[featured_image]Leadership Development: January 2011 | missionalchallenge.com

This photo has nothing to do with leadership development.

At a recent retreat, I was impressed by its size!

One of the greatest challenges I faced in church planting was the need to develop leaders around me. I quickly realized that we’d never be able to recruit enough leaders. Although we were blessed by a significant number of spiritual leaders who joined our church planting team, one of our biggest challenges was raising leaders from the harvest for the harvest!

Over the past several weeks, I’ve written multiple posts on this theme of developing leaders. Here is a quick overview for church planters who are seeking to increase their focus on developing leaders:

January 9: Two Things Every Leader Must Do Well

There are two things that leaders must do well – especially if they are leading other leaders. In fact, when leaders fail to do both of these two things well, they will lose those whom they are leading.

January 11: Evaluating Ministry Competencies

“The best predictor of future performance is past behavior.” Consider this list of questions that focus on critical areas of evaluating leadership skills.

January 12: Raising Leaders in a Church Plant – part 1

Every pastor of a healthy, growing church is faced with the challenging burden of developing and empowering spiritual leaders who will actively engage in the vision and ministry direction of the church. Where do pastors and churches find spiritual leaders? How are emerging leaders developed? What is the process for raising up spiritual leaders? And who is responsible for their ongoing training?

January 21: Training Leaders Through Distributed Leadership

Training leaders cannot happen without practice. You can orient and teach principles in a classroom, but true training happens on-the-job. Sharing leadership responsibilities with those you are training is necessary for them to learn how to lead. Here are some important practical steps.

January 24-27: 16 Categories for Spiritual Leadership Development (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4)

This was a four-part series on developing leaders that identified sixteen categories to consider in determining if someone is qualified to serve in a leadership role in a local church. They are also sixteen areas to pay attention to as you work to intentionally develop spiritual leaders around you.