The best possible thing you could do for your church is to create church leaders. Not only do they help shoulder some of the ministry tasks, but they help inspire future leaders.
You don’t always have to look for leaders outside your church. Many of your members are great leaders. They just need the right guidance and opportunities.
Of course, you can use your church website to help with this. Using your website also gives you the opportunity to mentor leaders worldwide, fostering a global culture of leadership and ministry.
Talk About Christian Leadership On Your Blog
The first step is to simply blog about Christian leadership. When you’re trying to create church leaders, you have to inspire people to want to lead. Some of the best leaders of all time didn’t realize that that was their calling until they were inspired by someone else.
Use your words and experience to show them the benefits of leading others along their own journeys. Odds are, someone inspired you at some point to do the same thing.
Many leaders have that one person who helped open their eyes and show them how wonderful it is to lead others. From helping others grow to doing good as a team, leadership is a wonderful thing. The best part is for every leader you inspire and create, more people will hear the word of God.
If you’re having trouble coming up inspiring leadership topics and posts, start following Christian leaders on social media. Use their thoughts as inspiration for your own posts. You can even quote them in your blog posts. ChurchLeaders, Crosswalk and Brian Dodd On Leadership all have great lists to help you get started.
Add A Leadership Section
We’ve already covered the six main pages every church website should have, but if you want to create church leaders, you may also want to consider adding a leadership section to your church website. This page would introduce site visitors to the idea of leadership.
Your leadership page should have several main sections including:
- Defining what leadership is in terms of church and faith – Leading others to live a Christian life isn’t quite the same as managing a team at a normal job.
- What skills it takes to be a great Christian leader – Remember to point out that skills can be learned as long as one as the passion and calling to do so.
- Leadership resources – These are tools and guides to help educate and inspire leaders.
- Inspiring stories – List several inspiring leadership stories from actual leaders in your church.
- Any upcoming leadership events – If you host leadership training in your church or online, list upcoming sessions.
- Any leadership opportunities – These can be actual opportunities within your church or ideas for opportunities in any area (for your online followers).
Think of your leadership page as an all-in-one guide for those aspiring to be leaders. It’s kind of like a New Here page for new visitors.
Provide Leadership Resources
To make your church website the perfect place to create church leaders, you need to offer leadership resources. There are numerous types of resources you can offer, such as:
- Ebooks
- Checklists
- Lists of places to volunteer
- Contacts
- Recommended people to follow on social media
- Courses (or links to recommended courses)
- Recommend prayers or even your own book of prayers
- Leadership forums
You could also offer links to the latest posts from some of your favorite leadership bloggers. Basically, if you find it useful and think it would help your site’s visitors, include it.
Even if you never hear anything from some of your visitors, those resources are still helping them become leaders. This means they’re taking a more proactive approach to spreading God’s word, bringing people together and ministering to their community.
Market Leadership Events
If you offer any type of leadership classes at your church, market them. Don’t just list them on your website. Instead, write about them on your blog. People want to know more details before they arrive.
Give them an in-depth description of what your classes will cover. Let them know what to expect when they finish the class.
More importantly, let them know that support is still available after the class. Provide contact details so they can ask questions before arriving.
If you want to make your classes available to even more people, live stream or just record the class for your online-only followers. Remember, you don’t want to just create church leaders for your own church. You also want to create leaders throughout the world.
Provide Leadership Opportunities
If there’s never a chance for anyone to lead, how will they know if they’re meant to be a leader? Offer leadership opportunities whenever possible. These can be online or offline.
For instance, list all current volunteer opportunities in your church. However, don’t just ask people to volunteer. Ask for people to lead the teams as well. Simple getting the chance to lead is all some of your members need to embrace who they really are. It’s also a great way to evaluate members to see who truly fits as a great leader within your church.
For online opportunities, list upcoming charity events. List different ideas for doing good in the community. For example, someone who lives in an area that doesn’t have a church where they feel comfortable might start a weekly Bible study group at the local community center. By taking the lead, they’re giving more people the chance to embrace God.
Hold Weekly Leadership Q&As
As you start to create church leaders, they will have questions. Make it easy to get answers by hosting weekly leadership Q&As. You can do this via live streaming or through a forum. You can even add a group chat feature to a members-only area (this can be free or available for a small fee to help support the church).
Spend 30 minutes to an hour letting people ask questions, discuss challenges (such as burnout) and even just interact with fellow Christian leaders. It’s fun and can even help make you a better leader too.
