From Here to There: The Preferred Future for Small Group Leaders
Yesterday's post about the 8 Habits of a Life-Changing Small Group Leader prompted some good discussion about how you might help a leader move in the right direction. Makes sense. Especially when you consider how hard we're working to create easy first steps into leadership that lead automatically to next steps.
See also, 6 Keys to Accelerating Small Group Ministry Growth and Impact and Teacher, Leader, Shepherd, Host: What's in a Name?
In a sense, the 8 habits begin to define the preferred future for small group leaders. As much as you have developed commitments that you want your leaders to keep, when you describe the preferred future, you're really going to be describing the kind of men and women you want them to be.
See also, 8 Commitments for Small Group Leaders.
The question is, once you define the preferred future for small group leaders, how would you take the raw product of a host (who really only signed up to open their home for 6 weeks) become the kind of leader who lives their life the way I described in the 8 Habits? It would take some thinking and some energy, and more than a little persistence...but it might not be as impossible as it sounds!
What if you took the essence of Saddleback's Leadership Pathway and built the habits into the elements of the path? Could you see a way to begin to sequence the development of habit? How would you do it? See also, Steve Gladen on Saddleback's Leadership Pathway.
I think you'd have to start by helping your leaders develop the habit of making a daily time with God a priority. Right? Can you imagine a way to do that? What would you work on next? I think I might try to create a system-wide awareness that none of us have arrived. In fact, I might develop a personal study that would help every leader with both habits. Can you see it? And what if at the end of 12 months I measured for those two habits?
See where this is going? It's not microwavable. It will take thinking, energy, and persistence. It will take tears and sweat and might even take blood (couldn't help that one). This is the very agony Paul endured and at the heart of why he wrote, "My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you...(Galatians 4:19)."
If we want leaders who have these 8 habits...we will have to help them develop them.
What do you think? Have a question? Want to argue? You can click here to jump into the conversation.