Jenn and I (Steven) fought nearly every day for our first year on the field.

At the end of our first term of 2.5 years, we did a debrief and noted that second only to learning union with Christ, both of us said our marriage, and our co-leadership of the ministry and team together, was the thing we were most grateful for. It was nothing short of a miracle that the Lord did to bring us to that point from how fragile, disunified, and hostile we were to each other.

To us, men and women leading together is a critical element in seeing missions teams and ministries thrive and be effective. We’ve seen many husband and wife units that were not on the same page strain in their marriage and leave the field. We’ve seen solo male team leaders struggle to lead without the gifts that women leaders bring. We’ve seen many gifted, passionate women goers be underused and underappreciated on teams where male leaders did not know how to empower them, who have eventually left the field. Many of those situations would have greatly benefitted from a woman leader’s voice along with a male leader to bring guidance and resolution.

As Jenn contends in her post on Women in Leadership, the Great Commission needs women leaders, and missions teams and ministries are not realizing their potential when they fail to empower women to operate in their gifts and leadership.

This is not to say that missions teams with male team leaders will necessarily fail to be healthy or effective. Good leaders will learn how to shepherd, direct, and develop their teammates regardless of gender. We’ll write a future post about tips for men leading women. However, we’ve found it most effective when there is a level of men and women leading together for multiple reasons.

This post will generally be about men and women leading together on missions teams, whether as a married couple or as non-married co-leaders. We’ll have some guidelines specifically about husbands and wives leading together in the future.

Our Story

Jenn gives a pretty thorough version of her experience of discovering her leadership identity in the midst of navigating life overseas and being in our first year of marriage in her Women in Leadership post.

We were 6 months married when we launched to the field – not recommended. From my (Steven) side, the feeling I most experienced during that first year was overwhelmed. I had heard from experienced goers how difficult the field could be on a marriage, and wanted desperately to establish healthy foundations between me and Jenn.

But at the same time, I was completely in over my head with our transition to the field, leading a team, and starting a new ministry. On top of the ‘normal’ field transitions like learning language and dealing with culture stress, I had innumerable team leader responsibilities piled on as well, including finding visas, opening ministry opportunities, detailing crisis plans, and approving 9 units’ ministry expenses.

The stress and burden of all of that hit me like a ton of bricks. 

I had always expected and desired Jenn to be a ministry partner with me, but I didn’t know what it could look like, didn’t know how to communicate that, and didn’t know what types of barriers and insecurities she was dealing with. It took us about a year of getting through culture-stress and learning to communicate as a newly married couple before we began understanding each other. 

Since we are both incredibly stubborn, we were missing the truth that God had given each of us exactly the thing we needed in each other. I needed someone to help carry the vision and responsibility of the team. And Jenn wanted to be empowered to use her giftings according to her calling. Jenn met the women on our team 1-on-1 and was in charge of their development and shepherding. I looked for more opportunities to invite her into areas of leadership according to her gifting and clear the way for her as a leader within our sending organization and our church.

10 years later, we couldn’t imagine working in a different way. We debrief nearly every ministry thing together, even if it’s something that we’re doing completely independently. We include each other in every ministry partnership, and we elevate and complement each other’s strengths. And perhaps from the example that we’ve set, it’s standard for men and women on the teams we’ve raised up to partner and lead together in ministry.

Along the way, as we’ve figured out what works for us and coached other ministry and team leaders, we think that men and women leading together leads to the healthiest and most effective outcomes.

Theological Considerations

Before we jump into reasons why we think men and women leading and working together is important, we want to quickly address the theological considerations around this topic. We aren’t trying to convince anybody towards or against a theological stance on women in leadership.

What we do want to encourage you to do is to study the Word about what it says regarding women in leadership, women in ministry, and men and women working together. From that, form a position that can be communicated clearly to your team. Jenn gives her view in her post on women in leadership, so I won’t state that here. But I will reiterate that once you have established your biblical view on women in ministry, explicitly empower women towards everything that they CAN do. Even though it may not be vocalized by the women on your team, it’s likely that some are wondering about where they can fit in, and being clear and empowering will be appreciated. Encourage discussion with your whole team about where men and women can collaborate and team together.

We find the Coworkers Bible Study and Developing Female Leaders by Kadi Cole as helpful supplementary resources.

Why Is This Important?

Ultimately, why is this topic of men and women leading together important? The bottom line for us is that missions teams that fail to empower both the women and men on their team towards their most effective role in ministry and leadership are missing out. They are missing out on seeing the fullness of the body of Christ at work. They are missing out on ministry opportunities that are available when both men and women are fully empowered.

Here are some of the key reasons why men and women leading together on missions teams is extremely valuable. The first three points are from Steven and the last two are from Jenn.

Increased Access in Ministry Opportunities

Over 50% of unreached people are women. Whether through direct disciple-making ministry or in partnering with local believers towards movement, having women in ministry leadership together with men will multiply your team’s ministry opportunities.

One of the major steps in pursuing movement is finding a National Apostolic Visionary to partner with towards multiplication. In many locations in the 1040 window, societies tend to be patriarchal, with men commonly in leadership positions. It’s good and strategic for movement practitioners to try to partner with local male Christian leaders. But because these local leaders are already very busy, there can be barriers with their availability. And given that there are usually few fruitful believers to work with, other expat workers may desire to partner with them as well.

However, there can be abundant opportunities found in partnering with local women believers who may be more available and perhaps even emerging leaders that are underdeveloped and open to pursuing different methodologies. Naturally, these local women believers will feel more comfortable interacting in ministry with outsider trainers and coaches who are also women.

