Take Me to Your Leader: Equipping for the Future

Take Me to Your Leader: Equipping for the Future

Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell

 Guest: Dr. Dave Deets

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 9/01/26. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Jamie Mitchell:

Well, good afternoon and welcome again to Stand in the Gap today. I’m your host, Jamie Mitchell, director of church culture at the American Pastors Network. I’ve served in some kind of ministry leadership for 42 years, and I can tell you the number one roadblock to ministry success is not money, facilities, good children’s or youth ministry. It’s not even a great musical ministry. All of those elements of church life are important, but they are not the number one roadblock. So what is it? Well, very simply, leadership development. If a church cannot find, cultivate, train, and deploy people in their ministry to share the load of leadership, the church will be stuck and never reach its potential. It did not take me but a year or two when starting a ministry that I knew this to be true. And if most pastors were honest, they would acknowledge that fact.

Yet, when you look at the seminaries and what they’re teaching and how churches constructed pastor’s job description, little time is devoted to developing leaders. As one very wise pastor told me years ago, we are one generation away from being completely disorganized, dysfunctional, and disappearing because we don’t develop leaders. Today, I want to consider this important issue of developing leaders in ministry and to help me Dr. Dave Deets, vice president of ministries at the Institute of Biblical Leadership. Dave, welcome back to Stand in the Gap. I’m so excited to have this conversation with you because this is a really important subject.

Dave Deets:

Yeah. Thank you so much, Jamie. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you and the rest of the listeners.

Jamie Mitchell:

Dave, you heard my opening and I assume that you agree with me because it’s what you do and you’ve devoted yourself to growing and raising leaders. But let’s say someone is listening and they hear what we just started to talk about and they’re not convinced. Can you just give me a brief explanation of why we should be concerned and intentional about growing leaders in our churches?

Dave Deets:

Absolutely. I mean, I think there’s so many things that bombard a pastor’s time and energy and pragmatics can certainly play a part in there. And so when it comes to leadership development, although some of us who are in that space would think that that’s just kind of a no-brainer type of thing, there are people who maybe don’t see the value of it or don’t see the need for it and why they should be intentional with it. And so I would say in a very quick nutshell, because we care about the great commission, that’s the reason. The great commission is not fulfilled with the evangelization of the lost. It’s not even fulfilled when they accept Christ. The great commission is not completed until those who were once lost and on their way to hell are taught to observe whatever God’s word has to say. We know from Matthew 28, go into all the world and preach the gospel, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.

And so I think the necessity of this and why we should be concerned about this is because it’s tied directly to the great commission. And the culmination, the natural culmination of the great commission then is the development of leaders in the church.

Jamie Mitchell:

Dave, I’m glad you said that because Jesus was concerned about seeing people get converted and come to personal faith and have their sins forgiven. He was concerned about them growing in their faith and getting connected to a church and growing in community, but he was very intentional about then developing leaders who he could then leave the ministry to. Dave, with this in mind, here is another question that some might ask or be thinking. Are leaders made or born? Meaning can you really train somebody who may not have the personality or presence or natural aura of a leader to be a leader?

Dave Deets:

Yeah, that’s a great question. And certainly there’s going to be some ease for some people with certain personalities. And I mean, obviously we know everyone is born with certain gifts, certain personalities, certain interests, et cetera. So when it comes to leadership development, some people obviously are more charismatic or engaging than others, as you say, the personality, the presence, the natural aura, if you will. And they’re more engaging than others. But I would say that the reality is that leaders are made. They’re not simply born. And so what that means is that no matter who I am or what my background may be, I can, and I would even argue, I must be striving to be a leader. And so part of that is quite honestly, it’s defining what a leader is. And I think too many people define leadership as in relation to a position, a title, power or whatever, any kind of human thought process that would go along with it.

However, at the end of the day, I would say that leadership, and I think the Bible would say leadership is about influence. And that’s why at IBL, we define leadership as a Holy Spirit led process whereby a Christ-like individual with a heart to glorify God influences others to embrace God’s objectives.

