Sample Chapters

Chapter 5: Mission Comes First

In military service, people learn early to ask a basic question: What are we trying to accomplish?

That question sounds almost too obvious to deserve a chapter. Spend enough time around organizations, though, and you discover how easily people can stay busy without being clear about what all the activity is for. Meetings fill calendars, money gets spent, programs continue, reports get produced, problems get solved, and everyone works hard while the connection between all that activity and the organization’s purpose grows harder to explain.

Military organizations have the same problem. I sometimes received confusing orders, competing priorities, and instructions that made considerably more sense at headquarters than they did where we were actually operating. Still, military life repeatedly reinforced the expectation that leaders and followers should understand the larger purpose of their work.

That habit can serve veterans well in ministry.

Christ has already given His church its mission. Our task is to keep programs, traditions, structures, resources, and our own preferences subordinate to what He has called His church to do.

A Mission We Could Explain

In December 2004, I brought my crew from USS Squall and took command of USS Chinook for a deployment to the Persian Gulf.

For most of the next six months, we helped protect Iraqi offshore oil platforms. Earlier that year, a suicide boat had attacked a Navy and Coast Guard boarding team from USS Firebolt, one of our sister ships. Three Americans were killed.

 

 

Nobody aboard Chinook needed a lengthy explanation for why we were there. Our orders contained plenty of details, but the mission itself was straightforward: protect the platforms and the people working there from another attack.

The work remained difficult, but clarity helped us make decisions.

On a small ship, almost every decision affected something else. Changing the watch rotation affected sleep. Deferring maintenance moved risk into the future rather than making it disappear. Changing where we patrolled affected fuel, time, communications, and what we were no longer watching. We constantly had to decide what deserved attention now, what could wait, what we could handle ourselves, and when we needed help.

The mission gave us a way to balance those tradeoffs.

The crew still had preferences. Sailors have always enjoyed complaining, and I doubt that has changed. Sometimes the complaints were entirely justified; other times complaining was simply recreation. Officers participated too, usually with a little more discretion.

A sailor could hate standing another late-night watch and still understand why somebody needed to stand it. The work could be repetitive, uncomfortable, and exhausting while remaining connected to a purpose everyone could explain.

Churches can lose that connection surprisingly easily.

A congregation may conduct worship services, Bible studies, children’s programs, meals, committee meetings, mission projects, holiday events, and fellowship activities while maintaining a building that seems capable of generating a new problem every week. Much of that activity may be good. Some of it may be deeply meaningful.

A full calendar, balanced budget, well-maintained building, or congregation busy enough to make everyone tired tells us very little by itself about whether a church is doing what Christ has called it to do.

Those things may support the mission. They can also consume so much attention that nobody asks what all the activity is supposed to accomplish.

Military service trained me to keep returning to that question. When circumstances changed, I still needed to know what the larger purpose required. When resources were limited, I needed some basis for deciding where they went. When two good things competed for attention, preference alone wasn’t enough to settle the issue.

Church leaders face those questions too.

The Plan Serves the Mission

Plans at sea sometimes felt outdated almost as soon as they were approved. Weather changed. Equipment failed. New information arrived. Another ship was delayed. A vessel showed up somewhere we hadn’t expected it.

The ocean showed very little respect for our planning process.

Planning still served a useful purpose. Ships need schedules, procedures, clear responsibilities, communications, boundaries, and coordination. Good preparation is often what makes adaptation possible when reality refuses to cooperate with the plan.

The difficulty comes when people confuse the plan with the purpose.

Military doctrine has useful language for this distinction. Marine Corps doctrine separates an assigned task from the commander’s intent behind it.

The task describes what someone is supposed to do; the intent explains the purpose the task is meant to accomplish. If circumstances change enough that the original task no longer makes sense, understanding the intent gives subordinates a basis for adapting rather than mechanically following instructions that no longer serve their purpose.

Current Air Force doctrine reaches the same conclusion: commanders direct the “what” and “why,” while subordinates devise the “how.” When existing orders no longer fit the situation, disciplined initiative allows them to adapt within the commander’s intent.¹

Disciplined initiative still operates within limits of authority, risk, resources, coordination, law, and the larger mission. Within those limits, healthy military leadership expects people to think.

That corrects a common stereotype of military service. Effective units depend on people who understand enough of the mission to exercise judgment when detailed instructions no longer fit the circumstances.

Churches also need to distinguish between mission and method.

A congregation chooses service times, organizes ministries, establishes budgets, assigns rooms, selects curriculum, schedules events, and creates processes for making decisions. Those choices can be important. Good structures help people work together faithfully.

They still aren’t the reason the church exists.

Aubrey Malphurs makes a useful distinction between mission—the broad statement of what a ministry exists to do—and strategy, the means by which it intends to do it. He also distinguishes enduring ministry functions from the particular forms through which they are carried out.² The terminology is less important than the distinction itself. Confusion begins when a form or strategy acquires the authority of the mission it was created to serve.

I saw how complicated that can become in the Tampa-area church where I later served.

Before I began attending, the church’s senior pastor developed terminal cancer. He was only about forty. A major cancer center treated him, and during his illness the congregation developed a deep appreciation for the care he received there.

After his death, the church began collecting teddy bears at Christmas for patients at the cancer center. A devoted group delivered them, visited patients, and sang Christmas carols.

The ministry had real value. A teddy bear could provide a small kindness to someone facing a frightening or lonely Christmas. For people who had known the former pastor, the ministry also carried a story. It remembered someone they loved and expressed gratitude toward the people who had cared for him.

Years passed, though.

By the time I was attending the church and later serving on staff, many members had never known that pastor. The cancer center was some distance away, the ministry was producing relatively few continuing relationships, and needs closer to the church offered possibilities for more regular involvement with people in the community.

Eventually the senior pastor concluded that the church’s effort could be directed elsewhere.

Ending the teddy-bear ministry was difficult because, for some people, it wasn’t merely a ministry program. It was a memorial.

A leader who misses that will unnecessarily hurt people. What looks from the outside like resistance to change may sometimes contain grief. People can become attached to a ministry because God genuinely used it in their lives, because important relationships formed around it, or because it connects them with someone they loved.

That history deserves respect. A ministry can have been faithful in one season without remaining the best use of a congregation’s people and resources forever. What God did through it remains part of the church’s story even when the ministry itself comes to an end.

The same principle applies to service times, annual events, committees, buildings, organizational structures, and countless other features of church life. They can become so familiar that questioning them feels like questioning faithfulness itself.

Pastors have their own version of the problem. We arrive with methods we’ve seen work somewhere else, ideas learned from books or conferences, and preferences we may be tempted to label as vision. Something new can become just as untouchable in a pastor’s mind as something old has become in the congregation’s.

New programs can waste time just as efficiently as old ones.

