Leadership can sometimes feel isolating and lonely. Even though you’re surrounded by the people you serve, who can you turn to for encouragement and friendship? We asked some of our previous conference speakers for wisdom on how pastors and church leaders can build close connections within ministry.
[Church leaders can find community] by practicing some intentional vulnerability in friendships and relationships. To me, this is different than what you would share in a sermon, or in a message, standing on a stage. It’s with certain people and in certain relationships—making sure they get to see a part of you that not everyone else gets to see. Vulnerability leads to community.
Ministry is one of the loneliest (if I may say) industries that there are. It’s a perplexing enigma wrapped in a riddle. And I think that if you can get two or three real friends over the duration of your ministry, that’s a serious gift. And to that end, the Scriptures say that he or she who would have friends must first show themselves to be friendly. I have practiced, and am practicing, watching God bring interesting people into my life and then embracing them as the persons he wants in my world. I would urge you to look around at the people God has already given you, and then from there, maybe you can pray for more.
Let me say this. I wholeheartedly reject the idea that you can’t be friends with people on your staff. Now I do know that it requires a certain level of care and maneuvering. But my closest friends are the guys and gals I am working every day with—with this same goal of making disciples at The Village Church. Then, I have pastor friends on the outside of The Village who I am creating space for in my calendar. Some of us, we go hunt. Others of us, we like to hike. Others, we like to just sit around the fire and hang out. I think having a group inside that is tight and vulnerable and there’s a lot of trust is super important, but also kind of popping out and having those places with other pastors to share concerns, to learn from one another, and to encourage one another are both really important.
I think one of the most difficult parts of being in church leadership is the sense of isolation, right? You’re in a context where people are able to be vulnerable with you. They look to you as their shepherd, as their spiritual safe place. But you can’t reciprocate that, no matter how deep your struggles may be in private, you can’t reciprocate that because they are your sheep.
What I would encourage is as a church leader, we have to be intentional about facilitating relationships with other church leaders who understand where we are. And I get it. My husband and I pastor a local church together. I know it can feel incredibly risky to share the parts of us that we wouldn’t want anyone else to find out about, but we’re in this together. So, I would encourage you to prayerfully consider: Who are other church leaders that God has placed in your life as “rams in the bush” to walk alongside you and to help you grow in a sense of safety? Pray about it and move forward.
Choosing vulnerability, openness, and intentionality all result in fruitful relationships in leadership. What practices do you have in place to build community in your leadership spaces? For more spiritual encouragement and practical resources, watch sessions from RightNow Conference 2024, Together. Click here to watch.
If we’re honest about church ministry, we probably feel like members of a triage unit in emergency care. While discipling our church isn’t less than caring for people in crisis and correcting pervasive problems, it’s much more.
Jesus’s model of ministry is instructive for how we spend our working hours in ministry. While Jesus taught, counseled, and healed crowds of people, he also called twelve men to be his apostles and journey with him closely (Luke 6:12–16). From that group of leaders, he selected three men—Peter, James, and John—to spend even more time with and pour into at key moments throughout his ministry (Matt 17:1–13; Luke 8:49–56; Matt 26:36–46). Jesus spent time with the crowds, the twelve, and, even more purposefully, the three.
If we think about our churches in terms of who Jesus spent his time with, our congregations are like the crowds, and our leaders—whether staff or volunteers—are like the twelve. But next-level leaders who disciple other leaders in our churches are like the three.
When you think about your weekly hours in ministry, how much time do you spend discipling your “three”?
Many of us have a small group of people who are developing other leaders in our churches. How can we invest in them like Jesus poured into Peter, James, and John?
Before we can be intentional with our “three,” we must identify who they are. We don’t need to have exactly three people in mind, but it needs to be a small enough number for us to realistically spend quality time with them.
Maybe as you’ve been reading, some people have come to mind. Write down their names and consider whether they’re the people God’s calling you to lead like Jesus led Peter, James, and John. If you’re having trouble thinking of people, commit to spending time in various ministries in your church (youth, small groups, etc.) to discern who those high-level leaders might be. Every church is supported by people outside of traditional places of leadership, so explore how God has gifted your church.
