Reading: Video Transcript - Training Someone to Replace You (Carl George)

In this, which is the second of our series on becoming an effective volunteer worker, we want to talk about a topic that is normally not discussed at all when it comes to developing your skill as a small group leader. We're going to be talking about the recruitment of the people that will make up the nucleus of your group before we talk about your meeting with the group. We want to start with placing the new leader in the leadership role from the very beginning. We say to the new leader, "Once you have found someone who will take your ministry report, then your next task is to find someone who will follow you and help you to build the group that you're hoping to lead. 

But you need to be careful in your choice because if you develop a sidekick who is going to assist you in the ministry because that person has the gift of help, you're going to have a wonderful journey, but it's a dead-end street you're traveling down. You have to have two people in the nucleus in addition to yourself that have very specialized roles and have aspirations that are appropriate to those roles. The two things we're talking about here are your assistant and your apprentice. Now, there's a world of difference between an assistant and an apprentice. An assistant is going to help you carry the log. An apprentice is going to learn how to carry the log and is going to take it away with a helper of their own. 

What we're trying to do is we're trying to help you develop a vision of what your ministry should be that does not leave you as a group leader but causes you actually to realize that as a group leader, you're going to not only be encouraging people, but you're going to be shaping their very vision of ministry in what it can be. You're going to be helping people become leaders in their own right, because they have been coached, helped, led by you. 

So as we think about your cell group, as we think about the Sunday school class that you're going to organize, we start with the concept of the class, yes. But we also say, "But where's the nucleus?" And in the nucleus, we know that there are these three components. The first component is you, the leader. And we name you in our special jargon shorthand by the Roman numeral 10 because, in a small group, we expect that you're probably going to be assembling 10 people into a meeting.

Now you may have to be working on 15 or 30 to get the 10 that you want, but you're having 10 in a meeting. So we refer to you as the leader as 10. So the Roman numeral 10 is our starting place. Then you need someone who will help you. This person can handle venue arrangements, the hosting or the hostessing that's appropriate - the coffee, the tea, the whatever is appropriate to your entertaining people in the meeting. Perhaps in these days of enlightened diets, we should be thinking in terms of fruit juice and water. But the host or hostess person takes care of venue arrangements so that your concentration can be on people and on their betterment.

And then you want that all-important apprentice person. And we refer to that person as the apprentice X. And when they become a leader in their own right, we just drop the apprentice. So we're really talking about a leader in training.

So as you're starting your journey toward being the leader of a community of faith, a witnessing community of encouragement, we're talking about starting your leadership by picking out the two people who will be your nucleus. When you have these two people working with you, then you do your work on deciding who's going to come, because they will help you pick out who's going to come to your group. It becomes a team effort from the very start.

Our focus during this particular facet is going to have to be on developing that apprentice to be able to replace you in the ministry. Now, this is an approach to ministry that is not popular with many existing cell group leaders or small group leaders, because they reason, "But why would I want to give away the ministry that I enjoy doing so very much?" An untrained cell group or small group leader thinks in terms of the meeting of those people as being the ministry. But this is not an adequate ministry meaning. This is not an adequate definition of your ministry. We're trying to help people grow in all ways. Some of those people will be gifted by the Lord to be able to assume leadership of a group. We should think of ourselves, then, as leader makers as well as group conveners. And that's what the apprentice role is all about. 

Now from the standpoint of a church and strategy, it makes all the sense in the world for each leader of a cell group or class to take responsibility for replacing themselves. Because in this fashion, the church's leadership base begins to expand without it taxing the resources of the staff. Because now, that task of finding new leaders has been shared among every existing leader of a cell or group in the entire church. And what we have found is that if you stay focused on this issue, 80 to 95% of the new leaders needed by a church can be discovered by the existing leaders of the church. And the staff are told after the fact that this is happening as opposed to being responsible for all of this happening. 

Most of the personnel needs of a volunteer organization can be met if a small group leader realizes that their second responsibility after being under supervision is to be mentoring someone to prepare them for ministry. 

Now as we have worked with churches in this area, we have discovered that decentralizing the ministry in this fashion - that is to see to it that more leaders are coming about because your efforts as a leader is helping to transfer your leadership skill to another person, we've learned the other elements of the church's administration and ministry can be decentralized as well.  

One of the most important of those is the childcare that's needed. Because every group is responsible for its own childcare, staff is not constantly having to hunt for childcare resources because we place that in the group. Now if you're going to be the teacher, or leader, or minister,r or caregiver in the group, you're going to need the apprentice leader and the host or hostess person to be able to help you with those arrangements for babysitting in addition to the bible studying and praying that you're doing. And if you don't have some help, you'll burn out very, very shortly. 

