The Best Way to Find Leaders

Host: TJ Freeman, Joe Wagner, and Josh MacClaren

Summary: In this episode of Rural Church Renewal, Pastor TJ Freeman focuses on the crucial task of preparing future church leaders. He discusses the decline of churches that fail to invest in leadership development and emphasizes that the Bible provides clear guidance on raising faithful, godly men. Drawing on Paul's instructions to Timothy, TJ stresses ongoing mentorship and hands-on ministry training. He shares personal anecdotes and challenges pastors to actively identify and nurture potential leaders in their congregations through consistent, faithful investment.

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Transcript

What happens to the church when the men who are leading today are no longer around? Who steps in? Maybe you've looked around your church and wondered, where are the next elders? Who are the next deacons? Who will be the next leaders of this ministry? And too often, we struggle to prepare them. But the Bible is clear.

Raising up leaders is not optional. It's actually essential. And here's the good news. Scripture gives us everything we need to do it well. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Rural Church Renewal. My name is TJ Freeman. And I'm a rural pastor.

I'm also one of the hosts of this podcast. And today I'm the only host. My dear brothers Josh and Joe are off gallivanting around the world and they've left me here alone, sad, in my study to record this episode by myself. But today we are talking about what it means to raise up the next generation of leaders.

And we're asking the question, what happens to a church that never prepares the next generation of leaders? I think a quick answer to that is that churches that don't develop leaders die with their current leadership. It's easy for a church to go unhealthy quickly when you just turn to warm body syndrome.

Who's the warm body who's willing to do this thing, instead of raising up the next generation of leaders? And a church like that crumbles and falls apart. Today, many of the churches around the nation and rural places whose doors are closed no longer have a congregation because, in part, of a failure to raise up the next generation of leaders. Yet, God explains to us in his word, number one, that we all share this responsibility, and number two, that the church raises up leaders in a way that looks quite a bit different from the world. So what is God's blueprint for church leadership?

The reality is that the Bible, not culture, defines what makes a good leader for the church. So you're not looking for the most charismatic person in the room. You're not looking for the best business leader. You're looking for what Paul says to Timothy, a faithful man who can train up other faithful men. Isn't that who Paul said to Timothy in 2 Timothy to train?

Paul says to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:2, Who will be able to teach others also. There it is. That's the simple blueprint. The things that you have received, you need entrust to other faithful men who will pass those things on to the next generation. That is not a luxury that if you have time to do it, you try to squeeze that in somewhere.

That's not something that you can wait until the end. end of your ministry to do, raising up leaders by entrusting the things that you have learned to faithful men who will teach others also, is the ongoing responsibility of every church leader.

And so what you need to be doing is simply having an eye out all the time for faithful men. And you're not going to know all the time who the faithful men are going to be. You're going to find that some people you thought were just going to knock it out of the park spiritually as leaders fail. And some of the people you least expected are going to be really good.

And so are you looking for leaders the way that God does? Are you actively trying to entrust the truth of God's word to men who, with God's help, will be faithful men who are going to teach others also? You know, faithfulness is the thing that we should be looking for more than anything else. And you spending time with those people gives you an opportunity to evaluate, is this person going to be faithful passing on the word of God to someone else or is he not?

And remember the way that Paul trained Timothy and Titus. He didn't say, okay, this guy looks like he's really cut out for ministry. Let's send him away to seminary for four years so that we can get him back and put him into good Christian service.

What Paul did with Timothy and Titus was train them through hands on ministry. You know, leaders grow by having opportunities to serve, not by getting a title. Jesus did the same thing. Jesus raised up leaders by walking with them, not just by teaching them. When he chose his twelve apostles, he did it so that they could spend time with him and then be empowered to preach after spending time with the Lord.

And you're not the Lord, I totally get that, but you should have some younger men around you all the time who you're training to be faithful. So that you can begin to entrust small leadership responsibilities to them, give them an opportunity to prove their faithfulness, so that they can then go on to bigger leadership responsibilities.

