Good Leaders Release Leaders

Note: This month I’m posting a series of devotional thoughts from Acts. Many of these are reposts, some are new. I’m “working out the kinks” for submission to a compilation of short, pastoral writings in Acts to be published later this year. If you have suggestions, corrections, or comments, please let me know!

In Acts 6 there is a serious leadership bottleneck. The church had been growing explosively (a good thing) but everyone was complaining about bad systems that led to broken community (a bad thing). Something had to be done before the whole thing blew up.

So the Apostles called the rapidly expanding congregation to choose some people to serve, to organize, to manage, and to care.

And the infant church grew even more quickly. And everyone was happy

It could have stopped there. Often as leaders we perceive we are doing our job well when we assign people to tasks that fit them. Moreover, when we see fruit from those decisions, we feel satisfied that our leadership direction really must be working.

But leadership isn’t just about getting people plugged into the right slots.  Stephen might have been called out for, and even gifted to, “wait on tables”, but he was soon doing signs and wonders, and preaching by the power of the Holy Spirit.

He was out changing the world.

Nowhere does the Bible indicate that this might have distressed the Apostles. After Stephen was martyred, we don’t find Peter and John saying, “If Stephen would have just kept his mouth shut and stuck to waiting tables, this persecution wouldn’t have broken out”.

In fact, when reading further about some of these servants (Stephan and Phillip), I get the feeling that the growth of their ministry was celebrated.

Wherever we have influence, we have to develop a culture that releases people beyond the task to which they are assigned and that celebrates with them when they step out. We must provide an ethos of trust to workers in the church. Just because a person’s job-title says “nursery worker”, “barista”, “parking lot attendant”, or “administrative pastor”, doesn’t mean the Holy Spirit doesn’t want to move through him or her in powerful ways.

Because as believers we all do specific tasks and jobs as we serve one another, but we also worship a God who wants to work through us in amazing, world-changing, unimaginable ways.

Are we doing everything we can to not hold people back, but to release them towards all God has in mind? Are we partnering with God in His awesome intentions for the people we lead, or are we limiting them to be bound by our own unimaginative ideas of what they might be able to accomplish?