Then Joshua the son of Nun, the attendant of Moses from his youth, said, “Moses, my lord, restrain them.” – Numbers 11:28 (NASB)

The stories of Moses and Joshua are my Old Testament favorites. Their lives are rich with leadership lessons. I feel the verse above is often overlooked when looking at the larger context of the situation where Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp while 70 elders had positioned themselves around the Tabernacle and were also prophesying. What grabs my attention from this verse is the phrase “the attendant of Moses from his youth”. The verse screams at us to start building leadership depth at the earliest opportunity.

One of the challenges we face in our congregation is leadership depth. We have broken the 200 barrier, but it still pulls at us like a spacecraft that is breaking Earth’s gravity barrier. We are an awkward size, just past too large for a small congregation, too small to be a large congregation with the inherent resources. At our size we are faced with the challenge of developing enough depth in our leadership so as not to burn anyone out and provide redundancy, but we do not have a large population pool from which to draw. There also exists the constant friction between doing several good things or a few great things. We have determined it is best to have leadership depth in a few great things than leadership width in several things.

So how is a congregation in our situation supposed to build depth? Here are some practical ideas that work for us:

1) Invest in yourselves. I cannot stress enough the importance of investing in the elder / minister leadership team. We do so by conducting an annual elder / minister retreat to discuss the current condition of the congregation, the fruit of our ministries, what goals we did or did not accomplish, and to set a theme with direction for the next year. For several months during the year the first item on our recurring meeting agendas included our minister leading a short discussion on a book pertinent to our congregation. We partnered with an elder and minister from a larger congregation to pick their brains on how to grow, what growing pains they encountered, how they dealt with the pains, and so on. We are intentional in our personal leadership development and seek to develop the depth of our leadership abilities.

2) Invest in your current leaders.

(a) Last October we held a leadership retreat in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. We were far enough away to remove ourselves from the distractions of being close to home, but close enough the drive was not a burden. We had beautiful weather, which is no guarantee in mid-late October at 9,000 feet elevation. Maybe the Lord felt our undertaking was worthy of the blessing. We asked our most creative elder to plan the retreat. Prior to the retreat we spent hours determining who to invite. We knew we would not be able to invite everyone, we knew some invitees would not be able to make the retreat, and we wanted to start small because we had never done anything like this before. It was a helpful exercise to go through a multitude of names and discuss if they were leading in some capacity within the congregation. I’m not talking about just your deacons (that is a given). I am talking about others in your congregation that initiate structure, influence others to accomplish Kingdom work, and just plain get things done. It was interesting to hear from some of those we did invite and how they felt they never saw themselves as leaders and wondered why they were invited. We identified a guest speaker from a congregation larger than ours so we could have the perspective of a large congregation leader during the retreat. We determined our theme would be from the book of Nehemiah (another amazing case study in leadership) and shared that with the guest speaker as well as several pages of notes from our annual elder / minister retreat, including our theme and spiritual framework for the coming year, which our guest speaker worked in to his lessons quite well. Our elder leading the effort built an itinerary of lessons, fellowship, meals, and fun activities which strengthened relationships among the group. Almost to a person, the group expressed it was a rewarding weekend. We felt it was a great “Return on Investment”.

(b) We invest in our current leaders is through delegation. Not just delegating actions, but delegating decision making. When we spent time picking the brains of the leaders from a larger congregation we determined we should adopt their decision making guidelines for our deacons and ministry points of contact. We give our leaders their budget for the year. We ask our leaders to consult with us before making a decision if they are going to bust their budget, if they are going to make a decision that with challenge a traditional norm, or if they are going to make a decision that could be interpreted as a doctrinal issue. Then we ask our leaders to make decisions under all other conditions and not to bring everything to us for the final say, but rather to inform us what decisions they have made. We are not perfect at this yet, but we are improving across the congregation.

(c) We invest in our leaders by providing an environment for them to grow. One example is our small group ministry which we call House to House. We seek out hosts and facilitators with the intention of placing them in charge of a House to House gathering and leading that ministry in their homes and in their discussion. This is proving to be one of the most fruitful ministries and environments for leadership growth in our congregation.

3) Invest in your future leaders. When my family first visited our congregation a little over five years ago, one of the qualities we liked was the involvement the elders had with the youth group. They sought to build deep relationships with the youth, just as Moses apparently did with Joshua. We continue that tradition. We installed an elder who was also the best youth deacon I’ve ever seen and he maintains that connection with our youth group. Once every two to three years we try to have an elder / teen retreat to strengthen the relationships between us and our youth and demonstrate they are important to us. We also stress their involvement in congregational activities and strive to keep them involved and integrated in the entire congregation and not limit them to teen / youth only activities, such as when the elders conduct a quarter’s worth of classes simultaneously for a mix of teens and adults in the same classroom. We have even expanded most of this approach to create a demographically based ministry we call Gen Faith (short for Generation Faith), which means those in their first few years of adulthood, whether single or married. Like Moses, we are concerned about the congregation now and take a long term view of the leaders of the Church in the next couple of generations.

These are just some ideas. It is definitely not an all-inclusive list, but maybe you will find it beneficial, thought provoking, and give you the opportunity to reflect on what you are doing to build leadership depth into your congregation, especially if you are still close to the 2oo barrier. I pray it helps.

May your blessings exceed mine today and every day.

-DEM