I have begun the month of March with some strong reflections on the impact of leader development on unreached peoples. When we think of unreached peoples, most of what I’ve written in the past is focused on the idea of unreached peoples, the need to reach them, how to recruit workers to reach them, how to deploy them, etc. But when we think of leader development, don’t we often put it into a different box? Am I getting off track and away from my vision? I don’t think so, but it’s worth taking a few paragraphs to examine where leader development and unreached peoples intersect.
1.
I have written about the need for workers for the harvest: 150,000 is my estimate. What will these workers do? I’ve written about that, too: I—and many others—would not envision them as “evangelists” or “pastors” but rather apostolic pioneers.
What that means is: such pioneers go into a previously unreached place and start the process rolling. Yes, they would evangelize, but not necessarily en masse. Yes, they might pastor, but not a huge church. Their initial job is to make a “beachhead” for the Gospel: to seek out a smallish number of converts and disciple them and help them begin ministries that will repeat the cycle. What I envision is 50,000 pioneer teams who perhaps each disciple 10 or 12 leaders (I’m not trying to be magical about the number), and help those 10 or 12 leaders each raise up 10 or 12 ministries that in turn impact 1,000 people over the course of 10 years. The numbers don’t need to be precise, but what we’re angling for is a pioneer team that impacts 100,000 people over the course of a decade.
In this model, the team isn’t trying to evangelize 100,000 people on their own. What they’re doing is setting in motion processes by which at the third generation they are impacting 100,000 people.
Now you can see where I’m going. This “swarmish” structure is about cross-cultural missions, yes. But it is also about leader development. What kind of person can pour themselves into 12 people? What kind of person can be brought to impact 1,000 people over 10 years (that’s 100 people per year)? What kind of person will prioritize quality over quantity?
2.
The intersection between leader development and unreached peoples is the apostolic team that makes disciples: someone who is trained to communicate cross-culturally but also self-disciplined enough not to raise themselves up at the expense of the people they are training. These kinds of leaders are perhaps more like Edward Kimball, the Sunday School teacher, and less like his “recalcitrant Sunday School student,” D. L. Moody (who of course would go on to evangelize millions).
Such leaders do not need to be Western. Indeed, the majority will not be Western. I have written before about our need to focus not just on church planting movements, but also on mission planting movements: where we help catalyze the formation of non-Western mission sending structures. LeaderSource, who I now work with, has another name for this: they call it healthy leader development movements. Okay, it doesn’t sound the same – one is raising up workers to be sent out, and the other is raising up leaders for the church. But as my one-time mentor Kent Parks said, “shouldn’t we be sending a tithe of our very best leaders to the front lines?”
In other words, healthy leader development systems lead directly to healthy leaders, which lead directly to healthy leader sending structures. We need people who are, in terms of the “5C” model that LeaderSource has developed: (1) intimate with Christ, (2) able to live in community, (3) maturing their Christ-like character, (4) recognizing their God-given calling, and (5) building the competencies to complete their calling.
3.
If we have healthy leader development structures in a church – whether it is an American, British, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Nigerian, Russian or Swahili church! – it is a small leap from there to sending some of those leaders (a “tithe” perhaps?) to the nations. But if we don’t have healthy leaders, we aren’t going to have healthy pioneers. At least not in the numbers that we need.
Missionary recruitment of the kind I am talking about therefore begins with leader development. Healthy leaders from the LeaderSource model will tend to develop swarmish structures (which is why I was drawn to them). Leaders are sustained on the field by good member/leader care. And they multiply their impact by doing things multi-generationally, not by trying to evangelize everyone by themselves.
So there is the intersection between leader development and unreached peoples. We need to be about the business of helping both Western and non-Western churches develop the kinds of people—the kinds of pioneer leaders—who can go into cross-cultural settings and pour themselves into local leaders. How well are we doing that? How can we do it better?
That question leads into the topic of assessment, which is my focus for this month, and which I’ll write about more later.
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