Lead On Podcast

On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, examines how a leader’s own style can sometimes inhibit ministry growth. He offers five diagnostic questions to help leaders identify barriers and better equip and empower others for ministry.

Creators and Guests

Host
Jeff Iorg
President, SBC Executive Committee

What is Lead On Podcast?

Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.

Hosted by SBC Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg, this dynamic podcast provides insight for seasoned executives, aspiring leaders, or those in ministry who are simply passionate about personal growth. The Lead On Podcast offers actionable, practical tips to help you navigate the complexities of ministry leadership in today's ever-changing world.

From effective communication and team building to strategic decision-making and fostering innovation, each episode is packed with valuable lessons and inspiring stories to empower you on your leadership journey.

Put these principles into practice and Lead On!

Jeff Iorg:

Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention and your host for the Lead On Podcast where we talk about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Thank you for joining me again on the podcast as we delve into, some pertinent issues that are facing ministry leaders today. Now, the last couple of podcasts have been about vision and vision casting and related issues. Most of us who are in ministry leadership, especially those of us in Southern Baptist Life want our ministries to grow.

Jeff Iorg:

And by grow, I mean become numerically larger. We want more people to be involved in what we do. So for example, if you have a youth ministry with 10 teenagers, you'd like to see it be 15. If you lead a church with 50 people, you would dream of the day that it had 75. If you're a church with 500 people, you may be thinking, how can we get to another 250, seven fifty total?

Jeff Iorg:

How can

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we do that? We dream of, strategize for, work toward, pray about

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numerical growth. And quite frankly, there is nothing wrong with that. Not one thing wrong with wanting to see more people engaged in the ministries that we're leading. Now, I do not mean to imply by this that the absence of growth means that something is wrong, or the absence of growth means that something is spiritually failing,

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or the absence of growth means mistakes have been made. Frankly, some ministry settings are very difficult, and growth comes very slowly. But most of us desire that whatever it is we're leading, we want it to grow. Now, one of the hardest things to admit is that sometimes growth is inhibited because we are the problem. So I want to talk about that on the podcast today.

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Are you the problem or are you the reason that growth is being inhibited in your ministry context? Now, please don't think of this podcast as a negative downer, I'm not here to criticize you. Instead,

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what I hope to do is help you diagnose some leader style issues that may relate to and be inhibiting this growth that you dream of. And then next week on the podcast, I'm gonna come back and talk about some organizational barriers, some systems barriers that perhaps are the reason that you're not experiencing growth.

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But today, I wanna talk about leader style barriers that inhibit growth. There are some

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things that are characteristic of leaders that can inhibit the growth we're trying

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to achieve. So here's barrier number one, capacity. And you can diagnose your capacity by asking yourself this question, how much can I oversee?

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Or to phrase it another way,

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how much do I really want to oversee? Many years ago, there was a church growth teacher named Lyle Schaller, and he was the first person I ever heard use this illustration. He may have borrowed it from someone else, but I'll credit it to him. He said some leaders are shepherds and other leaders are ranchers. Shepherds tend sheep.

Jeff Iorg:

Ranchers supervise shepherds, coordinate shepherds, enable shepherds. In his analogy, shepherds were the people who provided hands on ministry, the people who more directly did the work. Ranchers, on the other hand, were people who supervised many shepherds or many people who were involved in doing the work

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assigned. And the premise is this, capacity, your capacity to have an ever larger and growing ministry, is really determined by whether you see yourself as a shepherd or you see yourself as a rancher. Now, let's be clear. It's possible to be a little bit of both, and I believe it's possible to be one or the other, But it's very likely that you're going to have a natural bent or tendency toward one of these expressions of ministry. And when you find yourself either misplaced in that, are unwilling to embrace a different role, are quite frankly ill equipped or even unable to express that kind of role, you'll be very frustrated.

Jeff Iorg:

Let me give you an illustration of this from my wife Anne's life. My wife Anne is particularly gifted with preschool children.

Jeff Iorg:

You may have heard me say on the podcast before, you know, she's forgotten more about preschool children than I'll learn in five lifetimes. She's not only learned from the experience of raising three children, but also the professional training, which resulted in a master's degree in childhood education, which then facilitated her teaching and reading and writing and conference speaking and many other things directed toward preschool children. And so, it won't surprise you that my wife has spent a lot of time in ministry organizations working with preschool children. Well, at one particular time, she did this and the church where she was working grew significantly. And she moved from being a preschool teacher to a preschool director to ultimately a twenty hour a week part time staff person, director of preschool ministries.

