Monday, July 27, 2009

Indigenous Leadership

When building a team, you have two basic choices:
  • Raise up from within
  • Bring in from outside

Let’s consider the benefits of using people from within:

  1. You develop a culture of leadership development. When people see others excelling and growing, it naturally produces a leadership culture. Instead of bringing in the “professionals” from outside, it promotes equipping and promoting from within.
  2. People already understand your culture. When you bring someone in, it is always questionable whether or not they can catch the spirit and fit into the culture of your ministry.
  3. Local people are generally more loyal to the vision. Those who come from within are generally more loyal to the vision. Rather than being another rung on their ministry ladder, most who come from within see your ministry as a life calling.
  4. They can bring huge life experience. Those who have been successful in non-ministry roles can bring a wealth of wisdom from their life’s learning into a local church.

There are plenty more benefits. What are your thoughts?

[based on an article from LifeChurch.tv : swerve by Craig Groeschel]

1 comment:

Attack of the Killer Blog... said...

Just an observation...

One big argument sometimes made by leaders against promoting from within is the "pool" of people is very limited. While this may be true at times, more often than not it's lazy leadership that doesn't dredge the "pool" for potential leaders... or at least that's been my case! :)

In youth ministry, I have currently 13 leaders working in our ministry. Turn over in our ministry has been tremendous due to graduations, work schedules, etc. For the past 4 years we have graduated 5 to 12 students each year! This does drain the pool quickly.

When needing student volunteers or adult leaders, I've had to get creative with recruiting from within and have had to rely on my current leaders tremendously to pull in leaders as the others make their exit for college, work, etc., as already mentioned. I have been amazed that when we begin recruiting other leaders, and start looking for hidden talents and gifts in those around us already - I never cease to be amazed at how many willing, gifted workers seem to magically "appear".

The "magic" was in our looking at ones formerly not considered for ministry work. Shame on us!

So, I encourage others not to throw their hands up thinking they have no one to promote from within. When you begin to use the ones available, like the talents in the parable, one typically finds themselves with more than they started with. Exhaust ALL possible resources before immediately turning outward to look for leaders. Doing this has really stretched and grown my feeble leadership abilities.

I really appreciate the blog article...

Jeremy-