2. Gospel
I had poured my life into this lady. She and her family had occupied more of my pastoral time and energies than any other family in our church. I must confess that when I would see her approach at the end of a service, or when my wife, Luella, would tell me that she was on the phone, I would say to myself, “What now?” I struggled with the chaos that was her life and the subtle and not so subtle demands she made, but I was determined that I would pastor her through her trouble.
I thought I had been patient and understanding, I thought I had been caring and faithful, but she had become one of my biggest detractors. Not only was she highly critical of me; she freely voiced her criticism to others. It hurt my feelings. It made me mad. There were times when I wondered if being a pastor was what I wanted to do. I fought against my anger and resentment, but there were times and days when I lost the battle, and my focus was interrupted by replaying in my mind what I would like to say to this woman.
If I had been left to myself, I would have become either hardened and cynical or defeated and looking for a way out. But I was not alone. I was surrounded by an intimate, loving, encouraging, protective gospel community. I was granted the right to be absolutely honest about what I was going through, and I knew that I would be greeted with grace. My blindness was greeted by a community that sought to give me sight, free of condemnation. The community around me was patient and understanding. Fellow leaders took me to breakfast or lunch and lovingly preached the gospel to me. Arms of mercy were wrapped around me and would not let me go. I didn’t see it then, but I do now: this community protected me from me in a way that was loving, kind, honest, and encouraging. With all the endless demands of ministry leadership, these leaders took time with me without making me feel like an interruption. This may be an overstatement, but if it is, it’s not by much: without the ministry of that leadership community, I might not be in ministry today.
I am sure that my experience resonates with many of you. If you have served long in local church leadership, you have collected your own stories. You’ve been blindsided by criticism. People you’ve invested in have turned their backs on you. You’ve had your qualifications questioned. You’ve watched dear friends leave your church. You’ve been through seasons of feeling alone and misunderstood. There have been seasons when you fantasized about doing something else or at least doing what you do somewhere else. There have been times when you’ve been afraid to confess how hurt and angry you actually are. You’ve hungered for encouragement. You’ve longed for someone to come alongside you to help you deal with your struggle without leaving you feeling judged. You haven’t always been a happy, contented leader. You too have stories to tell.
Church Leadership Is Hard
If you have given yourself to building people, you have accepted the call to suffer for the sake of the gospel. Leadership in the church is not comfortable and predictable. It’s not a safe place to look for your identity and inner security. Not only is the church filled with unfinished people with sin still resident inside them in the midst of ongoing spiritual war; your leadership community is filled with the same. No one in your leadership community is free of sin. No one is fully spiritually mature in every way. Everyone in your leadership community needs everything the church is intended to provide. So your leadership is internally and externally messy. This is God’s choice. He knows your church or ministry is situated in a world that is terribly broken by sin. He knows that everyone to whom you minister is a person in process. He knows that this will make what you have been called to do difficult. But it has to be said that the hardship, messiness, and unpredictability of ministry is his workroom of grace.
Today there will be pastors and leaders who lose their heart and their way in the middle of the hardships of ministry, and many of them will lose their way because they are not warned, encouraged, confronted, supported, and loved by a group of leaders who function as a community of grace. You see, difficult things in ministry are meant by God to be redemptive things. What often beats us down is meant by the Savior to be a tool to build us up. What would make us want to quit is meant by him to strengthen us for the battles to come. Institutional achievement is not the Redeemer’s ultimate goal but a means to a greater, more glorious goal: the rescue and transformation of his people. So your core leadership community must be a pastoral community where leaders are carefully and intentionally pastored and where strategies to pastor the pastors are held in as high a regard as missional strategies.
Healthy ministry communities, which leave a legacy of long-term gospel productivity, have longevity and fruit because they are, at their core, communities of grace. Rather than achievement forming how the leadership community forms itself and operates, the gospel does. It’s the gospel that tells us who leaders are, what leaders need, how leaders should relate to one another, how the leadership community should function, what its values should be, how it will deal with disappointment and failure, and how it will identify and nurture future leaders. We should look not first at the corporate world for our formative values and ways of operating, but to the right-here, right-now truths, identities, and wisdom principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ. There should be no more powerful influence on leadership formation, mission, community, and methodology than the gospel of God’s grace. The gospel is profoundly more than the grace of past rescue and future hope. It is both of these and much more. The gospel provides a lens for us to look at and understand everything that we deal with in church and ministry leadership while also providing guidance as to how we should do everything we are called to as leaders in Christ’s church. If we are called to gospel mission, we must, as leaders, be a gospel-drenched, gospel-functioning community. Let me suggest in some detail what that looks like.
