How Empowering Leadership Shapes a Healthy Church

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Comedian Jackie Mason once said, “It's no longer a question of staying healthy.

It's a question of finding a sickness you like.” When I first read that quote,

I laughed, but then I sobered a bit when I considered its truth. It’s easy to find our comfort zone in a hurt, habit, or hang-up as individuals, but we can also make dysfunctions in a church comfortable.

We’ve been looking at the key indicators of a healthy church over our last few newsletters. At the foundation of health is the desire to leave our sickness behind and become vibrant and fruit-bearing. Through my work with churches, I find that some church leaders struggle to lead their church toward health. It seems their church has become content with “the sickness they like.” I wish this were the rare exception for churches, but unfortunately, it’s not. How do you lead your church out of this dysfunctional comfort zone?

Several of the eight qualities of a healthy church could address the solution, at least in part, and I want to reference one of them here: empowering leadership. Every church has leadership, good or bad, but healthy churches have empowering leadership. That is, not only do you empower them, but they also empower others. Moving a church from being satisfied with an unhealthy status quo can be quite a challenge, and the smart leader will recognize he or she must be committed to the long haul and not the short sprint. 

One key to overcoming this inertia is the church leadership. Obviously, church leaders who do not want to address their state of unhealth need spiritual renewal, and that might be the slow part of this process as you pray for these leaders and choose one or two with whom you will meet regularly to encourage and disciple. Your goal is to raise up a team of leaders who will lead the church toward greater health. You could attempt to do it yourself, but imagine the impact of having a team of key leaders, passionate about having a healthy church.

As you meet with leaders, discipling and equipping them, you will ultimately model what it means to empower them to serve. Leaders who are not equipped don’t feel empowered, so be intentional with how you prepare and release them to serve.

Also, create a healthy way to follow up so they know how they are connected to the church's bigger mission and understand the value of accountability.

Part of your preparation should revolve around helping your leadership understand their spiritual gift(s). If this is an important part of your new member assimilation process (and it should be), make sure your leaders are functioning at a high level in their areas of giftedness (if you need help with this, consider our resource at Natural Church Development: The 3 Colors of Your Gifts). This will bring about great confidence and spiritual fruit.

In the end, empowered leaders empower leaders, and the result is greater health as a church. Next month, we’ll consider another quality of a healthy church as we think about how to move our churches onto God’s agenda.