Training young leaders - CCM:Academy

"Everyone's a learner and everyone's a teacher"

One of my favorite activities I am involved with is running our Saturday morning CCM:Academy. I am tempted to say this is our church training course, which would have gone completely against my philosophy of training that I outlined in my last blog in which I outlined a holistic approach to training based on an apprenticeship model.

CCM:Academy is just a part of our training program where our young and more mature leaders learn together in a very interactive way. Last Saturday we had another excellent morning where we looked at 12 leadership characteristics of a pioneer leader. I love these mornings where around 15 of us sit around a table eating mainly un-healthy food, drinking nice coffee and working our way through different church values and leadership themes. The approach we follow is that we are all learners and that everyone has something to contribute. This philosophy adds greatly to the learning experience.

The apostle Paul’s teaching style seemed on occasions to be more debate oriented. You sometimes see the term “he reasoned” when teaching or speaking. This would of been so different too much of the present day lecture based approach to teaching in the church. Part of our development program on CCM:Academy is to train the teachers to have the skills to navigate people through a debate and a conversation model of learning. Our aim is that truth is really imparted and learnt so that we don’t end the mornings with the sum total of people’s ignorance in their eagerness to voice an opinion.

Training young leaders – apprenticeship

"Very few young leaders seem to be carrying leadership responsibility in today’s church"

A few weeks ago I attended a gathering of church leaders which was led by one of the young men I have helped train. It was great to see him lead so well and carry off the morning with a lot of authority. Last week I was at a gathering of some 700 leaders from across the Newfrontiers movement. From the front I asked how many of them had led their first church in there twenties. Most of the senior leaders of the movement acknowledged that this is when they had first begun. It provoked me to think about leadership development and how very few young leaders seem to be carrying leadership responsibility in today’s church.

As a 16 year old I left school and signed up to work for a company who designed and installed heating and cooling systems. This was one of the many apprenticeship opportunities that were available to me at the time. Over the years as a church leader this approach to training has served me well and has been the main building block to how I have trained many young leaders.

The program covered a four-year period. It had a mixture of hands on and practical experience, where you would work along side a designer to learn your trade. The program was punctuated twice yearly with an intense 6 week college course where you learned more of the theory. Very quickly it was expected that you would take on more responsibility as you handled increasingly complex contracts.
The other lesson you learnt from day one was that you were expected to be everyone’s “gopher”. This meant making tea and fetching lunch, in fact anything that the engineers thought they could get away with you doing. You learned very quickly not to complain and to serve if you were not going to get totally frustrated.  I personally enjoyed the interaction and banter this gave me with some of the engineers and in the back of my mind I thought that someone else would soon come in and be the new “gopher”.

When you reached 21 years old a lot was expected of you and the whole program was designed to equip you for this. Jesus had even less time to train his next generation leaders and if you look at his methods many of the characteristics were similar to my apprenticeship. This also included the same out come. That after a relatively short period of time youngish trainees would be commissioned to take on major leadership responsibilities.