advanced leadership and administration ml503 administration … · 2019. 9. 13. · wayne jacobson...

Advanced Leadership and Administration

Transcript - ML503 Advanced Leadership and Administration © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 19 of 24ML503

The Leader as Trainer

Advanced Leadership and Administration

Wayne Jacobson illuminates our subject of this nineteenth lecture in a crystal-clear paragraph, which appeared a few years ago in Leadership Journal. He wrote:

If I had a choice between getting all the people in my city to an evangelistic crusade or having a layperson with an infectious love for Jesus work beside each of them at their jobs for one week, I would certainly choose the latter. The same goes for our church’s gatherings. Rather than have a few professionals participate while most watch, I’d choose to see every member actively involved.

Well, you know by now, studying this course, that that is precisely my viewpoint and precisely what we’re talking about when we talk about developing leadership teams and team leadership.

Certainly the Church’s strategic task can only be accomplished through the use of an army of volunteers serving effectively under the direction of a few professional leaders. And effective service requires more than willingness; it requires training. And that’s our focus in this lecture.

To become a teacher in even the youngest grades, I have a wife and a daughter who served for years as kindergarten teachers, and even they had to study content and methods for years after high school. They had to be college graduates with a specialization in early childhood education. Contrast that requirement with our willing people in churches and ministry organizations who have assumed responsibility, with our blessing, without even knowing what is expected of them, much less having been trained for the job.

Leaders should be given basic training, of course, in the content of Scripture and the process of ministry. In the progressive organization, however, the trained leader will also understand

Kenneth O. Gangel, PhDExperience: Scholar in Residence,

Toccoa Falls College



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the entire ministry mission and see his or her place in it; and, of course, we have focused that several times already. Many individual problems which face the leader will be dealt with in those training sessions, and also a certain fellowship develops as potential leaders learn side by side in a training program.

Let’s come back to Jacobson one more time. He says: “The challenge to use every person in ministry presents us with the same alternatives. If a tidy church is our objective, we’d better make sure every important task is put in the hands of full-time professionals. But if our eyes are on the harvest, we’d better involve everyone.” And cleaning up messes occasionally is just part of the price. As a young father said recently, “It took me a lot longer to make breakfast this morning. My kids helped me.” That’s what delegation is all about. As Jacobson says, “In the meantime, as we leaders risk the problems in equipping the laity, they’ll reap a harvest no team of professionals can match.”

So we start out with influences on leadership behavior. We could talk about apperception, the transference of learning described and developed by Herbart, philosophically, years ago. Let’s do talk about that for a little bit. The transfer of learning which takes place can be either positive or negative. Positive transfer of learning facilitates team leadership performance, which means that the more a new leadership situation approximates previous ones, the more behavior patterns may be transferred. If you play the trombone, you’re probably going to have some difficulty transferring those skills to the organ, other than the fact that you can probably read notes of some kind; but you’re going to be in a different key, and a lot of things are going to happen. If, however, you’ve been playing the piano for several years, you might have some finger matters to straighten out, but basically the chord structure and the layout of the instrument and so on are considerably more similar. That is a positive transfer of learning.

A negative transfer of learning, of course, is detrimental to performance in leadership. A negative learning transference happens when leaders carry over old behavior patterns into a new situation without making the proper adjustments, such as playing the organ like you would have played the trombone. Or consider, for example, a rural pastor whose homespun, folksy style helped rural people feel right at home. Now he moves to the city and assumes the pastorate of a larger, more sophisticated church, and he applies the same old jargon, the same farming illustrations, and acts as those he had not changed positions. For a while the



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folks might find it quaint, but that negative carryover of behavior will hinder his ministry in the long run.

A similar situation occurs when high school students enter college. In high school, a fixed schedule requires presence in a given room at a given hour, and so on. In college, you choose courses, you do individual research, and some professors don’t even take role; you can come or go as you wish depending on the college and the professor. It’s very different, and you need to make some major transfers there.

Let’s talk just a moment about childhood influences in leadership training. I’ve said earlier that I’m not really focused on children and youth in this study, and that is true. We are looking at adult leadership training. But the earlier one’s effectiveness as a leader, the greater the present success in leadership. So if we can begin leadership focus even in children, we will reap that much later.

