Earlier this year, Leadership journal asked pastors, “What challenges do you face in the area of leadership training?” The nearly unanimous response was the challenge of motivating leaders to be trained.
Why are board members and other lay leaders not motivated to receive training? Most leaders want to serve well and would benefit from biblical and strategic leadership training in the unique context of church ministry. So why the resistance? We found four commonly mentioned reasons:
- People are too busy or don’t have time. Pastors lamented, “Too often the attitude is that leaders feel too busy and do not want to take the time to be trained.”
- My folks don’t consider themselves leaders. One minister explained, “The deacons in my small church are scared by the term leadership development. They don’t consider themselves leaders.”
- They think they already know about leadership and don’t need training. Said a pastor, “I’ve got businessmen who consider they’ve already been trained sufficiently.” And another: “My challenge is helping people to see the need for training.”
- “We have trouble finding material that is exciting and engaging for participants.”
This past year my wife, Karen, and I began leadership meetings in our church plant. We weren’t sure how many people would come, because they’re so busy (Reason #1) and many don’t feel comfortable calling themselves leaders (Reason #2). But the meetings grew in size, from about 10 participants the first time, to almost 40 by the end of the school year. We felt encouraged by that response, considering our entire church is only about 150.
We used training materials from Leadership’s companion website, BuildingChurchLeaders.com. They’re available on over 40 topics and are easy to download. We liked that we could choose from a variety of handouts for every topic, so we always found handouts that we knew would connect with our group. Each could be completed in 20-30 minutes, leaving us plenty of time for other organizational concerns and for prayer. That meant we didn’t have to hold a separate meeting for training, and a separate meeting for planning; we could do both at once, and busy leaders did not have to come back another time.
Best of all, the Building Church Leaders handouts got our group thinking and talking, and they liked the discussion. Some people even began to view themselves as leaders.
Karen and I wanted to share this good experience and to recommend BuildingChurchLeaders.com. Using these materials won’t solve all reasons lay people resist leadership training, but it will solve Reason #4 and greatly help with Reason #1. In our case, we even saw some movement on Reason #2.
—Kevin A. Miller is editor-at-large of Leadership.