Mission clarity therefore requires humility on both sides. The congregation has to be willing to ask whether something it loves still serves Christ’s purposes. The pastor has to be willing to discover that the inherited practice may make more sense than his replacement idea.

The plan serves the mission, not the other way around.

The Church Receives Its Mission

Churches sometimes spend months developing mission statements. The exercise can be useful if it forces leaders to think clearly and explain what the congregation is trying to do. It can also produce six months of meetings followed by a paragraph of church jargon that eventually disappears into a policy manual.

Whatever mission statement a congregation writes, its fundamental mission comes from Christ.

Jesus has already spoken.

After His resurrection, He told His disciples:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:18–20).

The Great Commission begins with Christ’s authority. The church belongs to Him before it belongs to a congregation, pastor, board, denomination, tradition, or generation.

Jesus sends His followers to make disciples. Acts 1:8 adds that the Holy Spirit would empower them to be His witnesses, beginning where they were and extending outward. The church exists for considerably more than institutional survival.

The congregation’s continued existence should serve the mission Christ gave His church. Its name, building, organizational structure, and familiar ways of doing things may be valuable, and responsible leaders should care about the congregation’s future. Faithfulness, however, asks whether those things continue to serve Christ’s purposes.

Making disciples includes much more than attracting outsiders or securing decisions for Christ. Jesus commands His followers to baptize and to teach people to obey everything He commanded. Acts portrays believers devoting themselves to apostolic teaching, fellowship, shared meals, prayer, generosity, worship, and witness (Acts 2:42–47). Paul describes Christ giving leaders to equip His people for works of service so that the body grows toward maturity and builds itself up in love (Ephesians 4:11–16).

The church reaches people and forms people. It gathers and sends. It teaches truth and learns to live that truth together.

Those biblical texts leave many practical questions open. Matthew 28 doesn’t tell us what time worship should begin, what percentage of the budget should go to children’s ministry, which roof repair can wait, or whether next month’s outreach idea is likely to work.

Mission gives those questions somewhere to begin.

Does this help the church bear witness to Christ and make disciples? Does it help believers grow toward obedience and maturity? Does it equip people to serve one another and use their gifts? Does it strengthen our life together or our witness to people who are not yet part of the church?

Different ministries can contribute to different parts of that calling.

Military units taught me the value of very different work being aligned toward one purpose. On a ship, engineers, electronics technicians, boatswain’s mates, quartermasters, cooks, and officers performed very different jobs. No one person could do all of them, but their work belonged to the same mission.

Paul gives the church a much richer image in 1 Corinthians 12. The church is one body with many parts. An eye doesn’t need to become a hand, and the hand doesn’t need to compete with the foot for importance. Each part contributes something different to the life of the whole.

That should help us think differently about ordinary church work.

Teaching children, keeping accurate financial records, leading worship, visiting someone who is sick, and repairing a broken door are different kinds of service. Some have an obvious connection to discipleship and witness; others support the environment in which those things happen.

The connection still needs to be real. Mission language should sharpen examination rather than protect an activity from it. A committee that no longer accomplishes anything shouldn’t continue merely because it has always existed. A ministry consuming substantial time and money should be able to explain how that investment contributes to the congregation’s calling. Pastors should also resist baptizing every new idea as “vision” and expecting everyone else to accept it as though Christ Himself had issued the instructions.

Mission gives diverse work a shared purpose. It also gives leaders permission to ask whether particular work still serves that purpose.

That question becomes especially important in revitalization.

A declining congregation can remain extraordinarily busy. Meetings and committees continue, recurring events fill the calendar, the building consumes attention, and volunteers fill positions because someone has always filled them. All that activity can create the impression of health while the church slowly becomes less connected to its community and less capable of making and forming disciples.

Mark Clifton argues that declining attendance, giving, and baptisms may be symptoms of something deeper: a church losing sight of its disciple-making calling. He also warns that programs, governance, property, and institutional maintenance can occupy enormous energy while the congregation’s spiritual condition and relationship with its community receive less attention.³

Mission drift usually begins quietly.

A program continues because ending it would hurt someone. More activities become oriented almost entirely toward people already inside the church. Leadership meetings gradually fill with property issues, schedules, complaints, and vacant volunteer positions. Prayer, spiritual growth, evangelism, and the surrounding community move farther toward the edge.

Novelty can create the same drift. Churches can copy another congregation’s programs, vocabulary, technology, and worship style because the other church appears successful.

A rural church can pursue Christ’s mission without imitating a suburban megachurch, and a congregation of eighty needs structures appropriate to its own size and setting. Context shapes how a congregation pursues the mission; the mission itself remains Christ’s. It doesn’t give us permission to replace the mission.

Preference will always be part of those decisions. Like most everyone in a congregation, I have preferences about preaching, worship, schedules, buildings, communication, leadership structures, and how long a meeting ought to last before everybody begins losing the will to live.

Some of my preferences grow from experience or theological conviction. Others are simply what I happen to like.

That’s normal.

The trouble begins when preference quietly claims more authority than it possesses. “I like this” becomes “This is the faithful way.” “We’ve always done this” becomes a theological argument. The pastor’s preferred model becomes “vision,” while anyone who asks a reasonable question is accused of resisting change.

Romans 14 reminds us that Christians can hold genuine convictions about disputed practices without turning every disagreement into a test of faithfulness. Doctrine, morality, justice, abuse, and faithful handling of Scripture can involve serious matters. Schedules, programs, methods, and style often belong to a different category.

Christ’s mission judges the congregation’s preferences.

It judges the pastor’s preferences too.

A Mission We Share

Military leaders can issue lawful orders. That creates a kind of compliance pastors simply do not possess.

Even in the military, demanding work requires more than compliance. People who understand only the instruction may stop when conditions change and the instruction no longer fits. People who understand the purpose have something to guide their judgment.

Church leadership depends even more heavily on conviction.

Love, generosity, reconciliation, spiritual maturity, courage, forgiveness, and obedience to Christ have to grow from deeper conviction. A pastor can attempt to use pressure, guilt, embarrassment, or spiritual language to force short-term behavior, but Christian commitment has deeper roots.

Paul describes a very different motivation when he writes, “Christ’s love compels us” (2 Corinthians 5:14). The gospel had reshaped Paul’s understanding of himself, other people, and the ministry entrusted to him. Christian service ultimately grows from Christ’s work in us, not from a leader’s ability to extract cooperation.

That changes how mission becomes shared.

Christ gives the mission; the congregation has to understand what obedience to it looks like in its own church and community. They need opportunities to ask questions, contribute what they see, use their gifts, and carry meaningful responsibility. Paul describes believers “striving together as one for the faith of the gospel” (Philippians 1:27). His picture is a congregation carrying the mission together.

Shared mission also becomes costly.

A church may say it wants young families until children are noisy, the nursery needs more volunteers, or newcomers fail to understand unwritten expectations. A congregation may say it wants to serve its community until doing so costs money, consumes evenings, complicates the building schedule, or brings relationships with people whose lives are messy. Churches may say they want new leaders until those leaders begin having ideas of their own.