Jamie Mitchell:

Oh, I love that. I just love that. We are to influence and it can be taught. We can give people the knowledge and the skills and the attitudes needed to be a leader. And I guess the big thing, Dave, as we have about a minute left, is leadership development has to be intentional. It’s just not going to happen. You must see that as you train leaders who will then train leaders, don’t you?

Dave Deets:

Yes. Yeah, we do. And I’m sure we’ll talk about it as we go on in the show today, but the reality is God has called us to be intentional in this process. This can’t be a kind of cross our fingers and hope for the best and y’all pray for us. We can’t practice this type of mentality when it comes to leadership development. There has to be an intentionality to this. And I think a lot of pastors can struggle with that because there are so many things that are going to demand their time and energy and attention. And leadership development is one of them. Like you’ve mentioned, and I would argue it’s got to be one of the primary ones, maybe right behind the preaching, faithful preaching and expositing of God’s word. And so we have to be intentional in this process. We can’t just sit back and hope it happens.

We have to be very proactive in this process of leadership development.

Jamie Mitchell:

Hey, listen, friends, if you’re somebody who’s sitting in the church, you’re a member, you’re a lay person in the church, you want to encourage your pastor and make yourself available and say to your pastor, “Look, pastor, I know you must need help, but I need to learn. I need to be trained. I need to be intentionally mentored to be a leader so that I can influence others and help you with the ministry. Here’s what I know from interacting with a lot of pastors and church leaders. All of them need additional leaders to help in ministry.” Now when we return, I want to discuss some of the challenges that we need to overcome when developing leaders. Listen, there’s plenty of crisis right in front of us that we have to deal with today. Leadership development is forward looking. It’s looking to the future and saying who and what will I need?

This is going to be an important discussion for churches today, so don’t leave us.

Thanks for staying with us, especially because of the nature of today’s topic, developing leaders in your church. Now, just so we don’t lose anybody, if you’re not a leader in your church or a pastor, this is still for you today. Leadership for the lack of it affects all of us in our churches. So even if you aren’t a leader, I hope that you listen today, you pass it along to your pastor. But I also believe by hearing what you’re going to hear today, it’s going to help you be a spouse, parent, neighbor, employee, employer. Our guest today is Dave Deets. Dave, developing leaders just doesn’t happen and there are challenges we face. Can you list out some of the roadblocks that you have encountered or you have heard from the leaders that you work with when developing leadership?

Dave Deets:

I think, and like we ended talking about the intentionality, I think one of the components of being intentional is understanding that there are roadblocks. You can have all the best intentions and motivations and concepts in minds, but you’re still going to run into some roadblocks, you’re still going to run into some difficulties. And I would probably look at these as a two-part component. There’s roadblocks that exist on the part of those who are to be developing leaders, pastors and other ministry leaders. And then there are roadblocks on the part of those who are supposed to be being developed as leaders. And so when I think about those who are supposed to be developing leaders, the leaders themselves, pastors and other ministry leaders, some of those roadblocks are apathy. Maybe they just don’t have the energy, they don’t have the drive, they don’t have the passion.

They’re just apathetic. What good is it going to do? I’ve not been successful in this process. And so they just get apathetic to the process. There’s ignorance. That’s a roadblock. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how to take somebody through a process of developing them as a leader. And then there’s inefficiency. It’s kind of like this idea, well, let’s just throw anything at the wall and see what sticks. And so man, we spend a lot of time and energy and we actually waste a lot of time and energy because we’re not intentional and we’re not strategic in leadership development. And then I think there’s another roadblock and that’s control, which may be kind of a negative concept, if you will, but it’s the control of the guy or the woman who’s trying to develop leaders, but he is trying to control things to say, I want the people I develop as leaders, I want them to look exactly like me.

They need to do everything just like me. They need to be clones of me. And that actually is not what leadership development is. It’s not making clones of yourself. And then I think there’s a fifth roadblock for those that are developing leaders and that’s that they actually themselves are unqualified to be in leadership. They’ve been put into a position, they’ve been put into a place, they’ve got a title, they’ve got a role. They’re not actually qualified to be there and so therefore they’re going to do a very poor or ineffective job at developing leaders. And then I think conversely, on the opposite side of those who are supposed to be developed as leaders, there can be some roadblocks as well, like a lack of commitment. I’m just not committed to this. A lack of availability. I don’t make the time to show up. I don’t make the effort to be available.

