Most church resources assume that leadership development trickles down from the top: the pastor trains the ministry leaders, who in turn equip their armies of volunteers. But in a church plant or house church, where a community of equals replaces a more traditional hierarchy, leadership is much more difficult to define and, as a result, to teach. What does it mean to lead when there are no ministries to run, no facilities to manage, no volunteers to recruit?
Felicity Dale has over 20 years of experience at the forefront of the church planting and house church movement, and has written multiple books about equipping men and women to lead within these specific contexts. She currently lives in Austin, Texas, where she and her husband Tony run House2House, which began as a print magazine and is now a website that provides resources for the house/simple/organic church movement. She spoke with BuildingChurchLeaders.com managing editor Laura Leonard about what leadership looks like when church is a shared meal, how to equip people to lead in this context, and how it all points back to the mission of the church.
You started out as a doctor. How did you end up in the church planting movement?
My husband, Tony, and I helped to plant our first church as medical students in the hospital where we trained in London. That church sent us out to a very poor and socially deprived area of London where we again planted a church. Our story was fairly typical of church planting in Britain in the 1960s and '70s, where all over the country churches spontaneously started in homes. In those days, we didn't have a theology of staying small, and so many of those churches became the basis of the large, independent charismatic churches today.
When the Lord moved us to the U.S. in 1987, we had nine years of training on the "backside of the desert." Everything we thought we had moved here for fell apart. It was only because his leading to come here had been so clear that we stuck it out. Eventually, we told the Lord that unless things changed, we were going back to England where at least we could work as physicians (we are not licensed in the US). Almost immediately, things began to change.
During our nine years in the wilderness, we had become friends with many unbelieving businesspeople. We invited a dozen or so of them to our home for pizza and a discussion of business principles using a textbook we would provide: the book of Proverbs. Over the course of a year, they all became Christians. We also started a "Breakfast Bible Club" for our kids' friends—which we ran on a Sunday morning because we figured all the Christian kids would be in church and we wanted to reach the non-believers—and many of them and their families found the Lord.
When we combined the two groups together, we had 55 people meeting in our average-size home. What to do? We'd had nine years to think about church, and knew there was something winsome about our early days back in the UK, when we met in homes. At the same time we were also hearing stories of house church movements in countries like China. So rather than rent a building and get larger, we decided to multiply out the small.
It wasn't long before we heard of other people doing the same. Two other leaders of house church networks approached us with the idea of a magazine to resource the growing movement. So House2House magazine (now a website, www.house2house.com) was born. This has given us a front seat in the arena of what God is doing with house churches not just in this country but also around the world as people contact us with their stories.
What does leadership look like within house churches?
Compared to how most people think of leadership, it's upside-down.
In Matthew 20, when James and John asked for positions of importance in the kingdom, Jesus seized a teachable moment to instruct them about leadership. He said, "You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people … " And we do know this. In almost every situation, leadership is hierarchical—even within the church. He then went on to say, "But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must become your slave" (Matt 20: 25-27, NLT). Jesus demonstrated this kind of leadership when he washed his disciples' feet. He demonstrated it when he laid down his life.
Leadership within simple/organic churches is flat, not hierarchical. It's leadership from among rather than over (1 Peter 5:1-3). We have a friend—very tall and imposing—who loves to demonstrate leadership by lying flat on his face at someone's feet and asking, "What part of me do you need to tread on in order to fulfill your destiny in God?" This kind of leadership is not about titles and positions. It's not even about servant leadership. It's about being a servant … period. In most leadership situations in the church or in the world, it's the vision of the leader that counts. Others are there to serve his or her vision. In house church, it's the other way around. The question is, what can the leader do to serve the vision God gives to those he or she is caring for?
So does this mean that leadership is not important within house churches?
Leadership is important within any society, but it's harder to recognize within a house church.
One of the most common metaphors for church within the New Testament is that of family. If church is family, then leadership in an individual house church functions more like that of parents. In a healthy family, the parents raise their children to become responsible members of society, and they are thrilled if their children surpass them.
In Ephesians 4, Paul outlines the fivefold ministry of apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers. These are likely to be regional functions, not necessarily all found within an individual house church. In this passage, apostles and prophets are described as the foundations of the church. Foundations are not seen. They are invisible and trodden on. Yet without them, a building would fall down. Leaders should not be on the rooftop—seen and applauded, with a business card to match—but in the foundations, laying down their ambitions and reputations and promoting others. Paul described this kind of leadership when he talked about apostles being prisoners of war at the end of the victor's parade (1 Corinthians 4:9-13). The function of this kind of leadership is to equip the ordinary believer to do the ministry (Ephesians 4:11-12). It's not so much to do the ministry themselves, but to train others.