A Leadership Community Formed by the Gospel
A Gospel Community Is Nurturing
No leader, no matter how successful or prominent, is free from the need to be nurtured. I can’t think of a passage that better captures why leaders need nurture, what needs to be nurtured in us, and how that nurture takes place than Hebrews 10:19–25. Let me say first that building and nurturing a spiritually healthy leadership community is like planting a garden. For a plant to flourish, it must be planted in nutrient soil; it must be watered regularly and weeded constantly, or it will not have what it needs to grow, bloom, and produce fruit. So it is with every church or ministry leader. Every leader needs to have his heart, life, and ministry firmly planted in the right-now nutrients of the gospel of Jesus Christ, so that he gets his identity, meaning and purpose, inner peace, and sense of calling from the gospel. Even though he is a leader, just like the garden plant that looks healthy but continues to need to be watered, so every leader, no matter how influential and spiritually mature, needs ongoing spiritual care from the community of leaders that surround him. And every leader still has weeds in his life that need to be pulled out. That weeding work, for all of us, is a community project. Now, to this wonderfully helpful passage:
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Heb. 10:19–25)
With this passage, it’s helpful to start with the last chapter first. What does a spiritually healthy and productive leadership community look like? First, it is populated by people who, no matter what they are facing, have an unwavering confidence in the presence, power, and promises of the one who sent them. So they do their work with confidence and courage, not because of the pride of success or confidence in their gifts, but because their work is ignited, animated, and shaped by the truths that they confess.
Because ministry is spiritual war, they work to do anything they can to stir up in one another a life of vertical and horizontal love and a commitment to expend their time, energy, and resources to do the good work that God has called them to. So this means their gatherings are not just for the purpose of financial, missional, and strategic planning but to nurture gospel confidence and commitment in one another.
Now for the top of the passage. At the center of the nurturing work of a spiritually healthy and productive leadership community is not a plan, but a person, Jesus. He is our confidence, our hope, our direction, our guide, our protector, and the ultimate nurturer of those he has called to lead his church. He did what we could never do for ourselves: open up access to intimate communion with God.
Now, what I am about to say here is very important. As leaders, we don’t just work to develop cooperation with and confidence in one another along with functional unity, but we work to draw one another ever nearer to the Savior. We are doing more as a leadership community than nurturing healthy ministry relationships that result in missional cooperation and productivity; we are also nurturing in one another a deeper devotion to the Savior. The most powerful protection from the dangers that every leader faces is not his relationship to his fellow leaders but a heart that is ruled by deeply rooted love for Jesus.
It is love for Jesus that has the power to crush leader pride. It is love for Jesus that ignites and protects our love for one another. It is love for Jesus that turns ministry achievement from a cause for self-glory into a reason to worship. It is love for Jesus that protects a leader from both fear of man and fear of failure. It is this love that we must never stop nurturing in one another, and if we are going to do that, it has to have prominence and priority in the choices we make in our life and work together. Would your leaders say that yours is a community that has nurtured their growth in grace and therefore their gospel productivity?
We need to take notice in the letter James writes to the dispersed church, that after he gives a lengthy dose of gritty street-level, right-here, right-now practical Christianity, his crescendo comments include this:
The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. (James 5:15–16)
Does the thought of leaders regularly confessing their faults to one another, so that they may receive the rescue of the powerful prayers of their fellow leaders, sound radical or impractical to you? It is this kind of rescuing and protective candor that only the gospel of Jesus Christ makes possible. A church or ministry leadership community simply cannot do its work if leaders are silenced because they are afraid of what others will think of them. It cannot do its work if leaders are hiding sin that robs them of the singleness of heart that keeps them focused on both their ongoing need and the sacrificial work to which they’ve been called. Fear of looking weak and needy will rob us of the help we need for spiritual health.
Here is the reality that should sober every one of us: there is sin in every church and ministry leadership community, because sin still resides in the heart of every leader. So either we are denying our sin to ourselves and hiding it from others, or we are admitting its presence to ourselves and confessing it to others. But if the acceptance and respect of fellow leaders or of the most powerful leader in the room becomes more important to us than honesty within ourselves, before God, and in relation to one another, we give room for sin to germinate, grow, and take control. Communities where leaders fall are often communities in which humble confession is not only not encouraged; it is silenced by a whole range of unspoken fears.
I need to work in a leadership community that is characterized by forgiveness and fervent prayer so that I can confess the weariness, wandering, and unfaithfulness of my heart to those who will take me to where help can be found. There are a whole host of leadership idolatries (position, power, success, acclaim, reward, etc.) for which there needs to be regular confession and intercession.
