Today, I want to talk to you about conviction, culture, and constructs. These components are foundational in building a leadership pipeline for your church. The reason most churches have a leadership deficiency today is that they never built a leadership development culture and constructs yesterday. Let’s take a look.
Odds are likely you hold a conviction your church should be developing your people. A survey of 1,000 pastors shows the majority affirm the importance of training and development. Yet, that same study reveals 27 percent of churches have a plan to develop their people, and only 1 in 4 requires leaders to attend the training they offer.
Remember that Ephesians 4 calls church leaders to “equip the saints in the work of ministry.” We’re not called to be doers only. We’re called to be developers, training and equipping those under our leadership. You must lead with conviction to begin establishing a leadership pipeline.
As you lead with this conviction, it will quickly spread into your church’s culture. Culture is simply the shared beliefs and values of your people. Recall that the Great Commission calls all believers to make disciples, who make disciples, who make disciples. Look at the life of Jesus and you see men were his method. As you lead out in equipping others, you will equip your people to do the same. Culture is formed by people not a program or piece of paper.
Once you hold a clear conviction that development is at the core of what your church does and you have a healthy culture, then you move to constructs. Constructs are the strategy, systems, structure, skills, and style that you use to build and align your leadership pipeline. Doing so provides a framework to uphold your conviction and culture of leadership development for all your people. Otherwise the burden of leadership development rests on the shoulders of the leader. A pipeline allows a structure and a framework to stretch that out.
If you have constructs but no conviction, you likely struggle with apathy and so do your people. If you have constructs but no culture, you’re likely exhausted, and so are your people. If you have developed a burning red conviction but not constructs, all you are doing is getting your people really excited about serving and then not giving them pathways to do so, and it is a merry go round of frustration.
Now that you understand conviction, culture, and constructs, what are you going to do about it?
