This content was co-written with my friend LB who previously served as a team leader in East Asia and is currently serving in member care.

In the previous post, I shared about my leadership journey and the unique internal tension I felt about being a woman leader in ministry and on the mission field. Though I felt called and affirmed by God to step into leadership on our team in Thailand, I also continually struggled with doubt, anxiety, fear, and anger. While it was easy for me to blame these feelings on outside circumstances or people, I eventually came to the difficult conclusion that many (if not the majority) of my tensions were self-generated.

When God calls someone into leadership, he is primarily concerned with that person’s character and heart. Who we are is just as important to God as what we do for him. A person could learn every leadership development framework or tool, but without a heart freed from lies and filled with the identity found in Christ, their leadership will never reach its fullest potential.

In this post, I will focus on the most common ways that women leaders (including myself!) sabotage ourselves in the secret places of our inner lives and hearts. Before we can even begin to address external barriers or specific contexts, we want to always start by looking inward. While this list could also apply to men, I have noticed women in particular tend to struggle with these areas. Research suggests that one reason for this comes from gender-role stereotypes, which means that our social understanding and expectations of what it means to be a leader coincides more with an expression of male leadership than female leadership. Because of this, women leaders find they often need to navigate through unspoken rules and expectations that society does not necessarily place on men. For example, male leaders who speak up are applauded as confident and assertive, but women who speak up can often be labeled as “bossy” or “pushy.” So we often end up adopting self-sabotaging mindsets and behaviors as a way to cope (Playing By the Rules, 12).

As you read through these examples, ask the Holy Spirit to highlight any you may struggle with and ask how He might help you find freedom.

Imposter Syndrome

A few years ago, Steven and I were invited to a meeting of other team leaders around the world to discuss strategic ways to onboard and train new missionaries. Those attending, mostly men, seated themselves at the multiple tables in a large conference room, but I hung back paralyzed about where I was supposed to sit. It felt like the middle school cafeteria all over again! 

All the women in the room, mostly stay at home moms who were not involved in their teams or in ministry, fit around one single table. Do I shrink over to the women’s table, simply there as “Steven’s wife?” Or do I join the tables with the other men and get to talk about ministry?

Would they acknowledge me as a leader?

I ended up shuffling over to the table of women and sitting with them. Because discussions were organized by table, I ended up not being able to participate in any of the discussions as my table was assumed to be non-participants. After the meetings, Steven asked me, “why didn’t you sit at the main tables? You have just as much experience and just as much to say as anyone else here.” I felt ashamed by this question, because what Steven said was true! I did have experience as a leader and had unique things to contribute. But instead of trusting that God had called me to be a leader and to bring my unique perspective, I chose to hide (literally!) and diminished my own voice.

What Is It: Imposter syndrome is a feeling of unworthiness tied to our self identity, particularly in leadership spaces. Kate Coleman describes imposter syndrome as “…profound feelings of self-doubt and pervasive feelings of being unqualified” (7 Deadly Sins of Women in Leadership, 7). In a 2020 KPMG study of 750 female executive leaders, 75% reported regularly experiencing imposter syndrome, mostly because they never expected they would ever attain such a position. In that same study, over half of the participants revealed a fear that they would never meet expectations. 

We can experience imposter syndrome for a variety of reasons, from societal messaging that presents men as ideal leaders, the roles we played in our families, or our own lack of self esteem, just to name a few. Deb Liu, CEO of Ancestry.com, elaborates on why women tend to experience imposter syndrome more – “this feeling is even more acute when you are ‘the only,’ someone who doesn’t look like everyone else. You feel singled out. You are not only being judged on your merits but also feel the weight of being different (Take Back Your Power, 63).” Many times, women leaders are the only women in the leadership room. It can be hard to feel like you belong when no one else looks like you.

