Biblical Leadership: Indispensable For Our Joyful Following

In Sunday’s sermon we revisited our purpose as a church—namely that we desire to be joyful followers of God to his glory. We did this to prepare for 2016. One of the realities we dare not miss is that sound biblical leadership is crucial to our congregation’s effective accomplishment of our purpose. John Maxwell puts it this way in the Introduction to his notes in the Maxwell Leadership Bible:

The most critical problem facing the church today is the leadership vacuum that grew during the Twentieth Century. Church expert and statistician George Barna asserts, “Leadership is one of the glaring needs of the church. People are often willing to follow God’s vision, but too frequently they have no exposure to either vision or true leadership.” Just a few years ago, Barna penned some sobering conclusions based on his research: “After fifteen years of digging into the world around me, I have reached…[this] central conclusion…that the American church is dying due to lack of strong leadership…. Nothing is more important than leadership.”

After thirty years of pastoral experience in the church I have come to agree with Maxwell’s conclusion that the church needs effective and competent leadership to carry out its purpose in a faithful and fruitful manner.

With the sense of its importance in mind, recently I began thinking a lot about leadership and how I could set before myself and the other leaders in our church what the Bible teaches about leadership in a way that can be digested and applied—not just to put more knowledge in our head, but ultimately to equip us to be better leaders.

As I thought about where to go in the Bible for the most succinct and focused teaching on the subject, it hit me one day that there are three Pastoral Epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus) in the New Testament that are written not just to teach the Church how to function (cf. 1 Timothy 3:15; 2 Timothy 1:8-14; Titus 2:1-15), but also to instruct two men in how to lead the Church (1 Timothy 1:1-2; 2 Timothy 1:1-2; Titus 1:1-5). In other words, these letters come as close as anything in the Bible to serving as leadership manuals.  And the more I thought about these letters, the more it hit me with greater and greater clarity that the leadership principles in them are very much in line with what the rest of the Bible taught.

So, armed with this insight and excitement, I read through these three New Testament letters and made notes on the key principles they teach about how one should lead from a biblical perspective. Once I finished, I saw ten principles that were repeated over and over. As I meditated upon these principles, two conclusions came to mind:

1. After forty plus years of reading the Bible from cover-to-cover (almost once per year), I can confidently say these ten principles truly are consistent with what the rest of Scripture teaches.

2. I need to come up with a way of communicating these ten principles that would be easy to remember so they can be at the finger-tips of current and future leaders in our church. If this is not done, they will do us little good.

After wrestling with these ten principles taught in 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, I came up with the following acrostic that communicates them in what I believe is a memorable way:

LAY BEFORE SELF AND OTHERS OUR ULTIMATE PURPOSE—GOD’S GLORY BY ENJOYING HIM.

EMBODY LOVE AS A KEY PURPOSE IN THE CHURCH.

ATTEND TO TRUTH AS A VERY IMPORTANT MEANS TO ACCOMPLISHING OUR PURPOSES IN THE CHURCH.

DEPEND UPON GOD WITH A HUMBLE, PRAYING, HOLY-SPIRIT-TRUSTING, GOSPEL-DIRECTED LIFE.

ESCORT OTHERS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION COURAGEOUSLY, EVEN WHEN IT IS HARD.

RUN HARD AFTER GODLINESS.

SHOW OTHERS HOW TO LIVE THROUGH YOUR EXAMPLE—WHICH ALSO WILL DRAW OTHERS TO CHRIST.

HAVE A CALL FOR OFFICIAL LEADERSHIP POSTIONS.

INVEST IN OTHERS THROUGH THE GOSPEL WORK OF TEACHING AND DISCIPLING THAT DELEGATES RESPONSIBILITY AND GROWS THEM.

PASTOR YOUR FAMILY, NOT JUST OTHERS.

Over the next few weeks I will continue to blog on this subject and unpack each of these all-important ten principles. I will do this as an introduction of leadership teaching and training in our congregation that I pray will create a common language about the subject, but even more importantly will equip us to lead the church to carry out effectively our mission.

I encourage you to begin memorizing these ten principles now. They will strengthen you as a parent, as a spouse, as a worker, and as a joyful follower of Jesus!