While serving as senior vice-president of LifeWay, I was on a team that gets to serve tens of thousands of churches a year. Every week I spoke with church leaders and listened and learned from both their struggles and the places where they saw the Lord working. I was also apart of several large-scale research projects and benefited from the wisdom and expertise of the LifeWay Research team. I learned a lot that I am taking with me as I have moved back into the local church.

“What learnings from serving many churches are you taking with you as you go back to serving one church?”

It has been a common question that ministry leaders have asked me over the last several months. While serving as senior vice-president of LifeWay, I was on a team that gets to serve tens of thousands of churches a year. Every week I spoke with church leaders and listened and learned from both their struggles and the places where they saw the Lord working. I was also apart of several large-scale research projects and benefited from the wisdom and expertise of the LifeWay Research team. I learned a lot that I am taking with me as I have moved back into the local church. After serving the broader Church for seven years, here are five learnings that I believe will be shaping my ministry for years to come.

1. Sadly, leaders can grow a ministry while their hearts grow cold.

I really wish this was not true because of the damage it creates, but leaders can lead and scale a ministry while their inner character is imploding. Leaders can build ministries while their faith and their families are deteriorating. Jesus said, “Apart from Me you can do nothing,” which means all that we build apart from Him is worth absolutely nothing in the end. Seeing ministry leaders who I respect implode has not caused me to think, “This will never happen to me,” but has given me a greater sense of my fragility. I need His grace to sustain me.

2. How a leader treats his/her team sets the tone for relationships in the church.

If we believe that leaders help set the culture of the church, then how leaders treat their team sets the tone for the relationships in the church. The famous “one anothers” found in Scripture give us a beautiful picture of what our relationships should look like: love one another, serve one another, submit to one another, forgive one another, etc. If leaders preach about the “one anothers” of the Bible yet don’t obey these commands in their own relationships with their team, they undermine their own sermons.

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