We’ve learned from other movement practitioners that women oftentimes are the earliest adopters of movement approaches and can be quicker to enter into pioneering spaces and endure persecution. These local women are then naturally able to access non-believing women who can be in highly inaccessible or even oppressive situations in patriarchal cultures. If we are failing to empower and create opportunities for the women on our teams to enter into ministry, we are potentially cutting in half the pool of laborers and leaders that could be equipped to engage the harvest.

This is anecdotal to our teams in Thailand, but of the different partnerships with Thai networks that we have, the most fruitful ones are with Thai women leaders. And to no one’s surprise, it is the women on our team that run point with those leaders – planning strategy, training believers, coaching leaders, and walking side-by-side with them. If we didn’t have women leaders on our teams, just as empowered and committed to the vision as the male team members, we would be greatly missing out on seeing more people hear and receive the gospel in Thailand.

In contrast, one male leader that I coach in the Middle East acutely felt the cultural gender barriers that exist in his country. Although there were local women that voiced their interest in knowing more about Jesus, it would be culturally inappropriate for him to invite them to a male or even mixed-gender Bible study, and there were no known women Bible studies in his city that he could invite them to.

When there are both men and women leading together and empowering the team, teams can appropriately seize the opportunities to interact with both men and women in ministry settings.

Plurality of Leadership and Improved Decision-Making

We’ve mentioned before that the multiple roles of the team leader can feel impossible – shepherd, manager, administrator, strategy coordinator, developer to name a few. In our experience, having multiple leaders share the burden can be a huge benefit to your team and ministry.

It’s generally understood that single women greatly outnumber single men on the missions field, with some ratios cited as high as 7-to-1. It’s extremely likely that you have more women than men on your team. However you structure it, having at least one woman leader will maximize the benefits of leadership plurality. Women leaders will better represent the perspectives and needs of the women on your team and in your ministry, helping the leaders make better decisions.

Increased Collaboration and Empowerment

Our initial team had 6 men and 7 women. I grew up with most of the guys on our team. I knew their strengths and weaknesses and knew what roles would maximize their giftings. I didn’t know the women as well and healthy boundaries kept me from knowing them as well as the male teammates. After Jenn began investing in the women teammates and getting to know them, it was much easier to empower them to their best roles and set them up for strong collaboration with the men on our team. Having Jenn step into a role of leadership catalyzed greater empowerment of the women on our team and fostered stronger collaboration between the male and female teammates.

Just by seeing me and Jenn model leading and working together, our teammates felt permission to do the same. The women teammates saw Jenn in leadership and were more willing to step into leadership and ministry opportunities they might have assumed were for men. Our teamwork increased as everyone was more fully enabled to operate in their best roles.

A critical responsibility of a team leader is to empower their people to operate to the fullest extent of their giftings and strengths. When we can do this for both men and women, a team is able to harness and operate in the gifts of the full body of Christ. When leadership is able to model both men and women working and leading together, this creates a culture that releases team members to take risks, practice their giftings, and to learn from and help each other as well.

Shepherding Without Crossing Boundaries

The intensity of cross-cultural living and ministry can stress those we lead to the point where deep sin tendencies begin to emerge. In these situations, people naturally become discouraged, lose vision, or can even fall into moral failure. Before they reach this point, leaders need to step and help them identify and address sins they are struggling with, and to find freedom and healing. 

Everyone may have different thresholds and boundaries when it comes to cross-gender leadership, but generally we would consider it inappropriate for leaders to cross genders in addressing deep sin issues, or even some relational or marriage issues. Additionally, the pitfalls when it comes to cross-cultural, cross-gender shepherding are even more risky. We have heard many stories of male missionaries who have talked directly to a wife in a local family and ruined the relationship with that family for bypassing the husband, or vice versa with female goers. So regardless of what tradition you come from, it’s important that you know your personal, team, and host culture’s boundaries and communicate them clearly so no one is left in an awkward or potentially dangerous situation! 

In our first few years on the field, the women on our team wrestled with suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, depression, marriage issues, and frustration with role, just to name a few. Each of these issues are extremely personal and requires careful handling. Unfortunately, no matter how well intentioned Steven was, there were certain boundaries that he couldn’t cross when it came to shepherding. But simply by being a woman, I was able to more naturally empathize with the woman on the team. To them, I felt safe, which allowed me to foster trust in order to ask the hard questions and be received as a source of help. However, while I was often “in the trenches” with the women, Steven’s strengths and gifts were also needed. He coordinated with professionals to create shepherding / health plans, building a framework for accountability and holistic healing. He advocated for them to our org and created spaces where they felt permission to work on their own health without shame. Steven and I were able to work together in ways that felt appropriate for the people on our team, and by God’s grace, many of these women have found freedom and continue to persevere in the work!

Generally, women leaders are able to build deeper relationships with national women and with women on their teams, and speak into heart issues that a man might not be able to as easily. Being able to shepherd a team deeply is critical to keeping people persevering in the work as they find freedom from “everything that hinders, and the sin that so easily entangles” (Hebrews 12:1).

Emotional Intelligence and Rapport

Both men and women image Christ in different ways, which often expresses itself in different ways in leadership. Corporate research also understands this dynamic. Multiple Harvard Business Review studies have concluded that women leaders generally excel in collaborative spaces, rapport-building, emotional intelligence, and empathetic thinking for others. Women are also often turned to in times of crises, trusted to exhibit more self-control and navigate difficult relational dynamics. But in some ministry leadership rooms, women can be more excluded and under-leveraged.

At its core, ministry centers around people. We team with people, we work with national partners, we try to love and serve people in a way that allows them to receive the gospel. In all these things, emotional intelligence, empathy, and collaboration are a strength that women tend to bring to the table. How many opportunities are we losing when we don’t harness the strengths of women leaders? How much more unified could our teams be? There is so much to gain through harnessing the unique contributions of women leaders.