A lack of desire. I just don’t want to be developed. I don’t see the need to be developed. I don’t want to be developed as a leader or a lack of vision. What does it mean to be a leader? Where are we going with this? Why are you investing time and energy into my life? What’s the end goal? We don’t have a vision for what that’s going to look like. And then a fifth roadblock for somebody being developed as a leader is there’s no developers. There’s nobody out there to develop them as a leader. Now, we would have to argue the sufficiency of God’s word is good and it’s profitable and it’s sufficient. So if I find myself without somebody to train me or develop me, I can obviously look to scripture, but it certainly helps when we have somebody who’s coming alongside of us and helping to develop us as a leader.

Jamie Mitchell:

Dave, as you’re laying those out, those are excellent, very practical. I hope people fully absorb what you just said because they are the things that keep coming up and we just have to understand that they’re going to be there. We just got to kind of navigate around them and anticipate them and not let them hijack what you’re trying to do. But one of the things with leadership development is that the likelihood is if you are a leader and you’ve been thrust into that role, the likelihood is nobody really invested in your life. And so you’re doing something for the very first time. No one has mentored you, nobody has trained you, no one has equipped you and you’ve got to start from scratch. Now I call that breaking the leadership development cycle. We have this cycle of never developing leaders and we are finally going to break this thing and we’re going to start this multiplication process.

But boy, if we don’t anticipate and overcome some of those roadblocks, we’re just never going to see this generational lack of leaders overcome. Dave, as you were also talking, I’ve seen two issues and I want you to weigh in on them and tell me if you’ve seen them as well. The first is simply this, especially when it comes to men in leadership, as they get older, they start to back off, they turn things over to young leaders who they see as having energy and new ideas and all that, and they basically remove themselves from the process. Why is that a potential problem? And then let me give you the second one real quick. As I have worked with people and I have invested my life into others and developing leaders, there are those who don’t want to do that, don’t have the time, energy or interest, but they’re still resentful because they don’t get to spend time with the primary leader.

Speak to both of those two issues in the time that we’ve left.

Dave Deets:

Yeah. Both of those are a problem and a challenge. So I’ll take the first one about the men as they get older, they kind of back off and almost like they kind of check out, if you will. That’s not always a problem, but I think we got to be clear as to why it is a problem. And so from the problem standpoint, it would seem to indicate if a guy is doing that where he’s just, “Hey, give it to the younger guys and I’m going to kind of almost check out and become disengaged.” That really indicates that they saw leadership development, they saw their role, their position as a pastor or ministry leader as simply that, a job. It was a task, it was a job, it was a position. And so in their minds they’re thinking, “Well, I’ve had my time, I’ve done my time, I’ve done my duty, so I’m going to hand it off and I’m going to kind of check out and I’m going to turn it over to the younger guys and they’re going to do all the work and I’m just going to go home and watch Andy Griffith or something because that’s what I think I should do.” And the reality is that God may lead us to give up a role or a position due to health or age or whatever, but he never calls us to give up the mission of developing leaders.

Just like, again, we tie this to the great commission. The great commission doesn’t have a timestamp where it ends like, “Oh, at 70, stop fulfilling the great commission.” So he never gave us this call to stop at 70 years old or 72 years old. And so we would say until we take our last breath, we should be striving to help others become the leader that God intends. So if I’m backing away, I need to ask the question, why am I doing that? And then I can give up some roles and responsibilities, but I still need to see the value and I still need to see the purpose that God has called me to develop leaders until he takes me home. And then the second question that you had as far as people being resentful and as they think through the role of the pastor especially, I served 20 years in pastoral ministry and I saw this a lot.