It may sound dull or lack spontaneity, but don’t overthink this one. Spending regular, purposeful time with people is the primary means of discipleship. If we think that the impact we hope to have on our leaders can happen exclusively in the margins of our schedule, we'll be disappointed. We must acknowledge that our time as church leaders is limited.
Set reminders or events that prompt you to reach out to your leaders and schedule times to grab lunch, coffee, or spend time together after service—before even putting the actual get-together on the calendar. Get into a rhythm of being present with these leaders and ministering to them regularly.
This may be the most impactful way to pour into your leaders. While it’s important to consistently spend time with them, randomly sending them a text, calling them, or giving them a gift to show your appreciation goes a long way. It makes people feel like you don’t just care about what they do for you—you care about them.
They likely have a lot on their minds when they’re not doing ministry. Remembering that your leaders—even the best of your leaders—can be struggling with personal, spiritual, and emotional concerns can energize you to be proactive in encouraging them, not just reactive.
We all spend time praying for our church, and we probably feel like we need to spend even more time praying for our leaders. We not only need to pray for them as they lead their ministries, but also to pray for them in their various roles as family members, workers, children of God, and more.
Try to go beyond praying for your “three”—pray with them. Invite them to pray with you before service, over the phone, or at the same scheduled time together during the week. Partnering with them in prayer can strengthen your bond as followers of Jesus and demonstrate how vital prayer is to your ministry and theirs.
Whether we know it or not, Jesus’s words in Matthew 18 may be ringing in our ears as we consider this question:
Then Peter approached him and asked, “Lord, how many times must I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? As many as seven times?” “I tell you, not as many as seven,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven” (Matt 18:21–22, CSB).
Problem solved, right? We always have to forgive.
Not quite.
In a similar exchange recorded in Luke, Jesus qualifies the forgiveness his followers must offer to those who repent:
“Be on your guard. If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times in a day, and comes back to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him” (Luke 17:3–4).
Repentance appears to be a necessary condition for forgiveness. So, we’re off the hook for forgiving people if they’re unrepentant?
Again, not quite.
To forgive someone is to “remove the guilt as a result of wrongdoing,”[1] not out of a fear of confrontation or a willingness to sweep an infraction under the rug, but out of compassion. God’s people are to be the kinds of people eager to restore relationships with those who’ve wronged them.
Jesus illustrated this type of forgiveness in Matthew 18 with a parable about a king who forgave his servant’s debt. Just before the king punished the servant for his unpaid debt (vv. 24–25), the servant repented (v. 26), and the master “had compassion, released him, and forgave him the loan” (v. 27). The king and the servant were then on good terms.
However, the servant later demonstrated that his repentance was false. Immediately after being forgiven, the servant found someone who owed him a debt and threw him in prison (vv. 28–30). When the king found out, he threw his servant in jail to be tortured, with Jesus concluding, “So also my heavenly Father will do to you unless every one of you forgives his brother or sister from your heart” (v. 35).
By definition, forgiveness depends on genuine repentance.
Christians are called to emulate God by perpetually offering forgiveness to those who are unrepentant. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). God always has forgiveness on offer—and there is nothing we can do to make him remove that offer.
But for God’s forgiveness to “activate”—to become true about us and remove our guilt—we must repent. We must recognize our sin and turn to God. And while God wants everyone to repent and avoid eternal punishment, he doesn’t indiscriminately apply forgiveness to all people (2 Pet 3:9). People can reject God’s offer of forgiveness.
So, what does this dynamic between forgiveness and repentance mean for us?
While we’re not called to absolve someone of wrongdoing without their repentance, we are called to be the kinds of people who are eager and willing to forgive those who admit their sin against us.
For some of us, specific faces come to mind when we consider trying to forgive unrepentant people. We may not describe ourselves as “willing” and “eager” to forgive them, but that’s what Jesus calls us to do.