Of course, the initial and most important influence is the family, not the church. How we teach a child to act and react within the context of his own home is the most crucial factor in leadership development for the first five years of his life, and maybe for the first fifteen, and maybe for the entire life. Obviously, we have to build a climate of acceptance and love and faith, but all of those bounded by a clear-cut fence of obedience. Discipline is extremely crucial during these years, and that is not to be confused with punishment. It’s the setting of boundaries, the narrowing of the line, so that the child walks in the path which the parents have set for him.

Secondly, the local church. A church really serious about training leadership will set up its entire educational program so that from the earliest years, in the nursery, where children will learn how to grow in maturity in the Lord and accept the proper responsibility for serving Him. They’ll construct a curriculum which helps the child develop an appreciation for the Word of God. She learns how to apply it in her everyday life and understands how to relate to other children.

Now let’s narrow that just a bit more, from the family to the church context to the individual classroom. Perhaps we should say here: Training experience is taking place now because, increasingly, churches and Christian organizations are moving away from formal classroom training programs to mentoring internships and some of the things we’ve already talked about.



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Nevertheless, teaching procedures and the atmosphere in which children learn at church and in classes and in church clubs and so on. Participation, involvement in groups, those kinds of things all lay a foundation for accepting more significant leadership in later years.

In school, public schools focus on the development of civic leadership and social responsibility, and well they should. Christian schools develop Christian leadership. Many believe that ministry leadership may develop more thoroughly in a Christian school than in a public school, although many others would dispute that. That’s not really the point of our concern here. In fact, let’s leave the whole idea of childhood influences and move for just a moment to adolescent influences.

As children mature into adolescence, the leadership pattern changes from coercive to persuasive, whether it’s at home or church or wherever it is. We move from overt and forced discipline to less-dependent, more independent problem-solving procedures. As we train adolescents in leadership, probably the greatest single factor is the team. Teenagers are profoundly influenced, of course, by the thought and behavior patterns of their peers. We can’t deny that. Nevertheless, many surveys show that strong Christian parents hold even greater influence than teen peers. It depends on what group of teens you’re surveying. Obviously, if you’re surveying inner-city gangs, you’re not going to find much of a peer influence. But if you’re with Search Institute in Minneapolis, and your research is essentially taking place with what they call “churched teenagers,” their surveys repeatedly show an enormous parental influence, even in kids who would never say that to their parents.

The leadership team with adolescents provides several important ingredients of teen life. Social relationships with members of their own sex and members of the opposite sex, competition within the crowd, cooperation within the crowd, between “our crowd” and somebody else’s crowd, the sharing of peer problems, opportunities to exercise leadership in various capacities, and – quite frankly, in a positive sense – a source of strength against adult authority. Obviously, that can be pushed too far and ends up an antinomianism, but it doesn’t have to go that far. Kids should be learning Christian social ethics, relationships etiquette, personal grooming, group activity, public oral communication; these are all leadership skills that all of these kids should have progressed in before they ever get to college. Now having been a



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college president, I can tell you that that is not always the case. You’re getting a lot of kids— even in a Christian college and even from Christian homes—who don’t have a clue to social ethics and have struggles with relationships and have no idea how proper grooming takes place and so on. But that doesn’t mean that those are not important things that we should be dealing with with kids, if we can.

Moving on to adults, at this point many churches, and to a lesser extent other kinds of Christian organizations, have not kept up. We have not moved properly from pedagogy, the process of teaching children, to andragogy, the process of teaching adults. We can’t prepare adults for leadership by spoon feeding them increasing doses of information, but that’s what a lot of training programs are. Of course they need to know Scripture, and of course they need to know doctrine, and so on; but teaching adults is different. We know that, and we need to deal with that. Now how is it different? It’s different because they have different needs.

Adults approach learning with a different set of developmental tasks than do children and young people. Educationally, a need is not a need until the adult learner realizes it. So forcing adults through training programs that they don’t think they need is a useless and frustrating experience. And we, as leaders, better figure that out very soon. Sure, they might do it just to please us, or to move into a ministry position which they believe God really wants them in, but if it’s just “ram it in, cram it in,” that’s not going to do the job in the long run.

Also, adults are different because of different experiences. They bring an enormous background to any leadership training situation. In many cases, that background includes work habits—good or bad—learned in previous positions. Throw in their educational years, family and domestic lifestyle, and we see immediately that the issue of leadership training is very different at the adult level.

