How to develop a leadership pipeline for your church

• Do you have enough leaders to sustain your growth and to keep you off the ministry treadmill? 
• Do you have a leadership development strategy that you promote consistently? 
• Are you using simple, strategic, and reproducible systems in developing leaders? 
• Do all your departments use the same general leadership development process?

If your answer was "no" to any of these questions, you might benefit from an Auxano Leadership Pipeline co::LAB that is coming to Dayton, Ohio this spring, 2016. 

"The leadership pipeline helped us clarify the process, identify a new crop of leaders, and develop their God-given potential to help us accomplish our vision." Dean Fulks, Lead Pastor, LifePoint Church, Columbus, Ohio.

"The Auxano Leadership Pipeline co:LAB has been incredibly helpful to our church. For far too long we relied on an organic model of leadership development that failed to produce both the quantity and quality of leaders we needed. If you are looking to mobilize high caliber leaders in your ministry then I highly recommend this training." Dr. Chad Keck, Senior Pastor,  First Baptist Church- Kettering, Ohio.

"We knew that our leadership pipeline needed work and we were confident that Auxano could help. After just the first day I realized that we saved two years of trying to do this by ourselves." Randy Hagemann, Gateway Community Church. 

The process will guide your church in understanding current realities in your leadership development system and will redesign it around equipping leaders in the stages of: leading self, leading others, leading leaders, leading a department, leading the organization.

An Auxano co::LAB is a continuous and collaborative process (hence the double colon) that 12 churches go through together in order to create a plan to develop more and better leaders in the life of the church. 

In an Auxano co::LAB experience, those who participate in the process will discover the operating philosophies embedded in other church's approaches to leadership development. This will then create potential opportunities for the entire learning community to support one another long after the process creation is complete. 

The process we will be going through has been designed and created over the last several years by Mac Lake, founder of the Multiply Group, who now works for NAMB and Auxano. It has been used across a myriad of churches of varying size, denominational backgrounds, and geographic location. I, along with Mac, will be at the helm of guiding the process for our six sessions.

At the end of the six sessions, each church will have created its own, distinctive leadership development strategy and process that aligns with the church's particular context, as well as its mission, vision, and values.

There will be six total sessions in 2016, all on Thursdays: April 28, May 19, June 23, August 18, September 22, and October 20. The sessions will be from 10:00am - 3:00pm at First Baptist Church Vandalia, Ohio, 140 Elva Court, Vandalia, Ohio. Lunch will be provided. Each participating church may bring up to four participants. 

Since this will be a co::LAB, Auxano is able to keep the costs down. When a Lead Navigator from Auxano consults a church one-on-one, the cost is usually between $15,000 and $20,000. The cost for the co::LAB in Ohio is $2,500 for each participating church and is limited to the first twelve churches to register.

To help you determine your need and readiness for the co::LAB, I would encourage your church leadership to access the Leadership Pipeline Assessment which can be found here.

In 2015, 11 churches in Ohio (including LifePoint and FBC Kettering mentioned above) and 1 church in Pennsylvania have been participating in a Leadership Pipeline co::LAB in Columbus. If you'd like to connect with those leaders to talk firsthand with someone about the effectiveness of the training, drop me an email and I'll put you in touch with the churches that just experienced this dynamic learning environment. 

Learning in community with other leaders makes meaningful application happen more intuitively and more rapidly. To use an old expression, as other leaders grapple with you to apply leadership development principles in their local contexts, the "aha" moments will multiply for you and your team.

If you are interested in signing up to participate in the co::LAB, you can access the Auxano Consulting Services Agreement here. For more information, contact me, Rick Duncan, at rick@auxano.com.

Save yourself 2 years of leadership development design work! You and your leaders will be glad you've come up with a process to multiply leaders in a simple, reproducible way.