To use a familiar saying: How do we stay ready, so we don’t have to get ready? What does it look like to cultivate an attitude that is eager to offer forgiveness?
How often do you pray for the people who’ve wronged you? What thoughts about them most often come to mind? Praying for someone to repent so you can reconcile is difficult. It’s easy to pray for our enemies’ downfall, but genuinely praying for those who have wounded us requires intention and practice.
Set aside some time in your prayers and ask God to soften the hearts of specific people in your life who need to repent. And ask God to soften your heart toward them so you can persevere in praying for their repentance.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how a reconciling conversation with an offender might go. Their repentance seems so far-fetched that you haven’t even considered what you’d say if they came to you and asked for forgiveness.
Imagine what would happen if a text from “that person” popped up on your phone asking for forgiveness. What would you feel in that moment? Why? What would be the wise, Jesus-like response? Consider what your reaction says about you and spend time thinking about what you’ll say and do when forgiveness calls.
While we’re waiting for specific people to ask us for forgiveness, there may be times when those close to us repent, and we’re still hesitant to forgive. Whether it’s an unkind word from a spouse, a friend’s consistent tardiness, or a child’s repeated mistake, people wrong us all the time, and they often ask us to forgive them. How do we typically respond?
Not only should we forgive when asked, but how we feel about forgiving them reveals a lot about our hearts. Like God, we should have “joy” when someone repents (Luke 15:7). As we joyfully forgive those in our lives who ask for it, perhaps our attitude toward those who don’t will change for the better.
So, is it okay not to forgive someone? Ultimately, no one is off the hook for forgiveness. However, Jesus calls us to something more than the cheap forgiveness that helps us “move on” or makes us feel better. He wants us to be genuinely invested in the good of others, even those who’ve hurt us.
If we want to be the kinds of people who are eager to forgive, we need to also be people who eagerly model the repentance we’re waiting for. As we work to repent when we hurt people, perhaps our attitudes will soften toward those who struggle to repent when they hurt us. The entire exchange is covered in grace, for us and for those we’re waiting to forgive.
[1] Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, “40.8 ἀφίημι´ἄφεσις, εωσ´ἀπολύω,” in Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996).
My husband jokes that the only difference between a toddler and a middle schooler is the need for potty training. With the pendulum of emotions and smells that pervade our home raising a ten-, twelve-, and fourteen-year-old, I must agree.
While keeping a toddler alive and happy is its own kind of hard, parenting preteens and teens feels next level. These pre-adults are dealing with hormones and the emotions that come along for the ride. They crave privacy and independence. They may experiment with pushing boundaries. They have the influence of friends invading a space that used to be mom and dad’s domain.
And although our kids still need us, they need us in a different way. How are we to navigate this new phase?
Here are seven practices to help you navigate the preteen and teen years of parenting:
Between school, sports, clubs, and youth events you may find yourself in the car with your teen more than any other place. Although Uber driver and social activities coordinator may not be impressive on your work resume, being present for those drive times with your teen is important.
One way to engage your teen during these car rides is to ask thoughtful questions. Not “How was your day?” but “How was that test?” Pay attention to what your teen values. You may still be met with a grunt but your teen hearing you ask about a specific part of their day that is important to them matters even if all they do is grunt back, “good.”
Toddlers are little chatterboxes. They ask questions and—before we have responded to their first question—they ask a second and third question. As children age, their questions and chatter slow. The worlds they readily welcomed us to be a part of become more exclusive. Friends become their sounding board. Their incessant outer dialogue and curiosity move inward.
That can be hard to take in, but it just means we need to listen and pay attention both to what they are saying and what they are not saying. Has your daughter stopped talking about her best friend? Did your son mention an audition coming up? Are they really excited about a playoff game? Your kids may not be as free with their words these days, but by paying attention, you’ll be ready for those moments when they open up to respond in a way that says, “I’m listening.”
