Union with Christ and Resurrection Life

As we’ve mentioned in several other posts, the most significant lesson we’ve received from the Lord during our time on the field has been union with Christ. It has made such a radical difference in our practical experience of walking in the Spirit that it is the message that we most want to share with other leaders, goers, and believers.

The critical explanation of oneness with Jesus comes best from Hudson Taylor:

The Spirit of God revealed to me the truth of our oneness with Jesus as I had never known it before.

How great seemed my mistake in wishing to get the sap, the fullness out of Him! I saw not only that Jesus will never leave me, but that I am a member of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. The vine is not the root merely, but all – root, stem, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit.

Think what it involves. Can Christ be rich and I poor? Can your right hand be rich and your left poor? Or your head be well fed while your body starves?

The sweetest part… is the rest which full identification with Christ brings. I am no longer anxious about anything, as I realize this; for He, I know, is able to carry out His will, and His will is mine. It makes no matter where He places me, or how. That is rather for Him to consider than for me; for in the easiest position He must give me His grace, and in the most difficult His grace is sufficient. No fear that His resources will prove unequal to the emergency! And His resources are mine, for He is mine, and is with me and dwells in me.

Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret

To us, learning about union with Christ unlocked the practical application of the promises of God in our lives. Those biblical promises for provision, joy, wisdom, power went from a distant and vague hope that they would happen to a daily, rich, and real experience in our lives and ministry. Without the secret of oneness with Jesus, we most likely would not have made it past our first term in Thailand.

And although we had been surrendering our control and receiving His promises throughout team leadership and growing ministry in Thailand, the shock and trial of cancer and burnout brought us deeper into the lessons of union. There was more surrender, more death to self that the Lord was bringing in order to receive the true goal of union with Christ: resurrection life and power.

We are continually learning and desiring to experience more intimacy, more of Jesus’ presence, more of our very lives, will, thoughts, words aligning with his. He continues to respond by giving more. 10 years into our time on the field, anxiety has gone from a near constant reality with no reprieve before learning about union, to something we had to actively surrender to receive peace from Jesus, and now to a rare occurrence that is honestly surprising when it pops up.

The circumstances of life and ministry on the field have not gotten much easier. But for thoughts of anxiety and the corresponding tension headaches, panic, desperation, escapism, and inevitable conflicts to go from 10 times a day to 10 times a year is a testimony of God’s power to transform our lives. 

This is not to even speak of —

• supernatural empowerment of strength and energy when my gas tank is completely empty,
• wisdom for decisions that I would never be able to make from my own knowledge, 
• joy in the midst of the lowest points in my life,
• favor and blessing in ministry with people that we did not earn,

and so many other miraculous and practical ways that Jesus has shown himself to be faithful.

His promises in Scripture are true. And they are available to us right now.

And there is so much more that he desires to give us than we can even imagine.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Galatians 2:20

More posts on Union with Christ and Resurrection Life:

1. Union with Christ Part 1
2. Union with Christ Part 2
3. Resurrection Life Part 1
4. Resurrection Life Part 2
5. Resurrection Life Part 3

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God’s Faithfulness, Provision, Protection, and Presence

It feels a bit cliche to say that God’s faithfulness has been a theme of the past 10 years, but there’s a reason why Scripture so often speaks to this aspect of His character. Samuel Saldivar examines 1 New Testament and 4 Old Testament terms that highlight God’s faithfulness and counts up to 733 times these terms are used in the Bible.

In spite of whether I realized it or looked to Him for it, God has been faithful. He has been provider, protector, and Friend.

When our marriage struggled and we fought nearly every day for our first year on the field, He brought healing and unity between me and Jenn to turn a weakness into a joyful point of strength.

When we didn’t know what to do as leaders or how to make decisions for our team, His Spirit gave wisdom and discernment generously and protected our team from catastrophe.

When our team had conflict and disagreement and unhealth, He created unity and camaraderie for us as one body in Christ.

When we were physically exhausted, sick, and out of gas, He provided supernatural strength, energy, and healing.

When trying to pursue a vision for multiplication among 70 million people without the gospel and being told from numerous experienced workers that it couldn’t be done, He blessed us with cherished Thai partners that are bearing fruit beyond what we could dream.