Worth the Cost

From Adam and Eve to Priscilla and Aquila to Paul and his coworkers of men and women, we see in the Bible that there is a precedent of men and women leading and ministering together. In seeking this type of leadership dynamic, challenges will emerge. It might feel slow at first as you figure out new structures, new ways of communication, new ways of teaming.

But it’s worth the cost.

Men and women leading together allows for teams to realize the full potential of the body of Christ in order to access anyone who God has prepared to hear the gospel or be trained to make disciples.

Discussion Questions

Here are some questions you can use to discuss and pray through how you might be able to empower the men and women on your teams toward greater co-leadership and collaboration with one another.

• What feelings arise when you think about men and women leading together? What excites you, and what tensions do you notice? Why?
• Looking at your current leadership context, are both men and women represented in leadership roles and decision-making spaces?
• What roles do men and women play on your team? How does cross-gender collaboration and teamwork currently function?
• How might empowering both men and women leaders expand your access to the people you are ministering to?
• Are team members and national partners positioned to thrive in their callings, strengths, and gifts? Why or why not?
• Is there someone you sense the Spirit is inviting you to intentionally elevate and develop as a leader?
• What specific changes could you make to strengthen collaboration and teamwork between men and women leaders on your team?

…every time there has been a spiritual awakening, women are often called up into ministry and spiritual leadership. It’s one of the signs of a revival that isn’t talked about very often.

Dr. Jo Anne Lyon, 181

In Developing Female Leaders, church consultant Kadi Cole addresses how churches and leaders can better develop, empower, and elevate women leaders, with strategies on how to navigate common “minefields” and barriers that women leaders experience.

Cole draws from research from more than 30 executive and high-level female ministry leaders from a variety of settings, survey results from over 1,000 female leaders around the world, and interviews from male church leaders who are actively engaging in this issue. Each chapter outlines a “best practice” for church leaders to follow and ends with discussion questions to work through with a leadership team.

We have found this book incredibly relevant and practical. Kadi Cole’s best practices challenge many common assumptions held about women in ministry leadership, and reveal how those assumptions might actually be holding leaders back! But when women leaders are intentionally developed in a supportive environment, all that stunted potential can be unleashed for the expansion of the kingdom of God!

…there’s always room for one more at God’s table…there will always be more than enough people to love, more than enough people to serve, more than enough people with whom we can share the gospel, and more than enough people who need great leadership. In God’s kingdom, there is more than enough for all of us.

Kadi Cole, 178

In our last two posts, we’ve defined what the “apostolic” is, and 5 essential elements of an apostolic leader. An apostolic leader needs to have all 5 elements of big vision, risking faith, foundation setting, leader developer, and surrender to God.

If you can find a clearly apostolically gifted, mature, national believer to partner with, that’s awesome! But, someone that gifted and experienced will likely already have many ministry responsibilities and it may take time to build trust with that leader in order to partner.

However, we are often looking for leaders with latent apostolic giftings that have not yet fully emerged. For one, I think apostolic leaders are relatively rare – there’s no research around this but talking to other CPM practitioners, generally the number is <10% of believers, if not <5%. Secondly, a fully mature apostolic leader is rarely available.

It may feel like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. But our encouragement is this: It only takes one.

All it takes is one national ‘Paul,’ with the vision, faith, giftings, and surrender to catalyze a movement that will change the trajectory of a nation.

In the early 2000s, the president of Campus Crusade in Thailand, Pastor Nok, used his significant influence to gather 80% of the pastors in Thailand in a Congress to ask the question, “What will it take to complete the Great Commission in Thailand?” From that, they formed the National Plan to see the gospel go to every district and village in Thailand. The churches that our team currently work with came through introductions from leaders within the National Plan.

I asked one ex-pat worker who knew Pastor Nok well, “What is his story? How did he come to faith?” He told me that Pastor Nok was the first Thai Cru staff ever, and that he was led to faith by one American Cru staff member named Chip, who only managed to win and disciple one Thai person to faith in 10 years in Thailand. That was Pastor Nok.

It only takes one.

But how do you find that one? How do you discern if they have the elements to be an apostolic, multiplying leader? What do you do with them to develop them and help their gifting and vision emerge?

Barnabas: Recognizing Hidden Apostolic Potential

Out of anyone in Scripture, Paul was perhaps the most unlikely candidate to be transformed and used by Jesus for his purposes. Often the apostolic leader may emerge from the most unexpected of places. Barnabas saw the latent giftings in Paul – that he had a miraculous transformation from a persecutor of Christians to a chosen instrument to bring the gospel to the Gentiles (Acts 9:15), that he immediately and boldly shared the gospel with the Jews in the synagogue (Acts 9:20), and that he needed an advocate before the disciples in Jerusalem that didn’t trust him (Acts 9:27). Eventually, Barnabas spends a year with Paul in Antioch discipling others (Acts 11:26), likely identifying and developing Paul’s strengths, before the Holy Spirit sets them aside for the first journey in Acts 13.

When everyone else saw Paul’s evil background, Barnabas saw his new transformation and calling.

When everyone else didn’t trust who Paul said he was, Barnabas advocated for his faithfulness.

When opportunities arose for new ministry, Barnabas went to recruit Paul, developing his giftings and maturity.

And when the Holy Spirit called them to be set apart to start a new work in new places, Barnabas was beside Paul as he stepped fully into his giftings as an apostle.

We need to be like Barnabas, to have the eyes to see the potential in latent apostolic leaders, and the ears to hear from the Holy Spirit how to help them fulfill their calling.

Indicators of an Emerging Apostolic Leader

When we are looking for these apostolic leaders, we are certainly checking for the 5 essential elements. We’ll ask them questions like, what is your vision? How did you come to faith? What does your ministry look like? What obstacles are you running into? And we’re listening for big vision, willingness to risk, methods that look like multiplication or at least are different from the norm, leaders that they’ve developed, and signs of surrender. But a latent apostolic leader may not have had the chance to step into pioneering ministry, and therefore may not yet exhibit some of these elements. Apart from directly evaluating these 5 elements, we’ve observed some other hints of someone having an underlying apostolic gifting.

