linvazquez

Many of us who serve at a church were looking forward to this Easter weekend that just occurred. Some of our churches had special service programs and Easter egg hunts for the children. This was the weekend for us to go all out on social media, in our communities, and promote Easter weekend like crazy. It really is great and incredible being able to do that to reach the community and invite people who don’t know God, but are we really looking at our reasoning behind this? Are we doing this for the numbers? Are we doing it so that we can become the next big church in our state? In our country? In the world? It’s so easy for us to emphasize the amount of people that showed up to Easter service but we need to make sure to take it a step further and follow up with what we committed to.

At every church in America at least one person attended a church that has never been to that church before, well, I assume this simply because it’s Easter and some people probably feel guilty of not going to church all year that they figured it would be a good idea to attend on “Resurrection Sunday.” So now the question is, what are we doing to build that relationship with that individual? I’m pretty sure attendance increased by a good percentage at your church, I know it did at my church, but are we taking the necessary steps this week to make disciples? Numbers are not going to matter if people don’t have a personal relationship with God. If we focus on the numbers we had this Easter Sunday and try to build from that momentum, our churches will die because of lack of discipleship. Let’s make it a goal to focus on discipleship.

Everything should still run smoothly. I am not an expert when it comes to ministry but I can simply share what I’ve learned in the past 8 years of being a leader in different aspects of ministry, which I hope can be helpful to you both in ministry and outside of ministry.

Some people will say that a good leader is someone who is respected by others and leads by example. While that is true, what can ultimately determine if a person is considered a good leader is in the time of their absence. I’ll keep this short with an example: let’s say that you are leading a team and you feel you’ve done a great job but one day you have to step out of that leadership position for whatever reason to take some time off and have to leave your team in charge of getting things done, what is going to determine if you’ve been a good leader is if your team is successful at running things as if you were never gone.

In ministry, we focus so much on getting things done for God that we forget to put our focus on the next leader in charge. Plenty of times we have preached that we are not promised tomorrow but we don’t live with that mentality because if we would live with that mentality we would have at least one or multiple people who would shadow us to understand the ins and outs of everything we do.

Therefore, I encourage you to observe what you are doing, especially if you’re in some sort of leadership position. As a leader you need to be ready to leave your ministry in the hands of another person. If that day would be tomorrow, do you know who would be the one to take care of things so that the ministry runs smoothly? If nobody comes to mind, then that is something that you will need to work on in order for the Kingdom of God to keep moving. Stop being territorial and stop thinking that you’re the only one who knows how to do it, instead get at least one person to shadow you so that another person is ready and prepared if needed.

Now, if you’re not in any type of leadership position, start asking questions. Look at the needs in ministry and ask how things are done so that you are at least aware of what’s going on. Someone may not be teaching you to be the next leader but that shouldn’t stop you from growing and being prepared if you ever have that opportunity in the future.

A good leader is one who can step out of a position and things don’t fall apart. If things fall apart, you did not do your job in preparing those who’ve been following you.

Author: linvazquez

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