When my wife was in the ICU after a seizure and I didn’t know if she would live or die, in the waiting room of the hospital at 2AM, I experienced His faithfulness and presence beyond any other moment I had before that.

Before you launch to the field, you hear testimonies from workers and read the words from missionary biographies like Adoniram Judson in the prison, Jim Elliot the night before they go to encounter the Huaorani and are martyred for their witness, and John Paton in the tree running for his life from savages. In those testimonies, they all talk about experiencing His promises for peace, joy, and trust, and about how Jesus had never been more present or nearer than in those moments of crisis.

John Paton writes, 

Yet I sat there among the branches, as safe as in the arms of Jesus. Never, in all my sorrows, did my Lord draw nearer to me, and speak more soothingly in my soul, than when the moonlight flickered among those chestnut leaves, and the night air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone! If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence, to enjoy His consoling fellowship. If thus thrown back upon your own soul, alone, all alone, in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a Friend that will not fail you then?

You read the word, you pray and plead, you hope within hope that when those moments of trial come, that He will give you faith to believe the promises. That your faith won’t fail. That He will be and do everything that He said he would.

Sitting in that waiting room, distressed and scared, I prayed the simplest prayer that I could muster: “God, I trust you. I believe that you are with me and that you are sovereign and that this will be for your glory and my good.”

The moment that I realized that I not only prayed but I believed those words, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and joy that He gave me faith to believe the promises. That He had not abandoned me but had drawn nearer than ever before. It felt like I had passed the test of faith, only because He allowed me to. I didn’t know what tomorrow would hold, but I knew that I was held by Him. My Friend that would not fail me in the very embrace of death itself.

God is faithful, even to give the faith to believe His promises.

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Joy in Fulfilling Calling

At one missions conference we went to, we heard a speaker say, “Many goers do not persevere long enough to see the vision that God has given them be fulfilled.” Obviously there are many uncontrollable reasons that people leave the field, but his exhortation to us was to continue persevering in the work even if it is slow or difficult or plodding.

Timelining out the significant events of the last 10 years was emotionally heavy. It took me 1-2 hours per year to look back, remember, and note the significant moments, and inevitably to feel and experience those things as well. Even with as many good moments as there were, much of what we experienced still feels weary, sad, and melancholic. In some seasons, even if there wasn’t a distinct negative event, it just felt like we were constantly plodding uphill in the mud and rain, two steps forward and three steps back. It’s hard to count how many moments we wanted to give up, to escape, to just pick an easier life. Difficult conversations, hospital visits, sin issues, burnout, and self-dependence tinged the timeline like stains on the page of a book. And this didn’t even count all the smaller burdens like missing home, lingering sicknesses, feeling strange and misunderstood in a foreign culture, and a continual underlying stress, anxiety, and loss of control.

I decided to mark the events with a green color for positive and a red color for negative. After tallying them up, there were 211 positive, joyful events and 56 negative, difficult events. For every difficult thing, there were nearly 4 joyful things.

Life on the field is low lows and high highs. There were 267 significant events in 10 years, about 2-3 per month. I doubt if I would’ve even had 1/10th of that had I stayed in the States. And it’s true, life would’ve probably been easier, safer, more stable. And I would’ve, for the most part, avoided most of these very difficult, heavy moments.

But I would’ve missed out on joy.

He had good works for us to walk in. And even in the difficulties and suffering, he was teaching us lessons of how to receive joy and peace and rest in Jesus.

Jenn shares that when we returned back to Thailand after cancer, it felt like her soul clicked back into place. There is a joy and a contentment in your inner being to be exactly where God wants you to be.

And there’s joy in seeing a vision begin to come to fruition. 

We came in response to a calling and a Commission towards a spiritual need for the gospel in Thailand. At first, though I might not have admitted it, I was seeking validation. I wanted to be validated that I wasn’t crazy for leaving a good job in the States to essentially start over in a foreign country. To be validated that I was a good leader. To be validated that we could see ministry fruit happen where others said it couldn’t happen.

When the first trials and challenges came, most of those inane desires went out the window as we were just trying to survive. Being humbled by the Lord quickly checked our motivations, and learning union with Christ made us realize that Jesus’ words in John 15 were painfully and wonderfully true – “apart from me you can do nothing.” We started to focus on abiding not so we could get what we needed to bear fruit, but simply so we could experience more of Jesus.