So that nucleus is important because it gives you the staff to work with. You say, "Well, that's not a very large staff - just two people." It's a whole lot larger than not having help. And people that don't have help burn out. So we've learned not to let people call meetings until they have built their nucleus and they know that within the nucleus they have the power to pull off the childcare arrangements that they need.

If you have taken a serious look at what it would take to help that person replace you, you begin to realize that you need not only to give that apprentice a role in every meeting, something to do in leadership in every single meeting, but you also need to give them something to do with every meeting. Because the secret of the group's vitality is found between the meetings as much as it is during the meetings. 

So you give your apprentice an assignment. Perhaps one week, they'll do the greeting and sharing exercise. The other week, they'll do the reading of a Bible portion. Another week, they'll lead at prayer time. Another week, they'll lead a bible study. And doing this sharing of the ministry during the actual time, you can systematically exercise your apprentice in various areas until they will look back over the last four or five, or six months and realize that everything that they need to do be a leader, they've done at least two or three times at one time or another. And then, the time when you had to be out of town or your kids were sick, they carried it for you. The group went ahead and met. 

As a consequence, they were gaining skill the whole time - piecemeal. And then, when the day comes that you're not there, they gain skill holistically. And then, when the day comes that you're no longer there, they're carrying the load and they have been eased into that responsibility by the many small practices that you have put together for them in the meetings and between the meetings. So they should do some of the phoning, some of the babysitting arrangements, some of the contacting of the helper. And then, as your spotting for new talent, they should be looking with you for new talent to spot, because one of the implications of having an apprentice is as you leave that apprentice with the group and you get ready to move out, you have had to spot an additional apprentice to take with you as you go. 

And they have had to spot an apprentice to support them now that they're going to be leading the group. So you're always going to be in a talent search looking for new talent. But here's what you need to realize. There is an invisible layer of talent untapped in the average church. We've been discovering that something like 10% of an average church constitutes the political talent pool for electable office, an appointment, the hive of invisible places that are occupied by people. Something like 10% of the church is available for that.

And when we start talking with churches and strategizing with their staffs and boards about how we're going to be able to develop a small group ministry of true care, which is very, very labor intensive, they say, "Where are we ever going to find the people because our officers, our leaders are overworked, they're overextended. They just can't carve out more time for this kind of thing." We're really talking about expanding the leadership base of the church. We're really talking about something that's a very biblical idea. You may recall that in Acts 6, as the church had grown, that it was no longer possible for the apostles to make the bread runs to the widows and cover everybody, and they were skipping places and missing people and there was a lot of disgruntlement. And what did they do to solve the problem? 

They didn't get up and preach, "You all, don't gripe." They said, "Oops. We've got people out there that are missing their bread. We need to appoint additional leaders to help us shoulder this load so that we can expand this ministry in the part of the church that seems to be growing, which happens to be in Acts 6 - the Greek part of the church, the Jews that had been off in diaspora had come back to live in Jerusalem. They were the ones being shorted because the original apostles were mostly Hebrews, so no connection. So they knew about all the Hebrew widows but they didn't have good communication lines for all those diaspora widows and so there was some complaint there because the shortfalls were pretty obvious.

And so they appointed a bunch of new diaspora-named Greek deacons and they filled out that leadership gap that was emerging because of their growth. And the church was able to find peace and go on from there.

You see, sometimes the growth that God gives the church actually gets ahead of the leadership development and then, it slows down the growth of the church because dissatisfaction grows because people's needs are not being met. So it's a perfectly reasonable thing for us to say, "Why don't we work systemically on developing new leaders within the church? Let's not leave it to chance. Let's do it on purpose." 

And we've been discovering that there is a layer of leadership as large as the politically available leadership you have right now that is largely untapped because it doesn't put itself forward, it doesn't volunteer itself for ministry. It has to be invited to ministry.

Now if you want to invite someone to ministry who's going to be effective, what better way to do than to invite someone who's in the context of a class or group watching how this is going on and you ask them, you say, "How do we get them to accept this rising leader role? How do we get them to do this?" 

But what you do, you ask them occasionally to do something just like an apprentice would do. And when they don't fall apart having done that, then you ask them to do something else. And over the course of time, a few experiences of that type, they find, "I have no real excuse for not moving forward. I can accept more responsibility in this area."