What Impostor Syndrome Looks Like: The way we display impostor syndrome can take a multitude of forms. Here are some of the ways I have seen it play out for myself and other women leaders: 

• Inauthenticity or “shrinking to fit” – pretending to be the ideal person who actually belongs in the leadership role and becoming less of your authentic self. Changing yourself to match the archetype of who actually fits.
• Fear of taking risks or of volunteering for assignments that carry a risk of failure.
• Inability to take feedback well. Constructive feedback will feel like a confirmation of all your insecurities and positive feedback will feel like a lie.
• Inability to ask for help for fear of revealing that you don’t have everything together, and isolating to make sure no one finds you out. 

Underlying Beliefs: When we experience impostor syndrome, common messages we tell ourselves may sound like, “I’m not good / smart / talented / liked / experienced enough. I don’t belong in leadership because I don’t look or sound like other leaders. Everyone, including God, was wrong to think that I might have something to contribute because they don’t know who I really am. I have to hide who I really am from everyone else or else they all will be disappointed.” 

How Jesus Addresses Impostor Syndrome: We must battle the lies of impostor syndrome with the truth of who Jesus says we are. The Bible says that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8-9). Jesus fully knows who we are and he chose to love us, save us, and adopt us into his family. Not only that, he has given you a leadership assignment and good works that only you can do (Ephesians 2:10). He promises to finish the good work of sanctification that he started in us (Philippians 1:6). And in fact, you are not a fraud because the Bible says that you are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:21) and a royal priest (1 Peter 2)! 

When we believe the lies of impostor syndrome, we reject the identity that Christ died to purchase for us. We defy God’s vision of who he wants us to be and replace it with a lesser identity based on our fears and insecurities. But you don’t need to change yourself into a certain kind of person to “belong in the room”, or shrink back from faithful risk-taking in your leadership. God knows who you are and desires for you to lead as you are.

Application: If you find yourself falling into impostor syndrome in your leadership, here are some things you can do.

• Memorize scripture about your identity. Remember your leadership call and find confidence in your identity from Jesus first. Remember that if Jesus was the one who called you to leadership, then you absolutely belong in the room because he was the one who placed you there. 
• Know and celebrate what you bring to the table, as well as what you don’t. This helps you to portray your authentic leadership, and also keeps us from drifting into pretending to be who we are not. Find mentors and peers who you trust to guide and speak truthfully to you about who you are and to help you not deviate towards pretending. 
• Learn to accept feedback and mistakes gracefully, without shame or over apologizing. All leaders have weaknesses, and we miss out on crucial development when we are terrified of constructive feedback.

Desiring the Approval of Man over God

Early on in our team, I led a girl who was very talented in the ministry work but struggled with anger. We were good friends and I knew where these struggles had come from and that she wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt people with her sharp comments. However, though it was my job to manage and develop her, I found myself often pulling my punches. I withheld feedback and made excuses for her behavior (despite often being on the receiving end of her frustration) because I feared hurting her feelings, making her dislike me, or of having to deal with the fallout that might come my way if I did share what I truly thought. I prioritized winning her approval – or avoiding her disapproval – over being faithful to do or say what I knew the Lord was asking me to do in order to lead her well.

What is it: Desiring man’s approval is the act of placing others before God in your life. This includes being afraid of someone, holding someone in too high esteem, being controlled or mastered by people, putting excessive trust in people, or needing people to fill needs that God should fulfill.

What Needing Man’s Approval Over God Looks Like: 

• Needing constant validation from people – our leaders, those we lead, peers, family, anyone! When it’s not received, we can shut down in despair, or try to hunt for it in the form of attention seeking. It might look like fixating on trying to guess what other people are thinking of you.
• Needing man’s approval leads to people pleasing behavior. When we people please, we change ourselves to match other peoples’ expectations, thus affecting our ability to say “no” or to have proper boundaries with others. We may deprioritize our own responsibilities, ideals, or values in order to not rock the boat. But over time, this may cause us to feel like we are compromising ourselves in order to maintain approval. 
• Fear of making decisions and being held responsible for those decisions. Leaders often will be the lone voice or final decision maker for a team, and this is a daunting and heavy responsibility. It is almost impossible to make everyone happy all the time, and people who struggle with approval will have trouble trusting their own perspectives and logic enough to confidently own the responsibility or repercussions of their decisions.