They don’t need to have all of these indicators, and just having one doesn’t mean that they are certainly apostolic leaders. But if you see some of these, it may be worth building trust and listening to the Holy Spirit about helping these leaders emerge into their calling and gifting.

Black Sheep – Often, latent apostolic leaders can be seen as black sheep that don’t fit the mold of their church. Other words could be non-conformist, oddball, contrarian. They are still part of the flock, still a sheep, but different from the rest. Sometimes church leaders don’t know what to do with this person who rocks the boat and may have a lot of new ideas that others aren’t willing to do. Whenever someone in Thailand tells me that another believer is interesting / weird / eccentric / not like the others – my radar immediately pops up. The latent apostolic leader is dissatisfied with the status quo, and it can cause friction with people in the church because their drive and desire is to pioneer, though they may not have personally clarified that vision yet.

Failed Entrepreneurs / Not Afraid to Start Things / Flexible Methodology – “failed entrepreneurs” was often a phrase that we were coached to look for in identifying apostolic leaders. That desire to set foundations, without a clear vision of their calling, can result in starting a lot of new businesses, ministries, and start ups. This boldness and risk-taking demeanor could be indicators of an apostolic leader. When we meet new leaders, we also want to see if they’re willing to be flexible in their methods or if they’re strongly tied to some kind of program or curriculum. If they’re willing to try new things to pioneer, that’s a good sign. If they’re wanting to simply grow their own ministry flavor, we would probably move on.

Anointed / Fruitful – Even before Paul started on his missionary journeys, he was faithfully sharing and discipling in Damascus, Jerusalem, and Antioch. He boldly and powerfully proclaimed the gospel and made disciples. Many times, we can meet a person that is saying all the right things – that they’re excited about multiplication, that they have a vision to pioneer – but the fruit of their lives doesn’t reflect that at all. It could be that they’ve never been empowered or equipped, and then there is an opportunity to help them live out that vision. But often, there is a lot of exciting talk without the actual faithfulness and fruitfulness indicative of a leader that God desires to use. Given the choice between someone who says the right things versus someone who has the fruitfulness of disciples and a godly life, I am taking the latter every time.

Character Immaturities – I’d imagine Paul was pretty rough around the edges when he first came to faith. Although he was certainly humbled by his Damascus road experience, there was still much of his old life – the prideful, highly positioned, well-known persecutor of Christians – that needed to be transformed. Though some of the disciples in Acts 9 were afraid of Paul, Barnabas came and advocated for him, eventually recruiting him and developing him into the minister to the Gentiles that he was called to be.

Similarly, a developing apostolic leader probably has some character immaturities that might be signs of opportunity. Sinclair says “self confidence, overassertiveness, and independence” along with stubbornness and overcontrol could be some character issues that an immature apostolic might struggle with. Miley adds impatience and being overextended in their commitments. You can see in these developing leaders the innate vision, passion, and drive to accomplish great things for God, but without the humility, testedness, and surrender needed for them to succeed. 

An immature apostolic has probably had many people in their church exhort them in their impatience and roughness, probably almost condescendingly so – “you’re young so you don’t get how things work.” “It’s nice that you have big goals and new ideas but we have to be realistic.” Increasingly they can balk against authority because of their internal conviction and what the Spirit is stirring up. When someone validates the vision they’ve received as well as challenges them to grow in their leadership to meet that vision, we’ve seen apostolic leaders respond with eagerness. There is a great opportunity for a Barnabas-type leader to say, “I see the potential in you and love your vision. I’d love to walk alongside you to help you grow in your ministry and your walk with God to see those things happen.”

Jack of All Trades / Multi-Gifted – For a yet developing apostolic that has started some new ministry, you may see that they are at least competent, if not gifted, to do many different types of ministry – evangelism, leader development, teaching, shepherding, mercy, administration, etc. In the pioneering environment, it may be necessary for an apostolic leader to play a lot of roles to get things started and God empowers them to do so. But the opposite pitfall for a multi-gifted leader is to hold on to control because they are so competent at so many things. Which leads us to…

Releasing Authority – The apostolic leader is willing and quick to release authority. As new disciples grow in their maturity and gifts, the apostolic leader is quick to empower every disciple to step into their authority to make disciples and serve God. Over control by leaders is a major barrier to multiplication. Apostolic leaders understand that they will play an important role of spiritual parent to many leaders, but they are also active in helping disciples step out in faith to grow in their dependence on God. If a leader expresses too much hesitation in letting disciples take simple steps of obedience like sharing the gospel or leading a discovery Bible study without them, that could be a barrier.

In coaching movement practitioners, identifying a national partner with apostolic gifting is one of the most complex and difficult parts of the process and something we get the most questions about. How do I know if it’s worth investing in this person? Should I spend more time with person A or person B?

Going out to share the gospel takes boldness but it’s relatively simple and straightforward – people are interested to know more about Jesus or they aren’t. But getting to know believers, building relationship with them, navigating language and culture, discerning their words, their actions, their vision, and their character is an art, not a science. It takes a lot of prayer, getting to know people, trying new things, and failing forward repeatedly before you might find someone. Sometimes, we’ve partnered with people for 3, 4, 5 years before it becomes evident that they are missing an essential element of an apostolic leader. And that’s OK. We don’t think of that time as wasted, but as time invested in trying to find a pioneering leader and learning what that might look like in our culture and mistakes to avoid. It’s also never a waste of time investing in local believers to grow in their disciple-making.

