In his book The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is the Time to #Join the Ride, Darren Hardy quotes a leader:

The only constraint of a company’s (or church’s) growth and potential is the owner’s ambition. I am the constraint. The market, the opportunity, everything is there. It’s up to me to set the pace, clear the obstacles, get the resources, and create the conversations to grow the company faster. As CEO, the most important thing I manage is myself. Do that right, and everything else falls into place.

Yet, this is one of the hardest things for a leader to do, to look in the mirror.

At every stage of a church’s growth, one of the main barriers to its growth and health is the lead pastor.

Yes, buildings get too small, you run out of kids’ space, ministry ideas get stale, but what often happens is a church grows past how a pastor is leading.

Every time a church grows, a ministry grows, a team or staff gets larger, you need to change how you lead, what you do, and what you don’t do. If you don’t make those changes, you will find yourself treading water, and ultimately you will stunt the growth of your ministry.

If you’ve gone through the barriers of 50, 100, 200, 400 and beyond, you know this to be true. What I did when the church I lead was 100 was not what I could keep doing at 200. And now that we are moving toward 500, I’m finding that how I lead, what my hands are in and what decisions I make, are changing again.

As a leader this is painful.

For those connected to you as a lead pastor, this is painful and exciting.

It is painful for some because the meeting they used to have with you they will now have with someone else. The decision you used to give feedback on, someone else will give feedback on.

It is exciting because they get to lead in a way they haven’t before. Right  now I’m handing more and more decisions off to other leaders and I’m making less and less daily decisions about my church.

This is exciting for everyone involved, but it feels weird for the leader who used to be involved with more things.

Yet, for a church to grow a leader needs to get out of the way so more leaders can play and use their gifts.