Homegrown Leaders: How to Build a Farm System for Church Leadership

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome back to the DiscipleMakers podcast. We have a long-term friend of discipleship.org with us today, our friend Jim Putman. And Jim, man, I am so excited to have you on because not only are you an incredible author and leader, but honestly, Jim, and I mean this, man, I met you for the first time when we were in India.

0:32 You brought a team over multiple times in order to help pour into our leaders in India. And from that time on, you were just one of the best personal DiscipleMakers who's in a church leadership role that I've ever seen. And most guys talk a lot about this from the stage, but they're not living it out as well in the actual mud in the blood of ministry.

0:59 And you are doing an incredible job leading from the front, which is why I think your voice carries so much weight and authority in this area. And so I just want you to know how much that's meant to me personally, man, and how much it's meant to the discipleship.org community who's had a chance to listen to you and learn from you.

1:15 And so thanks for being on, man, and thanks for leading from the front in your life and in your ministry, bro. Thanks Josh. I love you. I love Bobby. I love you guys. I love doing stuff with people that are practitioners, not just consultants or idea guys. So most of what we learn, we learn in the blood and the mud, right?

1:35 And then we got to live it out and hanging in there with grit, no matter how hard it is. That's what you guys do. That's what we try to do. So I'm glad to be here. Yeah. Well, thank you, bro. Honestly, the big thing I'd love to hit on today, Jim, for our listeners and take as much time as we can, is you have a new book coming out called Homegrown Leaders, which, by the way, Jim, to talk about, you know, just for a second, other books that you've done.

2:01 I mean, I remember, man, it was probably 15 years ago when somebody handed me your very first book on disciple making when I was in India. And just the challenge that it gave me as a leader who was really wanting to live this out was just a powerful challenge. And the influence you've had, Jim, through your writings and through your speaking and just from the church there, real life, has been incredible.

2:32 Not only that, but the network of churches now that have developed from that, that are planting churches in different parts of the country and even helping ministries across the world step into this. I just want you to know that the time you've spent on your writings, Jim, have been a blessing to leaders all over the world.

2:51 And I personally have been one of those. And so thank you for taking the time and energy, Amanda, to put your learnings and the principles and even failures or roadblocks that you guys have faced in writing so that we can learn from those things. And this one, Homegrown Leaders, you and I were talking about a little bit before we started recording, just on you guys really putting principles down that you guys have worked out over years and years of ministry.

3:18 And so why don't you take a few minutes, Amanda, and just kind of tell us where this book was birthed from and kind of what is the main thrust that you're trying to help leaders with through this book? Yeah, you mentioned the first book I wrote was Church as a Team Sport. And I didn't learn how to lead really in a church setting.

3:38 I learned how to lead in a coaching sports setting. And then my disciple maker said, hey, all that stuff you learn is actually biblical. And it would work in a church too, which is where it was supposed to be lived out. And I'm like, really? I've never seen that. So I wrote that Church as a Team Sport.

3:59 And a lot of the principles I write about in Homegrown were embedded in that. But now you fast forward 20 some years. What does that look like now, right? What did we learn? I mean, we were doing it back then, but we had been in a bit of church for, you know, seven, eight years. What does that look like to keep doing that and even change sort of the ways we do it so that we're raising up, we're coaches, we're raising up players and leaders?

4:34 And you know, what are some of the real roadblocks we hit and what we do about it? So yeah, Homegrown Leaders was still the concept of raising up leaders from within. It was birthed from the idea that I had done a job of teaching the staff how to work with staff. And so our guys that we were sending out planning churches knew we had elders, knew we sort of had an eldership process.

5:04 But when they were getting out there, they didn't know how I lived with the elders day in, day out. It wasn't just a process to make elders. How did elders and staff work together? How did I work with both those things? And how to build a relationship around philosophy and vision mission, but in relationship?

5:25 How do you keep that? And so how did we build elders here that were really still in relationship with staff because they'd come through the whole process together? Both elders and staff were trained together before they ever became elders and staff so that when they were elders and staff, they were still in relationship and the structure was built to support that.

5:48 Relationship is a lot like oil in an engine. You can have all the parts. You don't have relationship, the engine fries. And so what did we learn? It's still built on this philosophy of our job is to equip the saints, to raise up people. It's all right there in scripture. Everyone's a disciple. Not everyone's a leader.

6:09 Not everyone's the same kind of leader. And so how do you build a homegrown structure with regular everyday people that survives time that continues the mission on? And it's really meant to be, as you said, these are principles. I'm not trying to be prescriptive. Some guys will go, I don't like how they fulfilled that, lived out that principle.

6:36 The principle though has to be dealt with and you got to do something with it. You may not like what we did, but it's really good walks through how we train people. It's supposed to be really like a practical guide to what we did, why we did it and sort of how we did it, which then puts it in your hands to go, well, what do I do with that in our setting?

6:59 Which is so good, Jim, because honestly the reality is, I think there is a, as you and I talked about earlier, Jim, I think there is a major shortage in America of leaders that are coming out of churches that are ready to actually step into leadership roles. I mean, you talk to almost any leader in the country, church leader in the country, and one of their biggest issues is finding staff that can really step in and lead at the levels that they need to lead at.

