In our last Letters, we looked at the relationship between Christ and Community in the leader’s life: Christ builds Community, and Community builds Christ. First, “Christ builds Community” means the leader’s union with Christ will be expressed in the leader living together with others in the Community in self-giving love, in true [...]
Malcolm Webber
In our last Letter, we looked at the relationship between Christ and Community and the implications of this relationship for leader development. In the New Testament, there is a very close relationship between the church and the leader’s maturing union with Christ. This relationship can be expressed in two fundamental ways: Christ builds [...]
Malcolm Webber
In the western church, Christianity is largely understood as an individual thing – a personal transaction between the individual and God. Consequently, leader development is also understood, largely, in individual terms – the individual learns and grows in an essentially individualized learning environment and then, once qualified, he [...]
Malcolm Webber
In our last Letter, we saw that a healthy church, like a healthy body, is one in which every member is functioning properly; this means that every member grows, serves and builds others. If we can create a church culture in which every believer takes responsibility to grow, serve and build, our churches will transform their worlds!
Malcolm Webber
What is the best and most biblical way to define a “healthy” church? Should a church be considered “healthy” when it is doing well financially or when large crowds of people are coming to the meetings? Perhaps a church is “healthy” when the majority of its growth is from new converts, or when it has a strong foreign missions program? Is [...]
Malcolm Webber
As have seen in previous Letters, our leadership development efforts must not be conducted apart from a living community of people in which the emerging leaders function and participate.
Malcolm Webber
In most Western organizations today, we love specialization and compartmentalization. Consequently, as we have already mentioned, it is common for us to entirely delegate the task of leadership development to some “specialist” person or group – whether inside or outside the organization itself. We identify the emerging leader who needs [...]
Malcolm Webber
In our last Letter we looked at the traditional approach to building Christian leaders: the local church sends its emerging leaders to a specialized, independent, external entity (the “factory”) that takes responsibility for training them and then sending them back.
Malcolm Webber
An ancient African proverb says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Similarly, it takes a spiritual community or family to build a leader.
Malcolm Webber
The leader needs to be connected with four kinds of community: his family, his local church, the various ministry teams of which he is a part, and the world.
Malcolm Webber