What does leadership training look like in a church planting movement?
God is far more interested in our character than in our great learning. So his primary means of training is not in seminaries and Bible schools. This isn't to say that God doesn't use seminary training—the apostle Paul had great academic qualifications for his day. God uses leaders who have died to their own ambitions, who have lost all desire for the limelight, who have nailed to the cross their own agendas and titles, who are content to serve, unseen and unappreciated. And it often takes God's "school of hard knocks" to learn those character and lifestyle lessons.
Leadership training may look different depending on the context of the church planting movement. For example, a church planting movement in India we are familiar with has several tiers of leadership. All training is passed down from one stage of leadership to another and eventually to the people in the house church. Everyone is trained.
Probably the best example in this country is Church Multiplication Associate's Greenhouse training. Over the last decade or so, Neil Cole and those he works with have trained more than 45,000 people in the principles of church planting here and around the world. He teaches people how to multiply first disciples, then leaders, churches, and movements. Those who attend a Greenhouse are taught how to make disciples who go on to make other disciples, all within the context of the harvest. An accountability group of two or three called a Life Transformation Group helps this process. These accountability groups then gather to form churches. When someone has started more than one church, they receive more mentoring in the form of on-the-job apprenticeship with experienced leaders.
We take the priesthood of the believer very seriously. Everyone takes part. We don't have someone lead the worship, another give a teaching, and another look after the kids. Instead, everything is very participatory and interactive. The role of the leader is to enable this process. The leader has to be trained how to facilitate rather than take a primary lead; how to encourage others to share, and ensure that even the shy people are recognized and promoted; how to open questions to the group rather than answering them all. In a multiplying movement, this is especially important; if the leader answers all the questions, he or she becomes the authority in the group, but if he or she encourages others to share from the Scriptures, the Bible becomes the authority.
The title of one of your books is An Army of Ordinary People. What are some of the challenges of doing that? Does it require more hand-holding?
A church planting movement, by definition, consists of rapidly multiplying churches. We don't have the luxury of sending a leader away for years of training. We have neither the money nor the time. Ordinary people can be equipped to plant churches.
House church planting requires a complete paradigm shift from traditional methods. All around the world, God is using the pattern that Jesus demonstrated in Luke 10:1-9. Here are a few of the key principles for leading and developing leaders in this context:
- Jesus has a strategy for our location. We need to listen to him and go where he tells us: for example, to an apartment complex, or to a coffee shop.
- We are to pray that God will send out laborers into the harvest.
- We need to go rather than ask people to come. We want to make disciples in the harvest.
- The resources are already in the harvest; this means the location to meet as well as the leaders. The leader of the church we will plant is likely not a Christian yet.
- We are looking for a person of peace—someone open to our message who offers hospitality and who has a circle of influence. The Book of Acts has only two examples of individuals becoming Christians—Paul and the Ethiopian eunuch. Everyone else included a group—for example, Lydia and her household, Cornelius and his household. These are people of peace.
- We accept their hospitality, and thereby create relationship.
- We look for an opportunity to bring them face to face with a God who meets them at their point of need.
- We tell them and their friends the good news about the kingdom of God.
To illustrate, an example: a number of years ago, we were contacted by a friend in another state who had led a lady to the Lord over the Internet and wanted to know if we would we help disciple this new Christian.
When we met with her and explained that for us, church is about a group of ordinary people sharing around a meal in someone's home, she asked, "Could I have church in my house?" It turned out that she came from a New Age background and had been meeting for several years with a group of friends to discuss spirituality.
We were delighted and arranged to get together with her and her friends. Within just six weeks, these friends had found the Lord. But right from the third or fourth week, she led the group. How could that happen?
One of the principles of house church is that complex things break down, but simple things multiply. Our pattern of meeting together is so simple that anyone can lead a group once it has been modeled. Drawing inspiration from Acts 2:42—"They devoted themselves to the apostle's teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer"—every week the group shared a meal, told stories of what God was doing in their lives, spent time in the word of God, and prayed together.
Did we need to hand-hold? Of course. We closely mentored the lady who was leading the group, but the group responded well to the leadership of someone they already knew and trusted.