So, are you actively looking for these kind of guys, or are you just waiting for them to appear? Are you thinking, I need to send them off somewhere? Or are you trying to train guys as they're already beginning to serve? You know, leadership is not about filling a position. It's about preparing people for the kind of responsibility that the Lord would entrust to them.

I remember when I got really convicted about this, when I was in, I don't know, my third or fourth year here at this rural pastor position, and I wanted to raise up. I wanted to pour into the next generation of guys, but we really didn't have many young men in the church. In fact, we didn't have very many men that seemed qualified at all.

So what I had to do was decide, I'm just going to work with the people who are here and I found a high school kid who was going to be graduating and he wasn't sure what he was going to do next. And I just said, Hey, would you be willing to hang out with me? Maybe once a week, just pop into the office.

We'll hang out, we'll talk. And then maybe we could read the Bible a little bit together. Maybe we could read some of these other books together. And over time, we were able to develop a relationship where I was giving him some responsibility and working with him, training him kind of on the fly. And he was being faithful.

And the more faithful he was, the more I entrusted to him. I have had other guys. Since then, who did not respond well to those opportunities. They proved themselves to be unfaithful and I didn't give up on them or just, you know, cast them off to the side.

I'm not going to keep moving them down the curve in terms of their leadership responsibilities. I want to see them prove that they can be faithful with a little bit before I add more. So I can keep testing and trying and spending time with these guys, but I do want to try to pour most of my time into the guys who are proving to be faithful, as Paul said to Timothy.

And over the years, I've been really thankful to see younger men recognize that kind of pattern and want to be a part of it. And we've even had some of the older guys who are inspired by the way that the younger men are stepping up and they realize, Hey, I should be doing some of these things too. And so you can start to, as you invest in some guys. 

You can start to look for guys who are beginning to serve on their own without being asked. That is one of the greatest joys. So you get done with the church potluck and you look over and there's Sam. Nobody's asked him, but he's taken out the trash. And you look over there and there's John and he's standing there talking to somebody who came by themselves.

Looked lonely, and he noticed it, and all he's doing is visiting with them a little bit. You start to look for things like that, just little things, where you can pick up on this guy's doing something to try to be faithful to the Lord, and start to spend some more of your time with those guys. And you want to do this all the time.

You don't want to fall into the trap of waiting until you see that there's a need. Like, Oh, Deacon Larry, he's getting up there. I got to start thinking about who's the next deacon going to be. Or it's time for the nominating committee. I wonder who some of the guys are that need to replace some of the guys who are stepping off this time.

That is the worst. This is just something you need to be doing all the time. So you could ask yourself regularly, who in your church is already showing small signs of faithfulness? And invest in those guys. The future leaders are very likely already in your church. And you just need to invest time in them. And I know in a lot of rural churches there are not that many guys, but here's what's more important to remember.

God has called you to shepherd that flock. He didn't give you the flock that you wish you had, that has a hundred guys just chomping at the bit to get involved. He's given you that flock of a bunch of guys in their 70s who are getting really tired. He's given you that flock of mostly ladies, and the guys just kind of seem like spiritual bumps on a log.

He's given you that congregation where there's been families fighting for a number of generations, and they're still fighting under your leadership, and you're trying really hard, but man, you don't know if you can make it any longer. God has called you to this flock, and he's called you to raise up men from that congregation who can provide the kind of leadership that he has called for in his church.

And I do think it's worth noting what the two roles are that you're primarily raising up guys for. Number one, the Bible uses a term for leaders in the church. It actually uses a number of terms. Elder, Bishop, Pastor. Those, those are all interchangeable terms. But an elder is the God given design for leadership in the church, and not just one.

There should be a plurality of these guys. You might be in a situation where your church thinks elder is a bad word. I remember growing up, we had just deacons and trustees. And when I went in college to a church that had elders, I thought I was going to a bad place, because they had elders. Maybe you're in a church that's like that.

You do not have to rush to transition to elders. Don't panic about that. You might be the guy who just moves the ball one yard down the field during your ministry in a healthier direction. Whatever the leadership structure is that's in your church, there should be men who are filling an office, though, that represents what you see as elders in the church.