Those tensions require more than a mission statement on the wall. The mission has to become a conviction rooted in Scripture and lived together.

Pastors help cultivate that conviction by teaching, explaining, listening, praying, modeling sacrifice, and helping people see how their work contributes. That work requires patient formation and respect for the people who will carry it.

That temptation deserves particular attention in revitalization because leaders often arrive seeing problems that longtime members have learned to live with. A ministry no longer works. Money is being wasted. A decision has been postponed for years. Opportunities are being missed. The new pastor wants to move.

Sometimes he should. Pastoral patience still makes room for difficult decisions.

But urgency can become its own form of self-deception. Questions begin looking like resistance. Caution is dismissed as cowardice. Grief gets interpreted as selfishness. People who haven’t reached the leader’s conclusion as quickly as he has become impediments to progress.

At that point, mission focus has become impatience with the people carrying out the mission.

Jesus moved deliberately toward Jerusalem and the cross. Luke says that He “resolutely set out for Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Yet on the way He continued teaching, healing, welcoming, listening, and responding to people who interrupted the journey. Near Jericho, when a blind man cried out while the crowd tried to silence him, Jesus stopped (Luke 18:35–43).

The interruption didn’t pull Jesus away from His mission.

The man was part of it.

That should unsettle any ministry philosophy in which accomplishing the plan becomes more important than shepherding the people Christ has entrusted to us.

A program can be ended in one meeting. The people attached to it may need longer to grieve. Furniture can be moved in an afternoon; trust, memory, fear, and relationships don’t move nearly so quickly. A leader can reach the right decision and still carry people through it carelessly.

Christ’s mission includes shepherding the people He entrusts to us.

It should also keep leaders listening to people who are closest to the work.

As a ship captain, I had authority that a junior sailor didn’t, but much of the information I needed still came from people closer to the work. The technician maintaining a piece of equipment knew things I couldn’t see from the bridge. A watchstander might notice a change before I did. Good leadership required information to move upward as well as direction moving downward.

Mission clarity made that information more useful. When people understood the larger purpose rather than merely their own task, they could recognize when something was changing, identify a problem, propose a better approach, and exercise judgment within the authority they already had.

Churches need that kind of participation too. The children’s volunteer may understand pressures on families that the pastor hasn’t noticed. The treasurer may see a financial risk before anyone else does. Longtime members remember why an idea failed fifteen years ago; newcomers notice barriers that everyone else stopped seeing because they became familiar.

A pastor who believes every important observation has to originate with him eventually becomes a bottleneck.

Keeping the mission in front of the church therefore means more than printing it on a bulletin. It should shape budgets, calendars, leadership conversations, ministry evaluation, volunteer development, and the stories the congregation tells about what God is doing.

Measurement can help. Attendance, baptisms, giving, participation, volunteer involvement, and other indicators sometimes expose realities we would rather not see. A church claiming to reach its community while rarely encountering anyone new should be willing to examine the claim.

Numbers can reveal important realities without settling the whole question of faithfulness. A full room may coexist with shallow discipleship, while a smaller congregation may be deeply faithful. Measurement serves discernment within the larger frame of the church’s mission.

On USS Chinook, our mission helped us decide where to patrol, how to arrange watches, what needed repair first, and where we could accept risk. It kept those decisions connected to the reason we were there.

Christ’s church receives its mission from a very different authority and moves toward a very different kind of outcome. We belong to Jesus Christ. He sends His people to bear witness, make disciples, teach obedience, worship, serve, love, and build one another toward maturity.

That leaves plenty of room for disagreement about methods. An old practice may still serve the church beautifully. A new idea may be exactly what the congregation needs—or an expensive answer to a question nobody was asking.

The mission helps us tell the difference.

Before asking what to preserve, change, begin, or end, churches need to keep returning to the question military service taught many of us to ask:

What are we actually trying to accomplish?

For Christ’s church, He has already given us the answer.

Our task is to understand His mission well enough to order what He has entrusted to us around it.

The mission also shapes how leaders view everything placed in their hands: authority, people, resources, opportunities, and time.

They have been entrusted to us.

Chapter 5 Notes

1. U.S. Marine Corps, MCDP 1: Warfighting (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, Headquarters United States Marine Corps, 1997), 4-20–4-21; U.S. Air Force, AFDP 1-1: Mission Command (14 August 2023), 5, 8–9. The Marine Corps distinguishes the assigned task from the commander’s intent and treats intent as the more enduring guide when circumstances change. Air Force doctrine similarly distinguishes the commander’s “what” and “why” from the subordinate’s “how” and connects clear intent with disciplined initiative.
2. Aubrey Malphurs, Advanced Strategic Planning: A 21st-Century Model for Church and Ministry Leaders, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2013), 109–13, 165–75, 183–88.
3. Mark Clifton, Reclaiming Glory: Revitalizing Dying Churches, updated ed. (Brentwood, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2023), 7–8, 24–31.

 

Chapter 13: From Commanding to Shepherding

I knew something about command presence long before I knew much about pastoral presence.

Command presence is difficult to define, although most people who have spent much time in the military recognize it when they see it. It isn’t volume, swagger, or the ability to dominate a room. Some of the strongest leaders I knew were fairly quiet people. What they brought into a difficult situation was steadiness. They could receive bad information without becoming rattled, ask the questions that needed asking, make a decision when the decision belonged to them, and give other people confidence that the situation was still manageable.

You want that in a commanding officer. When equipment fails, somebody gets hurt, the weather deteriorates, or events begin moving somewhere nobody expected, the crew shouldn’t have to manage the captain’s emotions in addition to everything else.

The Navy trained that instinct into me over many years. Something goes wrong: understand what happened, determine what still works, find out what resources remain, decide what needs to happen next, and make sure the right people know. Those habits followed me into ministry, and I’m thankful they did.

Then I began spending time in hospital rooms.

A physician tells someone the cancer has returned. A husband sits beside his wife after a stroke and has no idea whether she’ll ever be the same. A family gathers because someone they love may not survive the night.

My instincts still wanted a next step. Sometimes there was one. I could help someone contact family, locate the right person, clarify a question, pray, or simply make sure nobody was facing the moment entirely alone.

Often, though, the central problem in the room was one I had no power to solve. I couldn’t reverse the diagnosis, restore what had already been lost, or make fear disappear by producing a sufficiently good explanation of suffering.

I could stay.

Clinical Pastoral Education made me examine why that sometimes felt harder than doing something. After a visit, I might write about the encounter and discuss it with a supervisor or peers. We didn’t talk only about whether I had said something theologically correct. We looked at why I had changed the subject, why silence made me uncomfortable, what the patient had actually said rather than what I assumed he meant, and why I sometimes seemed determined to improve the emotional condition of the room before I left it.