Hopefully, knowing the 5 essential elements and some of the potential indicators of a latent apostolic leader will help you in the process. Some practitioners we know met their apostolic partner in their first ever training – hooray for them, really. We were relatively fortunate and found our partner after about 3 years of ministry, 5 years in country. Some people we know took 10 years and hundreds of trainings and relationships to find their partner. It’s up to the timing of the Lord.

But remember – it only takes one.

Reflection Questions

1. Do you have a personal bias toward or against any of these indicators? Why?
2. Consider the local believers that you know. Do any of them display these indicators or essential elements?
3. Do you know local believers that seem to “say the right things” but lack demonstrated faithfulness and fruitfulness? Why do you suppose that is? How should you continue to engage with this believer?
4. Where are some networks or communities that you could build relationships to get to know potential apostolic leaders?

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.

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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!

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

Leadership Foundations Part 2: Why Are Leaders Needed?

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In the last two posts of the Leadership Foundations series, we covered the definition of leadership and some leadership principles, and answered the question – Why are leaders needed?

In this post, we’ll explore a question that many aspiring leaders ask: how do I know if I’m a leader? What does discerning a role of leadership in missions look like?

Discerning is a Process

Discerning whether God is calling you to be a leader is a process and shouldn’t be taken lightly or done too quickly. Many times on overseas field teams and in ministry in general, there is a ‘next man up’ view of leadership, meaning that whoever is available to be the leader will be regardless of calling, gifting, capacity, or character. The benefit of this reality is that there are many opportunities for leadership overseas because of the great need for leaders among the unreached – many leaders may need to return from the field for a variety of reasons (health, conflict, visas, etc.). The downside for this ‘next man (or woman) up’ view is that there can be very little discernment, clarity, preparation, or support for people who find themselves in a leadership role all of a sudden. This can lead to missed expectations, disappointment, and burnout for the leader and their team – and then, it’s the next next man up, perpetuating a cycle of poor leadership transitions and unprepared leaders.

In many biblical leaders’ lives, there is a process of testing, discernment, and development that God uses to help those leaders grow into the person that is prepared to lead, and for that leader to gain clarity and confidence in the role of leadership that God is calling them to. Between the time that David is anointed by Samuel to become King at around age 15, and when he is actually crowned as King at age 30, David endures 15 years of continuing as a shepherd, fighting Goliath, becoming one of Saul’s commanders, and even running for his life from Saul. During that time, I’m sure David may have asked himself the question, “Am I really supposed to be King?” Through all the testing and trial, God solidified David’s confidence in his calling to be King, as well as developed him into the person he needed to be God-glorifying in that role. Similarly, Paul had 13 years between his conversion on the road to Damascus where Jesus tells him that he is the “chosen instrument” to bring the Gospel to the Gentiles, and when he is sent out with Barnabas from Antioch on the first missionary journey. This time was filled with testing (Paul had to escape persecution), development, and discernment as well. For the record, we’re not saying it will take over a decade for you to discern whether you’re a leader, but just wanted to provide some biblical examples of the discernment / development process that God has many leaders go through before they step into the position of leadership.

In our opinion, your calling towards field leadership should be as solid as your calling to go overseas. The burden and responsibility of leadership can be as challenging, if not moreso, than the stressors of cross-cultural life and ministry. If this is true, then your calling towards leadership, and your preparation towards it, should be considered and pursued with intention!

Questions For Discernment

Here are some aspects to consider in your discernment for your preparedness and calling as a leader:

1. Have you been leading? How did that go, and where do you have room to grow? Have you ever led – anything? Experience leading in ministry settings would be great – this could include the welcome team at church on Sundays or a small group or a discipleship group. Even in non-ministry settings, have you ever been a leader on your sports team or in your workplace? How was your experience of leading – did people follow you? What was good and bad about that?
   
   If you haven’t ever led something clearly and you have an aspiration to, talk to a leader or mentor in your church or ministry. See if there are chances to lead by SERVING in your church, or by inviting others to join into a disciple-making team. (If you’re interested in how to start a disciple-making team, please contact us! One of the resources we use to help people get started is this book: Spiritual Multiplication in the Real World.)
   
2. Does your community (those that lead you, work alongside you, or follow you) affirm leadership in you? Ask your discipler, mentor, or leader and those in your church that know you if they sense or see leadership in you. Tell them, ‘I’m sensing that God might be calling me to step into a role of leadership in going overseas: what do you think? How can I grow? What are my strengths and weaknesses as a leader?’ It takes a lot of humility and a lot of courage to ask these questions. Be humble and receive the feedback – even if it is hearing, ‘you haven’t really been a leader yet and need to develop quite a bit before you can step into that role.’ The timing of entering into leadership is up to God.
   
3. Reflect on your motivations of being a leader. Is it for recognition or approval? Or to be faithful to God’s calling, and to serve others? In 1 Peter 5, Peter gives the elders and shepherds, spiritual leaders of God’s people, an exhortation for what motivations they are to have as leaders – ‘not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.’ A lot of leaders will struggle with pride, and it’s super dangerous. Just two verses later, Peter says that God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Ask God to give you a humble heart, and to help you surrender any prideful motivations to instead be a humble and servant leader.
   
4. Spend time in prayer and listening. Ask God if a role of leadership is what He has for you. Ask Him how you need to develop. Submit to God’s calling one way or another, even if He is saying that you aren’t ready or just not yet. Ultimately, the best place to be is submitted to whatever role that God has for you. But I’m willing to bet that for many of you, He may be calling you into a role of serving through leading.
   
