In 1995, Andy Stanley (son of Charles Stanley, pastor of Atlanta’s First Baptist Church) met with a group of believers to cast a vision for a new church, “a safe environment where the unchurched can come and hear the life-changing truth that Jesus Christ cares for them and died for their sin.” For three years the group met in rented facilities every other Sunday night. By 1998 they had moved into their new home on an 83-acre site in suburban Atlanta. Today North Point Community Church draws more than 10,000 people each Sunday, including 3,700 members. Preaching editor Michael Duduit recently visited with Andy Stanley to talk about leadership, preaching, and innovation.
Preaching: In your book The Next Generation Leader, you talk about some of the key characteristics that young leaders need to understand. What led you to write that book?
Stanley: The Next Generation Leader was the result of monthly leadership lessons I do here with our staff. And our staff is young. Once a month — I got this idea from John Maxwell — instead of our normal staff meeting, I do training — we do outlines, fill in the blanks, the whole deal. I spend a lot of time developing these talks for our leaders; we've got about 180 full time staff. That's where this book came from.
I was essentially answering the question: if there were just a few things I could tell young leaders, what would they be? These are things I think leaders generally figure out anyway along the way — they're not original — but I thought these are things I wish I'd known earlier. I would have saved so much time and energy if somebody had said up front, "OK, you may not believe this but just trust me, this is true. Go ahead and apply this stuff and later on you'll look back and be glad you did." So it's basically a few things I wish every young leader — especially in Christian leadership — would go ahead and embrace because it makes the learning curve so much easier.
The first one is the whole idea of doing less to accomplish more — find your core competence and play to your strength, delegating your weakness. Determine to do that even before you can do that — of course when you start up an organization or a church, as you know, you have to do everything. But we know we're not good at everything and young leaders often make the mistake of trying to shore up their weaknesses and wing it on their strengths. I did that for too many years. I finally figured out I just need to do what I'm good at and let the other stuff go undone, then eventually somebody else comes along and does it. It's amazing.
We talk about clarity and how even in the midst of uncertainty leaders have to learn to be clear. Uncertainty is permanent — it never goes away. I am pastor of this big church with all these wonderful things going on and there's more uncertainty right now in my ministry than ever before.