Part 1 – Leadership Foundations Overview

Part 2 – Why are leaders needed?

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

Part 4 – How do I develop as a leader?

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

Develop Towards Maturity

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

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

Ephesians 4:11-16

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

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

How to Form a PDP

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

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

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

Personal Evaluation

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

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

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

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

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

Abiding, Spiritual Walk, Character, and Attitude

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

Cross-Cultural Adaptation

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

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

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

Personal Time + Work Management

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

Ministry Skills

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

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

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

Leadership Evaluation

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

_______

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

Here is the link to the full evaluation:

Creating a PDP

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

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

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

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

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

Walking Others through Forming a PDP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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