Church leadership consultant Mac Lake shares how he learned the value of leadership development.
My first conversion was when I was 9 years old. That was my conversion from lost to found. That is my salvation story.
My second conversion came when I was 27 years old. I was a great follower of Christ, but I didn’t know how to lead. I was in seminary, and a pastor came alongside me and began to disciple me as a leader.
For the first time in my life I began to see, “Oh, I’m not just supposed to lead myself—God wants me to learn how to lead others.” And so, he helped me make that second conversion, from doer to leader.
Then I started in ministry, and at age 34, I was leading all kinds of teams. And it almost killed me. I had a midnight conversion where I went from leader to developer.
God whispered into my soul, “You know, if you want to have a long-term impact and really want to maintain health as a leader, you need to begin to develop leaders.” So, I began to focus all my efforts on discipling leaders so they could lead the teams and I wasn’t doing all the leading.
As I’m doing the leadership pipeline with churches, pastors are coming to me and saying, “Oh my goodness, my staff has never had this second conversion. My staff has never had this third conversion. I’ve been asking them to develop leaders when they’ve never had a leadership development conversion.”
That’s like asking a lost person to lead somebody to Jesus.
MAC LAKE (@MacLake) is visionary architect for the Multiply Group and leadership pipeline navigator for Auxano.
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