Jeff Iorg:

And as the church progressed and grew larger, she changed in her role and the expectations of her workload from being a shepherd, a woman who worked with preschool children, to a rancher, a person who trained, equipped, motivated, and supervised a whole team of volunteers that were actually then doing the work of shepherding these preschool children, teaching them the Bible, caring for them, meeting their needs in their family context, etcetera. Well, one day, Anne came home from church and said, I want to resign from being the director of preschool ministries. Well, this was going to have some financial impact on us, but more importantly, it was going to have some significant impact on our church involvement. And at first, I thought maybe even our satisfaction with being in the church and community where we were serving. But then Anne said, I want to stop being the director of preschool ministries, and I want to find a job teaching preschoolers.

Jeff Iorg:

And she said, I don't mind doing this other work, but I'm certain that there's someone else that can be found who will enjoy it more. I want to teach preschoolers. My wife was saying, in the terminology I'm using on the podcast, I want to be a shepherd. I don't want to be a rancher. Now listen carefully.

Jeff Iorg:

If you're out there and you're thinking about what is my capacity, don't misunderstand what I'm saying. You don't have to change from shepherd to rancher. You simply don't have to do it. But unless you do make that shift, your ministry organization is not likely to grow very large. Now, let me give you a second barrier.

Jeff Iorg:

Capacity is the first. The second barrier is closely related, and that is the barrier of fulfillment. And the diagnostic question for this is, what fulfills you in ministry? Now, than the rancher shepherd idea, I wanna use two different words to catch a closely related idea. I want to talk about being a chaplain or a catalyst.

Jeff Iorg:

A chaplain is someone who draws their ministry fulfillment from doing the hands on work of ministry. Chaplains preach and teach. Chaplains perform weddings. Chaplains officiate, at memorial services. Chaplains provide pastoral counseling and crisis counseling.

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Pastors show up on days when you're sick or hospitalized or preparing for surgery. Chaplains engage in direct ministry to the persons under their leadership. Catalysts, on the other hand, make those things happen. They may not make the hospital visits, but they make sure the hospital visits get made. They may not participate in the counseling sessions,

Jeff Iorg:

but they make sure counseling ministry is offered in the community. It's the issue of fulfillment. What fulfills you in ministry? I saw a wonderful example of this a number of years ago. I was working with

Jeff Iorg:

a church that had a a youth pastor. In this case, he had a full time salary and was expected to devote his entire time to the student ministry of the

Jeff Iorg:

church. He was a likable guy. He was a capable man. He was a seminary graduate. He had a very supportive wife.

Jeff Iorg:

He was a model father with of his own children. There really wasn't anything

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about this young man that wasn't admirable and respectable and appreciated. He came to the church, was serving as the student minister. They had about 25 teenagers. And over the next three or four

Jeff Iorg:

or five years, the church grew substantially. However, the student ministry remained

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the same size. And it became problematic because the church was actually reaching families that should have been connecting as well through this student ministry, and it just wasn't happening. So I was involved in this, situation, although I was not the pastor. I was in a consultive role and helped the pastor and others to work with this youth pastor understand how he needed to change his work style and his leadership style in order to accommodate the growth that was needed to keep pace with the growth that was happening in the rest of the church. And he tried.

Jeff Iorg:

He really tried. We gave him specific instructions about training other people to teach on Sundays in the youth Sunday school, about training other people to lead out in various activities, recreational and fellowship and others that the youth group might have. We talked with him specifically about developing other leaders who could shepherd and care for some of these teenagers in different life events or different circumstances. And he made a good faith effort,

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but he just couldn't do it. Why? Because he drew significant fulfillment from hands on ministry with these teenagers.

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He enjoyed being, if I

Jeff Iorg:

could put it in these words, their chaplain. That's where he thrived. And he did not receive fulfillment

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for training others to do that work and then standing back and watching them do it. He did not want to train three Sunday school teachers to teach three different classes of teenagers on Sunday. He wanted to be their teacher. Now you might think, well, that's just his ego. It wasn't his ego.

Jeff Iorg:

This is a good man. This is a guy that we loved and appreciated and enjoyed working with. There there was no ego involved, at all. He he just simply did not draw fulfillment from catalyzing people for ministry. Instead, he drew fulfillment from doing it himself and the personal and immediate gratification and satisfaction that he got from those relationships.

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And ultimately, he resigned from the church.

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And the job he took next was perfect. He became a group home parent. He and his family moved to a care facility and became group parents, to about six teenagers that lived in their home in this institutional context setting. And in that context, he was able to pour himself into these teenagers in these very intense relationships. And from that, he drew significant fulfillment.