When the ministry started seeing fruit, no one was more surprised than we were because we knew how incompetent, stupid, and weak we were. It was clearly because of what God was doing through our Thai partners, not because of us.

But still we experienced joy. Not validation of ourselves, not affirmation of our strength, but that we had a front row seat in seeing God’s goodness in bringing the first new believers, the first new churches. We celebrated when reports of new believers and baptisms came in. We worshipped when the sick were healed or demons were cast out. We wept with gratitude when we saw obedience and transformation in people’s lives and families. We were in awe when we realized that God was doing a work much bigger than we had anticipated.

If we had given up when things felt impossible, or perhaps never even took the first steps of obedience towards this wildly insane calling, we would have missed out on all of the joy that God wanted us to experience.

“Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit… These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

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Conformed to the Image of Christ

Lastly, what stuck out to me in looking back on the timeline was how much I have been changed. In the timeline above, the red events were negative and the green were positive, and I marked the blue events and lessons as significant moments of change, growth, and development for me personally.

This can perhaps be said of any 25 year old, but the word that comes to mind in describing myself at 25 is “naive”. My reality for the first few years in Thailand was something in between “I don’t know” and “What the heck is going on?!” In regards to life overseas, marriage, team leadership, and suffering, I had no idea what I signed up for.

I have failed as a follower of Jesus, as a husband, as a friend, as a ministry worker, and as a leader miserably, spectacularly, and repeatedly over the past 10 years to the detriment of myself, my wife, our team, and our ministry. Those failures were painful and have left scars that we have had to surrender to Jesus for healing. The fact that we are still here 10 years later with several physical and emotional scars is a testimony to the Lord’s kindness in sustaining us.

Reading through Robert Clinton’s The Making of a Leader helped me to understand that every experience, every opportunity, and particularly every failure has been how God has been shaping me. Those scars are literal and figurative marks of the ways that He has developed us more into who He has intended for us to be.

What excites me for the next 10 years is not only how much more impact we will have armed with the valuable lessons He has given us from the past 10, but how much more the Spirit will change me, how much more He will help me to know and love and become more like Jesus.

With 10 years behind us and the next horizon in front of us, we can simply say – If God has been faithful through all of this, how much more faithful will He be going forward?

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.”

Hebrews 10:23

In the previous posts, we covered some leadership basics and foundations, the need for leaders on the missions field, and how to discern if you are a leader. In the next two posts, we’ll try to answer the question, “I think I might be a leader – what do I do now?” In this post, we’ll cover a potential pathway towards leadership and general ways you can develop and prepare as a leader. In the next post, we’ll provide a tool that we use on the field for self-evaluation that helps you to create a personal development plan.

Pathway towards Leadership

There’s so much that a team leader needs to think through and plan in order to lead well on the field. Things like teaming, development plans for yourself and your team, location, strategy, investigation, language plans, visas, and recruiting; we’ll continue to address all of these topics in this blog. But for this post, we want to give aspiring team leaders, either who have already launched or have yet to launch, some of the broad categories that you’ll need to think through and engage in for the next 1-2 years as you clarify your calling and begin taking steps of faith towards becoming a leader in the future. As a reminder, we’re talking specifically about team leaders and sub-team leaders.

If you’re already feeling God affirming a calling to team leadership, there’s 2 categories that we’d encourage you to focus on in your pathway towards leadership – development and planning/preparation.

Development

The first category is development. Again, there’s so many things that a TL needs to develop in, but we’re focusing more on the next 1-2 years. 

• Character – Character, and your personal relationship with Jesus, is the most critical component of development for leaders. Speaking broadly, we think a TL should be shooting for a high level of character like what we see in 1st Timothy 3. This is a list that Paul prescribes for Timothy in selecting elders of the local church, but we think it is a great list of mostly character attributes that team leaders should also exhibit and develop in. Another grid is looking at your life and how it’s bearing the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23. Do a self assessment – which of these am I strong in? Which of these am I weakest in?
  
  You can also do something that’s called a 360 assessment to gain more feedback about your character and leadership – asking your leaders, peers, and those you lead (generally 3 from each category) some simple questions. The most basic three questions would be: What’s going well with my leadership? What’s not going well with my leadership? What’s missing from my leadership? Beyond those, you can add others that you want to gain feedback about: What are my strengths and weaknesses? Where do I need to grow? How do you experience my leadership? Where do I need to focus my time, and what should I stop spending my time on? And from that feedback, create a development plan around how to grow in certain areas.
  