They also bring different attitudes. We have conditioned children to learn because it is their duty. That’s what you do if you’re a kid; you go to school because you have to. If your parents don’t make you, somebody from the state comes to make you go to school. They study algebra because geometry is coming next year. Nobody ever plans to use algebra. They work through science and civics with that wonderful, ever-present promise of education: Trust me, you’ll need this someday. But all of that disappears with



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adults. The key word becomes immediacy. Show me something I can use now, and I may take time to listen, or I may take time to attend your training program.

We have different groupings. The age grading, so crucial to us throughout childhood and teen years—keep the third graders together, keep the primary kids together, so on—that all fades into insignificance in adult years. Of course, normally people twenty-five years of age probably have more in common with each other than they do with fifty-five-year-olds; but a young couple of thirty-five with a ten-year-old child has more in common with a couple of forty-five who also have a ten-year-old than they would with another couple of thirty-five who have no children at all. Do you see the connection? Needs and experiences become the dominant issue of life.

Different methods, therefore, need to be used in training adults. Teachers in classes around the world still teach adults as though they were children. Teachers plan the objectives, do all the study, talk for forty-five minutes, and wonder why nobody seems interested. This is not a book about teaching. This is not a study about learning. We’re not dealing with andragogy here in this course, but we do precisely the same thing in leadership training programs. Obviously, leadership development is adult education. One error that many churches and other ministries make in providing training situations is to conceive of it only as a technical specialization for a particular task. Adult leadership development must be much broader. Leadership is just as important at family devotions as it is in the worship services of the church.

Let’s move on to components of a training/placing program. Find that on your outline. Often when we talk about standards in leadership development, we refer to the standards we want to inculcate in potential leaders. And there’s a validity to that, but we must also place high-quality standards on the training program itself. It doesn’t matter whether you’re with Young Life or Campus Crusade or a college or seminary or a local church. An effective leadership development program, which really trains and places people in positions of ministry, has at least three basic qualities. And you can guess the first one: clear objectives.

Unless we understand what we’re trying to do in the training program, we’ll end up with frustrated people and frustrated training directors. As I’ve indicated already, the program at times can be general, since not everyone knows exactly what ministry



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God has called him or her to perform. But when that crucial piece of information becomes available, then we train toward specific leadership goals. Training an elder is very different from training a preschool director or a “Mother’s Day Out” director. The end results of what people know and feel and do—cognitive, effective – these end results aim toward two totally different types of ministry in being an elder or being that preschool director.

The second component is quality personnel. Here we have a two-headed coin. Obviously, we want quality personnel to head the training program. That doesn’t necessarily mean the pastor or the regional director. We need someone who understands team leadership development, even if he or she is not the highest-titled person in the organization. But we’re also looking for quality personnel to participate in the program. I thought through this a great deal as a pastor and concluded I am looking for at least four basic qualities in volunteers who enter training programs.

The first is spiritual maturity. Maybe we should say spiritual maturing. We’re all on a journey which leads to the ultimate goal of perfection in heaven, not on earth. But any leadership development program takes a giant step forward when we begin with people who demonstrate a reasonable level of spiritual maturing.

Secondly, leadership skills. Not just the potential for eventually developing some leadership skills someday, but something now. Obviously, we’re talking here about adults or maybe late teens who have had some opportunity, through experience, to gain these skills. Leadership is learned behavior, and I want to start with some skill level.

Third, learning potential. Here we have to consider intelligence and willingness and eagerness to move forward in the challenges of ministry. Every Christian leader knows it is nearly impossible to break through the shell of an adult who has convinced himself that he can’t learn, or who believes she does not need what you have to offer. So that kind of person is probably not a good candidate for a training program, unless somehow that attitude can change.

Then number four, cooperative attitude. Leadership is relational. We have been talking about that from lecture one. People who can’t get along with other people, even in a training program, have little chance of getting along on a leadership team.



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And growing responsibility, as we round out our list here—clear objectives, quality personnel, growing responsibility. If a program with clear objectives trains quality people, we can expect a growing responsibility level, even among those often criticized Boomers. Remember the elder training program we mentioned above? We wanted to be sure we started out with foundational things that wouldn’t frighten candidates away from the program. And we learn that these leadership candidates felt most comfortable with physical kinds of ministry tasks. Physical tasks—setting up chairs, taking role, handling something about the plant and the property of the church.