In the classic movie The Princess Bride, Buttercup learns that the farm boy Westley is saying, “I love you,” every time he responds to her requests with “As you wish.” One of the loudest ways we can say to our teens and preteens that we love them is by being present. Save the phone call for later. Delay the email. Sign off social media. Be in the moment with your kids. That time with your kids—even if they are reluctant to engage in conversation—speaks, “I love you” even louder than Westley’s “As you wish.”
When our kids were little, we often put them in time out for poor choices. This five-minute punishment was our way of helping them understand the consequences of their actions. And it usually worked well. It can be tempting to think the same approach will work for our preteens and teens.
In their search for identity, our kids will make mistakes. Time-outs won’t work and neither will verbal reprimands. That doesn’t mean their actions are without consequences. They may have to pass on a meet-up with friends or go without tech until they raise their grades, but they don’t necessarily need a polished lecture.
You probably know what I’m talking about. We oftenfeel tempted to start a “When I was your age” Ted Talk when what our kids really need is quiet to process what they are feeling and maybe a well-worded question that helps them think it through.
Ironically, as our kids age, we may need to put ourselves in timeout—our words at least. There are days when I really ought to have James 1:19 tattooed to my wrist. “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.” This means holding off on the lecture. It means realizing that just like you make mistakes being parents, your kids will make mistakes being kids. It means modeling restraint and understanding.
No parent is perfect. Let that settle in your mind and heart. You will make mistakes—and your teen needs to hear, “I was wrong. Will you forgive me?” This is an important practice at any stage but especially in a time when your teen may be terrified to be wrong or reluctant to confide in you that she messed up. If you can make mistakes and seek reconciliation, it gives her permission to make mistakes and seek forgiveness.
While kids need their parents at every stage of development, they start to lean on outside voices in their teen years. Because your teens will be listening to the voices of peers and other adults, you must also invite voices of faith into the conversation. Small group leaders. The student pastor. Parents of your teen’s friends. Our teens and preteens need to hear the values you uphold from other people. It sends a message to our kids that sounds something like: “These adults I trust are saying the same things my parents have been saying for years. Maybe there is something to this.”
When my kids were little, I found it easy to turn everyday moments into spiritual ones. “Look at the trees! Who made the trees?” I would ask my toddler crew. They would joyfully reply, “God!” “That’s right,” I’d respond. “God made the trees. Let’s pray and thank God for them.” They would fold their tiny hands and thank God for the trees.
As they’ve aged, those conversations don’t come as naturally. Of course, we can still thank God for the trees, but that suggestion is often met with an eye roll. Despite what may feel awkward, don’t give up on making faith a part of your daily interactions with your teens. Encourage your teen to look for God at work in her day. Thank God for the grace he gave your son to study for a hard test. Encourage your daughter to rely on God when best friends become bullies. We can help our kids see that the God who made the trees is present in the spaces that matter to them.
Parenting teens may not be as harrowing as the toddler years, but there’s a huge learning curve for how we interact with and react to our maturing brood. Lean into the strength that only the Lord can provide and love them well. Learn to listen more than you speak. And point them repeatedly to Christ. Even if they roll their eyes. And refuse to use deodorant.
It’s a critical question that gets to the heart of our mission, yet many of us aren’t fully confident in our approach. In a recent webinar for church leaders, president of Trueface and discipleship advisor for RightNow Pastors+ Robby Angle shared a valuable framework for effective discipleship.
Rather than jumping straight into systems and models, Robby challenged us to first examine how we view discipleship. He suggested that our beliefs about spiritual growth impact our ministry approaches more than we realize.
In the webinar, Robby called us to shift from a performance-based mindset to one of grace. Many Christians unconsciously operate from a “know more, do better” philosophy, thinking that spiritual growth comes primarily through increased knowledge and improved behavior. However, Robby proposed a different lens: growth happens through trusting and receiving God’s love, not through striving to earn it.
This perspective shift isn’t just theoretical—it dramatically impacts how we lead and disciple others. Leaders who see themselves as “sinners striving to be saints” will likely create discipleship environments focused on performance and knowledge acquisition. In contrast, leaders grounded in their identity as “saints who occasionally sin” tend to foster authentic, vulnerable discipleship spaces where real transformation can occur.
