When Tim entered the ministry, he honestly looked forward to working with board members. Even though he'd heard his share of war stories, he figured his case would be different. As long as good people were elected and carefully discipled, he saw no reason why he and the board couldn't get along famously.
But five years later, as I talked with him, Tim wasn't so sure. Instead of partners, the board members seemed like adversaries. It no longer surprised him when even his best ideas were rejected outright. Sometimes he wondered if his board members understood ministry at all.
Odds are, they didn't.
They were sharp people and good leaders, but no one had trained them for their role. They had never been exposed to the unique principles and requirements of leading a spiritual and volunteer organization like the church. That was left for Tim and his fellow professionals to learn at Bible school and seminary. The layleaders were expected to figure it out on their own.
Tim's training, and their lack of it, caused them to view issues from radically different perspectives. They were suffering from what I call "educational separation." And with every new book Tim read and every seminar he attended, he slowly widened the gap between the way he saw the church and the way his board members and lay leaders did.
When Tim told me about his predicament, I understood. Early in my ministry, I had faced a similar situation. It seemed the more I learned about ministry the more I found myself frustrated with board members who had never been exposed to the material, much less sold on it.
Overcoming Educational Separation
Searching for some way to close the gap, I decided to set up an on-the-job training program to expose our board members to the same insights and principles I had been exposed to during my own training for ministry. But instead of focusing on the standard biblical and doctrinal themes, I zeroed in on practical theology, the stuff I studied in my pastoral ministry and Christian education classes.
Almost immediately, the gap in our perceptions of ministry began to close. Now that they were being trained like pastors, many of our board members started to think like pastors. Even when we disagreed, we had an easier time understanding and appreciating each other's viewpoint. Most important, we made better informed and wiser decisions.
Over the years, we've tackled a variety of subjects: church growth, educational theory, group dynamics, management styles, and the role of New Testament elders, to name a few. We've read articles and books by church strategists, and we've reviewed the insights of secular books such as In Search of Excellence and Good to Great. Also, whenever I or a staff member have attended a seminar or conference, we've summarized for the board any significant insights.
Training the board makes a difference—a big one. It's one of the most effective ways to increase unity and efficiency. Unfortunately, most board members receive, at best, a cursory introduction to their task.
So let’s look at the big picture: why training is so important and what principles guide the way we train.
Biblical and Practical Priorities
From my perspective, training board members should be a top priority for both biblical and practical reasons. First, the Bible mandates it. Ephesians 4:11-13 is a case in point. It articulates the Christian leader's responsibility to equip the rest of the body to do the work of the ministry. Increasingly, in the church, the one-man show is out, something I find refreshing and biblical.
But I also find that in our rush to equip people to study the Word, evangelize, teach, and counsel, we often have neglected to train them for one of the most vital areas of ministry: leadership. As important as the usual training is, training for leadership is more so. I agree with Bob Biehl, who said in his Leadership Wisdom series, "Every organization is a direct reflection of its leadership, for better or worse."
It's no accident that Jesus spent the bulk of his ministry training a small group of future leaders rather than an army of followers. No doubt he knew the future of the church, humanly speaking, depended upon the quality of its leadership.
Even if there weren't a biblical mandate to equip leaders to lead, the practical benefits would still make it a wise choice.
First, training draws people together. Most church boards are made up of folks from widely divergent backgrounds. But a training program can provide everyone with common experiences and vocabulary, making communication easier.
It doesn't even matter whether everyone agrees with the content of the training. Just going through the process gives us a starting point from which to launch a discussion. It enables us to invest words, terms, and situations with an agreed-upon meaning. That way, even when we disagree, we at least understand one another's frame of reference well enough to intelligently discuss the differences.
Second, training is essential because a church is different from a business organization. It is spiritually centered and run by volunteers. It has a radically different bottom line: relationships. While some of the leadership principles of business carry over, many do not. A training program can help a board recognize and respond to these differences.
Frankly, it strikes me as ironic that most board members receive so little training today, because the modern-day pastor receives so much. This is the age of continuing education. Additional degrees and further study are not only encouraged; in many cases, they are required. Few churches would settle for a pastor or staff member who lacked formal training.