Underlying Beliefs: My value / security / protection is found in how people perceive me. I am not enough and need affirmation that only other people can give me. God’s approval of me is not enough or not guaranteed.

How Jesus Addresses Fear of Man: When we struggle with a need for the approval of man over God, we forget that we are called to love and fear God above all else. When we love God first, we find that he is perfect, deserving, and the safest person to anchor our value and security on (Proverbs 29:25). We cannot call ourselves a servant of Christ if we value man’s approval over God’s (Galatians 1:10). His is the only approval that matters. From there, we find hope in the things God says of us. God loves us so much that he invites us to enjoy the fullness of union with Christ (John 15:1-10). How could God disapprove of us when we are one with the Son, who is absolutely approved of by the Father? We are valued, seen, and secure in God, and so we have freedom from needing it from fallible and imperfect people.

Application: 

• Have mentors and peers who you can consult and process with in your leadership decisions, and who you can trust to give you loving and trustworthy feedback.
• Know your triggers for when you start falling into patterns of approval seeking from people. In what situations and with whom do you start to dwell on what people are thinking of you? In what situations and with whom do you find yourself assuming peoples’ expectations or  intentions? Who can you never disappoint? 
• Plan well before meetings where you will have to make decisions, especially those with people whose approval you seek. What are you there to say? What are your non-negotiables, limits, and requests? Pause before saying “yes” and take 1 minute to assess your motives. If you say yes, what is the cost? 
• If you are hesitant to give feedback or to say hard things, consider what the cost of not saying something might be. In many cases, leaders are the only ones with the visibility into a person’s life and authority to be able to speak in, and our silence may rob a person we lead of critical development. 

These two internal barriers both come from not viewing ourselves rightly compared to how God sees us. When we judge our own value based off of things like other people’s opinions or societal stereotypes of what a leader should be or look like, we will often compromise ourselves to fit. We shrink back from risks and acts of faith that are required for bold leaders. This deeply saddens the heart of God, as he doesn’t see us or value us through any of those lenses. Instead, he desires that we would embrace fully the way he has created us and lead out of a confidence that our value is found in Christ alone!

Processing Questions

• Are internal barriers preventing you from stepping into greater influence or leadership?
• What are some internal barriers that keep you from being the leader God has called you to be? 
• Where do your internal barriers come from? How have you seen them play out in your life?
• How does God see you today? What are some truths from scripture that can help you remember this? 

In the second part of internal barriers for women in leadership, we’ll address two other significant topics – perfectionism and shame in our emotions.

Currently, women make up ⅔ of the missionary workforce! However, there is often a staggering lack of women in leadership positions in field contexts and mission organizations. For example, of the 200 organizations in MissioNexus, the largest professional association of evangelical mission agencies in North America, only 5 have women at the executive level (Playing By The Rules, 11). 

My own leadership journey was filled with confusion, barriers, mistakes, and a lot of failing forward. There are many women currently with overlooked leadership giftings, experiences, and calling who aren’t exercising that leadership to the benefit of mission teams because of both internal and external barriers. I believe that when women are released into their leadership God will work powerfully through them for his glory among the unreached!

My Story

Committing to moving and serving overseas was an incredibly difficult process for me. Though my heart longed for Thai people to know Jesus, there were significant fears that I had to work through before I could fully surrender to God’s calling for me to go. And one of my primary tension points was that I feared that being a leader as a woman meant that I was sinning against God.

Our sending church adheres to complementarian theology and tends to celebrate more traditional gender roles. I had never seen a woman leader outside of kids or women’s ministries, and wondered if I could have a role outside those spheres. After we got married, whenever Steven and I were in rooms of other ministry leaders, I started counting how many male leaders would greet me or even make eye contact. Unfortunately, the number was always very low, as most people assumed Steven was a leader whose wife tagged along. Even our leaders in our organization thought this way, and I was warned that I better do as much ministry while I could because I would be “taken out once [I] have kids.” While there is good intent and wisdom in that statement about the realities of being a mom in ministry, I received it with frustration and discouragement.