In fact, I remember when I became pastor in our church in Michigan, we had a family leave the church. I had been there about nine months and the family left the church and the guy told me, it was an older couple, he told me, he said, “We’re leaving the church because he said you have spent more time doing ministry and helping other people than you have sitting in our living room,” talking about them specifically. And they were nominal people. They were not involved in the church. They came occasionally. But in his head, what he thought was, “I come to this church, I pay my tithe occasionally, and now I almost own part of the time of the pastor.” And so people do get resentful and those are real issues. And I think the hard part about being a pastor, one of the hard parts, is trying to find the time to accomplish everything that God has called you to accomplish.

And so that means you have to prioritize your time and your energy. You don’t have the ability to speak into or mentor or even disciple everyone in your church. And so even if that’s a small church, you don’t have that ability, so you have to prioritize. And I think that’s why two Timothy two: two, a familiar passage, many of our listeners would know that. What you’ve heard of me, commit to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. And that concept of finding faithful people, it’s the intentional strategic dynamic of leadership development like we’ve been talking about. And so Paul’s reminding Timothy to, “Hey, you’ve got to be intentional and you’ve got to prioritize and you’ve got to be okay with the fact that you’re not going to spend hours in every person’s living room because you don’t have that much time. And so be intentional and strategic with who you develop as leaders.”

Jamie Mitchell:

Listen, if you’re an older man or woman, don’t check out these young people. They need your wisdom. They need your experience. They need what God has taught you. Just don’t leave them. Stay there and stay alongside of them. And listen, if your pastor is spending time with people to develop leaders, if he can develop leaders, then he will have time to minister to you, but he has to find people to help him bear the load. People say the juice is worth the squeeze. Overcoming these problems and struggles are beneficial and they will help you in the long run. Well, next up, what do you need to pour into emerging leaders? What do they need to know? What do you need to teach them? Talk about leadership development and how strategic and important it is here at Stand in the Gap today. Stay with us.

If you’re just joining us, we’re looking at the issue of finding, developing and launching leaders in our church. It’s a great need and it is something that both pastors and church leaders have to focus their attention on. Dave Deets from the Institute of Biblical Leadership is our guest. Dave, we just handled the challenges and some of the struggles of developing leaders. Now we need to know what we must do with them. So we find a person who is faithful, they’re available, they’re teachable. You can train them. You think that they have tremendous potential to help take on some of the burden of ministry. What are some of the essentials of leadership development? What do you need to give them? What do you need to teach them? From your perspective, and you do this a lot, what are the essentials for leadership development?

Dave Deets:

Yeah. And I think you’ve kind of hinted around at a lot of those different thoughts that I was thinking about sharing as we’ve kind of gone through this. And I would say, and this is not original with me, I think actually I got this when I was in seminary from one of my professors, but kind of an easy thought to remember in this process is the phrasing discover, develop, and deploy. I do really well with alliteration like many pastors do. So as you’ve mentioned, we discover them. So we need to identify prospective leaders in our church or in our sphere of influence. Obviously we’re not talking necessarily about a church per se. So we identify them, which means we’re looking, our eyes are up and we’re constantly looking out to see who is there, who has the marks of a leader, who has the marks of somebody that has the right character that we’re looking for.

And so then we begin to develop them and that means that we let them watch us, we let them kind of come alongside of us and we let them observe what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. We get to know them, we spend time with them. We want to understand who they are, what their character is, what their heart is. We gradually, we let them to begin to do some things and first with some supervision. You don’t want to just launch somebody out there and say, “Be warm to be filled. God be with you and we hope for the best.” So we want to kind of supervise them as they begin to do the work and we watch them to see are they getting what we’ve taught them and are they comfortable? Are we comfortable? And then we deploy them. We send them out.

We apolu, as the book of Acts would say, we release them for ministry. And so we want to let them go. And even in that concept, a danger in this whole process of leadership development is that it’s far too easy for pastors and even churches as a whole to try to hold on to newly developed or developing leaders and not let them go. And that’s certainly understandable. You invested time and energy into a man or a woman and boy, you want to hang onto them, you want to reap the benefits in your ministry of them. But this is really, if we’re holding on too tightly to people, it’s really an indication that we are trying to control the situation or we’re trying to control the people. And sometimes we need to hear what God said to Pharaoh when he said, “Let my people go.” They’re not your people.