Some people panic at the thought of standing up in front of a group. Except when you're dealing with a group of 10, what's there to be afraid of? Everybody you know, you love, you share with, you've trusted, you've been upheld by. So there's no reason for panic. You don't even have to be a public speaker to sit and share in a small group. And what we're finding is, we're tapping in, church after church, to a whole new layer of leadership, doubling the size of the church leadership with leaders that are not simply electable but leaders that are ministry capable at the level of the cell. And that turns out to be where the real action is in most ministry anyway is at the level of the cell. That's where you get your real support. 

So the apprentice leader, the idea of bringing new people alongside to become rising apprentice leaders even is a way to ensure the church has its leadership needs in the future. Now your job as a small group leader is to learn to replace yourself with this ministry-capable apprentice. You're not promotable to a new field of ministry until you have your replacement in sight. 

Now in the business field, lecturers are constantly saying to business types, if you want to be promotable, train the person under you. Now that's great talking, but in these days of downsizing business, what that means is turn over your $60,000 a year job to a $30,000 person. And it's turned out to be the death nail for encouraging delegation and mentoring people under you in these large corporations. But the downsizing can only go so far and we'll be in a new era. 

But in our churches, there's never been a more apparent need for caring leaders than we have right today. The needs of a family, the needs of a community are so great that we could appoint every leader that we have, especially because we're not handing groups to leaders. We're creating leaders who can develop a following. So however many leaders we can develop, we can have that many cell groups or we can have that many classes. Because we're training the kind of leader that if they don't have a class, they grow one.

As a matter of fact, you could confidently predict that if a church could develop 10 additional ministry-capable cell group leaders that know how to replace themselves with apprentices, that every year that they would do that, they could add 100 people to their attendance. In other words, your leadership development could allow you to enlarge your network of care. Your enlarged network of care results in a larger attendance. And the numbers work out just about this way all the way to the largest churches in the world, starting with 100 going to hundreds of thousands. Ten times the number of new leaders that you develop is what your attendance is going to be over time.

So when you talk about church growth, we don't really have to say, "Well, let's set some outside goals for church growth." We can say, "Let's set some goals for developing new leaders," knowing that one of the consequences, intended or otherwise, of developing new leaders is expanding the base of ministry.

But the reason that a cell group approach, the reason that a Sunday school-based approach, a leader-based approach works so well is this: because you're working with a unit of care unit of 10, the quality of that church's caring life never needs to be diminished by the onset of new converts. No matter how many new converts you have. Then when you have new people come to your church, by the dozens or by the thousands, it really won't matter because they are cared for 10 at a time. The care in a church of thousand could be equivalent to the care of a very small church if the church has organized its care around the unit of 10. 

We're not talking about bigness here, we're talking about quality here. We're talking about people who are so loved, they don't want to leave. Now we can't afford to lavish that kind of care on people if we have to do it with paid staff. There aren't enough dollars in the budget for that. But if we're constantly developing new care leaders, then we can afford to lavish care on people. Because of those people who are cared for, we know there are some of them going to be given gifts of the Holy Spirit that will enable them to be true leaders.

Now how do you get that to happen? How do you get people to come forward? We have found that when you're first starting small group ministries in churches that you have to discover people who have this commitment. And there's a lot of talent around that's not being utilized that already have some group leadership ability. And so, we recommend you take a survey and find out who has done small group leadership before. Once you find out from the survey, then you invite these people to be your first small group leaders. And you tell them, "Watch this tape. It will tell you the importance of having an apprentice." That means they will become a leader producer from that point on. 

Now after you have them in place and they have recruited their apprentice, then they and their apprentice are both in this talent search mode to increase the number from that point on. 

But one of the most effective tools you have for being able to bring a person into candidacy for care group leadership is this: start affirming people's spiritual gifts. How do you affirm someone's spiritual gift? There's a reasonable process. First of all, become acquainted with spiritual gifts. I mean, read the scripture. There are lists of spiritual gifts in scripture.

Then whenever you catch somebody doing good, it's probably because they are using a Holy Spirit-given, God-given spiritual gift. So affirm them and even raise their consciousness about the possibility that that could be an evidence of God's work in their life. You say to them, "I get so much comfort when I talk to you. And the things you say bring such peace to me, and it's such an unusual experience I have in talking to you. And it's different from my normal conversations with other people, I just have to think that God's at work whenever I'm talking to you in some way and I get comfort from that. And I think maybe the Holy Spirit has given you the gift of being a comforter to people."