I began recognizing how strongly I preferred problems that could be solved. That instinct had served me well for years, and it still does. Churches have problems that need solutions, decisions that shouldn’t be postponed, and responsibilities that somebody eventually has to own.

People, however, cannot become problems for the leader to solve.

That’s where shepherding begins to change the way we understand leadership.

The Shepherds God Condemns

Scripture had been speaking about shepherds for centuries before Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11).

Psalm 23 presents the Lord Himself as Shepherd. Isaiah pictures Him gathering lambs in His arms and gently leading those with young (Isaiah 40:11). Israel’s rulers were also described as shepherds because they carried responsibility for people who belonged to God.

That background makes Ezekiel 34 uncomfortable reading for anyone entrusted with spiritual leadership.

God’s complaint against Israel’s shepherds wasn’t that they lacked vision, failed to expand the organization, or needed better management techniques. They had forgotten what their position was for.

“You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals,” God tells them, “but you do not take care of the flock” (Ezekiel 34:3). They hadn’t strengthened the weak, healed the sick, bound up the injured, brought back those who strayed, or searched for the lost. Instead, they ruled “harshly and brutally,” and the sheep scattered (vv. 4–5).

The leaders apparently still held office and retained enough authority to benefit from the people they led. God judged them because the benefits flowed toward the shepherd while the cost flowed toward the sheep.

That ought to unsettle every leader.

A pastor can preach good sermons, maintain a full calendar, increase attendance, raise money, and lead substantial organizational change while still using people badly. Visible results do not erase the condition of the flock.

God responds in Ezekiel 34 by saying that He Himself will search for His sheep, gather them, feed them, bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak. Then He promises a shepherd from David’s line who will care for His people under God’s rule (vv. 11–24).

By the time we reach John 10, Jesus isn’t borrowing a pleasant rural image to make leadership feel warmer. He is stepping into this long biblical argument about God, His people, and those entrusted with their care.

The placement of John 10 is especially revealing. In the previous chapter, Jesus heals a man who had been blind from birth. The religious leaders interrogate the man, question his parents, insult him, and finally throw him out. They possess authority, but they are remarkably uninterested in the person standing in front of them.

Jesus finds him.

Then Jesus starts talking about shepherds.

The shepherd knows the sheep and calls them by name. They recognize his voice, and he leads them. When danger comes, the hired hand runs because the sheep aren’t really his concern. The Good Shepherd stays and lays down His life for them (John 10:1–18).

Jesus’ authority is infinitely greater than ours, yet His authority moves toward the good of the sheep rather than using the sheep for the good of the shepherd.

That changes the leadership question.

A pastor certainly has work to accomplish. The church has a mission. Buildings, budgets, programs, preaching, discipleship, evangelism, safeguarding, leadership development, and a hundred other responsibilities still require attention. But the people aren’t simply the workforce through which the pastor accomplishes ministry.

They are part of the ministry entrusted to him.

Know the Person in Front of You

John 10 contains another detail that has become more demanding to me the longer I’ve served as a pastor: the shepherd knows the sheep.

Jesus calls His own sheep by name and later says, “I know my sheep and my sheep know me” (John 10:14).

No human pastor can know people the way Christ knows them. A pastor of eighty people cannot know even those eighty completely, much less someone serving eight hundred or eight thousand. Still, shepherding always moves toward particular people.

Administration naturally works with categories. Churches have members, visitors, children, students, volunteers, leaders, shut-ins, staff, small groups, donors, and whatever other categories help the ministry function. Good records and processes can actually strengthen pastoral care by keeping people from being overlooked.

The danger comes when I know the category better than the person.

Attendance can tell me that fewer people are coming without telling me who stopped or why. A volunteer schedule may reveal that children’s ministry needs help without showing that the same three people have been covering shortages for months. Giving can decline because commitment is weakening, or because a faithful family just lost an income. An older member may seem unreasonably upset about a proposed change until I learn what that part of the church represents to him.

The information may all be accurate. It simply isn’t enough.

My doctoral research reinforced that for me. The pastors I interviewed who had led revitalization while developing other leaders repeatedly described development through authentic relationships—meals, conversations, ministry trips, shared work, ordinary time together, and friendships that formed while serving.¹ They weren’t merely locating people to fill vacancies. They were getting close enough to know whom they were developing.

Paul described his own ministry in similar terms. He reminded the Thessalonians that because he loved them, he was glad to share “not only the gospel of God but our lives as well” (1 Thessalonians 2:8). Truth and relationship belonged together.

That became especially important during CPE. One of the more humbling lessons was recognizing how quickly I moved from hearing a problem toward doing something about it. Equipment fails, troubleshoot it. A watchstander is unprepared, train him. A process keeps breaking, figure out why. A decision belongs to you, make it.

Churches need leaders willing to do all those things in their proper setting. Grief is different. So is fear, or the bewilderment of someone who has just heard news that divided life into before and after.

A person in that situation may not need an immediate explanation of why God remains sovereign. The doctrine can be entirely true and entirely mistimed.

I had to learn to pay attention to what was happening inside me as well as what was happening in the room. Anxiety can make a leader talk too much. Defensiveness makes questions sound like attacks. Fatigue shortens patience. Embarrassment can produce lengthy explanations nobody asked for. Anger occasionally dresses itself up as decisiveness.

Writers on emotional intelligence use terms such as self-awareness and emotional regulation for some of this.² Those capacities are no substitute for the Holy Spirit’s work or for Christian character, but a leader who remains unaware of his own emotional state has a remarkable ability to make everybody else live with it.

The military had taught me to remain calm under pressure. Pastoral care forced me to distinguish steadiness from emotional distance. A steady person can make a frightened room feel safer. A detached person may also look calm while communicating that he would rather not get too close to what anyone else is feeling.

I’ve seen the same distinction outside hospitals. Someone comes into the pastor’s office furious about a ministry decision. Ten minutes into the conversation, I may be convinced that most of his argument is factually wrong, and sometimes the kindest thing I can do is correct the facts. Other times another fifteen minutes of listening changes the conversation.

The ministry change may have touched grief that has very little to do with the program itself. The anger may be carrying fear. Someone who seems excessively defensive may feel that one more familiar piece of his church is disappearing after years of watching other pieces disappear.

Understanding that doesn’t make every complaint correct, and pastoral empathy doesn’t require surrendering sound judgment. It helps me pastor the person who brought the complaint.

Jesus repeatedly paid that kind of attention. Crowds never became faceless masses to Him. Tax collectors, children, lepers, Samaritans, blind men, grieving sisters, frightened disciples, and self-righteous religious leaders remained people.

Matthew says that when Jesus saw the crowds, “he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). His compassion didn’t make Him vague about truth. It shaped the way He met people with it.

Shepherding Still Requires Leadership

Contrasting command with shepherding can create another mistake: making shepherding sound like little more than being nice and available.

