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Jesus' Leadership Team.




All great church leaders, rely on their teams of fantastic volunteers, to help build amazing churches. Those leadership teams need to be hardworking, fully committed, influential and responsible leadership teams.

If Jesus was a church leader and was around today, and his twelve disciples were his leadership team, then there is no way that his church would ever reach that often sought after, mega church status.

Just take a look at the type of people on his team. Simon Peter was emotionally unstable and prone to temper tantrums. Andrew, Peter's brother had absolutely no leadership qualities at all. James and John placed personal interests above, church loyalty. Thomas always questioned everything and was not good for team moral. Matthew had business habits that many people outside of the church community questioned. James and Thaddeus had radical cultural leanings and their doctrine was a little off, to put it mildly. As for the rest, they lacked initiative, enthusiasm and commitment, when things got tough they felt uncomfortable and got stressed out and left.


However there was one member of the team who was the best of the sorry bunch. He was resourceful, mixed well with the congregation, had a keen business mind and influenced people in high places, through his list of contacts. He was motivated, ambitious and responsible. It is just a pity Judas Iscariot committed suicide. Maybe Jesus should have spent more time with him, and made him assistant pastor instead of Peter.

The point I would like to make here is; sometimes leaders see things in us that we and others do not see. Who would have thought that this leadership team could have grown from 12 to 120 to 500 to 3000 to 5000 to nearly 3 billion?

Food for thought maybe?

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