But if the increasing complexities of ministry necessitate more training for the "professionals," isn't the same needed for the rest of the leadership team? And if as pastor I fail to train leaders to lead, what right do I have to complain about the way board members do their jobs or make their decisions?
As valuable as training can be, if handled poorly, it can do more harm than good. That's why I wrote an article for Leadership Journal entitled, "Why Board Training Goes Awry." But if training is done right, it can contribute to a beautiful partnership between pastor and board. Here are some key points I've had to learn.
No Lobbying
One of the most important things to remember is the difference between training and lobbying. The two are easily confused.
Training presents information away from the pressure of an immediate decision. It's designed to change the way we think.
Lobbying presents information in the middle of the decision-making process. It's designed to change the way we vote.
I never fully grasped the difference until we were about to hire our first full-time associate. I had someone in mind, a member of the church who I knew would hit the ground running. I also knew that every church-growth expert agreed we should hire immediately, before the need became acute. That way we would be staffing for growth, not maintenance.
I figured it was an ideal time to teach the board the importance of staffing for growth and the advantages of hiring from within. So I put together a packet of all the literature I could find on the subject, sent it out, and asked everyone to be prepared to discuss it at our next meeting.
When we began our discussion, Jim spoke first. "Thanks for the helpful articles, Larry," he said. "But I know there is always another side to every issue. All these articles agree with you. I'd like to see some from the other side as well."
When I told him there weren't any, that all the experts agreed with me, he looked at me in disbelief. He thought I was lying. It took a long time to convince him otherwise.
I learned a valuable lesson that night. When information is presented in the middle of a decision-making process, most people will look on it as a lobbying effort, not training. Regardless how accurate or helpful the information might be, if it is presented too close to a vote, it will be treated with skepticism—an appropriate response to a lobbyist's presentation.
Yet many of us share the bulk of our insights when an issue is at hand. Until then, the principles we've gleaned from reading, conferences, and experience stay stored in our memory, notebooks, and files. When the board is faced with a tough decision, we pull them out and present them in an attempt to sway their decision. But by then, it is too late. What could have been helpful training comes across as nothing more than manipulative lobbying.
There is another important difference between lobbying and training. Training allows people the freedom and time to change their mind. Lobbying asks for a decision right now.
Most of us have had the experience of later championing an idea we initially rejected. But the change seldom occurs overnight. We need time to reflect and mull over an issue. When I tried to train our board members in the middle of the decision-making process, they had no time to reflect and change their mind. The pressure was on. But now, if they do their best thinking in the shower or on the way home, that's fine. They have the time to do so.
When John, one of our board members, was first exposed to the principles of church growth, he rejected them a priori. "Frankly, this stuff disturbs me," he said at the beginning of one meeting. "We're supposed to be a church, not a business. All these guys care about is numbers."
But with the passage of time and further exposure, he worked through his initial concerns. Now John is one of our board's strongest advocates for growth. More than once he's pointed out an area where we were veering from a basic church-growth principle.
But if John's first exposure to these principles had been during a major growth-related decision, he would probably still be an opponent. Lobbying would have forced him to digest the information quickly and make a decision. As part of the debating and decision-making process, he would have had to defend his position publicly. And unfortunately, once a person takes a public stand, he seldom changes his mind. It's too threatening to the ego.
Avoiding lobbying removes skepticism and allows people to buy into ideas based on their merit, not our pressure.
Flexibility
Another key to an effective training program is flexibility. For me, that means not being slavishly tied to a set curriculum.
Whenever I talk or write about training leaders, people ask me for a copy of the curriculum we use. They're always surprised when I say we have none. Rather than using a set body of material, I select topics of study as we go along, trying to match our training to forthcoming needs.
I realize a curriculum can save time, cover a subject in depth, and add a sense of authority to the things I'm trying to get across.
But once we've started a program, most of us want to stick to it. We then resist excursions down a side road. Yet taking a side road is exactly what I want the freedom to do. I want to deal with issues that soon will be hot and take advantage of teachable moments. Not that I wait until we're in the middle of making a decision (as we've seen, that would be lobbying, not training), but I tackle an issue the moment I see it looming on the horizon.
