A critical part of leadership is recognizing that your fruit grows on other people’s trees. Fruitful leadership focuses on the responsibility of healthy leadership reproduction as the primary way to cultivate ministry expansion.
Many churches are waking up to the fact that every pastor is an interim pastor. But the truth remains that this maxim plays out at every level of your church’s leadership pipeline. Every role in your church is an interim position. Life happens. Someone gets sick, moves away, or gets burned out from being on point every week.
Imagine it’s Saturday at 8pm and you’re the preschool director at your church. The couple who teaches your 3-year-olds just texted that they have the flu. Who do you call to teach the 3-year-olds their weekly Bible lesson?
Or what if your church is launching your first multi-site campus? You currently have a great parking team, but the new site will meet in a downtown area where parking is limited. Oh, and the service times overlap with service times at your main campus. Who will lead the parking team at your new site?
Or consider that you’ve pastored at the same church for 20 years and are nearing retirement age. However, a sudden medical diagnosis has expedited your retirement to now. Who will fill the pulpit and minister to your congregation?
Odds are strong that your church has faced similar circumstances. So how is your ministry prepared to respond to each of the scenarios? Do you have the people and process in place to ensure continuity of ministry takes place? How do you ensure this continuity? Every leader must develop at least one successor.
Examining the fruit we are called to bear in Scripture, we simply cannot arrive at any other conclusion. In the Great Commission, Jesus calls us to “make disciples,” not just grow and develop ourselves (Matt. 28:19). Paul also challenges church leaders not to do all ministry themselves but to train and equip “the saints for the work of ministry” (Eph. 4:12).
Development within a leadership pipeline requires an investment of intentional time and effort. You can’t simply empower someone through email. Succession happens when your people are engaged by the mission, equipped to do it, and accept the responsibility to carry it out. Leadership development must occur up close, both shoulder-to-shoulder and eye-to-eye.
Leadership development and succession planning is not about replacement. Leadership development and succession planning is about reproduction. In far too many cases, we have allowed our thinking to shift into leadership placement over leadership development. When we focus on replacement, we not only dismiss the responsibility we are given as church leaders, we also settle for warm bodies instead of weekly volunteers.
"In recent years, we have gotten better at talking about succession, but often succession only refers to senior leadership within a leadership pipeline and is rarely more than a dream with few details and no deadlines."
Todd Adkins
What some would call succession planning is really just replacement planning. Both plans have their place and sometimes overlap, especially in emergency or unexpected succession. Replacement planning looks more like risk management and is often a folder to pull out if a key leader suffers a medical emergency or experiences a moral failure that immediately removes the individual from leadership. True succession planning is quite different.
Succession planning focuses on leadership reproduction over leadership replacement and leads with a proactive posture, not a reactive one. Succession planning also provides continuity of leadership by cultivating leaders within the church or organization’s leadership pipeline. Succession is not only concerned with the top levels of leadership or the key leaders of the organization but is a long-term investment strategy in the organization’s most valuable resource: its people.
The defining legacy of any leader is the quality of those you develop and your ability to transition out of your role—at any time and for any reason, with little drama or disruption. Whether sacred or secular, organizational leadership matters, and continuity of leadership matters all the more. This may seem counterintuitive to the popularized view of leadership. However, we are not called to such a limited view. We are called to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. If we do so, we will see unity in the body, maturity measured in the fullness of Christ, and a multiplication of ministry and ministers that hasn’t been seen since the early church. Leaders build an army, not just an audience. We must shift the conversation from talking about our church’s seating capacity to its sending capacity.