5. Count the Cost. As you discern whether or not you have a calling for leadership, it’s imperative that you take time to count the cost. Leadership is a heavy responsibility, and if leadership truly is serving, then it requires you to be thinking of your people and their needs, often even above your own. Are you willing to longsuffer with your people, and bear their burdens with them? Are you willing to sacrifice time to yourself or with your family for the sake of those you lead? Are you willing to go first, which many times includes failing first, in many ministry endeavors? Are you willing to engage in conflict and hard conversations as you develop those God has given to you? Will you give up your sleep and your free time and your preferences? Are you willing to take responsibility for the health, thriving, and direction of your team and teammates? If some of these things feel difficult to say ‘yes’ to, then process that with the Lord and ask him why you feel tension. Sometimes, this might reveal where we need to grow, and sometimes it might show us we aren’t quite ready for leadership yet.
   
   In our first year, Jenn and I were dealing with all the same cross-cultural stressors and difficulties of transitioning to the field. Learning a new language and culture is certainly a significant enough challenge! But as leaders, we were responsible for helping our teammates through those transitions as well. Whether it was helping a couple on our team through marital issues, staying with a teammate who was in the hospital for over a month, or mediating a conflict between team members, as leaders, we were called to be present, serve, and lead those that God had entrusted to us.
   
   Counting the cost does not mean just considering all the difficulties – the cost includes the reward. In that very same passage where Peter exhorts the spiritual leaders, he points us to the great and lasting reward given to those faithful in leadership.

“And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory.”

1 Peter 5:4

Ultimately, our role is to point those that we lead to the chief Shepherd – who shepherds those on our teams but also shepherds and cares for us! Are you willing to respond in obedience to God’s call on your life to not only go, but to lead others? The reward is to reign and rule with Christ in glory for all time.

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?

All Leadership Foundations Posts:
LF – Why are Leaders Needed?
LF – How Do I Discern if I’m a Leader?
LF – How Do I Develop as a Leader?
LF – How to Form a Personal Development Plan
_______

The words ‘leader’ or ‘leadership’ have a lot of broad connotations for different people. The term leader is used in sports, business, family, church, hobbies, politics, military, and practically every possible area of life. As a blog and resource for missions leaders, we thought it’d be good to define and introduce some of what we mean when we say ‘leader’ or ‘leadership.’

We’ll have a series of posts covering the thoughts and lessons we’ve learned about leadership over the years, and we will try to answer questions that we have had in our discernment process and questions that aspiring leaders have asked us over time. Things like – ‘How do I know if I’m a leader?’, ‘What type of leader am I?’, or ‘What’s the process for becoming a team leader?’

Much of the following is from an ‘Aspiring Leaders’ workshop we’ve given for the past 2 years at a conference for future cross-cultural goers to introduce them to leadership and help them discern if God is calling them towards a leadership role overseas.

What is a Leader?

When we launched to the field as team leaders 8 years ago, we were 25 year old, 6 month newlyweds – and we had NO IDEA what we were doing. Most of what we’ve learned, we’ve learned from making mistakes and failing repeatedly. Over time, as we started to learn how much we didn’t know and how much help we needed, we started grabbing mentors in every category of team leadership, reading books and articles, and most importantly, receiving from the Holy Spirit and the Word.

From that, a few clarifying lessons about leadership have been repeatedly true.

Firstly – what is a leader? After looking at probably 20 definitions of leader and leadership through my seminary class, this is the definition I use, primarily adopted from Robert Clinton’s Making of a Leader with a little adjustment.

A leader is a man or woman who receives vision from God to influence the people of God towards the purposes of God.

• Receives vision: Another word you could say is to receive direction from God. Without receiving direction from God – then it’s just a worldly leader instead of a godly leader, even if they are a ministry leader. Leaders must be consistently receiving from the Lord – through the Word, through community and mentors, and through prayer and the Holy Spirit. And this is true for a big, life-long vision, and the day-to-day steps of faithful obedience towards that end goal. Receiving from God is an essential component for a leader!
• Influence the people of God: The word influence here is used broadly, and can encompass a large variety of words – manage, direct, encourage, empower, communicate, etc. Once you have the vision, you have to be able to apply influence over a group of people to move in that direction. One way to tell if you’re a leader? If people are following you towards something.
• Purposes of God: There’s an end goal that God is trying to move His people towards. For missions leaders specifically, it’s to ultimately see God’s glory among the nations. As a leader, the things you say, the decisions you make, the actions you take – they are all focused towards leading the people God has given you towards seeing all peoples worship Jesus. And leading them to thrive in the specific purposes and roles He’s given them.

Other Aspects of Ministry Leadership

Now that we have the definition of leadership, here are some other aspects of biblical leadership that we think are important, with consideration towards missions team leadership as the focus.

God’s pattern throughout the Bible is using leaders: If you think about almost all the stories in the Bible, they are told primarily through a man or woman that God is calling to be used as His representative to receive vision or direction from Him, and to lead and influence the people of God, whether Israel or the Church, towards the purposes that God has. Think about people like Moses, David, Daniel, Esther, Paul, or Priscila and Aquila. God absolutely has a personal relationship with every person that belongs to Him, AND He chooses to use specific men and women as leaders of His people. Both are true. 

Many times, when the leaders that God chooses are godly, obedient, sensitive to the Spirit’s leading, and act as servants, the people of God thrive. When leaders fall into sin or disobedience, it has a negative effect on the people of God. For example, when the 12 spies enter into the Promised Land in Numbers 13, 10 of them are intimidated by the people in the land and spread a bad or false report to the people of Israel. In turn, the people grumble against God and invoke his anger, to the point that Moses has to intercede on their behalf. But the consequence is significant – from the poor leadership of the 10 spies, the people of Israel are condemned to die in the desert.

For some reason, God chooses to work through leaders, and as leaders go, many times, so go the people they lead. We’ve seen this as practically true on the field as well – when there are godly, healthy, servant team leaders, the teams tend to thrive. When there are ill-prepared, detached leaders, teams tend to suffer. And unfortunately, in our experience, there are many more ineffective and unhealthy leaders than effective and healthy leaders. Largely, team leaders want to do a good job and lead well, but the task is so insurmountable and the preparation and support is so minimal, that they are not set up for success. This is why we chose to start a blog for missions leaders.

