develop. And, it allows leaders an opportunity to give feedback and come alongside those they’re trying to help to develop.

Here is the link to the full evaluation:

Creating a PDP

Now that we’ve done the hard work of personal evaluation and trying to draw some highlights out of each section, we can go ahead and form the personal development plan from what we’ve learned in the evaluation. Forming a PDP is much more of an art than a skill, so below we’ve provided a basic guideline for how to form one. But again, there has to be personal buy-in for your PDP. If the topic you choose or the plan you create isn’t something that you’re personally invested in and driven to pursue, it’s an unhelpful PDP. Create a plan that you want to jump into!

1. Analyze your results. Take a step back and analyze the results of the personal evaluation as a whole. Overall, where are you strong and weak? What surprised you about your answers? Did anything upset you or make you anxious? Your emotions, positive or negative, or feelings of anxiety could be revealing that there’s a deeper heart issue surrounding that topic and that you might need to give it some attention.

2. Self-examine to try and get to the heart of the issue. This applies mainly for character and heart issues. For a development plan to really work, you need to target the aspect you want to work on as directly as you can. That means not just fixing an external behavior that is weak, but also understanding the root of our issues. Otherwise, all we are doing is behavior modification. For skills and competency issues, there may be an underlying insecurity that is at the heart of it (e.g. I’m poor at training because I’m insecure about what people think about me), but for the most part, skills just need to be developed through learning and practice. But for many character / heart issues, we want to ask some questions. What is at the root? Why is this a recurring issue? What keeps me from growing in this? 
   
   For example, if I marked myself as weak in “submissive to leadership”, I could just make a development plan that says “do what my leader tells me to do.” But that’s behavior management and my heart isn’t really impacted. I have to look at the root. Why is submission difficult for me? Maybe I don’t really respect my leader and think I know better than them. Maybe I think I’m a better leader than they are and the actual issue I need to work on is pride. Whatever the root reason is, that’s what you want to create a plan around.

3. Pray and ask God what He wants you to work on and how. Even with our PDP results, we still are going to have a biased view of ourselves. The only one who truly knows where we need to grow is Jesus, so ask Him to search your heart and reveal areas that need to be developed. Pray and ask God, where do you want me to focus on? How do you want me to grow? Who or what have you put into my life to help me develop? 

4. Form the development plan. 
   
   Again, pick no more than 1 character / heart issue and 1 skill / gifting / competency for your PDP. Any more and we tend to lose focus. Just picking 1, preferably the character / heart issue, is totally fine!
   
   Once you know what area to focus on, think of some resources, mentors / coaches, or opportunities that you could use that would help you grow. It could be a book, article, podcast, class, or person who is strong in this area that you would spend time and learn from – whatever way helps you to learn best. One of the most effective development plans is simply to do a word or topical study over the area that you’re wanting to grow in – Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts, humility, etc.
   
   Consider a head / heart / hands grid: head knowledge helps you understand what you’re trying to develop in. But head knowledge alone isn’t enough to help a person change and develop. Heart development gives you the why and an emotional connection. Hands helps you to apply the things you’ve learned.
   
   Continuing with the submission to leadership example, I might do a Bible study on Biblical submission and how Jesus exhibits this. For heart, I might set aside some time to consistently pray for greater humility – and to repent of my pride. For hands, I might consistently pray for my leader, or in my one-on-one meetings with them, ask them how I’ve been doing in the area of submission and if there’s anything I can do to improve.
   
5. Set a consistent and achievable rhythm for which you can be kept accountable over a 6-12 month time period. Try to think of an end point that answers – how will you know you’ve achieved your goals? What do you want to see happen? How can you break down your plan in month-long objectives or pieces?
   
   The above PDP put into consistent rhythms might look like:
   
   – First 3 months: topical Bible study on Biblical submission
   – Monthly: during Day of Prayer, set aside time to self-evaluate my heart and pray for humility; set aside time to pray for my leader.
   – Monthly: check in with my leader and ask them how I’m doing in this area and how to improve
   
6. Get feedback on your PDP from your leader. In our team process, our teammates will be notified at the end of the year that it’s time for the annual personal evaluation, PDP formation, and review with their leader. They’ll be given 2 weeks to fill out the personal evaluation and send it to their leader, and then take a first stab at forming their PDP, knowing that their review meeting with their leader might change that PDP.
   
