Are you the leader you would like to be?

Are you utilizing all your leadership gifts?

Would you like to improve the health and vitality of your congregation?

Barnabas Leadership Groups are groups of around twelve to fifteen pastors and other church leaders that meet in a focused, formal initiative to enhance their leadership capacity.  The groups typically will meet over two days, twice a year, for two years as a guided learning community. Each gathering combines direct instruction, reading assignments and reflection on leadership theory and practice.

Come with us! Join us as we experience the Lord who loves us in new ways. Bind yourself with others who share the desire to grow more deeply on the life-giving, life-changing adventure of the disciple-follower while also growing as leader-servants.

• Grow in your understanding of the essential practices of effective leaders and their application in today’s adaptive environment.
• Discover your leadership strengths and areas for growth using relevant assessment instruments and Group-based feedback.
• Enhance your effectiveness in the specific leadership challenges of your ministry, home life, other employment and community.  
• Navigate the leadership challenges of your increasingly complex environment.
• Reinforce your leadership competencies and capacities through online peer cluster discussions, Barnabas Leadership Group gatherings and conversations with the coaches of the Barnabas process.

Regardless of your present level of expertise in leading there is more to learn and room to grow so you may more fruitfully lead in our day of rapid change. Since leadership is intrinsically linked with discipleship, we also encourage your personal discipleship practices.

While you have probably read books and blogs about leadership, the Barnabas Leadership Group aims to amplify the knowledge you do have and translate more of it in to an actual enhanced capacity to lead. While concepts such as transactional and transformational leadership, adaptive challenges and disruptive change are common in current leadership jargon, the Barnabas process works to incorporate these concepts into your actual daily experience.

Who is Welcome in a Barnabas Group? You are!

If you have heart to grow as a leader - no matter what your current level of leadership excellence may be - you are welcome.

The Barnabas process has been specifically developed to enhance the leadership capacity of pastors and the people of God in the various venues of their daily lives.

While Barnabas Leadership Groups are typically made up of pastors and others from several congregations, people within the life of a single congregation also may experience the Barnabas Process.  Groups can include pastors, associate pastors, lay pastors, Christian Educators, interested congregational leaders, denominational regional leaders, and anyone who wants to grow in leadership effectiveness.

Click Here to Learn about the Barnabas Process.

The Barnabas Process

The Barnabas Leadership process helps you focus on the leadership moments that arise in your life and grow in the ways you address them.

We begin with humility. As Barbara Kellerman makes clear in her excellent book, The End of Leadership, the burgeoning leadership development industry of our day is producing mixed results. Much is known about growing leaders yet there is a lot we just do not know. The Barnabas Process pulls from several streams of leadership development processes to create a three-fold learning helix though which each of the streams influence and enhance the others.

Learning

We will study some of the finest material available on ways to grow in exemplary leadership.

Participants learn more about themselves by using two proven leadership survey instruments designed to highlight areas of excellence and areas for improvement.

We will also engage materials to help in the establishment of a “Rule of Life,” a means of growing in our faith, or “growing the soul of the leader” as Ruth Haley Barton expresses it. Centering our lives on the Lord who loves you shapes as a disciple of Jesus, who said, "A disciple is not above the teacher but when fully equipped becomes like the teacher" (Luke 6:40). Which means, among many wonderful things, that you will grow as a leader as you love and learn more of deeply Jesus, the superlative leader in all history.

Leading

“We learn to lead by leading.” - E. Stanley Ott

Learning through study alone is helpful but is insufficient by itself to really enhance your leadership. Reading can teach you a lot about swimming, golfing, cooking and flying airplanes but if you want to learn to swim, you have to get into the water!

Your own life is your leadership laboratory. Your life in its various contexts are the venues in which the The Barnabas Process process will help you focus on your leadership moments and grow in the ways you address them.

Reflecting

The Barnabas experience combines outside expertise with the ingenuity, input, and inquiry of its participants. Your own experiences as leader and follower and those of the Barnabas Leadership Community and its coaches create a catalytic environment for real growth in leadership. “Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens the wits of another.” Proverbs 27:17 NRSV