Is Leadership Development a Bottleneck In Your Church?

In this series of articles, we are looking at common bottlenecks that keep churches from growing. In the last article, we looked at the guest-path bottleneck. We asked whether our churches are easy to enter, whether guests feel welcomed, and whether there is room for them to take a next step. But that raises another important question: what happens after that?

• Healthy churches do not just attract attenders; they develop disciples. They help people deepen their faith, discover their gifts, serve with joy, and eventually begin carrying real ministry responsibility. Over time, some of those people even grow into true leaders and under-shepherds who help care for others.

Many churches hit a bottleneck when the same small group of faithful servants ends up doing most of the ministry, while others stay on the sidelines. New people may be welcomed warmly, but they are never meaningfully challenged, equipped, or entrusted with ministry ownership.

• The good news is that this bottleneck can be relieved. Churches can become places where people are not only gathered, but also grown. Here are some practical ways to begin.

Six Ways to relieve the people-development bottleneck

1. Cast a bigger vision

• Are people in your church merely attending and consuming, or are they being developed into ministers of the gospel? Unless they have been challenged to go deeper, people will naturally default into being passive consumers of your content.
• Every sermon should point people to the expectation Christ has for them as his followers. Every membership class should orient them to this joy-filled calling.

2. Stop thinking only in terms of volunteers

• Yes, you need more volunteers. You may even feel desperate for them. But if that desperation comes through in your messaging, you have missed the mark. If filling slots is what we are aiming for, we are aiming too low.
• The goal is to form disciples, unleash gifts, and raise up leaders and under-shepherds. People are not just extra hands. They are future ministers in the name of Jesus Christ. And framing it this way affects way more than your messaging!

3. Measure success differently

• Churches often measure success by attendance, programs, or how much the pastor is doing. But Ephesians 4:11-12 gives a different picture. Christ gave leaders to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up. That means one of the clearest signs of a healthy church is not how much ministry the staff performs, but how many people they are equipping for ministry.
• In How to Break Growth Barriers, Carl F. George and Warren Bird say: “I challenge pastors to be minister developers, and then to measure every other effect in the church by that standard, not by how impressive the sermon is but by how many ministers are made.”

4. Hire and deploy staff to produce more leaders

• It’s not just pastors who should devote themselves to leadership development. George and Bird say we must relentlessly focus on hiring staff members who can identify, coach, and release other people into ministry.

• They say it is reasonable to expect every staff member to raise up lay leaders (people who lead others).

5. make leadership development central for all staff members

• What percentage of the staff’s hours actually goes toward leadership development? If paid staff members are always busy doing ministry but rarely apprenticing others to do it, the church will eventually stall.
• This key expectation should be made clear in job descriptions, staff meetings, one-on-one meetings, and performance evaluations. To find acceptance and ownership, it must be a central part of the culture, which takes diligent work.

6. Delegate wisely

• We move from theoretical to practical when we start delegating, but where do you start? One of the most practical first steps a pastor can take is to write down everything he or she does. Then ask three questions: What should only I do? What can others do? What should no one be doing anymore?
• That exercise can be revealing, because it often shows how much energy is being spent on things that could be delegated, shared, or stopped altogether. It also helps ensure you work from your areas of strength, maximizing your impact and minimizing your fatigue.

Healthy churches do not stop at welcoming people in; they keep going until those people are equipped and sent! They continually help people grow into the calling God has placed on their lives. They help disciples become servants, servants become leaders, and leaders become under-shepherds.