Leadership Development

Church starting is one of the principle focuses of Tarrant Baptist Association. As such, we have aggressively established a goal of establishing 500 new churches by 2012. Along the way, we have discovered that one of our biggest challenges is finding existing congregations to sponsor these new congregations. There seems to be two major reasons for this. They are leadership and money. We are trying to aggressively address these two issues that are constantly cropping up in our conversations with the existing congregations. The leadership issue, in turn, manifests itself basically in two ways. First, churches are afraid that they are going to have to give up their best and most active leaders to the new church. The converse is that they don't think they have any leaders who can step in to take these outgoing leaders' places. Unfortunately, the leadership and money issues stem from the fact that the vast majority of our churches are in survival mode. They are dying and grasping at everything, holding on for dear life in order to stave off the inevitable in just a few more years.

Therefore, if we are serious about starting all of these churches here and establishing a strong foundation to launch new churches around the country and the world, we are going to have to strengthen our existing congregations. In an effort to help our churches, we have begun several initiatives. The first is ServantsEdge. This program, developed in Houston under Jim Herrington as Young leaders, grew into LeadersEdge and we have brought it to North Texas as ServantsEdge. It is a two-year process of placing pastors (now open to other staff and lay leaders as well) in intentional learning peer accountability groups led by a mentor/coach with four retreats and monthly peer meetings. Each retreat focuses on a different dynamic. Those in week one focus on personal transformation (becoming a changed agent before being a change agent). Week two focuses on congregational transformation (moving the focus from membership to discipleship). Week three focuses on community transformation (how can my church impact its community). And week four focuses on world transformation (moving my church from its community to Kingdom focus). Several significant outcomes have become apparent. One, the churches whose pastors have gone through the process are growing and developing the focus we are working on. Two, the pastors have a support group to help them and even those pastors who have moved away from Tarrant are continuing to plug in. Three, strong men's groups are beginning to develop in some of the churches with strong lay leadership. Four, two of our graduates are meeting with fellow pastors from their community across denominational lines to bring them into the process so that they can form a united effort to focus on the lostness of their community. And fifth, most of our new church-sponsoring churches are led by graduates of ServantsEdge.

We are working on several new areas with ServantsEdge. First, we are requiring that all of our new church planters go through the process. This is giving them a wider basis of support. Two, we have opened up the parameters in timing and have the capability of doing it in Spanish, although at this time these do not seem to be priorities. Finally, we are contracting with a nationally recognized coaching trainer to help us develop the mentor/coaches that lead each of the peer groups. We feel that this is a skill set that is invaluable to them as they address the needs of the peer group but also as they lead their congregations in developing a stronger discipleship program.

If you are interested in learning more about ServantsEdge or the coaching training please contact Becky Biser at 817-927-1911 x 222 or by dropping her an email at becky@tarrantbaptist.org.

Thomas L. Law, III
Executive Director
Tarrant Baptist Association
Ft. Worth, Texas