Throughout college, I had participated in and served on a leadership team over a 300 person campus ministry. Steven and I had together received vision, passion, and calling for Thailand through similar experiences and over a similar timeframe. I felt deep ownership over the team and vision that we were forming, and I desired to lead alongside Steven. But I had so many questions. Is it Biblical for women to be leaders? Can men and women co-lead together? What does that look like?

Our first year on the field was extremely difficult. My hidden questions, when met with cultural stress, stirred up into anger and accusation. No way was I going to be invisible! I was going to lead with my husband! It was my vision too! I pestered Steven ad nauseum, asking to be part of meetings he was going to. Questioning his decisions. Refusing on principle to do household chores (although, maybe I always would have done that). 

Steven, on his part, was confused. In his mind, when he had asked me to marry him, he always had expected me to be a ministry partner and co-leader with him. He discussed plans with me, facilitated team meetings with me, and brought me to networking opportunities. And he patiently bore with my obstinate antics, until one day in the midst of a spiraling complaining speech, he blurted out – “Who is oppressing you?”

Although he meant it as a joke, that one question made reconsider my whole perspective. This whole time, I was operating under the assumption that I was the only one able to advocate for myself and that Steven was only grudgingly humoring me in my desire to lead with him. Instead of trusting him and communicating, I projected my insecurities about my place in leadership onto Steven and felt like I had to fight him for a “place at the table.” But as we continued to discuss this topic (without my passive aggressive lashing out), we realized that we actually had always wanted the same things, but simply needed to get on the same page. 

I began to take proactive steps to grow in my own leadership, with much encouragement from my husband and our team. There were plenty of external obstacles, such as a lack of examples of women leaders, or lack of clarity in communication and expectations with my husband, organization, and sending church. But I realized that my greatest obstacle was my own lack of confidence that this was actually something God had called me to do. I needed to learn that my leadership was not sinful, but actually my form of obedience to God.

My View On Women in Leadership

After years of studying the Word on this topic, I believe that the Bible is incredibly empowering towards women who desire to step into leadership. The Bible is full of women leaders from Deborah (Judges 4-5) and Esther in the Old Testament, to Lydia (Acts 16:14-15) who led a house church, and Priscilla (and Aquila) (Acts 18:18-28) who co-labored with Paul in the New Testament. Jesus honors women in his interactions with them (Luke 10:38-42), going out of his way to speak to and encourage women (John 4), and the first witnesses of his resurrection were women (John 20:11-18).

My conviction in complementarianism is that there are certain roles and responsibilities that are set aside for men, namely elders (1 Timothy 3:1) in a local church and headship for husbands with their wives (Ephesians 5:22-23). Apart from that, men and women who are believers are commanded to honor one another, serve one another, counsel one another, and submit to one another out of reverence for Christ (Ephesians 5:21, Romans 12:10, Romans 15:4). 

However, in my understanding of ministry leadership on the field, the role of a team leader isn’t the same of that of a local church elder, and I believe that women can be team leaders and can even supervise men. A clear example of this is Apollos, one of the greatest evangelists ever, was taught by both Priscila and Aquila (Acts 18:24-26).

I understand that this is a nuanced and potentially difficult topic for many. If you come from a tradition, organization, or church that has a different stance than what I described above, that’s okay! What matters is that you personally work out this question with the Lord and the Word with total honesty, until you reach a point of peace that you are obeying as God would have you do.

What Can Women Do?

Much of the discussion around womens’ roles centers on what a woman cannot do. Can a woman teach, and if so, who can she teach? Can she exercise authority? While I understand the desire for clarity on these sorts of questions, I have found that this discussion is much more empowering and productive when we focus on what the Bible says about what women CAN do – which is a whole lot! 