  It’s important that an aspiring team leader have solid foundations in abiding, spiritual character, relational health (singleness/marriage/family), freedom from bondages, and good emotional health and awareness. Of course, all of these are critical for cross-cultural goers, but can be even more high stakes for leaders, as weaknesses in these areas are where the Enemy tends to attack in high stress, high spiritual warfare environments. Additionally, team leaders that don’t have solid foundations in these areas would have a hard time helping teammates and national partners to develop in these ways.
  
  
• SHAPE – Another aspect that you can develop in is your SHAPE. SHAPE stands for Spiritual Gifts, Heart, Aptitudes, Personality, Experience. It’s basically a grid to talk about the way that you’re wired and the experiences you’ve had that make you who you are, and help you know your strengths and weaknesses. I (Steven) didn’t know what my spiritual gifts were when I was in a training group preparing to go overseas until we went over some spiritual gifts assessments. I had never learned about APEST in Ephesians 4 – apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers – and found myself in the apostolic group without much idea of what it meant. But discovering my own gifting was a helpful grid for me to understand how to lead in the strengths God has given me, and where I need to set rhythms or recruit and delegate to others that will cover my weaknesses. Lead out of the SHAPE and strengths that God has given you, and also try to develop in your weaknesses and recruit people to your team who can balance you out!
  
  SHAPE Guide – This is a general tool we’ve found online that helps people discover, understand, and evaluate their SHAPE. If this one doesn’t feel helpful, a quick google search will show several similar guides. For each section of the SHAPE, you can also use different tools to evaluate. For example, under spiritual gifts, we prefer the Clinton Spiritual Gift Assessment (below); for Abilities, we’ll use StrengthsFinder; for Personality, we will use Meyers-Briggs and Enneagram. Each tool will have pros and cons – you don’t need to align your identity with a personality test, but take what’s helpful to bring further self-awareness into the ways that God has shaped and created you so you can further develop and serve in those strengths. After each teammate goes through the self-assessment, we will hold a SHAPE retreat to talk about how teams can work well together according to their SHAPE. If you’re interested in learning more about how to hold a SHAPE retreat with your team to figure out roles and working styles together with your teammates, please contact us!
  
  Clinton Spiritual Gift Assessment – This is the best spiritual gifts assessment that we’ve found. Robert Clinton is a former professor at Fuller Seminary who was focused on Biblical Leadership Development. His book, The Making of a Leader, is one that has really helped us understand how God develops leaders over a lifetime.
  
  Style of Influence – There’s so many personality tools out there, but we’ve found this to be one of the best in helping leaders to understand how they lead and help teams to understand how they work together. Here’s an example of what those assessments look like.

• Personal Development Plan – It’s critical for people who want to be leaders or who are leaders to pursue their own personal development! Having a personal development plan to evaluate, set goals and rhythms, and stay accountable to the plan is a crucially important aspect of prioritizing personal development. On our team in Thailand, we have each of our team members do a self-evaluation annually, and then go over it with their leader so they can receive feedback. From that, they’ll generally pick one character / abiding type of development goal and one skill / competency type of goal, and make a plan for the year for their development. Our next post will cover this PDP tool, how to use it, and how to lead others through it.

• Take Opportunities to Lead – Another way you can develop is through leading! It doesn’t matter if it’s the tear down team on a Sunday, or leading a disciple making team, as long as it is a place where you can be receiving vision from God, to influence the people of God, towards the purposes of God. Take opportunities to lead if you think you’re a leader! And remember – leading is serving. Ask leaders and mentors in your church where there might be opportunities for you to serve and to lead.