If we are afraid to confess sin before what should be the most spiritually mature community in the church, we are sadly living in a state of functional gospel amnesia, no matter how robust our theological grasp of the gospel is. The gospel of God’s grace is a welcome to personal and community candor, because we know that nothing can be known, revealed, exposed, or confessed about us that hasn’t already been covered by the life, sacrifice, and victory of Jesus. There is no dark thing that lives beyond the reach of God’s grace. Hiding sin is burdensome. Manufacturing nonanswers to probing questions gets exhausting. Acting as if you’re okay when you’re not okay will sap you of your vitality.
One of the sure signs of a spiritually healthy leadership community is the degree to which heartfelt, humble, honest confession is not only possible but a regular ingredient of the life and work of that community. Do the members of your community fear being honest about their sin, weaknesses, and failures, and, if so, what changes do you need to make?
The great apostle Paul, a man with an unbridled courage of faith and a passionate heart for gospel mission, was also an example of leader humility.
Perhaps one of the most dangerous, yet seductive, temptations to pride in leaders is the desire to appear to fellow leaders and those they lead as being more righteous than they actually are. A devastating spiritual transaction can take place in the heart of a leader, often subconsciously. Living and ministering for the glory of God increasingly gets replaced by self-glory. Who they project themselves to be becomes more formative in ministry than who they actually are before God. Self-aggrandizement, like the drip, drip of water that reshapes a rock, begins to reshape their hearts. Humility gets replaced by pride in position, acclaim, and success. The esteem and applause of others becomes too valuable. Pride causes boasting to replace confession, and shows of strength replace requests for help. The long-term health and gospel productivity of a church or ministry leadership community are directly related to the humility of the members of that community.
Humility is a fruit of the rule of the gospel in your life. The gospel will humble you because it requires you to confess that the greatest dangers in your life live inside you and not outside you. The gospel calls you to run to God for rescue because your greatest problem is you. The gospel tells you that no matter how long you have known the Lord or no matter how successful you have been in his work, you need his grace right now as much as you did the first moment you believed. The gospel doesn’t work to make you independent and self-reliant, but willingly dependent on God and the community of grace he has placed around you.
I love the example of gospel humility in the life of the apostle Paul. He clearly would not have uttered the following words if he’d been motivated by protecting his reputation and prominence in the eyes of others:
We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many. (2 Cor. 1:8–11)
Consider that these are the words of a great man of faith, with his gifts and theological understanding, a man numbered among the apostles. You would think that he had a heart so filled with the courage of the gospel and confidence in God that he never experienced a moment of doubt or panic. But hear his humble words. Not only is he confessing to fear and despair but to the temptation to be self-reliant. He is confessing the need for God to show him again that his hope cannot be in himself but in God and, further, that he is still in need of the help of the prayer of others. In this way, Paul is not a painting we look at and wish we could be like; rather, he is a window to the awesome rescuing grace of the Redeemer. Leader pride produces personality cults, while leader humility stimulates worship of God.
A gospel-rooted leadership community is marked by humility, and that humility engenders a confidence in people that runs deeper than a trust in leaders. It engenders in people a confidence in the presence and grace of the Redeemer and a desire to live in a way that gives all glory to him. Is your leadership community known for its humility?
As a leader in ministry I am confronted and encouraged by James’s call to patience in ministry:
Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing at the door. As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful. (James 5:7–11)
It is to my grief that I have to confess that I am not a naturally patient man. I am naturally project- and goal-oriented. It’s hard for me to wait, and I am easily irritated as I wait. It’s easy to think negatively about the people, places, and circumstances that have made me wait. The fact that, at this point in my ministry life, I am more willing to wait is itself an argument for the existence and power of God’s transforming grace.
It is vital for every leader to recognize that the call to patience is a significant and inescapable aspect of the call to ministry. Impatience in a leadership community will again and again put that community in the way of, rather than being part of, what God is doing in their lives and in the lives of those they have been called to lead. As leaders, we are called to wait because we live in a fallen world where things just don’t function in the way God intended. The brokenness of the world surely interrupts the best of our plans. We are called to wait because we lead imperfect people who don’t always listen well, think well, choose well, or follow well. We are required to be patient because we are not sovereign.
In order to achieve our ministry goals, many things over which we have no control need to fall into place. To add to this, we do not control when the winds of the Spirit work conviction, commitment, unity, and cooperation in the hearts of the people we are leading into service. And we are called to wait because waiting is one of God’s most regular tools of maturing grace. From the perspective of the gospel, waiting is never just about getting what you’ve been waiting for but, more importantly, about the good changes in you that God produces through the wait. Willingness to wait with patient hearts is a clear sign that your leadership community has been and is being shaped by the gospel.
