Building Leaders: Blueprints for Developing Leadership at Every Level of Your Church

by Aubrey Malphurs, Will Mancini

Training the next generation of leaders is crucial to spreading the gospel, yet most churches have no formal way of doing this. Why? Tight budgets, small staffs, and a lack of know-how are just a few reasons suggested by church consultants Aubrey Malphurs and William Mancini in this groundbreaking book.
Building Leaders provides real-life examples of ways churches can unleash their true ministry potential by training staff members and laypeople to lead. With step-by-step instructions that can be applied to any church or parachurch ministry, Building Leaders shows readers how

- empower, not just train, leaders
- overcome obstacles to developing leaders
- identify emerging leaders
- use biblical models for training leaders
- form a leadership training program to fit any size or budget

Packed with surveys, discussion questions, and a leadership development guide, Building Leaders will encourage leaders to "duplicate themselves" in order to see their ministry grow. It is a perfect resource for ministry students, church leaders, and pastors.

Genres: Leadership, Christian, Church, Reference, Church Ministry

286 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2004

Reviews

[Nathan Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

Building Leaders should be an essential read for pastors. It helped lay a great foundation for what it looks like to equip others in a church context.

[Ben Chubb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to give this book a firm handshake and say, “great stuff, little long winded but I definitely believe you that this would work”

[Faith Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for my masters class. Ended up more skimming through a lot of this book. It was very dry, I thought there were elements that were helpful, but too black and white for what ministry actually is.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Summary

Building Leaders is the second of a trilogy on leadership by Aubrey Malphurs, this time co-authored with Will Mancini. It was preceded by Being Leaders in 2003, and followed by the book Leading Leaders in 2005. Using the metaphor of building an ideal home to describe the steps in building ideal leaders, Malphurs and Mancini divide their process – and their book – into four parts. First, the proper foundation must be laid. Before diving into their descriptions of the actual development process, the authors make some important points. In the opening chapters, they elaborate on the importance on developing leaders as well as share some common problems that hinder leader development. They close the section by stressing that only true empowerment (as opposed to false imitations such as directing, abdicating, or disabling) of potential leaders will ensure their progress into maturity.
The second part of the book describes the proper “blueprints” for leadership development. That is, any model of leadership development must be founded upon the practices for developing leaders used by Jesus and the early church. First the book walks through the principles of building leaders found in Jesus’ work with his disciples. Then, relying heavily upon the work of David Bennett, Metaphors of Ministry, Malphurs and Mancini investigate why Jesus used metaphors to develop his leaders, and how to mine insights from the metaphors used by Jesus and the early church.
After the blueprints, the house is built from foundation to finish in the third part of the book. In this section, the writers lay out a step-by-step process for developing leaders in a ministry context. By far the largest portion of the book, Malphurs and Mancini spare no expense in detailing every stage of this process. First, they describe pulling together and empowering the necessary leadership levels, including the senior leadership and development teams. Then they devote four chapters to the steps of recruiting/launching, developing, and evaluating potential leaders. Having put the process in place, they wrap up the third section by offering further insights into improving the process and establishing a church culture that encourages leader development.
Finally, the book concludes with a glimpse into how this process might work in two different contexts. First, the authors share how Faith Temple Baptist Church, a small traditional church near Dallas, used this model to establish a leadership development process in their church. Then they turn their focus to Clear Creek Community Church, a megachurch located near Houston. After walking through how both used the same process to develop leaders in very different contexts, the book concludes with a few additional appendices providing some additional resources.