Secondly, we discovered they began to feel increasingly comfortable with program responsibilities; reading the Scripture on Sunday morning, hosting a Bible-study class in their homes, and then finally worked to the highest level of leading other people. So you have physical responsibilities moving upward to program responsibilities moving upward to people responsibilities. If we reversed that, and threw them immediately into some leadership responsibility where they encountered lack of interest, unfaithfulness, absenteeism, complaining, grumbling, criticism, and everything else that you have in the realm of people problems, they’d say Well, forget this! I don’t want to be a part of this. I can’t handle it. Who needs this?

Persistent Communication. People involved in a training program need to stay in touch with each other and with their training leaders. We can’t be too busy to stay in touch, answer questions over the phone, offer a Barnabas-like relationship all the way along the line. We keep their needs in mind, and we tailor the program to their rate of growth. We deny and we denounce a closed leadership style that keeps them shut out from the very few people who should be mentoring them, and as they grow, we welcome them into the circle of leaders.

Paul Hebert warns of the mixed blessings and dangers in that kind of openness.

Training leaders is a more difficult task, for we must train them to think and to make decisions on their own. But this is threatening, for it means that they can and must challenge our own beliefs and plans. Key to the process is to teach them to critique what we ourselves have taught. There is no ego trip involved in this.



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Rather, we expect in the end to be set aside as new leaders take over, teach new ideas, and set new courses of action.

All I have to say is: Are you ready for that?

Then, finally, just a word about Niche Selection. Training and placing are not the same, but they are inseparably related. People who have worked through a training program of any rigor expect to do useful ministry, just as college graduates expect to find a job after we hand them that diploma. Niche principle simply refers to people who occupy a special place on the team. They feel special, and they perform in a special way, and those kinds of team niches humanize teamwork.

Structuring Effective Training. We cannot divorce the discussion of leadership training from the issue of ministry philosophy. All ministry groups must have a clear understanding of how their particular service contributes to the total church ministry and the strategy it employs to achieve the goals which spring from the mission. When we keep this clear, each group or individual plans training experiences in cooperation, not in competition, with other ministries, and that is very important. Then we have a synchronized schedule of training processes, a cooperative balance in the recruitment of possible workers, a sincere appreciation for ministries other than our own. All of these are desirable attributes. We want to have this happen. This is a major goal.

No specific training courses can be effectively designed until preparatory work has provided a satisfactory organizational climate for leadership. I know I keep repeating myself. That climate, that environment, includes involvement in a ministry team with clear-cut goals and harmonious working relationships. The church or organization able to employ a full-time director of training; not many can, but some do. Or maybe this will fall on the desk of the pastor of education who obviously will benefit from that. But a properly trained missions director will supervise training as well teach several of the courses. So there’s an involvement here with the professionals. A Christian school board must give wholehearted support to training new faculty in faculty development programs. Enthusiasm and cooperation accompanies every approach to developing new leaders in Christian organizations.



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What about methods? There’s probably no one best method of leadership training for any ministry. A church, for example, actively producing leaders usually utilizes various approaches to its training. Perhaps no organization will utilize all of the following, but let me just run down a whole bunch.

1) First of all, a coaching plan. This personal approach to leadership training focuses on the pastor or any team leader working with one or a small group of developing leaders on a personal basis.

2) Utilization of a training consultant. Sometimes it’s helpful to hire a specialist to direct a training program. Somebody who comes in from the outside for a weekend or a week or several Saturdays; whatever works.

3) The apprenticeship idea. In this system new leaders are trained by watching and helping experienced leaders. After serving in that kind of capacity for three or maybe even six months, depending on the work, of course, the rookie may be ready to assume responsibility for his or her own ministry. Apprenticeship should probably be accompanied by a more formal leadership training approach.

4) Support leaders. Every organization should have a core of people who serve periodically under the supervision of a veteran. This is different, for example, from a cadet-teacher program that some churches use, in that in this system a person may serve as a substitute or a support leader for a number of years, teaching quite sporadically. But then, finally, he or she may take a ministry post on a permanent basis.