Jeff Iorg:

So in this particular case,

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the youth ministry wasn't growing, not because of lack of effort or lack of intentionality or lack of training. It was in a sense sabotaged by this leader's need to draw fulfillment from the work that he was doing as a chaplain rather than as a catalyst. So another barrier to growth

Jeff Iorg:

is fulfillment. What fulfills you in ministry? Well, we've covered capacity and fulfillment. Let me give you another barrier. It's security.

Jeff Iorg:

And the diagnostic question for this one is, how much risk can you tolerate? How much risk can you tolerate? And if you have a high control perspective, then you're not going to see much growth. But if you can move from control to empowerment, the potential for that growth is significant.

Jeff Iorg:

For example, I once worked in another ministry context where a leader came on board who really needed to be in control. He needed to attend every meeting. He needed to have a voice in every decision. He wanted to, be on every program.

Jeff Iorg:

He was very much a person who needed to be in control. And quite frankly, most of what he controlled was, pretty good.

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When he was in a meeting, he did well in that meeting. When he was on a program, he generally did well on that program.

Jeff Iorg:

But the problem is you can only control so much. And after that, the growth has to stop because one person can only control so much.

Jeff Iorg:

That's why large organizations are built not on control, but on empowerment. Leaders empower others who empower others with both the authority and the responsibility to carry out the overarching mission and the key strategies that have been adopted for an organization.

Jeff Iorg:

If you're going to experience growth, you have to move from control to empowerment. From having to be in the room when every decision is made to equipping others to make good decisions and allowing them to get that work done. You have

Jeff Iorg:

to move from being in control of direct ministry and its outcomes to empowering others to join you in that task. So for example, rather than maintaining control of pastoral care in your church where you say, it's my responsibility and opportunity to visit every sick person that goes in a hospital that's a member of our church, Or would you meet that same need of caregiving by empowering others, training them, mobilizing them,

Jeff Iorg:

and then supervising them in such a way that the ministry actually gets done, but you're empowering others to do it. This third big issue, the issue of security. So we've covered capacity and fulfillment and security. Now, I said it at

Jeff Iorg:

the beginning of the podcast, but before I finish, I

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wanna say it again. You don't have to make these changes. God wants some of you to be shepherds and chaplains and to be the ones who control the methodology and outcomes of ministry that is being provided. But God wants some of you to be ranchers and catalysts who are focused on empowerment and by adopting these roles, real growth can take place. Well, here's a fourth perspective that affects growth.

Jeff Iorg:

It's what I call barrier. It's what I call perspective. And the question is this, how fast do you want the results? How fast do you want the results? Now let's contrast two words in understanding the answers to this question.

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Achiever on the one side, equipper on the other side. Are you an achiever? Are you an equipper? Now this is what's counterintuitive. You might think, well, want the thing to grow.

Jeff Iorg:

I want this ministry to grow. I want this church to grow. So therefore I better be an achiever. Well, it's actually the opposite of that. If you really want it to grow, you'll be an equipper more than an achiever.

Jeff Iorg:

Now,

Jeff Iorg:

that every ministry equipper is in a sense also an achiever because you are doing things day by day to accomplish the checklist of responsibilities that you've been given. But you are achieving in the sense that you are achieving as an equipper, not achieving as a minister or ministry leader. You see, if

Jeff Iorg:

you're an achiever, your goal at the end

Jeff Iorg:

of the day is to check boxes. You can say, I achieved. Today, I visited five people and talked to them about Jesus.

Jeff Iorg:

Alright, that's good. That's really good. But an equipper would say, today, I visited two people and talked to them about Jesus, but I trained five people to go and talk to others about Jesus. Yes, I'm an achiever. I'm actually doing the ministry, but the bulk of my responsibility as a leader is to be an equipper, to help other people be equipped to do this work that we've been assigned.

Jeff Iorg:

Now the challenge of this

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is that equipping goes slower than achieving, especially at the beginning. But once you build the momentum of equipping in a congregation or in a ministry organization,

Jeff Iorg:

then the results become far more significant than any achiever could ever accomplish on his or her own. I saw this demonstrated so powerfully in my first pastorate. When I went to my first church,

Jeff Iorg:

I was an evangelistic machine. I would witness to everything that took breath. I I was trying to win every single person in my city to faith in Jesus Christ, And I was working long hours and making many family and personal sacrifices to do everything I could to reach as many people as possible with the gospel. And I was also frustrated because more people in my church were not joining with me in this task. And one Sunday morning, I preached a blistering sermon.