• Study Leadership – Studying biblical leadership and learning lessons from what leaders did well and not well can help us learn what we should aspire to and what we should be cautious of. Consider leaders like Moses, David, and Deborah. What kinds of attributes did they have? Look at how God raises up leaders in the Bible or in history and see if there are marks of that in your own life. Again, Christ-like character is the first prerequisite for leadership. Doing Bible studies over the lives of leaders in the Bible can have some of the most impactful lessons. Biographies of missionaries or ministry leaders can be helpful – one of our favorites is Through Gates of Splendor about Jim and Elisabeth Elliot. There’s also a ton of helpful leadership resources out there, like Spiritual Leadership by J. Oswald Sanders which focuses on high biblical character, or The Making of a Leader by Robert Clinton that we mentioned above. And although there are helpful books from the business or organizational leadership world, we can’t emphasize enough – the leadership example of Jesus is Philippians 2. According to Jesus, leading is abiding and listening to the Holy Spirit. It’s being a humble servant. In the West, we too often equate business and organizational leadership values with biblical leadership, and many times, that isn’t true. We’d encourage you to take helpful things from business / organizational books, but to not let it become primary over the Word and spiritual leadership.

• Find Mentors – As you work on developing yourself and try to grow in areas where you might have weaknesses, be quick to look for mentors and to ask for help. There are so many people in the body of Christ who have experiences and giftings that we can learn from. For example, I (Jenn) am not a very naturally gifted shepherd. When people on our team had problems, I looked to our counselor for help and wisdom on how she would handle the situation. If I had been trying to figure it out myself, I would have made problems much worse. We also found mentors to specifically help us grow in our marriage and to speak into things like team dynamics as well. I think that sometimes we can get a little shy about asking people from help. But I want to encourage you, don’t be afraid to ask people for help – most people who are leaders WANT to be able to pass on what they know and would be honored to receive an ask from you! 

• Learn to Hear from the Holy Spirit – And lastly, as you work on developing yourself, learn to hear from the Holy Spirit. The truth is, no matter how well you prepare, life on the field and particularly leadership on the field is incredibly difficult. There are no obvious right answers and the stakes are very high. In light of that, team leaders MUST know how to walk in the Spirit and how to listen to the Holy Spirit actively. He is our source of guidance, comfort, wisdom, help, and fruitfulness. If listening to the Spirit and asking for his guidance in your decisions almost daily is not a normal rhythm for you, I would encourage you to start practicing – add listening times to your quiet times. A good book to read is Spirit Walk by Steve Smith. One of our friends in our organization has a great workshop on listening prayer that we’ll publish in the form of a blog post in the future.

Preparation and Planning 

Another aspect of a pathway towards leadership is preparation and planning. There will be a lot of categories here, which can feel overwhelming. Our advice is to set small goals and slowly make progress on 1-2 things a week. And it’s OK if some aspects are very open ended or still have a lot of question marks at the end of your preparation – things will begin to get clearer as you gain stability on the field. Lastly, we’d highly recommend for you to find mentors as you go through this process – other TLs that have gone before and can give wisdom in these areas. If you need help or consultation with any of these aspects, please reach out to us at contact@missionsleaders.com. We’d love to help you!

• Get Pre-Field Training – In order to be a healthy and effective team leader, it’s important to have the foundations and skills to be a healthy and effective cross-cultural goer. We were trained in a 9-month training program in our church from Launch Global. It focuses on living in community, learning from field realities, and practical applications that prepare you for the field. We’d encourage you to get cross-cultural training like this in order to engage in healthy practices, rhythms, and foundations that will help you in becoming a solid goer in order to become a good team leader. Check out the website to see if there’s a training group in your city.

• Investigate / Vision Trip – Once you’ve discerned where God is calling you, try and investigate as much as you can. Find resources online, read books, connect with leaders / goers from those places, take a vision trip, and try to learn as broadly as you can. Ask questions to local believers, goers, and local people that you meet. The more information you can gather, the better you can prepare as a TL for a variety of things.
  
  Before we launched to Thailand, I (Steven) read books about the history of the church in Thailand, we talked to Thai students at the Thai student club in Austin, and we connected with experienced goers in Thailand. I prayed for one of the 85 UPGs in Thailand every morning during my quiet time and just worked down the list in Joshua Project. It took me just 5-10 minutes a day, but through that, I also learned a lot about the people groups in Thailand. We took a vision trip and learned about demographics, culture, society, religion, and visited a bunch of different ministries like red-light district ministry, college ministry, orphanages, and church planting ministry. We knew we wanted to pursue CPM but wanted to gather as much info as we could about what God was doing in Thailand so that we could join with him in that. We’ll post about how to have an effective investigation / vision trip in the future as well.
  