Say, for example, it's becoming obvious that our growth is going to make an additional service necessary within the next year. I want to be able to stop and study what other churches have done in that situation. And I want us to learn that now, well before we're forced to make our own decision.
A second reason why I haven't tried to develop a set curriculum is that I want to stress training as an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Most of us view a training course as something to be finished; once we've completed the material, we consider ourselves trained. That's the last thing I want our leadership team to think. We can't afford to stop learning and growing. To emphasize this, I've chosen to avoid a curriculum with a clearly defined start and end.
In short, it's not easy to be a church leader. The demands on our board constantly change, and new and unforeseen situations crop up. A flexible training program is the only way I can guarantee the board's training will relate to its task.
For instance, a few months ago we had to deal with a case of sexual immorality. What made it difficult was that the sinning brother acknowledged the sin, verbally repented, and put himself into an accountability relationship. But he continued to sin.
We'd never before had a situation in which someone repented and denounced a relationship, and at the same time fell back into it. As a board, we had to make a tough decision. Should we apply the discipline procedures found in 1 Corinthians 5, or keep trying to help this person turn around?
We stopped our current training topic and spent the next couple of sessions wrestling with church discipline, sexual purity, and corporate responsibility. Our study led us to a consensus that as church leaders we could judge people only by their ongoing actions, not their tears, so we asked him to leave the fellowship, which he angrily did. It was a classic teachable moment. I have no doubt that the Bible studies and lessons in that setting never will be forgotten. By keeping ourselves flexible, we were able to study what we needed to know when we needed to know it.
Repetition
Most training programs cover an item once and go on. We tend to think if we have carefully covered an issue once, everyone understands. We forget our own need to hear an idea several times before it soaks in. Also, we fear boring people, so we may move on long before the lesson has been learned.
To keep from doing that, I keep in mind the three stages of learning: exposure, familiarity, and understanding. A lesson hasn't been learned until we've completed the third stage.
The exposure stage is by far the most exciting. It's fun to be exposed to new ideas, to wrestle with concepts and principles for the first time. When suddenly I grasp what was only a mystery before, there is a sense of exhilaration.
During the second stage, familiarity, there are few surprises. I know where the discussion is going, so there is a great temptation to tune out because "I know this stuff already."
But actually, I don't.
Familiarity falls far short of the final stage of learning: understanding. When I'm familiar with a subject, I recognize where the teacher is going. When I understand a subject, I can teach and apply it myself. Only then has the lesson been learned.
Keeping these three stages in mind has helped me avoid the temptation to move on from an idea too early. For instance, we studied the principles of church growth on and off for about three years. If I had stopped after the first book or a couple of articles, we all would have had a nodding acquaintance with the subject. But we would not have been able to explain church growth to others in the congregation or base decisions on a mature understanding of it.
Even when we fully grasp a subject, it needs to be repeated within a couple of years. Otherwise, a turnover of even a few people can destroy the unified understanding of the board.
Obviously, going over the same material year after year could be a pain for those who have been on the board a long time. To save them the agony, we've put together a starter packet for new board members. It covers material we feel every member needs in order to understand our present board's organizational climate and way of thinking. It also includes some articles I've written on the church. With the packet, new board members get a running start, and the gains of today aren't lost tomorrow.
Building Leaders
I once thought equipping the saints for ministry was limited to helping people develop godly character, a knowledge of the Bible, and a specific ministry skill. I left the job of equipping church leaders to the seminaries and Bible schools.
Now, for the sake of our church's long-range health, I've made equipping our leaders to lead a top priority. It has paid off in a board that consistently works through tough issues without losing its cool or its unity.
But the church as a whole has not been the only beneficiary. Our board members have benefited as well. The same principles that made them better church leaders have also helped them lead at home and in the marketplace.
I remember when one elder called to tell me about a major promotion. He was moving into a management position and was going to be overseeing some significant projects. After I congratulated him, he said, "This is a new track for me, but I am excited about it. I've already seen a lot of areas where I can apply the things we've been learning about leadership. I'm confident I'll do a good job."
And he has. His company would be surprised to learn that part of the credit goes to the training he received as an elder in his church.