Pride of accomplishment, identity of success, and the idolatry of power are the soil in which impatience grows, and that impatience always results in a harvest of bad fruit, both in leaders and in those they lead. Impatience tempts them to try to control things they have no power to control, to create change they cannot create, and to move what they have no ability to move. Nothing good results when a leader assigns power to himself that he doesn’t have. Leaders who are unwilling to wait value planning, schedule, and goals more than people. This causes them to think of and treat people as obstacles in the way of their leadership rather than as those who are to be served by it. So they don’t steward people’s gifts well, giving time and room for expression, and they don’t give time for God to work insight and willingness into people’s hearts. All this creates a ministry culture of fear, where people feel more constrained and driven than commissioned and shepherded. People tend to fear getting in the way of this fast-moving ministry train more than they fear being left behind by it.
But when the gospel is nurtured in the hearts of leaders, they lead with a robust rest in God’s sovereignty; his wisdom; his convicting, convincing, and transforming grace; his love for his own church; his faithfulness to his promises; his willingness to intervene; and his timing, which is always right. How has impatience interfered with the ministry work God has called your leadership community to do?
A Gospel Community Is Forgiving
I can think of a no more important passage for a leadership than the gospel-lifestyle call of Paul in Ephesians 4:29–32. Your ministry community is populated by people who still struggle with sin and are still growing in grace, so sin, weakness, and failure will challenge your unity and interfere with your work. In ministry leadership, it is impossible not to be dealing with sin and failure in some way. Somehow, someway, every leader you work with will disappoint you. There have been times when my words and actions have disappointed my ministry team. When this happens to you, you will deal with the sin, weakness, and failure of others either with forgiveness and restorative wisdom or with subtle denial, quiet bitterness, active or slow-burn anger, or the disloyalty of slander. The various pathways for dealing with failure are practically laid out for us in Ephesians 4:
Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. . . . Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. (Eph. 4:25–27, 29–32)
It needs to be said that forgiveness is not to be confused with permissiveness, where you turn your head away from wrong and let it slide. When a leader responds that way, he doesn’t do so because he loves the one who wronged him but because he loves himself and doesn’t want to go through the hassle of tense and awkward moments that might result if he lovingly speaks truth into that wrong.
Paul begins this wonderful call to forgiveness with a call to speak the truth, and he later describes what that truth telling should look like. It is shaped by a desire to build up in a way that is appropriate to the moment by seeking to root the offending leader once again in the glory and grace that is his or hers as a child of God. Any other way of speaking in a time of failure is unwholesome in God’s eyes, unhelpful to the offending leader, and disruptive to the unity of that leadership community.
This means we need to cry out to God for help with our anger, with our tendency to hold onto an offense too long, giving bitterness room to grow and our tendency to give in to the temptation to speak unlovingly to others in the leadership community about the offending person. I will admit, and would encourage you to as well, that tenderheartedness is not natural for me, that I need a deeper commitment to kindness and a willingness to be quicker to forgive.
But I have learned that the more I am bathing my heart in the wonder of God’s forgiveness of me, the more willing I am to forgive others. Here’s what every leader needs to face. If we are going to live and minister together in spiritually healthy leadership communities, we need to fervently pray that God will rescue us from us, rescue us from the pride that causes us to be more focused on the failure of others than our own, rescue us from our tendency to speak in unwholesome ways when we are disappointed, rescue us from the temptation to replay a failure over and over again in our minds, and rescue us from responding too quickly with the judgment of anger so that we can respond with tender, forgiving grace.
As I look back now at over forty years of ministry leadership, I do so with delight at how God has grown me and used me but also with twinges of grief. I know I have been forgiven, but there are moments and conversations I wish I could remove from people’s minds and ears. Throughout the years, my harvest has not always been a good gospel harvest, but often the fruit of my failure to extend to fellow leaders the very same grace that has been lavished on me.
I am writing this because I am sure I am not alone. There are too many angry leaders in the church of Jesus Christ. There is too much gossip in our leadership ranks. Too many of us are quicker to judge than we are to forgive. Along the way in ministry, too many of us have lost our tender hearts. Too many of us are quick to separate from people who have failed us in some way. Too many of us find it difficult to give room for God to grow a young, immature leader. Too many of us are quick to forgive in ourselves what we struggle to forgive in others. Forgiveness serves, anger dominates and controls; it’s not hard to discern which of these is the way of the gospel.