They aren’t there for you. You’re a steward of them. God has given them to you to train and to minister and to discover, develop and deploy, but ultimately they’re gods. And so we want to steward them and maybe God leaves them in our church and we get the benefit from them and all of the development we’ve done. But maybe in God’s sovereign plan, he has them moving on to another ministry, another church, another mission field, wherever it may be. And we do all that not for our own glory, but for the glory of Christ to say we want his kingdom, his ministry to be advanced around the world.

Jamie Mitchell:

I want to drill down on something you just said there and I want to go back to this whole issue of discovering leaders. I know this might sound crazy, but when I was cutting my teeth in ministry, I was a youth pastor and that’s where I really started learning how to develop leaders. I was developing high school students into leaders. And one of the things I had an old youth pastor friend say to me, he said, “Look at the kids that are causing a lot of the trouble. They’re the ones who they glue the hymnals together. They do stuff like that because they’re like a diamond in the rough.” And you know what? I found that to be true. Some of the greatest troublemakers ended up being some of the greatest leaders that I ever had involved in my ministry. But as somebody who trains leaders, and I know as pastors and church leaders are listening today, are there things that kind of tip us off and we see in people that we could discover that there’s potential leadership there?

Are there one or two things that you have seen over your experience?

Dave Deets:

Yeah. I think you’re going to, like you said, you’re going to look for the kid who may be in trouble a lot. He may be mischievous, but he has got a lot of passion. He’s got a lot of energy or she’s using that generically. They have a lot of passion and energy. They’re teachable. They’re around. You can spend time with them. And I think so much of even Christ when he developed the disciples, we would look at that. Of course, we know MacArthur wrote the book 12 Ordinary Men and we would look at them as kind of just ordinary people, but all of them had crazy different backgrounds and they were all unique and different. And so it’s easy sometimes for us to focus in on maybe the quiet, good kid who’s sitting with his hands folded in his lap and he’s just, everything is all in a row and that’s a great person to develop as a potential leader, but not to the neglect of the other one who is maybe a little bit mischievous or maybe a little bit rougher on the edges.

I have found in ministry development that actually, like you said, the ones who are kind of rougher on the edges, they bring a dynamic to the leadership table that is really good. They’re courageous, they’re bold, they’re willing to stand for truth. And if we can develop them and we can kind of hone those skills and those character traits within them, they have a great deal of potential to do many times things that the other types of personalities won’t do.

Jamie Mitchell:

Dave, I’ve heard the phrase used more than once that more is caught than taught. Leaders obviously have to be good students. They have to know things. They have to be diligent and study, but they also need to do more and practice ministry. Let’s get practical in the couple of minutes we have left here. What are some ways to engage people in ministry? What are we looking for as trainers of leaders as we do deploy them and get them involved in ministry and get them doing some things? How do we do that?

Dave Deets:

Yeah. I think practically speaking, we’ve talked about identifying them and I think that is the first step. I think a prospective leader could identify themselves. They could come forward and they could kind of by their own assertion of personality or service or involvement kind of begin to assert themselves and say, “Hey, I want to be trained as a leader.” But many times it takes us as the ones who are already in leadership to identify them and to begin to invest in them. We tap them on the shoulder. We go and talk to them. I was 20 years in pastoral ministry and now in my role at IBL, I’m not a pastor, I’m not officially an elder at a church, so I’m a congregant and I get the need for sometimes a current leader coming and just saying, “Hey, here’s a need that we have or here’s a situation that we have or here’s something that we want to do to invest in you.” Sometimes they just need that tap on the shoulder that says, “No, actually we want you to be involved in this and we see the value of you being involved in this.” And I think giving them clarity, “Here’s what this is going to look like.

Let’s meet every week or let’s meet every two weeks or let’s have you do this ministry and you’re going to do these things.” And so we’re spelling it out. We’re not just assuming that they know and they understand all that they’re supposed to do. And then we give them some encouragement and some praise when we see progress being made and we’re willing to kind of cheer them on and kind of encourage them in that capacity, no matter who we are. I mean, we all enjoy and we all thrive on that kind of praise and that opportunity. And I think that’s something that’s very important for us as we think through that. And just in the short time we have left, I remember I told the story often, but I was probably about eight years old. I was a kid. We had a large church in the Christian School where I grew up and we had a soccer coach who I thought was the coolest guy in the world.