They need to understand what that means, what the responsibility is, what the accountability is, how the flock benefits from that, etc. So you should have elders. If you can't have elders, you need to have elder like people that you're trying to raise up all the time and you should not hold that position alone, because that's a very dangerous place for you to be as a pastor. Again, don't freak out if that's the situation the Lord has you in now. You are not a second class pastor because you don't have elders. Do your best, though, not to give up, not to capitulate, but also not to force something on the congregation that they're not ready for.

Just be a patient, loving, careful leader who's raising up other guys who could fill that role should the Lord allow it during your time of ministry there. The other office is deacons, and deacons are caring for the needs of the body. They need to be kind of a buffer between the elders and the congregation.

You can see that in act six where they kind of have a shock absorber kind of function. There's some trouble between the congregation and the elders, and they choose deacons to go and address those issues. And it's so good that it leads to even priests in that area becoming Christians. It's awesome.

Well, in your church, you need to have guys you're raising up to meet the needs of the congregation. Sometimes that looks like caring for the building. Sometimes that looks like visiting the sick. Sometimes that looks like helping the elders prepare a budget. There's all kinds of ways that deacons can be used to serve the body.

And you can be really creative about what that looks like, but you should be raising up guys who understand I have a responsibility to help the leaders of my church care for this body by meeting the needs of the people in the congregation. That's why it's so good to have an eye toward the one that's going.

Yeah, I'm going to grab that trash and take it out. Or yeah, I'm going to go talk to that person. Biggest distinction by the way, between an elder and a deacon scripturally is that the elders are the ones who are apt to teach. And so you should also be trying to help guys understand how they can be better teachers.

And even those guys, the elders should be servants as well. So are we training leaders in the word? So are we training leaders with an eye toward the office that they could fill or are we just kinda hoping they figure it out? Be intentional about the way that you're training, and this is likely to have a very long-term impact on your church because churches that don't train leaders fade away.

Churches that train leaders leave a legacy of faithfulness. It's not about keeping the church running, it's about faithfully making the gospel visible where you live. You don't want to be a part of another church that has to close its doors because they didn't raise up the next generation of leaders, which means that you need to start today training the leaders that will shape the church tomorrow.

And just ask yourself, what will your church leadership look like 10 years from now? If you stay on the track you're on, what will your church leadership look like 10 years from now? And if you start investing in guys today, how would that change the picture? Well, I know that this is hard work brothers.

It is time consuming, it's messy, it's uncomfortable, and it's often very frustrating, but this is good work. And you have the reliable Word of God, which helps you understand that this is a responsibility that the Lord will help you with. It's a responsibility He's called you to, and it's the Word of God, not your efforts that is going to raise up the next generation of leaders.

So keep pouring the word into guys, no matter how frustrating it may be. The goal isn't speed. It's faithfulness over time. So who will you invest in this week? Faithful leadership starts with one faithful step. Take that step today. And as you're doing that, you may want to think about this song, Take My Life and let it be.

I love this song written in 1874 by Francis Ridley Havergal. And here's what it says. Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord to thee. Take my moments and my days, let them flow in ceaseless praise. Let them flow in ceaseless praise. Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of thy love.

Take my feet and let them be swift and beautiful for thee. Take my voice and let me sing always, only for my King. Take my lips and let them be filled with messages from thee. Take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold. Take my intellect and use every power as you choose. Take my will and make it thine.

It will be no longer mine. Take my heart, it is thine own. It shall be thy royal throne. And this last verse. Take my love, my lord I pour, at thy feet its treasure store. Take myself and I will be. Ever only all for thee. Dear brother, I know you've got hard work ahead of you. Being a faithful rural pastor is not easy work, but the Lord has called you to this.

You've given him your life. Just trust him to take it and let it be all for his glory. Hey, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Rural Church Renewal. This is a ministry of the Brainerd Institute for Rural Ministry, where we want to see a healthy church in every rural town.

You are part of that. We're thankful for that. We'd love to connect with you on Facebook, facebook.com/ruralpastors, or you could head on over to brainerdinstitute.com. That's brainerdinstitute.com for more. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time.