• Recruiting – At some point in the process of being a TL, you’ll have to learn how to recruit others to your team. Recruit like-minded people who want to go where you want to go and do what God is calling you all to do together. Find people that fit well with you and who respond well to your leadership style. Whoever you recruit should be called and able to do the actual ministry work, but it can also be helpful to recruit people that can fit different roles on your team – people gatherers, servants, administratively gifted people, teachers/trainers, worship and prayer leaders, etc. Multiple roles can be filled in one person; they don’t all have to be different people. And most importantly, if you’re going to launch as a team leader, recruit a sub-team leader that can balance out your weaknesses and become a leadership plurality together with you! It helps so much!
  
  Some of our favorite parts in our time in Thailand were times with our sub-team leaders over the first few years. We’re not particularly strong at administration so we recruited a couple that are amazing with admin-type things and they basically saved all of our lives through helping us find insurance and visas and preparing crisis plans. We’d meet for hours with our sub-team leaders every month, debriefing all the ministry and team issues, praying and planning for the future, and then we’d de-stress by ordering McDonalds (not recommended) and watch reruns of Friends together. Through leading and doing ministry together, our sub-team leaders have become some of our closest friends, in part because there are certain things that only other leaders will really be able to empathize with.
  
• Strategy / Vision – As you discern and investigate, start writing down and forming vision statements and strategy plans for your team and ministry. It provides clarity for you and your team in what you’re shooting for and what God’s calling you to. Here are our posts on Strategy – what it is, and how to write a Strategy Plan.
  
• Logistics – Lastly, there’s a ton of logistics and administration that comes with not only moving overseas but with leading a team overseas. Finding an organization, finding mentors / coaches, support raising, visas, packing, apartments, language learning plans, writing a strategy plan, and writing an MOU to name just a few. We have developed a lot of resources around this (or should I say, our admin leaders that we recruited have developed resources) but it’ll be different for each team and context. Like we mentioned above, our recommendation is to find an agency with mentors that you really connect well with who will help you through all these things! In the process of investigating agencies and teams, look for demonstrated competency. That means, don’t only ask them questions about things that you value, but ask them how they do those things through their time and how they invest in it. For example, if you really want to find an agency or coach that will help you with having healthy rhythms and abiding – ask them how they’ve done that before, what it looks like in their lives, how they’ve helped other people in those areas – not just if they value it or not.

Again, with so many things to think through and prepare for as a team leader, the task list can feel overwhelming. As a TL, the list of things to oversee and accomplish will only increase as you launch to the field. In our own strength, no leader can possibly accomplish all of the things needed to lead a successful team. We are NOT saying that team leaders need to be experts in all of the areas that a team must consider. The role of a leader is to hear from the Lord and help their team towards what He is asking.

We’d encourage you to focus on discerning from the Spirit what he is calling you to be faithful to today, and to be obedient to that. If He has called you to be a leader, He will provide the strength, wisdom, people, and resources to accomplish what He has asked you to do. Invite your teammates into these areas and lean on their giftings and capacity, and find mentors and coaches that can give you guidance on how to engage each of these areas.

The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.

Proverbs 16:9

For our second post in the Leadership Foundations series, we felt the need to address this question – why are leaders needed?

From our Overview post, we defined leadership as this: a leader is a man or woman who receives vision from God to influence the people of God towards the purposes of God.

A disclaimer to begin: this blog, this post, and really anything we write about leaders and leadership is not meant to devalue ‘non-leaders.’ Like we said in the overview post, leadership is a role not a value, and Kingdom leaders are servants. There’s also different types of leaders over different scopes of influence, from a couple of people to thousands or even millions. It all depends on what God chooses to do in and through your life – and it’s up to us to be surrendered and content with our Kingdom assignment.

But we started this blog because the work of pioneering among the unreached is exceedingly difficult, and for those called to help lead a team of people in that work, the resources and training are slim to none. Because of that, there is a massive lack of well-prepared, well-coached team leaders on the missions field, leading to significant carnage in people’s lives that is largely preventable, and lack of effectiveness in the Great Commission. Here are 4 reasons why more and better leaders are needed on the missions field.

