Kingdom Focused Solutions Podcast (3)

How to lead difficult leaders to become healthy leaders

Welcome to Kingdom Focused Solutions Podcast, I am your host Chris Priest.

Here we discuss biblical healthy church leadership and how to become healthy.

In today’s episode we are discussing how to lead difficult leaders to become healthy leaders.

The difficult leaders could be another pastor, it could be a deacon, a trustee, a Sunday school teacher, or it could be just an influential person in the church.

As leaders we have all been faced with a person that bucks or hinders what we are trying to lead.

As a pastor of 10 plus years and three different churches, I have faced difficult people.

Some of those were just members of the church, some were other leaders, and some were ones that not only had great influence over the whole congregation but were in a top leadership position.

I was discussing this with another pastor the other day, and he said, when the church calls the pastor, they are calling the shepherd, the overseer of the church and if the church believes that the pastor is the man God has sent, then the church needs to trust that God is leading the pastor and if the pastor is not following God’s leading that God will deal with him.

This is not to mean that the pastor does not meet with the deacons, the trustees, and the church as a whole and listen to their ideas, and their opinions, but the church must trust that God is leading the pastor.

As the pastor, the shepherd, the overseer, it is their responsibility to seek God’s will and direction for the church.

With that just as a shepherd to sheep will not lead their sheep to a field that has harmful weeds in it, or to water that is poisoned.

The shepherd has the best intentions for the sheep, as the better the sheep do, the better for the shepherd.

This is the same with a godly pastor/shepherd, they will not do anything that would cause harm to the church.

One might say well the deacon will not lead in the wrong direction, and we would hope that is the truth.

What can happen though, is the leader is following God, but at some point they get so caught up in their position, and life that they get side tracked from God’s leading.

Just as sometimes sheep will stray off from the herd, some times we as Christians will get sidetracked, get strayed off from God’s leading.

When this happens just as the shepherd goes after the sheep, as the shepherd of the church, the pastor must work with that leader or member to get them back on the right path.

Jesus speaks on this in a parable in Luke 15:4

Luke 15:4 NASB95

4 “What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it?

When the pastor sees a member straying, it is his job as the shepherd to go and work with that person to get them back into the fold, back on the right path.

Unhealthy characteristics.

As a leader we need to know what to look for as unhealthy characteristics, the quicker we recognize unhealthy characteristics the easier it will be to help that person get back on track.

If we recognize unhealthy characteristics and do not address them but ignore them then that leader will continue to grow unhealthy to the point that it causes major problems with in the church.

Some of those unhealthy characteristics are pride, unaccountability, asking others to do things that they are not willing to do themselves, self-focused, not accepting critique, not willing to grow, and unwillingness to change.

Now this is not an exhaustive list of unhealthy characteristics, but it gives us a starting point.

Some of these we could group together, such as, pride and self-focused, unaccountability and not accepting critique, and not willing to grow and unwillingness to change.

Pride and self-focused, these unhealthy characteristics can come out in different ways, it could be that the person believes that they are always right, that their opinion is the only one that matters, and that they are the only one that can do certain tasks, and jobs.

Unaccountability and not accepting critique can be seen in different ways, such as, a person causing a problem but not taking responsibility for it, this could be also where two people have a disagreement, and one apologizes and the other puts it off on the first, it can be when a person is confronted with a situation and they try to make it out as someone else’s problem, or that they are not the problem at all.

A leader should always be striving to grow in their position, in their leadership, and as a person, as a Christian leader we should always be striving to grow spiritually also.

When a person believes that they have no room for growth in their life, in any area they have become an unhealthy leader.

If a leader ask a person to do a task that they are not personally willing to do, and the reason is not healthy or mobility related, they do not want to do it because they feel that the task is below them, they have become unhealthy.