Monday, July 8, 2013

How Early Church Leaders had Great Influence







The need for leaders and leadership--There is no substitute for quality leaders

Two factors are crucial in a positive leader-Character and Competency.

Character has two parts: Knowing and managing the inner life.

a.     Knowing my inner thoughts, feelings, values, ethics, boundaries, spiritual desires, and motivations
b.     Managing my inner life through the Holy Spirit who leads us to self-motivation, self-nurturing` and self-control.


Competency has two critical aspects: The knowledge about what to do in leading and the skill to carry it out at the right time.

a.     Competency of knowledge about a group, an organization or an individual. For example, a therapist needs to have a basic knowledge about psychopathology as well as a model for interventions for that pathology.

b.     Competency in the skills to implement the intervention is quite different from the theoretical information noted above. A teacher may have great knowledge about a topic but fail in communicating that knowledge in a way that students can understand.

Exponential changes: In the world of the New Testament, the leadership challenges were quite different from those in the Old Testament. Moses led a developed community of people toward a goal. In the New Testament the goal was much more diffused. It was to take the Good News to the whole world. A small group of fanatical monotheists in a tiny place called Palestine could hardly turn the whole world upside down! But, they did. The long awaited emphasis on world evangelization had come.

The only way to accomplish that was through exponential or geometric rather than arithmetic growth. Take a piece of paper and fold it 40 times. How tall would it be? Two inches, two feet two miles two million miles? How about half way to the moon?  This is the power of multiplication of doubling.  This was the strategy of Jesus and it worked.

Many of us think about ways to evangelize the world or at least our city. Imagine if you won 10,000 people per week to Christ or some 500,000 people to the Lord annually.  We all agree that such a thing would be wonderful. Billy Graham would stand up and take notice. You would be famous. However, that method is not as effective as the one outlined by Jesus.

If you could win two people to Christ and spend time to disciple them so they could win others and repeat the process every two years you would be far more successful than if you tried the other way.  Jesus and the New Testament leaders chose the exponential process rather than the mass marketing approach to evangelism. They started small, trained well and always reproduced and the world was dramatically touched in a few hundred years. Unfortunately, in our lust for fame we nearly always choose the big event approach rather than exponential discipleship. We like the “rock star” approach of the Rolling Stones rather than the Solid Rock approach of the Messiah who rolled away the stone.

We need more people to adopt the discipleship and multiplication process and forget about the big events. Do you have any nominations for exponential leaders? Who would you say was the most influential Christian leader in history? I have asked this question many times in a variety of places. Seminars and seminaries; churches and church elder boards; sermons and solo pastors. I get some rather interesting answers. Here are a few of the nominations.

  • Mark (He wrote the first Gospel)
  • Mary (The mother of Jesus)
  • Luke (He wrote more of the Bible than any other person)
  • James (Brother of Jesus and wrote a book)
  • Luther (He started a revolution)
  • Mohammed (Without him, Christianity would be much bigger)
  • Billy Graham (A modern evangelist of repute)
  • Bill Bright (Founded Campus Crusade

  • And you nominate?__________________________________

  • My nomination is coming!

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