The biblical shepherd leads.

Psalm 23 is full of comfort, but the sheep are going somewhere. The Shepherd leads them toward green pastures and quiet waters and guides them along right paths. His rod and staff communicate protection as well as comfort. Even the darkest valley is a road through something rather than a permanent address.

Pastors sometimes avoid needed leadership because they don’t want anybody to be upset. That isn’t shepherding.

Veterans may bring something especially useful here because many of us spent years in settings where responsibility eventually required decisions. Somebody had to decide what maintenance could wait, whether conditions were safe enough to continue, how a watch would be staffed, or what to do when the original plan no longer worked. Churches can become extraordinarily skilled at discussing a problem nobody intends to own.

Pastoral leadership occasionally has to say that something needs to change.

A declining congregation may need to end a ministry, redirect money, address neglected maintenance, simplify an overloaded schedule, restructure leadership, or admit that something it once did very well no longer accomplishes what everyone assumes it does. A new pastor may see some of those problems quickly.

What he cannot see quickly is whether the congregation trusts him enough to follow him through the change.

Mark Clifton describes the revitalization pastor as a “visionary shepherd” and uses the phrase “tactical patience” for the judgment required to distinguish what should be addressed now, what can wait, and what may simply be the new pastor’s preference dressed up as urgency.³

That tension fits veterans particularly well. Military service often teaches prioritization. Not every discrepancy carries equal risk, not every maintenance problem becomes an emergency, and not every desirable improvement needs to happen immediately.

Pastoral leadership needs the same judgment with another consideration added: people themselves are being formed while change takes place.

I may arrive at an answer in a week to a problem that took thirty years of congregational history to create. That history doesn’t get a veto over obedience, but wise leadership tries to understand it.

Patience can also become negligence. A serious safeguarding problem cannot remain untouched while leaders wait for the perfect relational moment. Abuse must not be protected in the name of peace. Financial misconduct requires action. Persistent teaching that contradicts the gospel cannot be treated as though every theological disagreement carries the same weight.

The shepherd protects.

Paul told the Ephesian elders to “keep watch over yourselves and all the flock” because threats could arise from outside the church and even from among its own leaders (Acts 20:28–31). His order is worth noticing: keep watch over yourselves.

A pastor who believes he is protecting the flock can become part of the danger. Pride can make correction almost impossible. Insecurity can turn disagreement into disloyalty. Ambition can make gifted people look threatening, while exhaustion can make ordinary questions sound hostile. A leader may convince himself that he is protecting the church when he is actually protecting his control of it.

That’s why Scripture keeps reminding shepherds whose flock this is. Paul says God obtained the church with His own blood. Peter calls it “God’s flock” and reminds elders that the Chief Shepherd will appear (1 Peter 5:1–4).

The pastor never becomes the owner.

That limits his authority, but it also gives him no permission to ignore danger because confrontation will be unpleasant. Someone harming vulnerable people may need to be removed from ministry. A teacher persisting in serious falsehood may require correction. Bullying and manipulation shouldn’t be reduced to personality differences, and sexual misconduct cannot be handled primarily as a public-relations threat.

Gentleness toward someone who has been wounded and firmness toward the person doing the wounding can grow from the same pastoral love.

The Navy Leader Development Framework treats personal connection as part of leadership itself: leaders share what they are experiencing, seek to understand what is happening in other people’s lives, and build relationships that strengthen character and resilience. Veterans interviewed by Kirchner and Akdere likewise described effective leadership in terms that included listening, teaching, protecting, and caring for others as well as accomplishing the work.⁴

That accords with my experience. I cared about sailors—their safety, training, careers, families, and what happened to them after a serious mistake. Many military leaders I respected carried that same responsibility. Ministry didn’t require me to discover concern for people for the first time; it gave that concern a deeper foundation.

The sailor under my authority had been entrusted to me for a period of military service. The Christian sitting across from me belongs to Christ.

That changes the patience with which we form people too.

Policies can be rewritten in an afternoon. A budget can be amended in a meeting. Furniture can be moved before lunch.

People are slower.

Jesus spent years with the Twelve, and they still argued about greatness, tried to keep children away from Him, wanted to call fire down on a Samaritan village, and repeatedly misunderstood what He was doing. Peter could confess Jesus as the Messiah and then object when Jesus explained what the Messiah had come to do.

Jesus corrected them, sometimes sharply, and kept forming them.

Peter may be the clearest example. He boasted about his loyalty, denied Jesus three times, and later found himself face-to-face with the risen Christ beside the Sea of Galilee. Jesus confronted the failure and returned Peter to responsibility. Three times He asked about Peter’s love: “Feed my lambs,” “Take care of my sheep,” and “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17).

Before Peter was told to care for Jesus’ sheep, he had learned something painful about his own need for grace.

That was useful preparation for a shepherd.

People still grow at different rates. One person may need encouragement toward greater responsibility while another needs permission to rest. One needs a direct conversation about sin. Another has spent years interpreting every failure as evidence that God is disappointed with her and may need to understand grace before receiving one more assignment. A new believer with healthy relationships and considerable life experience may develop quickly, while another carries wounds and habits that make every step slower.

Fairness doesn’t require pretending those people are identical. Shepherding learns to deal with the person actually standing in front of us.

Under the Chief Shepherd

There’s a danger in everything I’ve just said about knowing people, listening, protecting, staying present, and walking patiently with them. A conscientious pastor can begin believing he ought to do all of it personally.

He can’t, and he shouldn’t. No pastor is the Good Shepherd. Jesus already occupies that role.

He knows every sheep completely. I don’t. He can be present to His people in ways no human leader can be. My time, attention, energy, knowledge, and emotional capacity all have limits.

The New Testament doesn’t address those limits by making pastors care less. It spreads the work of ministry throughout Christ’s body. Paul summoned the elders of Ephesus and charged them with care of the flock (Acts 20:17, 28). Peter addressed elders when he wrote about shepherding God’s people (1 Peter 5:1–2). Ephesians 4 describes leaders equipping God’s people for works of service so that the whole body grows toward maturity.

The pastor was never intended to become the congregation’s entire pastoral-care department. His work includes helping the church become a people who care for one another.

A pastor who insists on making every hospital visit, teaching every class, counseling every struggling person, resolving every conflict, approving every decision, and remaining personally involved in every ministry may appear wonderfully devoted for a while. Eventually the limits show up, often first in his family or health, and the congregation discovers that nearly every important relationship and decision passes through one increasingly tired person.

An experienced pastor can instead take another leader on hospital visits and talk afterward about what happened. Mature Christians can learn how to sit with someone who is grieving, pray with the frightened, disciple a new believer, recognize when a problem requires additional help, and respond to ordinary needs without waiting for the pastor to authorize every act of care.