Strengths

Many books explain the importance of leadership but few tell you how to go about building leaders and establishing a "culture of leadership" within your church. This is not the case with Building Leaders. The authors have done an excellent job in outlining not only the necessity of leadership at all levels in the local church, but also how to create leaders at all levels. The book is a prime example of how to pack a lot of quality information into a concise package.
The greatest strength of Malphur and Mancini’s work is their ability to lay out their model for leadership development from inception to completion. Unlike David Bennett’s Metaphors of Ministry, which dives deeply into a very specialized portion of the process (specifically, that of biblical foundation), Building Leaders walks you from the Bible to the board room. Ironically, in doing so they draw out more insightful conclusions and applications of Bennett’s material than Bennett does himself! Along these same lines, the two case studies at the end of the book are an extremely nice touch. Without them, the book could have been accused of involving a great deal of theory without ever coming down from the clouds. However, these two examples put meat on the skeleton that has been laid out through the rest of the book, and give further suggestions for how to start the process in one’s own context.

Weaknesses

For all its merits, this book is not necessarily an easy read. Malphurs and Mancini are extremely detailed and thorough as they examine the leadership building process for the local church. It is fairly technical in how it delves into the applied theory of leadership development. Along with this critique, building in more illustrations throughout the work, instead of placing much of it at the end of the process, perhaps could have broken up the load of information.

Takeaways

I believe that God has blessed me with the gift of discerning potential leadership in others. Yet I have often fallen into the trap of believing that simply recognizing and calling out such potential is the same as developing it. Thanks to Malphurs and Mancini’s work, I see how stunted my process of leader development has often been. The book has provided a foundation for me individually to consider a broader plan for ongoing leadership enlistment and development. From recognizing some of the delays to leadership development that I must address in my context, to the comparison of over a dozen different training venues, there are numerous launching points from this book that I can utilize almost immediately in my own ministry work.
Building Leaders is a great book for a staff to read together for their own development, or for ministers of involvement, discipleship, or lay ministries to consult on how to equip deacons or lay leaders. It goes beyond simply reciting the platitude “church leaders need to train others to lead” and actually shows how to do it. I would highly recommend this book for any one that has the responsibility to enlist and train leaders at any level in the local church or Christian ministry.

[Daniel Mok]

The book provide a framework 5 steps framework to establish a sustainable program to train leaders in the church with practical advices. A good book to read.
- Step 1: Discover new leaders for development.
- Step 2: Launch new leaders into their positions of leadership.
- Step 3: Develop new and current leaders for ministry in the church.
- Step 4: Regularly evaluate your leadership-development process.
- Step 5: Regularly reward those in the leadership-development process.
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[Bryan Reeder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our church team is pursuing developing a leadership pipeline. "Building Leaders" is a tremendous resource for us as we begin the process of creating systems. This is a book more about leadership principles then about how to do it. But understanding principles can lead to implementation.

[stanley Philippe]

You should read if you want to build leaders

Awesome book on leadership development. It shows a clear process. Buy it, read it and give it away to your staff.

[Geoff Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid book.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dated, but conceptually good. Malphurs is a wealth of experience on leadership development in churches, and much of the book's material is timeless.

[Daunavan Buyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was really helpful. Lots of good stuff in here - I will definitely need to go back through it and reflect. It laid out a leadership development process so clearly.

[Joseph Henry Kester · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full of helpful application, but sometimes too prescriptive.

[Paul Pascoal · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the distinction made by the author about leadership and discipleship. Another good point is the description of the alternatives to empowering (directing, abdicating and disabling. I found the four essential qualities of a potential leader, according 2 Timothy, very useful. Paul mentions competence, trustworthiness, faithfulness and teachableness (p.100). Another valuable quote is: "Some churches make disciples but not leaders, and others make leaders but not disciples. We want to clarify the need to have unique processes for both disciple making and leader building" p.190. The assumption of the authors is that "while all leaders are disciples, not all disciples are leaders."

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short and sweet here. I think this is a valuable resource for developing ministry leaders, but I believe it is too heavily based in the western business model instead of a biblical ecclesiology. I find this to be true of most of Malphurs' books. This is valuable in the building up, but take it with a grain of salt as it is aimed to the American, or at least western, model of church and governance, based around practice for said culture instead of function apart from culture.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book with practical tips.

[Ronald J. Pauleus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good content.