Leadership and Legacy

Every generation is faced with passing the baton of faith to the next.  It is not a passive passage but rather an intentional mission to do so.

When I worked as a church-planting missionary in Benin, West Africa, we were very intentional about passing the baton of leadership.  We never sought to pastor churches; rather we sought to raise up pastors.  We did this by:

1. Offering real experience - just like with our kids, the best teacher is actually doing something first-hand; classrooms instruct and guide us but internships give us experience doing it.  On the mission field, we rarely worked alone.  If I was going out to teach in a village, I was doing so alongside up-n-coming leaders.  And they ended up doing alot of the teaching.
2. Offering a firm foundation - just as we spent hours in the field, we also spent hours huddled together in training.  Not so much rote memorization, but with in-depth study of God's Word and best practices in evangelism and church development.  Without this understanding, these up-and-coming leaders would be void of any basis for what we were doing together.  After we were gone, they wouldn't know why they should continue.
3. Offering a gut-check on motivation - a generation of leaders (spiritual pastoral leaders or even your children) who simply follow your lead to please you and make you happy will fail to teach true faith to their descendants.  They will pass on an adulterated perversion of faith that is centered around themselves.  Ensure your followers are there for the right reason:  test them to make sure they are not their for self-gain or self-preservation.  Give them hard challenges to make sure they stay the course; this exposes bad motivation.

In Judges 2.10, we read "another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for them."  Sad.  Not only did they not know of God, they didn't even have one single testimony to celebrate about what God had done.  In the previous historical narrative, Joshua leads the people God and God institutes the 12 stones memorial (see Joshua 4).  When such an incredible memorial is in place, how does the next generation miss it?

Leave a legacy.  Lead them to carry it on.

-Randy