Exercise Gifts

When I first started leading our team, one of the most cunning lies that Satan repeated was that I didn’t look like a leader. In my mind, a leader commanded a room, led meetings, always had the right answer, and was strategically minded. I thought that being a leader was leading in the way that Steven did. And anyone who has ever met us knows that we exist on two opposite spectrums.

For years I tried to lead like him. I awkwardly interrupted meetings because I felt like I needed to say something decisive. I tried to learn and speak in strategic terms, and project out long term ministry objectives. But most of these attempts felt clunky and awkward, because I wasn’t leading as myself using the spiritual gifts God had given me.

Paul teaches about spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12:

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.

Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good

– 1 Corinthians 12:4-7

Gifts are given by the Holy Spirit’s will, for the common good. It is our responsibility to use our gifts, and employ them toward advancing God’s kingdom. Notice in this passage, there is nothing that distinguishes the gifts by gender. This includes giftings that are typically attributed to men like teaching, apostleship, or leadership.

What this also means is that it’s vital that women are able to know and work out of their own spiritual gifts. For me, my giftings include leadership, exhortation, and prophecy. My leadership doesn’t have to and shouldn’t necessarily look like Steven’s leadership. Instead, I have found that my best role in leadership is in exhorting our teammates and Thai partners to persevere and to develop toward greater Christ-likeness. “Hard conversations” have become my niche, and I am content to let Steven lead out on strategy conversations, though we both participate, give feedback, and support the other when they are taking the lead. I am thankful that God allows us to lead as we are!

For women reading this, do you know your spiritual gifts? Are you able to utilize your giftings on a regular basis? For women leaders – does your leadership role allow you to use your gifts? Are you aware of your teammates’ spiritual gifts and are you able to lead them toward roles that best maximize them?

Make Disciples

The last thing that Jesus said to his disciples before he ascended to heaven was the Great Commission. 

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

-Matthew 28:18-20

Out of Jesus’ own authority, all believers, male or female, are commanded to make disciples, to baptize them, and to teach these disciples how to obey God. Like giftings, the Great Commission is not dependent on gender! Therefore, women can and should be encouraged to make disciples who multiply, not only so that more may hear about Jesus but also for their own personal obedience to Christ.

When we consider that 51% of the unreached are women and that ⅔ of all goers are women, it is far too costly to exclude women from leadership and ministry work. By pulling women out of the equation, the potential missionary labor force is cut by more than half.

In our work in Thailand, we partner with National Apostolic Visionaries in trying to multiply movements of disciples and churches. Again, if the giftings of the Spirit are not limited according to gender, how many National Apostolic leaders could be women? Without women mission leaders to encourage and empower female NAVs, what opportunities for kingdom expansion are being missed? But when women are welcomed into leadership and given freedom to exercise their gifts fully, the Holy Spirit will use our contributions to glorify the name of Jesus! 

If you are a woman in leadership, or even considering leadership, is your whole team (male and female) equipped and confident to raise up disciple makers? If not, how can you develop them? Spend some time praying and asking God – what is my role in the Great Commission? Who have you called me to influence and disciple? Are there any female NAVs that you would have me walk alongside and empower? How will you use my leadership to multiply the gospel? 

For men reading this, reflect in prayer and ask God – are there women in my sphere who I could encourage toward leadership? How? Am I cultivating an environment where women can exercise their giftings?

Lead!

Regardless of where you land theologically on women’s roles in leadership, there are plenty of ways to build out roles that exercise your unique leadership and giftings in ministry to whatever level you believe is biblically encouraged, even without a title.

For example, discipling your family or new believers is a form of leadership. Training groups of people in evangelism tools and methods can be a venue to exercise a potential teaching gift. Shepherding and encouraging teammates is an integral leadership role on a team that doesn’t necessarily require a title. Project or administrative management is often an overlooked type of leadership gifting that can bolster a team or ministry effort in critical ways.

You may even begin to pursue team or ministry leadership, taking on responsibility over others and leading out in vision.

What are some ways you can start to practice and exercise your leadership on your team or in your ministry context? How can you pursue clarity with your leaders to find a role where you can begin to lead?

How Do I Start?