Jeff Iorg:

I mean, the kind that peels the bark off people and pour salt on the wound. When I finished preaching this sermon about evangelism and my church's woefully inadequate efforts at evangelism, said the closing prayer and looked up, and one of my most loyal and faithful members was standing about a foot in front of me. And he said, and I

Jeff Iorg:

can quote him, don't ever do that to me again. And I said, do do what? And he said, don't ever lecture me from the pulpit about something you've never taught me how to do.

Jeff Iorg:

And he turned and walked out of the building. Well, that confrontation impacted me deeply. First of all, this person who spoke to me, I respected him, I trusted him, I valued his friendship and his membership and support of our church. So him saying this to me was not some critic harping on something from a distance. This was a person I really cared about their their input.

Jeff Iorg:

So I started reflecting on what he'd said and I I thought about it for a while and decided to make a strategic change. And that is I received training in a very intense but very effective evangelism training model, and I started implementing it in our church. And I started implementing it by the first three months training just two people. One of them was this man who had come to me and another woman in our church. I picked both of them intentionally and told them, I'm gonna spend the next three months teaching you about evangelism.

Jeff Iorg:

And then you're going to spend the next three months teaching that to someone else. Well, we started in this process and at the beginning, the number of people we reached with the gospel actually went down because I was spending less time out evangelizing, although I

Jeff Iorg:

was still spending some time doing this, but actually more time training some people starting with two and then expanding it two by two to do evangelism. Well, this went on for about three years. We finally reached February 1989, four Sundays in that month, and I was gone for

Jeff Iorg:

the whole month in doctoral studies. I was only flying home on Saturday, preaching on Sunday,

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and flying back to the school on Sunday night. That month of February 1989, we had 22 adults come forward in our worship services and profess faith in Jesus. And I had never personally shared the gospel with any of them. What had happened?

Jeff Iorg:

My work of being an equipper for about three years flourished and blossomed into remarkable evangelistic success.

Jeff Iorg:

So perspective. How fast do you want the results? Are you an achiever who gets fast results but a limited amount of results? Or an equipper takes longer

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but has the potential of a crescendoing compounding interest

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kind of result in your organization?

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And then the last personal barrier which can inhibit growth is what I call the focus barrier. And the diagnostic question is, who or what controls your schedule?

Jeff Iorg:

What I mean by this is, is your schedule a reactionary schedule or an intentionality schedule? Do you only do those things throughout your day that are

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in reaction to what other people expect of you or what other people demand of you or what other people ask of you? Or is your schedule driven by intentionality? You do what's going to produce growth and you stay focused on that and not on the minutiae of activity that people wanna clutter up your schedule with. You know, I've had a few people say nice things about me over the years, but I I have one compliment that is my all time favorite compliment. It's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me, and that is a man that I respected and, worked with who was probably about thirty years older than me and been in

Jeff Iorg:

ministry a long time, once said to me, Jeff, what I really admire about you is you never do anything except on purpose. That was such an incredible compliment. You never do anything except on purpose. Your life, your schedule, your decisions are marked by

Jeff Iorg:

intentionality. You're not simply reacting or responding to what other people are expecting of you. You're intentionally, strategically deciding what do my actions need to be to produce the results that I'm really longing to see, and then you hone in on those things. Now, the premise of the podcast today is this,

Jeff Iorg:

leaders by innate qualities or characteristics within us can be the inhibitors of ministry growth. And you say, but doesn't someone have to

Jeff Iorg:

do all this hands on ministry? Yes. And you may be that very person. I want to underscore this, not everyone has to change. Not everyone has to become a rancher or a catalyst or focus on empowerment and equipping.

Jeff Iorg:

Not everyone has to be devoted to intentionality more than reacting or responding. You don't have to make these changes, but here's the issue. If you're not going to, then the leadership barriers in your life will reinforce the sameness of where you are and what you're doing. Look, there's nothing wrong with having a chaplain's perspective on ministry, but if you're a chaplain where you make the visits, you do the counseling, you do the weddings, you hold the Bible studies, it all comes down to you, there will be a finite number of people that you can actually connect with. But if you can do some of that while at the same time spending much more of your time as a rancher who's a catalyst who empowers others as an equipper, if you can spend more time doing that with intentionality, then, then growth is more likely to result.

Jeff Iorg:

Well, we've talked today on the podcast that all of us want our ministries to grow, meaning that we want them to be numerically larger. We talked for the last couple of weeks about how culture can mitigate against this, but now we've talked today about how leader style can also inhibit growth. If you need to make some adjustments, ask yourselves those diagnostic questions. How much can I oversee? What fulfills me?

Jeff Iorg:

How much risk can I tolerate? How fast do I want the results? And what controls your schedule? Work through those questions and move toward answers that facilitate the growth that you long for. Put it into practice this week as you lead on.