He was probably 24, he was probably dirt poor, taught in a Christian school. We had gone as a family to Ponderosa Steakhouse and I thought it was cool because we were going with this guy and his wife and I had to wind up sitting with the women. I had to sit with my mom and my sisters and I spilled my Coke and it was a bad day. I remember that night at church, this guy came and he said, “Hey,” he goes, “After church, we’re going to go to McDonald’s.” And I was like, “Wow, we’re going to go to McDonald’s two days in a row or two meals in one day. That was huge for me. That was like Thanksgiving.” And so after church, I met him at the double doors and he said, “Hey, are you ready to go?” And I said, “Well, we got to wait for my family.” And he said, “No.” He said, “Just me and you.” And he said, “We’re going to go to McDonald’s.” And so he took me to McDonald’s.

We got a hamburger, we got a Coke, and at eight years old, he began to invest in me and just spend time with me. And so I think part of this too is no one is too young to begin the process and no one is too old to begin the process of developing them as a leader.

Jamie Mitchell:

Absolutely. I love reading the gospels and not just what Jesus taught, but how the real life leadership experience that he forced his disciples to encounter. And each experience was strategic to their development. The payoff, he ascended to heaven and they took the ball and ran with it. Don’t go anywhere as we finish up this important discussion about how to find, train, deploy, and expand our leadership in God’s church. Stay with us. Well, another hour comes to a close and we so appreciate Dr. Dave Deets being with us again. Dave, as people have been listening, they may want to connect with you. And also I want them to know about the Institute of Biblical Leadership where you serve. Can you take a moment and share how they can find out about your ministry and what could IBL do for them and their church’s ministry?

Dave Deets:

Sure. Yeah. We’re so thankful for this opportunity. And if anybody’s listening, they’re interested in IBL, they can go to our website, iblministry.org and they can look at our ministry there. They can check out the website. We’re actually kind of in a season of change and transition. And so there’ll be a lot more that’ll be coming in the next few months there as well, but they can certainly go there. IBL’s been around for about 40 years and it’s really the whole concept of IBL, the whole concept of the ministry has been to serve side by side, to develop leaders who honor God. And so we serve ministry organizations, we serve churches, we serve individuals. We do this through leadership development, through ministry development and through team development. So maybe you’re an individual and you’re like, “Hey, I need some help. I need training. I need help into being developed.” We can serve you in that capacity.

You need maybe coaching or counseling or whatever it may be. Or maybe you say, “Well, my ministry, we’re just kind of stuck. I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know what we’re doing. We’re just kind of stagnant. We’re not really going anywhere. We can help come alongside of you with maybe some vision, values, initiatives type of things or role clarification or whatever it may be that we can do to serve you and to just help get you going and get over those roadblocks.” And then maybe say, “You know what? Our team dynamic has some struggles. We’re relationally having some difficulties or we’re just not really clicking on all of our cylinders. We’re happy to come in. We do assessments all the time to just kind of assess where a ministry’s at, where a team is at, and figure out what do they need in order to continue to advance and to move forward as a team and as a ministry.” So we’re happy to do that.

We’re happy to have any kind of conversation. Everything that we do is very tailored to the ministry or the individual that we’re serving. And so oftentimes we just start with a phone call or a Zoom call to say, “Let’s just find out who you are.” Many times when we’re getting introduced to a ministry team, we’ll do just a gentle, if you will, getting to know you weekend where we can come and your team can meet us. We can meet them. We can do an assessment. We can just figure out where you’re at and what you need and how to help you move forward. And so we’d be thrilled to have that conversation with anybody who’s listening today or any pastor or church or ministry and however we can come alongside of you and serve you, we’d be happy to do that.

