John 1: 43 The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, “Follow me.”
One of the most important things we do as leaders is make other leaders. Leaders who only make followers will eventually be overwhelmed and bogged down. By inspiring leaders you increase your ability to reach more and more people with the gospel.
Indeed as we see in the Scripture above every time Jesus called someone to follow himself it was for the purpose of training them to be “fishers of men”. (Matt 4:19) In many ways being a disciple is about training to be a leader since every disciple needs to imitate Jesus who was a leader.
Jesus was a master at creating leaders. In John 3: 22 the bible says “After this, Jesus and his disciples went out into the Judean countryside, where he spent some time with them, and baptized.” This is a perfect example of Jesus taking his new disciples out on their first expedition together. He is the main driver of the activities as he spends time with them and he also baptizes in their presence and probably with their participation so that they could learn the ropes. He’s stretching them evangelistically but it’s obvious when reading the Gospels that in “spending time with them” includes teaching them all about worshiping God, the Scriptures, etc.
Like a mother goose that teaches her goslings to swim, to fish, to avoid danger and eventually to fly, young disciples also need to be stretched to evangelize and grow before baptism and even more so after baptism. However just as a mother goose doesn’t leave her goslings in the lake overnight disciples need to monitor their young proteges and continue to nurture them so that they will grow strong and confident. On the other hand if the mother goose doesn’t take them on the lake at all they will never learn the skills they need to survive and will eventually die. The mother Goose needs to measure the danger of exposing them to the wild and leaving them untrained. She must navigate a course between the two dangers so that they can grow and thrive.
Jesus with his disciples in Judea is a perfect example of what discipling needs to look like in the first months of embarking upon the amazing adventure of being a disciple of Jesus. Jesus was a tireless worker who tended his flock with skill and discipline given by the Holy Spirit. Its takes spending time together in fellowship, in teaching and also in baptizing. When a young disciple gets to participate in baptizing others, especially soon after their own baptism, it has an incredible strengthening effect on them. Every young disciple needs to experience this.
It’s safe to say that without the training and practice they received in John 3:22 then John 4:1-2 would never have happened! It reads: “The Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John, although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples.” Wow! Here Jesus disciples have grown and he has changed oars from baptizing with them to supervising them as they begin to run the ministry. This is an incredible outcome of Jesus’ work. He has produced leaders who are now expanding and multiplying his strength to reach even more people!
This is the biblical principle. In practice, however, since no one is as good a leader as Jesus, when one starts a ministry or takes over a ministry you will find it in some variation of the illustration of the goose and goslings above. On one side of the spectrum the goslings might be all barricaded away from the “dangerous” lake and failing to grow numerically or geographically. On the other end the goslings might be recklessly separated and at risk. In fact they may not even be goslings anymore, they may have become independent geese who have no idea of how to lead goslings of their own.
Regardless of the state of the ministry your job as the leader is to drag it kicking and screaming back to the example of Jesus. If the goslings have become independent geese you need to teach them loyalty, obedience and unity. If they are barricaded away in a monasteryesque ministry of powerlessness and fear then you need to peel their attention from their own belly buttons and focus it outwards to the lost.
That being said Satan is not going to let you punch him in the face twice the same way. The strategy that brings you success this time brings you defeat the second time. What that means is we can’t get over enamored with either stage of the process, shielding the goslings or taking them out to learn. Instead we need to use the right move at the right time or the ministry gets bogged down and loses its power. It takes blowing it a few times to really take this to heart but once you’ve learned it you never want to learn that lesson again!
The road to making great leaders is not a road that’s been tried and found not to work, its been tried and found hard. Many disciples left Jesus and many disciples of great potential will leave you (John 6:66). The difficulties of life, the attractiveness of sin, a lack of perseverance have left many disciples in Satans grasp. However one must always recall what Jesus did with his twelve surviving disciples once they were fully trained and ready to take on the world.
To survive the road of training leaders one must fan into flame the gift of the Holy Spirit which is the gift which gives us the power to accomplish the goal, the love to persevere and the self discipline (2 Tim 1:6-7) to do the work regardless of the chaos around us. Without the Spirit driving the whole process one will quickly run out of steam.
Making leaders is not only a matter of survival but of sur-thrive-al of the ministry. Though you must constantly correct the balance between protecting and stretching you must raise up powerful leaders with power given by the Holy Spirit who can go out and do the same. In doing so you will have many partners in the gospel and see the world evangelized in our day!