Helensvale Baptist Church

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Leader, leaders, leaders

Filed Under:  Matt's Blog   —   7th Apr, 2011

Our understanding of the multi-site church here on the northern Gold Coast is that it won’t happen without the ongoing development of new leaders. Indeed some multi-site church proponents describe the multi-site church as an incubator for leaders: leadership development is fundamental to the ongoing effectiveness of a multi-site church.

We saw this as we drafted the ministry in the multi-site church paper for HBC and SBC. One of the ten priorities of the multi-site church is one (flexible) ministry team staff (pastoral staff) across the whole church. By having one staff team, pastors and staff members can be mobilised across any campus of the church as needs arise and the campus and church agree. This is a great example of the shared resources of a multi-site church: one campus believes its kids’ ministry needs to be enhanced, another has a kids’ ministry thriving under the leadership of a pastor set aside for kids work. By having one staff team, the kids’ pastor could be released to invest two days a week (or whatever) in the second campus to encourage the development of the kids’ ministry team on that campus.

But of course there is a catch. The church could not release this kids’ pastor to the other campus, unless the first campus, and indeed the kids’ pastor, had been investing in that campus’s kids ministry team to release new leaders to take on responsibility for the kids ministries at the first campus the kids pastor would have to be released from to invest in the second campus. Thus leadership development is fundamental to the model.

You can see the same between the Lead Pastor and the Campus Pastor roles. One of the greatest problems in churches in Australia has been the issue of transition from one pastoral leader to another. Many a church thrives under one leadership, only to flounder under the next as the original leadership group was never intentional about developing new leaders to carry God’s ethos, values, mission and vision of the church on to the next generation. Having Campus Pastors alongside Lead Pastors in a multi-site church provides a potential structure for transition and leadership development even for this significant leadership issue.

In this sense the multi-site church demands that leadership development and training goes on. Without it the principle of shared resources is merely words.

But there is another sense in which the multi-site church is all about developing leaders. It also provides a greater variety of structures and frameworks to release people into vocational (paid) ministry. More on that next week.