Jamie Mitchell:

Well, I want to encourage you, if you’re listening, especially your pastor and as you’ve been listening today and you say, “You know what? We’re really lacking in this area of leadership development.” Maybe you need just to take some time and talk with somebody who’s doing this and Dave would be glad to help. Dave, as we finish up, I know as I know a little bit about IBL and check them out, you guys give a special attention and you’ve done a lot of work in the area of developing leaders internationally as well as in rural settings. Why special attention to those two very unique geographical settings? Is leadership development different there? And if especially somebody’s listening and they’re in a rural setting, is there anything that they need to know about developing leaders that would be unique to their situation and their context of ministry?

Dave Deets:

Yeah, absolutely. So you’re right. I mean, actually one of the really foundational ministries of IBL back when it began was doing ministry training, leadership development training in Vietnam. And our heart behind the international training is not necessarily that we would, for the proverbial, throw a dart at the map and see where it lands and then go there and develop leaders. I mean, we could do that, but our heart really is to say if there’s a church or a ministry that maybe has missionaries or they have connections to national leaders and that church says, “Hey, we want to develop them. We want to help train them. We want to equip them.” Then IBL would come alongside of that church and facilitate the development in the training. We have a regimented scheduled training process that we go through internationally. It usually lasts three years and it’s usually two modules, week long modules per year.

And so we serve the local church by facilitating the leadership development in the international context to be able to help that church fulfill its burden and its passion that it has for leadership development in the international context. And so we’d be happy to have that conversation too with churches that are interested in that. And then the rural setting is really a relatively newer initiative, if you will, that’s really blossoming and we actually have an urban idea that’s going to be kind of along with it. And then the heart of it is taking what we do internationally in kind of this regimented module program of giving three core disciplines, which would be theology, pastoral skills, ministry skills, if you will, and then biblical leadership. So they’ll typically get 20 classes in theology, 20 classes in pastoral ministry, 20 classes in biblical leadership. And so what we found in the rural setting and even in the urban setting is that oftentimes there are churches that are without pastors because it’s hard to get a guy who wants to go pastor a church.

Maybe he’s got to be bi-vocational or the church just doesn’t have enough people and so it’s hard for them to attract a pastor. And so what we find is that there are a number of churches in these rural contexts who have ministry leaders within them. They have deacons, they have maybe elders or other ministry type leaders and they don’t feel adequately equipped and trained and prepared to lead the church, especially in the absence of a pastor. And so our heart is to say we are setting up, we actually have in 2027, we’ll actually have several of these out west of rural locations where we’re able to bring in 10 to 12 surrounding churches to an area and say, “Let’s just train your ministry leaders in theology, in pastoral ministry type of skills. How do you do a sermon? How do you do a lesson? How do you prepare the hermeneutics and the homiletics of preparing a message?

And then how do we develop you as a biblical leader so that we’re helping to equip really the lay ministry leaders who live there to be able to trust in the confidence of God in his word, to be able to lead that church forward in the absence of a pastor. And then if they do have a pastor who’s there leading them, now we’ve strengthened the core of the leadership team within that church. And so there’s a number of churches and ministries that are lacking. I think one of our colleagues has a list of like 300 churches that we know of that are looking for pastors. Well, in the meantime we would say, well then let’s train the ministry leaders who live there and who go to church there and who are working jobs in the area. Let’s train and equip them to be able to serve and minister and to sustain that church through the help of God and the spirit until they can find a pastor as opposed to watching that church maybe implode or that church have to shut down because there was no one trained and equipped to be able to lead them.

And so that’s why our passion in the rural context for this type of ministry.

Jamie Mitchell:

That’s so good because those churches are so isolated and this is a way to minister to them. So many of them have bi-vocational pastors. What a blessing. Thank you, Dave. Thank you for what you’re doing, taking the time today, giving us a taste when it comes to developing leaders. At the end of the day, the church will not continue to progress and reach more for the cause of Christ if we are not intentional at raising up leaders, just like Paul passed the baton to Timothy and others. We need to do the same no matter where we are as a leader. Remember, a key quality to leaders is to have courage. So that’s why I end every program the same way. Live and lead with courage. We will see you 23 hours from now for another episode of Stand in the Gap Today.