My dissertation participants described leader development in much the same way. Pastors developed other leaders through relationship and real responsibility. They invited people alongside them, allowed them to observe, entrusted meaningful work, remained close enough to help, and gradually stepped farther back.¹

Shepherding should reproduce shepherding. Otherwise the pastor can unintentionally create a congregation capable of receiving good care only while he remains healthy, present, and available.

Peter understood the limits of human shepherds when he wrote to church leaders near the end of his life. He had been bold, impulsive, loyal, frightened, overconfident, corrected, broken, forgiven, restored, and entrusted with responsibility again.

His instruction to elders was simple: “Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care” (1 Peter 5:2). They were to serve willingly, avoid selfish gain, refuse to lord authority over people, and lead by example. Then Peter reminded them that “the Chief Shepherd” would appear (v. 4).

He hadn’t forgotten whose sheep they were, and neither can we.

Military service can give veterans substantial preparation for this work. Many of the strengths described throughout this book need not disappear when someone enters ministry. They do have to serve a different understanding of the people being led.

A pastor still decides, corrects, protects, prepares, and develops. He also learns that people cannot be moved like equipment, hurried through grief, or standardized into identical rates of spiritual growth. Sometimes leadership requires taking charge; at other times it requires listening long enough to understand why a person is hurting before deciding what to do next. Sometimes there is nothing useful left to do.

I once thought leadership showed itself most clearly when circumstances became difficult and somebody needed to take charge. I still believe those moments reveal a great deal about a leader.

I’ve also learned that leadership can be revealed in a hospital room after everything useful seems to have been said. There’s no plan that will fix the situation and no decision that makes the loss disappear. The pastor doesn’t need to manufacture an answer simply because silence feels uncomfortable.

He can stay with someone who shouldn’t have to face that hour alone.

The shepherd sometimes leads from the front and sometimes walks beside someone who is hurting. Learning which is needed is part of a lifetime’s work of caring for people who belong to Christ, and much of that work can be frustratingly difficult to measure.

Chapter 13 Notes

1. Bart L. Denny, “A Phenomenological Study of Pastoral Leadership Development Behaviors in the Revitalization of Small Evangelical Churches” (PhD diss., Liberty University, 2022), 128–35, 146–47, 153–55. Authentic relationship was the study’s most frequently occurring leadership-development theme; participants described formation through conversation, proximity, shared ministry, modeling, and progressively greater responsibility.
2. Michael J. Anthony, “The Emotional Intelligence of Effective Leaders,” in Michael J. Anthony, James Riley Estep Jr., and Kevin M. Gushiken, Leadership Essentials for Christian Ministries: A Practical Guide for Those Called to Serve (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2026), under “Defining Emotional Intelligence” and “Emotional Intelligence in Your Ministry,” EPUB. Anthony emphasizes self-awareness and emotional regulation as useful capacities for ministry leadership. These capacities support but do not replace spiritual formation and the Spirit’s work in Christian character.
3. Mark Clifton, Reclaiming Glory: Revitalizing Dying Churches, updated ed. (Brentwood, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2023), 119–24. Clifton describes a revitalization pastor as a “visionary shepherd” and uses “tactical patience” to describe discerning the timing and importance of changes rather than treating every issue as equally urgent.
4. S. Navy, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Leader Development Framework, Version 3.0 (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, May 2019), 5; Michael Kirchner and Mesut Akdere, “An Empirical Investigation of the Acquisition of Leadership KSAs in the U.S. Army: Implications for Veterans’ Career Transitions,” Journal of Veterans Studies 4, no. 1 (2019): 119–20. The Navy framework treats personal connections and relationships as integral to leader development, strengthening character and resilience as leaders seek to understand what is happening in others’ lives. In Kirchner and Akdere’s qualitative study of ten post-9/11 Army veterans, all ten described experiences of protecting or caring for soldiers, either as leaders or as people being led. Because the study used a small, purposive Army-only sample, the findings should not be generalized to all veterans.

 

Chapter 18: The Leaders Already Among Us

I have often wondered how many veterans have stood in church on Veterans Day, received applause for their service, and then sat back down without anyone ever asking what those years actually taught them.

The congregation knows the person served in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, or Space Force. Someone may know his or her rank. A few people may have heard where she deployed or what ship he served on. Then the conversation moves on.

Meanwhile, the same church may be wondering where it can find people willing and able to carry responsibility.

The veteran sitting three rows back may have spent twenty years training younger people, handling conflict, managing resources, solving problems under pressure, supervising complicated work, receiving correction, and learning to function as part of a team. None of that automatically qualifies him or her to lead anything in Christ’s church, but it seems worth knowing.

Veterans are only the most obvious example for a book like this.

The congregation may include a teacher who has spent thirty years managing classrooms, communicating with parents, helping children learn, and training younger educators. A nurse may make difficult judgments every week while frightened families ask questions she cannot answer with certainty. A tradesman may have trained apprentices, supervised crews, estimated jobs, dealt with customers, and learned what happens when somebody cuts corners. A business owner may understand budgets, personnel, risk, and responsibility for decisions that affect other families. A mother who spent years raising children may have more experience teaching, mediating conflict, caregiving, organizing complicated schedules, and responding to unexpected crises than any résumé will ever show.

Some of those people are already leading in significant ways. The church may simply not know how to read the experience.

The Résumés We Don’t Know How to Read

Churches naturally recognize preparation that looks like church preparation.

Someone attended Bible college or seminary. Someone taught Sunday school for ten years. Another person served on the board, led a small group, worked with youth, or held a ministry title somewhere else. Those experiences are useful signals because church leaders understand what they mean. We have some idea what theological education is supposed to provide and what years of teaching Scripture may have required.

Other forms of preparation are harder to interpret.

A veteran’s discharge paper, colloquially known as a “DD-214,” tells a story in a language most civilians don’t speak very well. Military occupational specialties, warfare qualifications, duty assignments, ranks, and command titles may communicate a great deal to another veteran and almost nothing to the pastor reading them.

Civilian careers present the same problem. Charge nurse, plant supervisor, journeyman electrician, school principal, or small-business owner describes a job. It doesn’t tell us everything the person had to become capable of doing over twenty or thirty years.

Sometimes even the person who lived the experience has stopped noticing.

Michael Kirchner and Mesut Akdere encountered that problem when they interviewed Army veterans about leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities. The veterans didn’t always find it easy to name their capabilities in the abstract. Once they began telling stories, however, the formation became much easier to see. Their experiences revealed communication, teamwork, teaching, problem-solving, care for others, and the ability to function in difficult circumstances.¹

I understand why. For years, I could tell someone that I had commanded ships. That sounded impressive enough, but outside the Navy it didn’t explain very much. More useful questions came later: What had command actually required of me? What did I learn from being responsible for people whose work I couldn’t personally perform? How did I respond when the plan failed, somebody made a mistake, or the information reaching me was incomplete? Which habits did those years reinforce, and which of them would help or hurt when the assignment changed?