Servant Leadership: The biblical definition of leadership is not the same as the world’s definition. Mark 10 makes this very clear – James and John want positions of authority at Jesus’ right and left hands. And Jesus makes it clear that biblical leadership is servant leadership. 

And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Mark 10:42-45

People might think at first that being a leader has privileges – you get to decide what happens, people have to listen to you, do what you say – that isn’t really biblical leadership. If you try to ‘exercise authority’ instead of serving others and putting other people’s needs and desires above your own, then your leadership will backfire. So this is a question for aspiring leaders who are discerning: are you willing to put down your preferences in order to be a servant leader?

Leadership is a Role, not a Value: I (Steven) personally struggled with stepping into leadership when we were forming our team. Some of the people on our Thailand team were friends that I had known for 20+ years, and we were just wanting to join a team together. But as we investigated, we didn’t find almost any teams that were healthy and pursuing a vision for movements. So we were encouraged to become a team, and I was invited to be the team leader. At first, I rejected it completely – it’s so weird, why would I be a leader over my peers and friends? I’m not better than them, and I didn’t have more experience or anything like that. But as I spent time in prayer and studying the Word and asking for feedback, God was showing me that leadership is a role, not a value. The world may look at leaders and assign to them more value. In the kingdom of God, our value is found in belonging to Christ, regardless of what role we play. 1 Corinthians 12 helped me to understand that the body of Christ has a variety of giftings, meant to serve one another, and in fact it is the more modest parts that deserve to be given greater honor.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

1 Corinthians 12:21–26

For me, God had given me some attributes and giftings that made sense for me to step into the leader role. So when I learned that it was a role, not a value putting me ABOVE my friends and teammates but even more so in a position BELOW them as a servant, then I became willing to say ‘yes’ to becoming a leader. And a huge credit to my friends, who displayed great humility by allowing me and even encouraging me to become their leader. There are many roles on a team; some of the ways that the leader role serves others is by helping to cast vision, make decisions, take responsibility, and communicate.

Character and Gifting for Leaders: There are many ways to break down the components of a leader, including character, calling, gifting, and capacity. But the primary marker of biblical leadership is Christ-like character. Leaders are not perfect – in fact, in the Bible, there’s a ton of flaws that we see in leaders – but it’s clear that Paul emphasizes spiritual character and maturity as the prerequisite for becoming a leader. Having certain gifts or attributes as a leader are important, but the character piece is primary. 1 Timothy 3 and 1 Peter 5 provide some lists of expected character for leaders in the church or ministry. For our team, we are particularly looking for people who have strong humility, maturity, and integrity, or at least are willing to develop in those things. Godly character is primary for spiritual leaders!

In terms of leadership giftings, one grid to look at is APEST in Ephesians 4:11 – “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.” This can be a helpful grid to think about what type of leader you are, though it’s not just limited to those. There’s also the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12. For example, administration is another type of gifting that can be found in a leader. Learning your leadership giftings is important so that you can lead out of the ways that God has made and gifted you. And learning your giftings helps you to be self-aware about the areas you might be weaker – in order to develop your competencies as a leader or to recruit others that will fill in those weaknesses. We’ll talk more about developing your character, giftings, skills, and strengths in a future post.

Types of Missions Leaders – Team Leader and Sub-Team Leader: Lastly, there’s many different types of leaders within the church and ministry, but for the purposes of this blog, we are specifically focusing on leaders for missions teams. You’ve probably heard people say something like, ‘everyone is a leader!’ In some sense, this is true that every disciple is a leader, because we are all called to be disciple-makers.

But throughout Scripture (Exodus 18:13-26; Deut. 1:13-15) and in ministry, there are different levels of leadership – a disciple-maker would be a leader over 2 or 3. You might have a leader over a disciple-making team of 6-10 people.

Two roles that we are primarily highlighting is that of a team leader or a sub-team leader, but there are a variety of leadership levels on missions teams. The goal is not necessarily to reach one of these levels, but to identify what level of leadership that you are at and to serve faithfully in that role for the season that God has you in.

In Part 1, we discussed what strategy is and is not, and some areas for learning before trying to establish a strategy plan. This post is a step-by-step guide for how to write a strategy plan for your ministry. Creating the strategy plan assumes you have received from God the end vision he has given you and your team. The examples in this guide are specifically for church planting ministry, but the broader steps can be applied to almost any ministry context.

1. Pray and Fast: This must be the first step – to look up and go to the One who Sovereignly knows and guides every plan. Start by surrendering and releasing all of your expectations and assumptions. Ask God for wisdom, faith, big vision; ask Him for a promise, theme, phrase, verse, image, and spend time waiting and listening. You may not get something specific immediately, but receiving a verse or phrase from God to guide your planning can be a strong foundation.

2. SWOT Analysis: This assumes you’ve done some homework on investigating your context. From there, do a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats, Opportunities) for your area. For how to do a SWOT, check out this short guide. Also, here are some helpful questions you might ask in a SWOT analysis. The SWOT Analysis gives you some insight into what opportunities and challenges may be happening in your area at this moment in time.

3. Shortened ‘Gap Analysis’ and Pathway: Gap Analysis is just a way of asking – where are we now, and where would we like to go? By clarifying the present situation and the end vision, it lays the foundation for how to create your strategy plan, which is how you will get from here to there. Take your ministry principles and / or model and list out the broad steps or pathway for how to get to your end goal. Our team uses this CPM Continuum as a guide for where we want to head, and for new teams, you would want to start at the beginning with things like Investigation and Partnerships. If you are further along and re-visiting the strategy plan, start where your current status is. 