When it comes to practical implementation, Robby outlined four key areas for building an effective discipleship strategy:
1. Developing Leaders: According to Robby, the health and maturity of small group leaders accounts for about 60% of a group’s effectiveness at discipleship. He said 25% of the group’s success comes from following best practices, and the other 15% comes from influences beyond the leader’s control, like group chemistry or life circumstances. Since so much of a group’s health depends on the health of the leader, Robby suggested spending intentional time developing leaders.
2. Supporting Leaders: Both initial onboarding and ongoing support are crucial for forming leaders who can disciple others in the ministry. Robby said the onboarding process is important because leadership habits are easier to form early than to change later. In the webinar Robby shared “5 Core Components that Separate Great Leaders from Ineffective Ones.” Those components can be used as a rubric to guide leaders and ensure their effectiveness.
3. Forming Groups: Robby encouraged church leaders to think about group formation like a “customer journey.” But instead of mapping a buyer’s steps to purchase a product, he said to list out all the steps someone must take to join a group at your church. The best way to improve this process is simple: ask people who recently joined groups about their experience. Use their feedback to make it easier for others to get connected.
4. Equipping Groups: Robby encouraged churches to be clear about the small groups model they choose (closed vs. open groups, study format, meeting frequency, etc.), but to focus more on the quality of the small group leaders than the actual group format itself. In Robby’s experience, he’s witnessed both excellent and poor outcomes from virtually every small group model. While many churches spend the majority of their time focused on group models and strategies, Robby suggested that this might be misplaced energy. Instead, turn your attention to your leaders by giving them all they need to lead well.
For those feeling overwhelmed by the scope of building or improving a discipleship strategy, Robby offered encouraging advice: don’t try to do everything at once. Instead, prayerfully discern the one next step God is inviting you to take in your ministry context.
Creating a thriving discipleship culture is patient work that unfolds over years, not months. But as Robby reminded us, it’s worth the investment because the impact is eternal. It’s about seeing people fall more deeply in love with Jesus and experience genuine transformation.
Want to dive deeper into these concepts? Watch the full webinar for detailed examples, additional resource recommendations, and an exclusive Q&A with Robby. Click here to access the webinar recording.
Much of the webinar’s content was based on Robby Angle’s Discipleship Framework course, a comprehensive training experience designed to help your team think about, build, and implement a discipleship strategy tailored to your church’s unique needs. Click here to learn more about Discipleship Framework.
Disclaimer: This blog was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence. It may contain inaccuracies and should not be relied upon as a substitute for professional advice. If you find content that is inaccurate or otherwise needs to be reviewed, please email webinars@rightnowmedia.org.
The following is an excerpt from www.Exponential.org, originally written by Ben Connelly on August 14, 2024.
As we consider a shift “from reaching Christians to making disciples,” church leaders and followers of Jesus can miss a vital step: knowing how the Gospel sounds like truly good news to people! Do we live as if the Gospel is truly good news to us? Do we talk about Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and reign as if He makes an actual difference—not just in our theology but in our lives, and in the lives of those around us?
At the end of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he asks his friends in Colossae to pray for him specifically—and this is informative for us as we pursue God’s mission—“that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison—that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak.” Leading by example, Paul, arguably the most “successful” missionary in history, reminds us that God’s mission was completely dependent on God. Then he exhorts his friends, “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person” (Colossians 4:2–6).
Salt makes things tasteful. Peter gives a similar warning as he exhorts followers of Jesus to share the Gospel. After encouraging readers to “always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” he encourages this posture: “yet do it with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15). Grace, gentleness, well-seasoned and respectful. If we asked many of our not-yet-believing neighbors and friends, I’d imagine those are not the words they’d typically use to describe their experience with Christians’ presentation of the Gospel.