And somebody says, "What? What? All I'm doing is just being myself with you." They're so unaware of the work of God in themselves they don't even know that they have something unique and special in their ability to minister comfort. But you name the gift. You speak it to them, and you raise their consciousness. And they say, "Oh, there's a possibility. Hmmm. I wonder if that could be God at work in me."

To another person, you'll say, "I need some advice on this. I really need some counsel on this because this is a tricky, sticky question here. And every time I've ever talked to you about this kind of thing, I've gotten wisdom that I carried away. It has been a huge help to me. I think God must have given you some kind of a gift of wisdom because when you share with me your advice, it works." 

And the person who's giving the advice goes home and they say to their husband or their wife, "Marjorie, tonight, she said that every time that she gets my advice, it works. And she's come to rely on that." 

And your spouse will say, "Oh yeah. Everybody knows how wise you are."

And you say, "I didn't know how wise I am."

They say, "Well, that's the only area where you're not wise, knowing who you are. Because you're wise."

And as people are affirmed for their gifts, do you know what that does? It causes them to realize that they have the stewardship of that gift. That is that gift was given to them by the Holy Spirit for a reason. And the reason was to enable them to encourage other members of the body. Now it's a neat thing to realize that, just as you in the medical care community, healthcare community, you go to different specialists. You can go to surgeons, you can go to people who do diagnostic work and treat with medicines and you can go to therapists of various kind - psychological as well as physical therapists. And it's nice to know there's a whole array of skills needed out there. So if your foot hurts, you don't go to the same doctor as for your ear and so forth.

And it's nice to know that the Holy Spirit has provided for our spiritual health and growth in the church by having given this whole variety of different abilities to different members of the body. And he kind of spread them out. And the reason the Holy Spirit spreads out these gifts is to cause Christians to be appreciative of one another. 

In other words, the way we learn to love and appreciate one another is the fact that we recognize the uniqueness. God has made each of us to be special in our own way. And we provide something that other people need. Now the more mature you get, the more you rely on that.

As your Christian life matures, you begin to rely on the wisdom of this person, you begin to rely on the comfort of that person, the guidance, the encouragement, the exhortation. People have been known to stand up next to exhorters and say, "I think I need a swift kick, and I have learned that I can always count on you for a swift kick." 

"No. I have learned that I can always count on you to know what next to do." I have an experience in my own life wherein needing to know what a next step was, an exhorter was given to me to provide for me the questions that helped me to take next steps that led me to the career that I'm in now. 

Because the exhorter that was given to me asked me a very simple question. "If you were to use the gifts the Holy Spirit has given you, what would you be doing? And knowing that, what's the next step towards getting to do it?" 

Now you can talk to a comforter all day long and they'll never think of that question. They'll think of things that make you feel good. But the exhorter will take you through your pain to the new objective. And God will give each person to you that you need if you're a part of a community.

Now as you affirm the spiritual gifts of people in your cell groups--and by the way, how do you learn the spiritual gifts in the cell groups? Besides the studies and besides affirming them, what do you do? You just watch how people minister to one another. Because we intuitively minister, out of God's grace, through our spiritual gift to other people in the group. And in an auditorium setting where there are a lot of people sitting passively listening to a teacher, you never get to see spiritual gifts at work. But put people in contact with real need - a teenager that's acting up, a washing machine that's broke, bills that can't quite be paid out of the current supply of money - you put people in actual needs and getting them to struggle and watch them go through some of the griefs of life, an unreasonable boss, a jerk at work, all the things that are part of the human frailty and you watch how people interact to support one another. And suddenly, you discover not everybody acts alike to help each other.

And as you begin to realize that that difference in action is a consequence of the activity of the Holy Spirit, then the results are excellent because gift-aware people know that God expects them to use their gifts in the building of the body.

You're going to take that apprentice, you're going to let them watch you work. Then you're going to let them help you. Then you're going to watch them. And then you're going to step away and leave them doing it.

In that process, you're going to have taken them from letting them be your ministry model to becoming their ministry coach. And then, as you go about doing your ministry, you'll do the same thing and the leadership pool will ever be lightened.

This is clearly biblical. Look at Elisha. He was brought on by Elijah. Clearly biblical. Look at Timothy. He was brought on by Paul. Look at Paul himself as Saul. He was brought on by Barnabas. Look at the apostles themselves. They were brought on by Jesus. It's a biblical pattern. It's been there for a long, long time. 

And Timothy, the last of those lives, he was told the same things that we have shown and taught you, you teach faithful people who will be able to do likewise. So apprenticing is a biblical way of life.