Skip to main content

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?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The myth of Ministry Leadership.

The myth that all leaders are leaders. Not everyone who leads in church is a leader. I think it is wrong, for Church leaders to believe that those they train up to take various ministry leadership positions, are in fact leaders in their own right. They are not. At best I would categorise these people- that many churches call 'ministry leaders' as ministry managers.                 "At one level there is nothing wrong with title inflation; it is a cheap way of recognising people who work hard and make serious contributions" Jo Owen. I am of the opinion that this title inflation undervalues both the leader and the ' ministry manager' and can often bring about confusion and mismatched expectations. Many churches have ministry training evenings for their volunteers. Many use the reason for this training is "to make a person a better leader," when in fact the only thing actually happening is that th...

The 1970's Christian Coffee Shop

I remember as a new Christian being invited into a Christian Coffee shop in the town where I grew up. It was clean and tidy, the table tops were all brightly painted in different colours,  but mainly yellow and scattered on top were a random selection of Christian tracts. Fish symbols and Christian posters proclaiming that there was but 'One Way' to heaven were everywhere. The music playing out of the stereo was The Bill Gather Trio or Dolly Parton singing Gospel. The crockery, was a mixed assortment of coffee mugs, donated by keen supporters of this outreach to the unsaved sinners and ungodly people living in the city. The coffee was a local brand heavily mixed with chicory. In all the years the Coffee Shop operated, I never saw a non-Christian go in and I never heard of a person coming to faith through having coffee there. I never really understood its purpose. Fast forward to today, when I was asked recently, to advise on helping a local community church open a c...

Playing well with others.

Today's rambling. Looking over some of my old school reports the other day and was amused at how some of the comments, that teachers made about me have shaped my life and in many respects made me who I am today. One teacher wrote that I didn’t play well with others, I was 5 at the time maybe I had an excuse. Another teacher in my high school years, the wood working teacher or wood shop teacher for my American friends wrote; “If you value your life you will keep him away from power tools and other dangerous equipment. I can’t remember why he wrote this, obviously I did something that made him fear for his life. Today as an adult I have to say that I don’t do well in committees, for most of my life I have been self- employed. I have steadfastly stayed away from power tools and other wood working equipment, basically anything that can cut something off and is a danger to life and limb. Over the last 10 years I have been looking at and teaching about Emotional Intelligence ...