In my work with The Equipping Group, we often help pastors see that Christians are more typically viewed as arrogant, uncaring, heady, and presumptuous. These postures miss God’s heart, and miss opportunities to walk in wisdom, even as we speak the good news! There’s a way to display the heart of the Gospel, even as we proclaim the content of the Gospel.
Our posture as we share the Gospel—from our stages and classrooms, and even more so in our streets and living rooms—is to consider how our audience (whether one or 1000) is hearing it, and to ask ourselves if it’s palatable to them. How can we fulfill this first principle of Gospel proclamation? The second principle is the key.
Paul’s second exhortation to his readers is to “know how you ought to answer each person.” Paul doesn’t encourage a one-size-fits-all approach to sharing the Gospel. Instead, there are literally dozens of ways to share the Gospel, and that “each person” might need to hear it in a unique way, to sound real to them. For me, the Gospel was “good” in that it displayed Jesus as satisfying in my dissatisfied life.. But if I now only know how to proclaim the Gospel through the lens of satisfaction, it might be wasted on you if dissatisfaction isn’t your struggle. Instead, as I often tell our church family, we must learn to speak the one objective Gospel, into hundreds of subjective situations around us.
For example, I used to think God redeemed me at age eight. Now I think I was actually twenty—and ashamedly, two years into student ministry!—when the good news of Jesus became real to me. The realization hit me like a ton of bricks: “If Jesus is real, He should matter to everything!” It sounds embarrassingly simple now, but seemed revolutionary at the time. What truth made the Gospel become real to me? For years I had sought satisfaction in leadership roles, music, “success,” women, and ironically, doing the right thing in the eyes of others. All that had left me empty and dissatisfied. When I was twenty, the truth I’d even taught others finally sunk into my own thick, self-gratifying skull: God. Alone. Satisfies. That truth changed everything.
Every time we see a diamond commercial, the stone sits on a black background, rotating. Every slight turn picks up the light in a unique way, reflecting it in more beauty. It’s one diamond, but each angle shows its sparkle differently. In this way, Jesus is like a diamond. There is one Gospel, but there are many angles from which people through history find the Gospel to be truly good news.
I explore some ways the Gospel is good news in Reading the Bible, Missing the Gospel. But there are many, many more! Even in Paul’s elder qualifications, he says leaders must be well-thought-of enough to earn an audience; we must have strong relationships and have “respectable” lives. Based on Colossians 4, we must learn peoples’ stories, enter into their brokenness, and know their values, needs, and idols. In this way, we can speak the good news in a way that “answers each person.” But isn’t that difficult? Yes. Doesn’t it take time, effort, and sacrifice? You bet. Is there a high potential I might fail, misrepresent God, or speak foolishly at times? Absolutely.
But on one hand, grace exists to us, because “salvation is [only!] of the Lord”—it’s the Father who opens doors; it’s the Spirit who gives us words. On the other hand, it’s worth it. Because everyone on earth—both inside and outside our ministries—proclaims the glory of something. And there is only One Thing worth proclaiming, that won’t let them down. Jesus alone is, among a hundred thousand other things, Satisfaction to the dissatisfied, Joy to the joyless, Hope to the hopeless, Forgiveness to the indebted, Freedom to the enslaved, Salvation to those facing judgment, and the Answer to every problem. And hear me, minister: that same Gospel that can sound like good news to every facet of peoples’ lives, is also truly good news to every facet of your life too!
There is one objective Gospel, and it applies to every subjective situation. As we consider our disciple-making processes and strategies, let’s also prioritize living lives that reflect that truth. And let’s slow down enough to know how to best proclaim it in a way that speaks to individual souls, answers unique questions, and “answers each person.” Let’s accept God’s invitation to do this, from our pulpits and on our couches. Let’s share the good news with those in our ministries, those who would never come near them, and in our own hearts as well!
How are you hoping to, or continuing to, cultivate and nurture a healthy framework and practice of discipleship within your church? If you need a resource to get started, check out Essentials of Faith—a multi-series discipleship program designed to help your church develop mature followers of Jesus. Click here to learn more about Essentials of Faith.
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