Ask Why People Don’t Want To Lead
Why don’t more people want to lead? Frankly, it’s hard. This is especially true for anyone who’s ever worked in any type of management position outside of the church. Most people shy away from leadership positions because they either don’t want the responsibility or they don’t feel they’re ready for it.
This becomes an even bigger issue outside of the workplace. At church, people feel even more pressure. They’re often trying to lead friends and family. They might feel like they’re responsible if someone suddenly questions their faith. In short, it’s a much more personal leadership position.
Go ahead and ask your members and even your church website visitors why they don’t want to lead. Odds are, you’ll get these common responses:
- I don’t have time.
- It’s too difficult.
- I don’t want to lead my friends.
- I don’t want to stand out.
- I don’t know how.
All of those responses are valid, but you also have the power to eliminate all those reasons. All it takes is the right training and opportunities. This being said, not everyone is cut out to lead or even wants to lead. That’s fine. They’re still able to do amazing things by working together as a team.
Before you try to create church leaders, find out why there aren’t more to begin with. Simply asking the question is all it takes to demystify your lack of leaders.
Introduce A Leadership Forum
Leaders can’t do this alone. They need support. Create a leadership forum on your church website. Alternately, you can create a Facebook group as well. Just make sure you list the group in your leadership resources.
The forum is a great place for people to ask questions. It’s also the perfect place to make new friends, even outside of church.
You’ll definitely want to get a few volunteers to help moderate the forum. Sadly, you’ll have people wanting to cause trouble and add spam. Keeping the forum friendly and educational is key to making it successful.
Have A Clear Leadership Vision
Leadership isn’t about being the one in charge. It’s not about prestige either. Leadership is about helping others accomplish more. To create church leaders, have a clear leadership vision.
What is it leaders should strive to accomplish? What’s the point of becoming a leader? What makes Christian leaders different?
Share this vision on your church website. Show potential leaders what they should be trying to accomplish. Describe the skills that would help make a great leader.
Offer An Anonymous Place To Vent
It doesn’t matter how great of a leader you are, it’s still a difficult job at times. It’s so easy to get burnt out and even depressed when things aren’t going well. For example, if you help train a leader who starts a teen ministry group, yet many of the teens go out of their way to do terrible things, the leader may start to feel they’re not good enough.
Instead of giving up, give leaders an anonymous place to vent. It should be anonymous so no one feels guilty complaining. For some odd reason, Christian leaders often feel like they shouldn’t complain. Yet, this is how they get better. They vent, get encouragement from fellow leaders and keep going.
In the example above, fellow leaders could offer advice on what to try. Having a new approach could be all the teen ministry leader needs to turn the kids around and feel better as a leader.
Offer Weekly Christian Journal Guides
A great way to help potential leaders determine if they’re ready is by offering weekly Christian journal guides. These are prompts that help your members and online followers learn more about themselves and their faith.
As they write, they may just discover that they want to lead. At the very least, they’ll continue to grow as Christians. There’s nothing to lose, but so much to gain. By just doing a single prompt a week, it’s easier on you and your busy followers.
All of the prompts don’t have to focus on leadership. Ideally, you want all of your site’s followers to do these prompts weekly. So, make them about growing as a Christian too. You can even have prayer prompts.
Since many people would rather use technology than a pencil, suggest a few free journal tools to help them get started. Zapier and Lifewire both offer some great suggestions for free and low-cost journal apps. Techboomers also lists several free journal sites.
Be Willing To Evaluate Budding Leaders
While there are many reasons why your church might not be growing as quickly as you’d like, one major reason is no one is willing to evaluate budding leaders. Your church needs leaders in order to get more done. It’s not possible to do everything with just a small staff.
Instead of hiring someone else, create church leaders from within. This means taking the time to evaluate budding leaders. Pay attention to what they’re doing. Listen when they ask questions.
Take notice when someone goes above and beyond to help others. You can even notice this online. Perhaps someone is doing more than their fair share in the forums or have incredible advice to help out fellow leaders.
Evaluate them and invest more time into helping them grow.
Invest Time Into Leadership Development
That leads to the final step. Invest time in leadership development. It can’t just be a passing thought. To grow your church, increase ministry worldwide and help people reach their potential, you have to invest the time.
Your church website offers a great opportunity to create church leaders. By investing even a few hours a week, you can create more leaders within your church and all over the world. As you create more leaders, they can start taking over managing the leadership portion of your site, giving you more time to minister in other areas.
Don’t have a church website yet? Contact Reach Right Studios today to get started on an engaging church website that helps you build leaders for your church and worldwide.
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