Those questions reveal far more than the title.

Churches would benefit from similar curiosity about everyone who comes through the door. Rather than asking only whether someone has been a leader, ask what responsibility the person has carried and what those years have formed.

That also keeps us from confusing leadership with image. Confident, articulate people get noticed quickly. People comfortable speaking in public often look like leaders because they resemble those we are accustomed to seeing in visible leadership roles. Sometimes they are excellent leaders; sometimes the quieter person listening at the other end of the table has better judgment.

Leadership research by James Kouzes and Barry Posner pushes against the idea that leadership belongs to a rare personality type. Their work treats leadership largely as observable behavior that ordinary people can learn and practice rather than something possessed only by unusually charismatic people or those holding impressive titles.² Christian leadership requires additional questions about calling, character, doctrine, spiritual maturity, and giftedness, but the basic observation is useful: potential does not always announce itself.

The pastors in my doctoral study learned to watch people over time. They cared about ability, but character received even more attention. They noticed whether people followed through, how they received correction, what happened when responsibility became inconvenient, how they treated their families and other people, and whether greater opportunity was accompanied by humility rather than entitlement.³ Those things rarely appear on a résumé. They become visible in relationship.

That means churches have to become curious about the lives people lived before we met them. Veterans also have some responsibility for helping us understand. Most pastors have never served in the military and may have no idea why another veteran would immediately recognize significance in the words chief petty officer, platoon sergeant, watch supervisor, or commanding officer.

We have to translate rather than expect people to be impressed by vocabulary they don’t understand.

That doesn’t mean inflating the story. A veteran shouldn’t walk into a congregation assuming that previous rank entitles him to church authority, and spending six months explaining how much better the military did everything is unlikely to produce the sort of influence he imagines. Instead, tell people what the experience required. Describe the younger people you trained, the responsibilities you carried, the failures that taught you something, the leader you learned from, the one you never wanted to imitate, and the situations that changed the way you make decisions.

Then let the church see who you are now.

The Navy may have prepared you for some things; Christ’s church will still have to prepare you for others.

Disciples Before Leaders

Previous experience is evidence. It’s not ordination.

A retired general does not become qualified to pastor because thousands of people once served under his command. A successful executive is not automatically ready to become an elder. A gifted classroom teacher may not yet be equipped to teach Scripture faithfully, and professional experience managing millions of dollars tells us relatively little about whether somebody should be entrusted with church finances if his character cannot be trusted.

Capability tells us something important without answering every question the church needs to ask.

Paul’s qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are remarkably unimpressed with résumé prestige. He looks at character, faithfulness, self-control, relationships, reputation, sound doctrine, maturity, and a person’s life close enough to home that public accomplishment cannot conceal private disorder.

That emphasis should keep churches from being dazzled by occupational success without making us suspicious of competence. Someone may possess beautiful Christian character and still be unprepared to counsel a troubled marriage, interpret a difficult passage of Scripture, manage a budget, supervise employees, or lead a congregation through complicated change. Character and competence answer different questions. Calling adds another.

Not everybody who can lead needs a church leadership position.

One of the clearest findings in my doctoral research was that the pastors didn’t begin leadership development as though every disciple were a prospect waiting for promotion. Their approaches differed, but they agreed that Christian leaders must first be disciples while not every disciple needs to become a formal leader.³

One pastor told me about an elderly woman he called Miss Ruthie. She was a faithful Christian, mature in Christ and influential in the lives of other people, but she had no desire or calling to formal leadership.

That was okay. It still is.

Churches sometimes broaden the word leader until almost every form of mature Christian faithfulness gets absorbed into it. The intention is usually good. We want Christians actively serving rather than consuming religious goods and services. But discipleship does not need the title leadership to acquire dignity.

The church’s mission is to make disciples of Jesus Christ. Some of those disciples will eventually demonstrate the character, gifts, desire, and capacity to carry particular forms of leadership. Others will serve faithfully for decades without chairing a board, preaching a sermon, directing a ministry, or wanting anyone to invent a title for what they do.

Paul’s picture of the church leaves room for all of them.

Romans 12 speaks of different functions and gifts—serving, teaching, encouraging, giving, leading, and mercy among them—all exercised according to the grace God gives. First Corinthians 12 makes the point even more strongly. The Spirit distributes gifts “for the common good” (v. 7), and the body needs its differences precisely because a body composed entirely of one part would be absurd.

So the leadership question cannot become, How do I turn more of these people into versions of me? It should begin with something closer to, What has God placed in this body?

A pastor gifted in preaching will probably notice communicators quickly. An administrator recognizes organizers. A visionary leader may naturally gravitate toward people who share his appetite for change. Meanwhile, another person notices who is being left out. Someone can bring order to confusion without making herself the center of attention. Another has extraordinary patience with teenagers. A retired tradesman knows which building problem needs attention immediately and which can wait. A woman who taught in the local school district for thirty years knows nearly every family in town and understands the community in ways the pastor may take years to learn.

Those people aren’t all candidates for the same office. They are members of the body, and part of pastoral leadership is learning to see what Christ has distributed among His people without forcing every useful gift into the same organizational mold.

Give People Somewhere to Begin

Acts 6 gives us an interesting picture of people becoming visible through a practical need.

A serious complaint had developed in the Jerusalem church because Greek-speaking widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. The Twelve didn’t dismiss the problem as administrative trivia. People were being neglected, so the church needed trustworthy people to handle the responsibility well.

The believers selected seven men known to be “full of the Spirit and wisdom” (Acts 6:3). Character was relevant to food distribution because people could be harmed by bad administration.

Among those seven was Stephen. The assignment didn’t define everything God would eventually do through him. Luke quickly shows Stephen becoming a powerful witness to Christ. Philip, another of the seven, later preached in Samaria and explained Isaiah to the Ethiopian official in Acts 8.

The first assignment gave the church somewhere to see them serve.

Churches sometimes make leadership development harder by imagining that we have to identify a person’s eventual role before giving him anything significant to do. We rarely know that much about another person, and most of us know considerably less about our own future than we imagine.

Give people somewhere faithful to begin.

That doesn’t mean manufacturing busywork to test them. Church life already contains more than enough real work. Invite somebody to help with a project, accompany a pastoral visit, teach part of a class, organize something modest, assist with finances, participate in outreach, or take responsibility for one piece of a ministry. Then pay attention.

A person who looked like a natural teacher may discover that teaching drains every ounce of life from him. Someone who rarely speaks during meetings may turn out to be remarkably calm and capable when a crisis occurs. A person everybody assumed was an administrator may hate spreadsheets but flourish when helping people one at a time.

Development isn’t a conveyor belt carrying everybody toward the role the pastor guessed for them when they first arrived. It helps people discover where they can serve Christ faithfully.

Stories help here too.

