Developing Emotionally Mature Leaders By Aubrey MalphursÖrnek

Day Seven

Helping or Hurting

Scripture: Psalm 133:2

Why do leaders need training in relational skills? One of my disappointments in teaching at a seminary has been sending out students to launch churches at home and especially abroad only to see them return after a year or so, dragging their feet emotionally. When I inquire as to what happened, the response is often, “We just couldn’t get along together as a team.” 

Few would argue that leaders need training in such organizational skills as identifying core values, developing a mission, casting vision, setting strategy, and so forth. However, there is more to leadership than these skills alone. Leaders lead people and therefore must be able to relate well with them. Relationships are central — especially for today’s Millennials (the generation born between 1984 and 2002). After all, it’s the congregation who are gifted and called to carry out the ministry (Ephesians 4). While leaders must give what amounts to several days a month to organizational skills such as vision casting and strategy development, they have to relate to people in some way much of the day every day. You can be the church’s greatest vision caster but offend people and run everybody off because you don’t know how to relate to people. In short, you can either help them or hurt them, and none of us wants the latter. That is not why we are in ministry. 

While discussing the topic of people skills with a missionary, I was surprised when he said that one primary reason missionaries don’t last on the mission field isn’t competence but their inability to get along with people. 

Is the problem of getting along with one another endemic only to the mission community? One summer I took an interpersonal skills course designed primarily for missionaries only to discover that one-third to one-half of the class were non-missionaries. They were pastors and people involved in parachurch ministry. Most problems in any ministry, though they may be theological in origin, are primarily relational.

Christianity is fleshed out in the arena of relationships. It’s all about people relating to people. How people feel about themselves when they are around you is vital to the effectiveness of your leadership and the influence that you exert on them for Christ. The question is, how do you affect people? 

How has this devotional changed the way you view your leadership?