Good to Grow: effective leadership

One of the topics that I look at in the book Good to Grow is effective leadership – what is it and what does it mean to lead the church well? The following quotes from the book highlight this important topic:

‘To build mission-focused communities requires sustained, focused leadership in the local church – we must continue to take a close look at ourselves to ensure that we are practising what we preach. I find that local churches have a tendency to drift towards a pastoral mode, taking their agenda from believers rather than the lost.’


‘I am continually amazed at how quickly church leaders, many of whom are pastors or teachers, become primarily focused on looking after the existing group of people. If you want to grow a church, the future is in the new people – your task is to get all the existing committed people to see this as their job too.’


‘One of the greatest leadership challenges is to predict the future, and the best way to predict the future is to look at past trends. A church that hasn’t grown in the last five years is unlikely to double in size in the next five without major re-engineering or other significant change. At King’s we have always planned for and prayed for an annual increase of 10 per cent – net. As I mentioned previously, a church will double its size in seven years if you achieve this goal.’