Only Hire Leaders

Once again, I’m at Granger Community Church for EnterMission Coaching Network. EnterMission is a coaching network where pastors from about a dozen churches from around the country gather once a quarter for 18 months.

Today we were honored to have Mark Beeson & Tim Stevens present on leadership and team building. They both said so much that is worthy of posting but the big confirmation for me was the discussion around one of their values of hiring: They only hire leaders. Then the job of those leaders is to lead volunteer teams.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 7:05 pmand is filed under Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • http://echofaith.com Jesse J. Anderson

    Though I am fans of both Mark and Tim, as a creative professional who has a passion for the church this deeply frustrates me. I have seen this idea shared often in many of the emerging ahead-of-the-curve types of churches which I love, but ironically this prevalent thought make me feel completely devalued.

    God may not have blessed me with a gift to lead people, but he did give me a passion both for the church and for creative arts… to serve at the type of church I love, do I have to work for free? Why is “leading” at a church worthy of an income, but other roles important to the church are not?

  • http://www.scottharris.org Scott Harris

    Jesse, I can understand your frustration. Admittedly, I have wrestled with this philosophy through the years.

    “Only” is a strong word and used to provoke and sometimes a pastor/church leader needs to pay someone to get something done.

    However, if you were responsible to manage the limited budget of given local church, and were theologically compelled to empower everyone in your congregations for meaningful ministry, who would you hire? Say you could choose between two candidates for a creative arts role. They were equally talented in their art but one seemed to have the ability and track record for recruiting and empowering teams of volunteers. Who would you hire?

    I’d hire the one who could equip others to do the work of the ministry.