Our leadership communities really do need an outpouring of God’s forgiving, rescuing, transforming, and delivering grace. All we need to do is scan Twitter to see how quickly we judge one another harshly and speak of one another unkindly. These responses never defend the gospel but rather corrupt its message and obstruct its fruitfulness. But I am not discouraged, because I believe in the rescuing and restoring power of God’s grace. I have seen its fruit in my own heart and in the hearts of others. May we pray for fresh waves of that grace across our leadership communities! Is forgiveness producing the good fruit of personal growth and relational unity in your leadership community?
A Gospel Community Is Encouraging
I am so personally moved by Paul’s desire to encourage and so grieved that it is not more of a formative value in our church and ministry leadership communities:
We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and increasing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, just as you learned it from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.
And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (Col. 1:3–14)
There is not much that I need to add to this beautiful passage about the character and content of gospel encouragement. I would only add that since ministry is spiritual warfare, fought on the turf of the heart of every leader, and since that war is fought in the context of a terribly broken world that not only doesn’t function as God intended but also regularly throws temptation in our path, ministry leadership is marked by struggle and disappointment. So there is never a time in a leadership community—no matter who is in the community or where they do their work, what agenda they have committed to, and who they have been called to lead—when encouragement isn’t needed. Encouragement focuses leaders on the glory of what God has already done and on his power to do even more, and in so doing, builds hope, courage, and confidence in the face of whatever difficulties, challenges, or obstacles may be in their leadership pathway. Encouragement captures the hearts of leaders with the gospel and guards their hearts from discouragement and feelings of inability. Gospel encouragement is also a defense against the ever-present danger of the pride in accomplishment, because it puts credit where credit is due, that is, at the feet of the Savior. Are your leaders more apt to encourage than to criticize and to judge?
A Gospel Community Is Protective
Being a protective community means understanding that personal spiritual insight, which protects leaders from spiritual seduction, deceit, and danger, is the result of community. Every leader needs protection in order to lead long and well. Pay attention to how the writer of Hebrews paints that kind of community:
Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. (Heb. 3:12–14)
If sin blinds, and it does, and if sin still remains in us, and it does, then, even as ministry leaders, there are pockets of spiritual blindness in us. So it is vital that we all forsake the thought that no one knows us better than we know ourselves. If there are places where we still suffer from spiritual blindness, then there are inaccuracies in the way we see ourselves and interpret our words and behavior. If, as a leader, you deny the possibility of personal spiritual blindness and trust the accuracy of your self-view, you are not humbly open and approachable to fellow leaders whom God has placed near you to help you see what you won’t see on your own.
So we all need a lovingly protective leadership community to help us see things that we need to see but are blind to on our own. If personal spiritual insight is the fruit of God’s grace, then a gospel-shaped leadership community functions as an instrument of seeing in the hearts of the members of that community.
I know I need this protection because I tend to be blind to my blindness. It is hard to escape that the writer of Hebrews is calling us to humbly admit that the grace of personal spiritual insight is the product of community. Does your leadership community function as a protective community, giving one another sight where sight is needed, thereby protecting leaders from the deceitfulness of sin?
A Gospel Community Is Restorative
Leaders in the church lead on the front lines of spiritual warfare. There will be casualties, and therefore every ministry leadership community must be committed to the work of restoration. I will discuss this much more fully in a later chapter, but for now, consider how James ends his letter:
My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. (James 5:19–20)
I am afraid that in the face of the wandering, failure, or fall of a ministry leader, many of our ministry communities are much more conditioned to get rid of such a leader than to work toward his restoration. Restoration should not be confused with being soft on sin. Gospel restoration never minimizes sin. Gospel restoration never values efficiency over character. Gospel restoration never compromises in the face of position and power. Gospel restoration never puts the needs of the institution over the heart of the person. Gospel restoration never compromises God’s ordained qualifications for ministry leadership.
But a leadership community that has been tenderized by the gospel, so that its members are humbly aware of their own susceptibilities and the extent to which they are being forgiven and protected, is not quick to judge and separate but joyfully gives and does whatever necessary to rescue and restore this loved one who has given way to sin. I will address this more fully in chapter 10. Does your leadership community have a track record of leader restoration?
If we, as leaders, are ever going to lead those entrusted to our care to give their time, energy, and resources to the cause of the gospel in their generation and at their location, we must function as a gospel community so that we have the humility to battle together, the courage to do great things, and the insight to confess and forsake those things that may be in the way. So we remind ourselves of the massive forgiveness we have received and that our Savior battles for us so that the gospel will shape us even when we don’t have the sight or the sense to battle ourselves.