Before we talk leadership, here’s a quote from the Summer 2009 Leadership Journal regarding interdependence, the topic of my last blog:
“We truly want to have an impact in our community, but too often we don’t achieve anything significant because we insist on doing everything ourselves. We’re so caught up with our individual goals, agendas and projects that we forget how desperately we need each other. Our impact is weakened because, like the world around us, Christians have succumbed to individualism.”
Tullian Tchividjian, pastor, Coral Ridge Presbyterian,
Ft. Lauderdale, FL (Leadership Journal, p. 98)
Well, interdependence is indeed critical for healthy churches . . . it is the Body of Christ at work, after all. And a constant, consistent and effective development of leadership would fall into that critical category as well.
Visits with vulnerable churches almost always reveal missing generations within the congregation and comparable missing generations of leadership. Someone in a vulnerable church will often say it this way: “we’re down to two elders, and we have no prospects in the wings.” When leadership gets that thin, vulnerability is almost always a characteristic of the church’s overall status.
This characteristic doesn’t grow over night. It usually grows in churches that once had growing ministries and developing leaders. However, upon arriving at a reasonable level of success, those leaders who had been moving the mission forward stopped doing the things that made them effective. They began to simply ride those key elements, including leadership, which had been put in place during the growing period. When that “ride” begins, ineffectiveness and its partner decline are not too far away.
Too many seasons of the ride will create huge leadership and generational gaps in a church. If existing long enough, those gaps will be nearly impossible to close.
The principle? Good church leadership never stops doing, in principle, the things that made their church and its mission successful, and one of those keys is having generations of leadership always in development. | 
