My friend, Stephen Watkinson, has written a short post concerning the strategy of leader training leaders in the church. You can read his thoughts here. For what it’s worth, I broadly agree with him. What I wanted to do here is just push the implications of what he said a little further.

Stephen’s key point is that the leaders training leaders model relies on a form of trickle down theory that pretty much never seems to deliver what it promises in any of the contexts in which it is employed. He argues that because we have encouraged leaders to focus on making leaders we have therefore failed to actually make mature disciples across the whole church. We have, instead, focused on a gifted few, determined they will be the leaders of the next generation and then passed on churches that are woefully undiscipled and tragically immature because we have spent all our time pouring into them as leaders to the detriment of everyone else. Stephen doesn’t quite phrase it that way, but if you listen to our podcast, you will discover he is more measured while I am seemingly more of a rumbunctious straight-talker. I will leave him to argue back – in a typically measured and probably well caveated and kindly manner – whether that is exactly what he is saying, but it is what I am hearing. Obviously, if I am simply hearing myself in a feedback loop of course I am going to agree. But assuming I am hearing him rightly, even if I state the matter a bit more crudely (or, honestly, depending on your disposition), then he and I agree. The big question is, what’s to be done about it?

One of the frequent refrains on our podcast, and I’ve mentioned not a few times on this blog, is that we seem to have this habit of frequently making almost anything other than the main thing, the main thing. The church’s task, which is a fairly straightforward one all told, is to make disciples. But we seem to have this habit of either deciding Jesus’ mission is not enough or our particular concern and/or hobby horse is the more vital one. So, we find a subtle change in the mission of the church from the making of disciples to the making of leaders, or winning the culture, or defending biblical mores in the public square, or whatever it is that happens to have captured our imaginations lately. If not subtly changing the mission of the church itself, we determine the means of the mission – which the Word may well not specify – are to be rigidly set and dogmatically applied in any and all contexts often to the detriment of the actual mission itself beause we, for some reason, have deemed this the right way, or the best way, or an important way that ultimately means is, at least in our minds, the only way. But it seems to be this habit we have of failing to make the main thing, the main thing.

There seem to be two specific applications worth mulling over in what Stephen said. First, if we actually went about making and growing disciples rather than leaders, we should find that whoever comes to lead the church after us will have a church that has actually grown rather than stagnated and remained in immaturity. If we actually want to serve the leaders who come after us, there isn’t much better we can do than pass on a church that has grown in maturity. Appoint them to a church that has a culture of people already making disciples and those disciples growing so that they disciple other people. This will allow the church’s capacity to expand beyond them and them alone. All ministry will not have to pass through the bottle neck of the pastor but will expand as new disciples grow and then learn to make new disciples who grow and make new disciples and so on. It will also give that new pastor a team of people capable of serving alongside him rather than merely a church of undiscipled people all of whom he must personally disciple as the only one apparently capable.

I mentioned in my post yesterday (see here) that those who are often touted as ‘experts’ are often no such things. They may have done something longer and may have more confidence than you doing it, but the truth is that the mission of the church – in case you’ve not got it, it is to make disciples – is really quite easy. Easy in the sense that knowing what to do (build relationships, share the gospel, point people to Jesus) should be within the grasp of us all. Which means your pastor really ought not to be the only person in the church able to disciple anyone. Though we often make out otherwise, the truth is that all of us should be able to disciple one another. The goal is for the whole church to be disciples who make disciples. A church where that isn’t the case, and where people have been believers many years but don’t seem in any way capable, is to some degree failing in the very mission Jesus has given us. If what has been left behind by retiring leaders is a church of people who cannot disciple anyone, and a church that cannot raise up elders despite being believers for decades, this is surely a failure of the man’s ministry. For those retiring boomer pastors who bemoan the current generation of pastors, if their lament has any validity at all (and you can decide for yourself whether their case is reasonable) ought it not to cause a degree of introspection on their part? After all, who were the leaders supposed to raise up the next generation of disciples?

The second application worth mulling over is this: if we actually focused on the mission of making disciples, we might not need to worry quite so much about raising up leaders. Leaders raising up leaders seems to have led to a total lack of discipleship and maturity across our churches. But leaders who make disciples who make disciples should have little problem in raising up leaders. Because who do we want to lead the church of Christ? Surely those who have matured and are capable of discipling other believers and teaching the Bible. This is what elders are fundamentally called to do. Teach the Bible and act as godly examples to the rest of the church. What we are often looking to do when we appoint an elder is not “train an elder” who isn’t currently an elder so much as simply recognise as an elder someone who is effectively already doing the work of eldership. A disciple-making culture across the church ought to create that where leaders raising up leaders evidently has not.

As Stephen said in his post, this sort of thing will be slower and take more time. We will be looking at discipleship over decades rather than plucking bright young things, training them over three years and saying Bob’s yer uncle. Dare I say, the model of taking the bright young things and training them over three years or so is just a secular university model to which the church, and its majority middle class contingent, seem entirely in hock and cannot see beyond. It is this pervasive part of our culture that not only affects who we train and how we train them but also the models for discipleship in the church, our teaching patterns and pretty much everything down the line. We need to junk the secular university model entirely in the church because it doesn’t work. I mean, just imagine, a system never designed for the church or with the church in mind doesn’t particularly serve the mission of the church or what it is about. What a shocker, right! No doubt someone will argue for common grace and redemptive usage, but the results are in and the church isn’t healthier for our obsession with an educational model that was not designed by Jesus nor well suited to the mission of the church.

A more basic discipleship model is the order of the day and a more realistic time frame to bring people into leadership is in order. Yes, I know, Jesus had his disciples for three years. But it bears saying they were not exactly entirely green to the Jewish scriptures nor the culture in which Jesus was sending them to operate. But even if we concede that, the model was entirely different at any rate. They gave up everything and followed Jesus round for three years, watching pretty much everything he did. He taught them in parables and then explained the parables. He answered their basic questions and addressed their vainglorious squabbles. He dealt with their sin on display diretly and he encouraged them where they were doing well. He didn’t spend his time delivering theological lectures and asking them to write essays. However you cut it, the model was different. In the end, Jesus taught his disciples how to make disciples and then sent them off to make disciples and they led the church because they were handpicked by Jesus himself and saw his resurrection. After them, the Apostles appointed elders who were the more mature disciples in the specific churches in which there were any disciples. Jesus didn’t specifically train them to be leaders; he trained them to be disciples who make disciples and they led – just as those after them – based on their level of maturity as disciples.

We need to recover this idea of the whole church making disciples. What us Baptists used to call ‘every member ministry’ and has since become called disciple-making culture. Whatever you call it, the whole church needs to be involved in the work of making and growing disciples. This is how new disciples are made and older disciples mature further. Once we have a church of disciples who make disciples, we want to appoint as elders and pastors those mature disciples who are discipling less mature disciples well. And what task do they have as church leaders? To disciple the church to be disciples who make disciples. They aren’t called to make leaders, but disciples. As they make disciples, they may just find they not only have among their number some evident leaders, but they will have a church of more mature disciples to leave behind them too.