As a leader, your time spent developing and equipping the right people can have immediate and expansive results.
Leadership development is really just apprenticeship or discipleship further along the path of faith, knowledge, and skills. Discipleship further up the slope. If you have trained people in such a way that they can now reproduce and train others, in turn producing future leaders, you have the makings of a true movement.
It’s like this: When I teach my kids what I learned from my mother or father, and they in turn teach these same things to their own kids, that encompasses four generations of my family:
My parents, my wife and I, my children, and their kids. You see that–four generations.
This is a picture of how multiplication works. It moves naturally and quickly from one generation to the next and has the ability to impact the future in powerful ways.
In the New Testament of the Bible the apostle Paul once said to his younger apprentice Timothy, “The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.” Paul, Timothy, reliable people, others. There it is again, we see four generations and a natural pattern.
For years when I read this passage, this simple yet powerful blueprint escaped me. It seemed natural when I read it, but I didn’t immediately grasp the explosive implication found here. One generation of people is generally considered to cover around twenty-five years of time or history. Four generations therefore encompasses about a hundred years.
Many sociologists point out that throughout history we tend to see major shifts in culture and worldview approximately every four generations. If we want to change a city or a nation, and we can immediately touch the next three generations of disciples (four including ourselves), we will see amazing multiplication that can have an incredible impact on the world. Just by being intentional in passing on reproducible discipleship in all of life, we each have the potential to shift and influence the next one hundred years and beyond.[clickToTweet tweet=”By passing on reproducible discipleship we’ve the potential to influence the next 100 years and beyond” quote=”By being intentional in passing on reproducible discipleship in all of life, we each have the potential to shift and influence the next one hundred years and beyond.”]
But this doesn’t have to take a whole century to become a visible reality. When you get to the fourth generation of reproduction in your own communities with the process of disciples making disciples, things are now fueled by new traditions, and a new culture itself begins to take flight.
That’s some powerful stuff!
So if like many of us did for a long time, you’ve been developing others and working with new leaders primarily to fill holes in your programs, the next best time to think movement, and 4 generation cultural explosions is now.
I’d love to hear about your successes with this and any questions you may have. What has really made a difference in all of this for you? Leave me your thoughts in the comments below or on Facebook.