If you’re a woman reading this post and you feel like God might be calling you to be a team leader, to have some role of leadership on a team, or to exercise your leadership more in the context of CPM ministry, here are some next steps you could take. 

1. Come to a point of personal clarity and conviction concerning what the Bible says about women in leadership. While the Bible should be primary, a good commentary or theological studies like Men and Women in the Church are also helpful resources. The Coworkers Podcast is also a fantastic resource about men and women partnering together in movements, with a Bible study you can do with your whole team.

2. Take time to process with the Lord whether you are truly being called into leadership. We wrote a post on how to discern if you’re a leader that has some guiding reflection questions. Surrender your expectations and fears, and ask him for wisdom on how he has gifted you, and what role he would have you do and who he would have you lead. Write down questions you might have about what he tells you. Ask for verses to anchor your vision and calling into, and make your commitment to Jesus first. 

3. Communicate your desire with your organization and / or leaders. Ask them about the process toward becoming a team leader and for guidance on how to proceed. Each organization or denomination will have different requirements. 

4. Develop yourself. There are plenty of resources out there for women who want to develop as leaders. Books like Developing Female Leaders (Kadi Cole), 7 Deadly Sins of Women Leaders (Kate Coleman), and Making of a Leader (Robert Clinton) are good starts.

5. Begin to lead! If you aren’t ready to be a full blown team leader immediately and to recruit your own team, begin with smaller intermediate steps. Perhaps there is a specialized role on your team that you can begin to own, such as team development or resource creation, or maybe begin to own a key relationship with a national partner. You may encounter resistance at first, but remember, you belong in the room! God has given you a specific calling to leadership and he is pleased to use female leaders for his purposes! Everyone’s context is different, so if you need more guidance than these basic steps, feel free to contact us at contact@missionsleaders.com.

The Great Commission Needs Women Leaders

When we first launched, I wasn’t sure if I was a leader or what my leadership was supposed to look like. But through different experiences and circumstances, Jesus helped me to discover that I am one. I’ve had different opportunities to use my giftings, had a husband who championed me, a team that allowed me to lead them, and mentors throughout the years to guide me. However, the most significant factor God used toward helping me embrace leadership was our partner, Mint.

Mint was a church planter working in Northeast Thailand with a vision for the region and for neighboring Laos. As we spent time together and developed a relationship supporting her vision as Barnabas did with Paul, we increasingly became Mint’s friends, peers, coworkers, and confidants.

I quickly realized that Mint looked at me as a leader. It made no difference to her that I was a woman. If anything, it was more important to her that I was a woman leader who was just as committed to seeing Thailand reached as her. And because we are both women, she feels safe to open up to us, spend evenings in our home, train with me, and bring me into discipleship conversations with other women leaders. Because I am a leader, she respects my feedback and exhortations and knows that I empathize with her own leadership challenges as a woman.

Mint started out as the church secretary before launching as a church planter with no support or training. Now, through God growing her leadership, she is a regional leader with a dozen church planting teams under her and generations of churches multiplying out of her stream. In Mint’s region, the least reached in Thailand, her best leaders are unsurprisingly women. And she has continued to be an example that many other women have seen and desired to emulate throughout our church planting network because she has obeyed God in exercising her leadership gifting. Seeing God bear fruit through Mint has been one of the most rewarding and empowering affirmations of my own leadership.

The Great Commission will never be completed without women stepping into leadership. All women are called to be disciple makers, and many women are gifted in a multitude of ways to lead. Women display and model Christ in a wonderfully distinct way from men, and it would be a shame to pull back our contribution because of fear, a lack of clarity, or because the pathway is not defined. In my next post, I will address some of the major internal and external barriers women face in leadership.

I believe there are more women being called now to courageously step into greater leadership and influence. The Holy Spirit is raising up female national leaders among the unreached, many of whom will be best empowered by other women missions leaders. 

We are confident that when these two groups are able to partner together in the gospel, the Spirit of God will pour out power that will result in multiplication and restoration for generations to come.

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