5) Visits to other ministries. Learn by observing. New leaders learn by watching better trained leaders in action, not to important methods from other places and to say Well, this is the way they do it over at First Church, so this is the way we’ll do it here. Not that, but rather to just observe and pick up ideas.

6) Workshops. Laboratories and clinics in Christian leadership are offered from time to time at Bible conferences and seminaries and Christian colleges, and emerging Christian leaders should be involved in those kinds of programs.



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And, of course, their organization should pay for their involvement.

7) Conventions. Regional, state, national conventions sponsored by professional organizations like PACE, the Professional Association of Christian Educators; or perhaps by denominations on a regional or state basis. Those kinds of things provide a lot of help for local church leaders and parachurch ministries as well.

8) Cooperative training schools. Leadership training can be conducted on call it a one-night basis for a period of three months or so. If a single church can’t provide this kind of training program, maybe we should work that as a cooperative venture with several churches participating.

9) Regularly scheduled training classes. Classes can be held annually in any Christian organization serious about leadership training.

10) Staff meetings. The staff meeting serves as a leadership training time. Although informal, the exchange of information, agreement on goals during these weekly or monthly sessions is really crucial. It also builds unity.

11) Reading library. Books available from the church, from the organization, from the local Christian college or seminary. Obviously, active use is the issue here.

12) In-service training. This general term involves many of the above in one way or another. The main distinguishing feature emphasizes the training of people already involved in the program, rather than potential leaders. I don’t think any leader should ever be allowed to feel that he or she has arrived, just because there’s the diploma or certificate. New methods, new ideas, continuing lifelong learning is the issue.

13) Correspondence courses. Your organization probably has less control over this kind of program. More difficult to build motivation, but you have the course that you’re doing right now as a kind of a correspondence course with an active voice. Moody Bible Institute’s program, Taylor University Fort Wayne Extension; there are a lot of possibilities for people to pick up courses.



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Well, if you like this one, share it with other people. Put some folks at your church through the same course.

All these and many more approaches to training are not only valid but can be very effective. In the book that I’ve mentioned several times, and you have read, Volunteers for Today’s Church, we point out the most effective training for the people in your church is that which you design and carry out locally. Usually the broader the outside training experience, the less likely it will meet the specific needs of your workers. A program designed in your church or organization can address your particular needs and will be much more effective.

What about enlisting trainees? Christian ministries have a task even more difficult than providing training. That’s getting people to use it. Church need and task surveys kind of pinpoint these people, and we can go after them; but there also is another grocery list of ideas here. I’m just throwing out things, and I’m not suggesting that any of you would use all of these but that something here might work.

How do you contact people?

1) Use personal appeal. It’s great to advertise a leadership training class and attempt to inform everybody that it’s going to happen, but in the final analysis, if you can get this as an invitation-only basis, you’re way ahead of the game.

2) Use all available public promotion and publicity; bulletins, periodic mailings, announcement boards, posters, etcetera.

3) Impress present leaders with their responsibility to produce new leaders. We’ve already talked about this. Every leader in your organization should see himself not only as holding office in a given agency, but also a sharing in the developing process of other leaders. Every leader becomes a potential recruiter of other leaders.

4) Recognize leadership achievement. Try to recognize that people have involved themselves in trying to do better. Leaders challenge the process. At one church, out in the lobby, they have the pictures and names of all the people ministering in that church. And under each name


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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and picture hangs a long ribbon upon which everyone can see diplomas or achievement awards earned through leadership training programs. It reminds me of a medical doctor displaying his credentials on the office wall.

5) Set high standards for everybody to follow.

6) Put people to work. Even more than college students, adults want to see the practical value of what they learn. So get them out of those classrooms and put them into mentoring situations, and put them into support leader roles, and those kinds of things.

7) Then, of course, you want to require reports of all leaders. The report should record what professional growth has taken place during the year. We’re talking now about people who are on the job and how they’ve sought to improve themselves. We’ll still hear people say “I don’t have time,” “I’m not interested,” “We’ve never had a training program before. Why do we need it now?” But we can’t get discouraged when those things happen.

What Christian organizations attempt to do when securing and training leadership is crucial to the future of the organization and its ultimate success all the way down the line. And you may have a major role and perhaps the single most important responsibility there, so this study is important to that end.

advanced leadership and administration ml503 administration … · 2019. 9. 13. · wayne jacobson...

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