1. Because God’s pattern in the Bible is using leaders.

We mentioned this in the Foundations post as well, but God’s clear pattern throughout Scripture is in choosing, communicating, and working through a leader or leaders in order to lead the people of God. The majority of the books of the Bible are named after, or at least follow the life and actions of, the leaders of God’s people. Ultimately, every single leader in Scripture and in our lives is meant to be a dim representation of our one true and better leader, Jesus. In the one person of Jesus, we see all the facets of godly leadership together: prophet, priest, and king, servant, conqueror, shepherd, teacher, healer, everything.

And this pattern of leaders who imitate Christ that we are to imitate and follow (1 Cor. 11:1) is continued by Paul’s establishment of elders over the church in the New Testament. There are leaders for the shepherding of the flock where the church is established, and also leaders to pioneer the work where the church is not yet present. More on that later.

2. Because leaders are the bottleneck.

What we mean by this is that without leaders, the effectiveness and thriving of missions teams is greatly slowed or halted. If God’s pattern for helping His people thrive and multiply His glory among the nations is through godly leadership, it also means that where there is a lack of godly leaders, God’s people are slowed in moving towards His purposes. Examples abound in Scripture of unrighteous leaders leading their people towards ruin (10 spies, Saul, Judges, etc.), and godly leaders helping to make God’s name great and His people flourish.

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.

Ephesians 4:11-16

In Ephesians 4, Paul speaks of how Christ has given a variety of leaders with different giftings (apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers – commonly known as the five-fold giftings) to the church. But for what reason? 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.

Leaders are given to equip the people of God for the ministry of God – not simply to do the ministry themselves. And when the saints are equipped and ministering, the body of Christ is built up and the believers move towards maturity.

The same is true on the missions field. Leaders are greatly needed to provide equipping, development, shepherding, and vision for those called to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth. It is arguably the most difficult category of calling that can be given to a believer – pioneering the gospel in a radically different culture that has been resistant to the gospel message and messengers for potentially hundreds of years. Yet there is a surprising lack of resources, development, and coaching for goers, and even less for team leaders on the missions field.

When we launched to the field as 25 year-old team leaders, we had already gone through a 9-month training program for cross-cultural workers, and worked in ministry for another 1.5 years to develop in leadership. That preparation helped greatly – and it was still maybe 10-20% of what we needed to be successful as team leaders. Most days, we had no idea what we were doing. As we reflect on our early years especially, it’s clear that without the Father holding and persevering us and our team to stay on the field, if we had gone just 5% more in the wrong direction, our entire team could easily have been sent home.

In our past 8 years on the field, we have seen many friends that were clearly called to the nations, passionate about the glory of God, fully committed to give their lives to the Great Commission, have to leave the field. In the ReMAP II study over missionary retention, they conclude that over 50% of people that leave the field, leave for preventable reasons like team conflict, lack of clarity, unmet expectations, and lack of effective leadership.

For me, much of this stems from the lack of well-prepared and well-coached team leaders on the field. Much of the mindset of the missions environment is a ‘next man up’ approach to leadership – someone needs to be a team leader if there are goers on the field, whether or not they are called or prepared or even want to be one. There are plenty of leaders that find themselves in a leadership role and want to do a good job, but just aren’t supported or equipped in order to do so. The weightiness of needing to be at least competent in a multitude of areas like shepherding, management, vision-casting, administration, communication, language learning, cross-cultural interactions, security, and not to mention pioneering the gospel among the unreached, can be crushing for almost anyone. And that’s just for those that even desire to be good leaders. I wish I was joking when we say that we know of multiple friends who moved overseas only to find their team leader had moved to a different location and abdicated their leadership responsibility without telling anyone.

3. Because the Great Commission is unfinished.

In Romans 15, Paul gives some insight into his driving motivation for his life and ministry: “and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, ‘Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.’”

This Romans 15 type of ambition is what Floyd McClung called ‘Apostolic passion’ – people with a passion for God’s glory among the unreached who are willing to abandon their lives for this purpose. Many people, whether goers, senders, or mobilizers, have this apostolic passion.

But I believe it is leaders with apostolic passion that are needed to pioneer out into those 7000+ remaining unreached people groups, and to equip and influence the people of God who might have this same apostolic passion towards their most effective role in the Great Commission. Leaders are the ones that are willing to go forward and go first, ones that see the need and fulfill it, ones that can create the solutions and opportunities for others to join in.