4. Brainstorm the Questions: Now you have the general pathway and broad steps for how to get to your end vision. The next step is to discover effective applications for your context in each step. Start with brainstorming questions that need to be answered to discover effective applications. Below is a list of the sections and questions adapted from the CPM Continuum, CPM principles, and the Multiplication Cycle that are relevant to our ministry context. The questions below are just examples of what you might ask in each step; you would want to list 3-7 key questions under each to try and find appropriate applications in each step.

5. Answer the Questions, Establish the Applications: After you lay out the steps and the questions, try to write down various answers. Some answers will be obvious, and others will just be a guess. This exercise will help you understand your level of confidence in the application for each step. If you’re particularly unsure about a section, then spend more time in prayer and investigation about it. Then, list no more than 2 to 3 potential applications that could be used in that section. 

• For example, Gospel sharing or evangelism is an important step in our ministry process. After discussion, prayer, and investigation, our team listed out 3 different potential tools that we wanted to try in our context. We automatically eliminated the ‘Bridge’ diagram because Thailand was a fear/power context and not a guilt / innocence one. Eventually, after experimenting with a few different evangelism tools like 3 Circles, we decided to primarily use a testimony + prayer for needs approach that led to a simple, biblical gospel presentation that one of our Thai partners wrote. It took several years of iteration and experimentation to establish that application, and it was mainly picked after this church planter started seeing dozens of people come to faith!

6. Create 5-3-1 year goals: Now that you have the pathway and some applications, create your goals – what progress in your pathways are you realistically pursuing in these time frames? 3 and 5 year goals are going to be more vision level, but 1 year goals should have clear lead / lag measures to get to where you think God is calling your team to go. These can be easily changed as you progress forward depending on circumstances and timing, so don’t worry if you don’t feel rock solid in your 3 and 5 year goals. They are there as a benchmark to see where you are shooting at, and you want to work backwards from future vision to current actions. For example, a new team post-language school might have these potential goals:

• 5 years: Train and coach 15 church planting teams in our area; see 20 simple churches planted.
• 3 years: Establish at least one main national partner; Train and coach 5 church planting teams; see 30 Discovery Bible Groups started.
• 1 year: Investigate 5 potential national partners; pilot the first 5 trainings for church planters.

7. Establish your Wildly Important Goal (WIG): Our team uses the 4 Disciplines of Execution as our short-term goal setting tool. Basically, the premise of 4DX is that if you can focus on your 1 or 2 most important goals for success, you can achieve it, but if you have too many goals, you’ll be too stretched to obtain success in any category. So for our 1 year goals, we want to give extra thought and discussion with our teams to make sure it is the most important goal that will move us forward the most towards our end vision. Our teams will do a 2-3 day planning retreat to go through this entire strategy process, ending in a single 6-18 month goal. The 4DX process also gives some helpful tools for how to be accountable and how to track your progress in this goal with a scoreboard.

• Using the above example, the goal is to begin piloting trainings for church planters by the end of one year. In order to do that, we have to establish introductory partnerships with 5 potential national churches and leaders (lag measure – the outcome we want to see). Our lead measure (the critical activities that we engage in to affect our lag measure) would be to engage in a partnership development meeting with a potential partner at least 3 times a month (e.g. attend the church, visit a small group, cast vision with a leader, serve in some capacity to build trust, etc.). We believe that by faithfully acting on these lead measures, God will help us find the right churches and leaders He wants us to partner with.

8. Get Feedback: After you’ve given some time, thought, and prayer into your strategy plan – get feedback from others! This could be other peer leaders in your agency or country, mentors or coaches, your teammates, and your national partners. 

9. Additional Questions to Consider: These are some broader questions to consider along with the ones you establish in your pathway.

• How will we recruit, develop, and establish leaders at every stage?
• What are your top potential barriers / constraints / obstacles? How do we turn them into opportunities? 
• What knowledge, skills, resources, teammates, roles, partnerships, competencies will you need to achieve your strategic objectives?
• Would additional financial resources help you achieve your objectives? What are budgeting aspects to consider in your strategy plan?
• What rhythms of evaluation / feedback will you have? And how? 
• What might be some completely out of the box / way out of left field ideas that could spur innovation in your strategic approach?
• What support structures do you think may be needed in your strategic approach?

10. Jump In!: Once you’ve written your strategy plan, gotten feedback, and established your 6 to 18 month goals, jump in and do the work! Now that you’ve prayed, investigated, and discussed the different steps, applications, and goals, you can focus on the most important goals, while keeping an approach of experimentation, learning, and adjustment if your applications aren’t effective. Don’t be afraid to fail forward – even if your plan doesn’t bear the fruit you’re hoping for, it’s an opportunity to learn and innovate to move forward. There’s also a fine line between discerning when you should innovate and change something, or when you should keep persevering in a goal – ask the Holy Spirit to give you wisdom to decide. As a general guide, we have heard from CPM practitioners that you don’t want to say something ‘doesn’t work’ until you’ve tried it 200+ times!

On first glance, this may look like a lot of moving parts and complexity. My encouragement to you is to set aside 2-3 days and just start trying to follow the guide and fill in your plan. I’m confident that by the end, you’ll have at least the beginnings of a solid strategy plan for you and your team. Going through this process gives you and your team clear goals to focus on, an understanding of your ministry process, questions that you can investigate, and motivating vision for where God is leading you. To me, getting even a semblance of those benefits is worth giving a couple of days of focus, as opposed to you or your teammates waking up each day and not knowing what you’re supposed to do!

And as we said in Part 1, allow the Holy Spirit to guide and surprise you. If you sense him nudging you in a different direction, follow him with obedience and boldness! Most importantly, we submit all of our plans to him:

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

Proverbs 16:9

Lastly, if you need help either getting started or at any step in the creation of your strategy plan, we’d love to help! Please reach out to us at contact@missionsleaders.com.