(That Can Transform Your Church)

The church is full of broken people.

Although they long for loving leaders to help them travel from where they are to somewhere better, they also struggle to trust anyone’s leadership, even God’s.

This means, even the best leaders may be inadvertently leaving behind those most in need of good leadership.

Here are four tips that will help you become a leader they’ll follow:

1. Be vulnerable.We tend to think leaders are the ones who have it together. You might wonder, “Who’s going to follow if they see the messes in me?” But vulnerability is required in order to move from brokenness to wholeness. A leader is simply the one willing to go first. Jesus, our best model of leadership, did (Hebrews 4:15, 16).
   
   
2. Listen well. We often believe it’s a leader’s knowledge or wisdom that qualifies him or her to lead. But ask those who have walked from brokenness to wholeness in some area of their lives—chances are, it wasn’t a sermon, a book, or a blog that changed them.The leader who is willing to listen well to someone who has long been burdened with a secret, a sin, or a wound, that’s a leader who is learning to love well.
   
   
3. Invite confession. Teach and model that confessing faults, failures, and weaknesses to each other is a normal part of the Christian life (James 5:16).When the expectation in a church or small group is that all of us need help from each other and from Jesus, when it’s the norm for individuals (including leaders) to confess the good, bad, and ugly of their lives, everyone benefits (1 John 1:6-9).
   
   
4. Don’t confuse pity and grace. Pity gives because it sees the other as pitiful. It lowers the standard to accommodate those you think can’t do better.Grace, on the other hand, gives so that the other would come to know his or her true value to God and to you. It maintains holy standards and trusts Christ to bring each of his followers there (Philippians 1:6).

To lead in these ways helps us as leaders to view leadership not as a status, but as a service. And it helps us keep Jesus’ cross at the center.

Question: Which of these leadership tips most challenges you? What other tips can help leaders lead those most in need? Leave a comment below.

This way,
Josh