   Be humble to receive feedback from your leader and be willing to tweak it. Many times, our leaders might have insight into blind spots that we have, things that we aren’t aware of that are negatively affecting the ministry, our team, or even ourselves. In our experience of leading people through PDP formation, either we agree pretty heavily on the topic and might just give some feedback on the elements of the PDP, or if there’s an area that we bring up that our teammate hasn’t considered, we’ll find a middle ground and make both those topics (ours and theirs) the 2 aspects of their PDP.
   
   Since we’ve done this process for several years with 12+ teammates and coached our leaders in how to lead their people through this process, we’ve been able to walk through a multitude of topics for personal development, including humility, perfectionism, anger and unforgiveness, executive presence, training and coaching, communication, self-awareness, leadership, among other things. We’re working on gathering all those development plans that can be used as example PDPs, and when we’re done we’ll post it here!
   
7. Work your plan and have accountability towards working on your plan. If you have a regular one-on-one with a leader or mentor (preferably on a monthly rhythm), that’s a great time for them to check in and make sure you’re accountable to your development plan and give you feedback in that area. It can be as simple as them asking, ‘how did you do with your PDP goals last month, and what are your PDP goals for this upcoming month?’

Walking Others through Forming a PDP

Lastly, we’ll just provide a few tips for current TLs who might be walking their teammates through this process and how to give constructive feedback well. Sometimes, this personal evaluation and review process can be a good opportunity to give feedback into a topic that can be challenging to talk about.

Pray and prepare beforehand. As much as we might want to control people’s development, only God can grow his sheep. Ask God how he wants to develop this person and for him to give you encouraging and truthful words that can spur them on. Make sure you’re surrendering any of your own bias or selfish motivations that you might have for bringing an issue up – is it truly what the Lord wants for their good and their development or just so that I can have an easier time leading? Think through and have concrete examples of areas you have seen this person in their strengths and in their weaknesses. Have bible verses that speak to the standards that you want to exhort your teammate towards.

Start by asking questions. It’s best if they’re able to self-evaluate these issues as opposed to hearing critical feedback right out the gate. What did you think about your self-assessment? Did you see any trends? Did anything surprise / encourage / discourage you? Ideally, they will self-identify. If they don’t bring up the topic that you are wanting to discuss, ask some more probing questions around the topic. Did you have any thoughts specifically about this topic? How would you rate yourself on this?

Seek to encourage as much as possible, but also don’t hesitate to speak truthfully. A basic tenet for difficult feedback is an ‘encouragement sandwich’ – encourage, give feedback, and end by encouraging again. Remind them that you are truly for their good and desire to see them grow and enjoy more of Jesus. We may want to spare someone’s feelings by avoiding hard topics, but your goal is to help them identify blind spots in areas they may need to grow in. If they’re not able to self-identify what the issue is, then give feedback as kindly but as clearly as possible, with clear examples of what is expected (even biblically), what has happened (with concrete examples), and where you’d like them to grow and develop. As leaders, we want to spur our people on and encourage them to mature into becoming more like Jesus and to operate in the ways God has created them.

A PDP can be one of the most effective tools that leaders can have for their own development and to help others grow as well. Many times, with the huge backlog of responsibilities and spinning plates that a leader has, personal development can be left to the side. But without proactive development, we’ll find ourselves perpetually at a deficit of having the knowledge or skills for how to lead, or worse and more likely, not dealing with the heart issues and obstacles that keep us from living out the fullness of who Jesus has created us to be. It takes time investment, hard conversations, and hard work, but seeing yourself and your teammates grow into maturity and fullness of Christ will be one of the most rewarding and impactful things that you will do as a leader!

If there’s any specific questions or need for consultation on how to form a PDP for yourself or a teammate, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at contact@missionsleaders.com. We’d love to help you!