Movement Leading

Movement leading is the shift from relying on highly qualified, professionalized church leaders to releasing ordinary, willing people to catalyze multi-generational disciple-making where they live, learn, work, and play.

I want to tell you about Margaret. Margaret lives in northern Kenya. She cannot read or write. She has no formal education, no seminary training, and absolutely no credentials that Western Christianity would recognize as qualifying her for ministry. She isn't an extrovert, nor is she a dynamic communicator. Yet, she is responsible for over four hundred local churches. Not because she built them or sits atop a corporate org chart, but because she practiced a set of simple, repeatable habits with others, who then did the same with others, down through the generations. If we are honest, our current Western church structures would have benched Margaret. We would have told her she needed more classes, more training, and more credentials before we ever let her lead.

As someone who holds a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, I have the credentials. But I also have the spent matches to show for using them. I co-founded a church on the seeker-sensitive model and pastored it for twenty-five years, only to come to a crisis I am willing to say out loud: the disciples we were making were not making disciples. We had built a system that was entirely expert-dependent. And that is precisely why we are losing ground . Our hierarchical, building-centric ministry models keep the gospel heavy and unable to move freely. By insisting on professionalized leaders to run our programs, we have bottlenecked the Great Commission. If our disciple-making strategies require a seminary degree to execute, they will stop with the person who has the degree.

In their book *Metaphors We Live By*, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphors aren't just decorative language; they are the cognitive architecture of how we make meaning. The metaphors we have inherited for church leadership are corporate, hierarchical, and heavy. But we see a different way in the Scriptures. In Acts 19, we find Paul in the Hall of Tyrannus. After two years of discussions, the text tells us that the entire province of Asia Minor—some fifteen million people—heard the word of the Lord. Paul didn’t personally visit every town. Instead, simple, repeatable disciple-making strategies allowed ordinary people to carry the good news through their existing relational networks . They found "persons of peace" in their communities and let the gospel run free. This is what becomes possible when we stop trying to build a leadership caste and instead focus on catalyzing a movement.

We have been trained to look for *leaders*—credentialed, charismatic professionals who can run programs—but we must learn to look for *leading*—the simple, repeatable activity of ordinary people helping others obey Jesus.

When we shift our focus from nouns to verbs, from positions to activities, we unlock the potential of every willing believer. Let’s look at how we can transition from managing programs to releasing the willing.

Sources drawn from: *Spent Matches* and *Habits of Replicating Disciples*