If God’s pattern in Scripture is using leaders to move His people, and a lack of leaders is the bottleneck for effective ministry, then the Great Commission remains unfinished because there are not enough godly, effective leaders with this Romans 15 apostolic passion. 

Hudson Taylor was a leader with this apostolic passion; he said, “If I had a thousand lives, China should have them. No! Not China, but Christ. Can we do too much for Him? Can we do enough for such a precious Saviour?”

Jim Elliot said, “‘He makes His ministers a flame of fire.’ Am I ignitable? God deliver me from the dread asbestos of ‘other things.’ Saturate me with the oil of the Spirit that I may be a flame. But flame is transient, often short-lived. Canst thou bear this, my soul – short life? In me there dwells the Spirit of the Great Short-Lived, whose zeal for God’s house consumed Him. ‘Make me Thy Fuel, Flame of God.’”

Lillias Trotter said, “Oh to learn how to fight through the battle in the heavenly places till the day comes. To attempt the impossible & expect the impossible – it comes back to that again.”

C.T. Studd said, “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.”

Has God given you this burning desire in your heart to see those without the gospel worship Jesus? Has he gifted you with a mindset or willingness to push forward when you see a need or a gap? More of these leaders are needed to see the Great Commission finished and to hasten the day of Jesus’ return.

4. Because it might be the role God has called you to play.

The first 3 reasons were abstract, high-level reasons why leaders are needed. But for the person reading this post, it comes down to what role God has called you to play. If you’ve read this far, it may be something that God has for you.

Like I (Steven) mentioned in the first post, I reluctantly entered into a role of team leadership. It was weird to lead my friends, I didn’t feel ready, and I had never really thought of myself as a leader. But I remember praying and asking the Lord, talking with mentors, having honest conversations with the friends I was going to be leading, and felt like the answer was yes. It was a role that God was asking me to take.

It has been the most difficult, frustrating, lonely, insane thing that Jenn and I have done. And it has been the most rewarding, worthwhile, humbling season that drew us closer in identification with Jesus than we could’ve imagined.

Leading a team took a lot of tears, long conversations, conflicts, hours in the hospital with teammates, hard decisions. But God brought us through all that and provided what we needed, mainly through teaching us Union with Christ. In 2019, when we expanded to 3 teams, we realized that our original team was ending. So we did a little exercise and asked – think of 3 words that describe yourself and 3 words that described this team when you first joined, and pick 3 words that describe yourself and the team now. And these are the words they chose.

From selfish, proud, naive, insecure, broken, superficial, strangers – to joyful, rooted in Christ, safe, knitted together, abiding, thriving, tested, humbled, fruitful, impactful family. It’s such an unbelievable thing that God did in such a short amount of time. By God’s grace, we are coaching dozens of Thai church planting teams that have seen some unbelievable fruit in the last few years. And that is so awesome. But if you ask us what might be the most rewarding thing from these last 8 years, it would be this list and our people. To see people freed from sin, grow into their own giftings, to see our team go from this mishmash of strangers into a legit family – it’s been one of the greatest privileges and joys to be a part of what God was doing with these people. If you would consider playing this role on a team as a leader – I guarantee it’ll be one of the most difficult things you’ve ever done, and probably the most worthwhile.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with an exhortation: Don’t disqualify yourself! So many times with leadership, including in me and Jenn’s story, we get in the way of what God is trying to do in and through us. We might think – my character isn’t godly enough, my motivations aren’t pure enough, my experience isn’t good enough, my giftings aren’t impressive enough – whatever it is, and we think, ‘maybe I shouldn’t be a leader.’ Many of you guys may have heard this quote – ‘God does not call the qualified, He qualifies the called.’ Moses, David, Abraham – all of them were not ready for the leadership role that God prepared for them when He called them to it, but for all of them, He prepared them to be leaders over His people in the right role and the right timing.

There is so much joy in stepping into what God has prepared! Like the parable of the talents, it doesn’t matter if you’re given 2, 5, or 10 talents – if you’re faithful with it, you join in the pleasure of our good Master. But if we reject or bury it, His response is rebuke. Be obedient to what He calls you to – whether it’s a role of leadership, or whether it’s something else.

In our next post, we’ll try to answer the question – How do I discern if I’m a leader?