“What are your leadership skills?” is a surprisingly difficult question even for people who have led for years. Ask instead about something real. Tell me about somebody you trained. Tell me about a situation that went badly and what you learned from it. What responsibility do people routinely trust you to carry? When have you had to resolve conflict? What did you learn from the best leader you ever worked for? What mistake changed the way you approach your work now?

Then watch how the person serves in this community. Does he keep commitments? Can she receive correction? Does inconvenience produce communication or disappearance? How does the person talk about someone who is not in the room? Can he say he doesn’t know something? Can she ask for help? Is Scripture actually reshaping judgment, or has Christian vocabulary simply been laid over assumptions formed somewhere else?

That kind of discernment takes time because leadership is relational. My dissertation participants described ordinary discipleship and shared ministry as the environment in which prospective leaders became visible. Relationship gave pastors enough proximity to observe character, recognize gifts, mentor people, and gradually entrust greater responsibility.³

Churches therefore need both proximity and opportunity.

A pastor who leads every meeting learns very little about who else can lead one. If I teach every class, handle every complicated pastoral conversation, and remain personally involved in every meaningful decision, I may become increasingly convinced that the church lacks leaders when I have actually created very few places for leadership to emerge.

Recognition and opportunity work together. We see enough in someone to trust him with something more, and carrying something more reveals things we could not see before. Sometimes the new information confirms our judgment; sometimes it corrects it. Both are useful.

Jesus said that whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much (Luke 16:10). He was speaking about stewardship rather than giving the church a leadership-development formula, but the principle describes something churches observe constantly.

What people do with responsibility already in their hands tells us something about what they might do with more.

Look at the Body God Already Gave You

Churches often talk about developing the next generation, and we should. Congregations that give little thought to younger Christians are borrowing against a future somebody else will have to live in.

But next does not always mean youngest.

My doctoral study intentionally examined younger leaders because I was researching next-generation leadership in aging churches. That was a research boundary, not a theological claim that useful development ends at forty. In fact, I argued in the dissertation that churches should not neglect middle-aged and older adults who may have substantial experience and decades of useful service still ahead of them.³

A book that began with a forty-four-year-old seminary student can hardly argue otherwise.

Someone leaving the military after twenty years may still be in his early forties. A retired teacher, nurse, tradesman, engineer, business owner, military officer, noncommissioned officer, farmer, or government employee may enter another season with experience, time, and a desire to serve that were not available earlier.

Some people became Christians later in life. Others spent earlier decades raising children, building careers, caring for family members, or carrying responsibilities that left little margin for formal church leadership. Some simply weren’t ready earlier.

God has shown little interest in conforming His work to our preferred career timeline.

That should widen the pastor’s field of vision.

Every church has familiar people who already know how everything works. They know where every key belongs, which cupboard contains the supplies nobody else can find, and whom to call when the furnace develops an opinion about Sunday morning worship. They are dependable, which means they often receive more responsibility until the church has rewarded years of faithfulness by ensuring they can never take a vacation.

Meanwhile, someone newer may be sitting nearby with experience nobody has explored.

The answer isn’t to abandon the reliable people. It is to become more curious about everybody else. Eat with people. Work beside them. Ask what they did before they came to the church. Learn what they loved about that work and what they hated. Ask about responsibilities, failures, difficult seasons, people they developed, and occasions when somebody trusted them before they were entirely sure of themselves.

Pay attention to the people who keep showing up without much recognition, and leave room for the answer to be that somebody is already serving exactly where God wants him.

A congregation doesn’t become healthier merely by handing out more titles. The larger goal is a body in which people increasingly recognize what God has entrusted to them and use it for the good of others.

That is why Ephesians 4 places the work of ministry throughout the church. Christ gives leaders “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up” (vv. 11–12). The pastor isn’t the body’s professional minister surrounded by volunteer assistants. His leadership includes helping God’s people become better prepared to carry the work Christ has given His whole church.

Sometimes the leadership shortage a congregation feels is real. A very small or badly wounded church may simply not have enough mature people ready for everything that needs to be done. Several pastors in my research knew that experience well.³ No amount of positive thinking can create preparation that does not yet exist.

Scarcity shouldn’t become our starting assumption.

Before concluding that God has failed to provide people, look carefully at the people He has provided: the veteran whose résumé you don’t fully understand; the teacher, nurse, mechanic, accountant, farmer, engineer, homemaker, business owner, retiree, or young adult who has never held a church title; the person whose name keeps appearing whenever something actually gets done; the quiet Christian other people seek out when life becomes difficult.

Ask about their stories. Watch their character. Pay attention to what other people already trust them to do. Give faithful people opportunities appropriate to who they are now and enough support to discover whether they can carry more.

Some will never become formal leaders, and there is nothing deficient about that. Others may surprise us.

This book began with a veteran wondering whether more than twenty years of one kind of preparation had anything to contribute to an entirely different assignment. It has taken us through what military service can form, what ministry can receive from it, what the gospel has to translate or correct, and what experienced leaders owe the people coming behind them.

The final lesson widens the question.

Veterans are one example of people whose formation may be difficult for the church to recognize. They are far from the only one. Before we ask God to send us the people we need, perhaps we should look more carefully at the people He has already placed among us.

The church may have been praying for a leader.

Sometimes that person really does arrive from somewhere else.

Sometimes he has been sitting three rows away all along.

Chapter 18 Notes

1. Michael Kirchner and Mesut Akdere, “An Empirical Investigation of the Acquisition of Leadership KSAs in the U.S. Army: Implications for Veterans’ Career Transitions,” Journal of Veterans Studies 4, no. 1 (2019): 110–27, esp. 116–22. Their qualitative study found that Army veterans sometimes struggled to name military-developed leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities abstractly while readily describing experiences demonstrating communication, teamwork, teaching, care for others, and problem-solving. The study used a small purposive sample and should not be generalized to all veterans.
2. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations, 6th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 11–12, 294–305; James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, Learning Leadership: The Five Fundamentals of Becoming an Exemplary Leader (San Francisco: The Leadership Challenge, A Wiley Brand, 2016), chaps. 1 and 3. Their work treats leadership largely as observable and learnable behavior rather than as a capacity limited to formal officeholders or unusually charismatic personalities. Christian leadership requires additional attention to calling, character, spiritual maturity, gifting, doctrine, and biblical qualifications.
3. Bart L. Denny, “A Phenomenological Study of Pastoral Leadership Development Behaviors in the Revitalization of Small Evangelical Churches” (PhD diss., Liberty University, 2022), 114–20, 128–41, 146–47, 153–55, 165–66. Participants emphasized character and discipleship in identifying prospective leaders, described ordinary service and authentic relationship as settings in which leadership potential became visible, and gradually entrusted greater responsibility as people demonstrated maturity and faithfulness. The dissertation’s conclusion also cautions against overlooking middle-aged and older Christians who may have substantial experience and years of useful service ahead.