7:28 Even senior leaders, I mean, there is a major shortage of like senior pastor, preacher kind of people in order to take over for the last generation who's now retiring and wanting to hand over church. Many of them do not have successors lined up and many of them don't have people like Slingshot and Vanderbilt or having trouble finding good people in order to put in front of churches.

7:52 This whole idea, Jim, of creating a system, almost like a farm system within our churches to raise up people from within in order to help our church, and then also, I mean, I know you, Jim, personally, you've shipped out countless people from within to go either lead churches in other places or to be staff at other places.

8:13 So not only are you building a homegrown system to help your church flourish, but you're also very open-handed with those leaders in order to allow them, if they feel called to other places, to go and plant and do what God's calling them to do. Man, could you imagine if we had, you know, hundreds and hundreds of churches across the country that created these homegrown systems like you're talking about?

8:35 It would be a game changer for future church leadership. And so thank you for putting it out there, bro. Well, here's one of the things I do in the book that I think is unique. I think the system as it currently exists has a lot to do with why pastors don't stay where they are, why they're discouraged, why there's battles at the leadership level in churches.

9:01 I mean, think about it. Most people don't have a leadership system within, so if they have a college kid that wants to go into ministry, they send them somewhere else, right, to go to Bible college or to do whatever. They end up marrying somebody from somewhere else and then they never go back to their church or they don't usually go back to their church.

9:22 They go somewhere else. So now you're a young couple. You're going somewhere where you don't have relational roots, where you don't have grandparents and parents to help you raise your family. You're going to a place where all the people that are there typically have deep roots and you're the outsider.

9:41 You're supposed to bring a vision when you don't, you're not from that subculture. And you're going to go meet with elders that already have relationship. They already have a culture and as much as they want a different culture, everything you change impacts their relationships. They got somebody that doesn't like this or doesn't like that.

10:02 You're always the outsider. And the reason you don't have roots usually is because you're not there long enough because you move on to somewhere else because you hit an impasse or you don't have relationships. So the system itself, first of all, the church says when we're going to hire somebody, hey, what's your vision for our church?

10:25 Well, why don't you already have a vision for your church? If you haven't raised up a vision for your church and I got to have somebody else somewhere else to do it. Now I got it. Whether they like it or not, that church does have a vision for the church. Now you got two competing visions, you have relationships.

10:41 It's most of the time unspoken, right, Jim? The vision's unspoken, but they have one. They do. And so you're going to come in and change the culture without the deep relationships. And even if you're an older guy who's bounced around, you know, and again, then what happens is they build relationships and they do this, but then if they're older pastors and they stay and they get rooted in, but then again, they're still not raising people up from within.

11:07 They hire everybody from outside based on resume. And the problem with the resume is you put on there what you want, you put on there who you want and, um, and half the people that you bring in don't even define the same words the way you define those words. And so you're, you're taking a chance every single time versus if you raise them up from within, I know what we're going to get.

11:32 I know what they do. The bad and the ugly, all of it. Yeah. And so it, they're just, the system itself is broken in my view. And when I send people to another place, to another staff, I don't want them to just live in that culture. I want them to help change a culture to be a culture where we're raising people up from within.

11:55 Right. Um, yeah. So that that church develops a disciple making culture and in a disciple making culture again, it's not just vision or definitions, which is all important. It's it's deep relationships that help you survive living out the vision. Yeah. My relationships helped me survive the battle. Yeah.

12:18 They helped me dictate how we fight the battle. We get together on how to fight the battle. And then when, when the battle is being fought and I'm taking shots, we stick in there together. And if you don't start creating that kind of environment in your local church, then we, we are perpetuating, I think, a problem that, that, uh, uh, has developed over time.

12:38 A lot of people say, well, didn't Paul go from place to place to place? Yes, he did. But he also raised up leaders that were going to stay there and create a local culture that would be ongoing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's so good, man. I, I, what do you think, what, what was it, what was the moment Jim, when, cause honestly, We both were brought up in the traditional US culture of church, right?

13:04 Where a lot of times it's one or two leaders at the top. If it's a smaller church, if it's a bigger church, it's many more leaders. But the reality is the Holy Ephesians 4 vision that you have mentioned multiple times of our job is to equip the saints. Our job is to equip the people to actually do the work.

13:23 What was it that really shifted your mindset from this has got to be like a program driven staff, like is doing all the work kind of church to, no, we've got to get everyday ordinary people that are equipped, discipled and launched out to do the work. What was that pivotal moment for you? Because I think a lot of leaders will say, amen to the vision of this, but when it comes to actually implementing it and putting it into practice in their church, sometimes it's too far of a gap for them to jump from the program driven staff led ministry to equipping everybody to do the work.

13:58 What was that moment for you, bro? Well it goes all the way back to when I was a kid. When I said I was done with God and all that, my process was okay, I'll accept Christ, but I'll never accept the church. It's because I thought the church was running. I blame God for that because I thought the church was actually running according to scripture.

14:19 You thought the church was running God's playbook. Yeah. And then when I find out, wait a minute, but I experienced, for instance, let me just say this, go back to this issue of pastors moving around. I moved every few years, which meant that as a family, as a kid, I was following my parents and I was always the new kid who was trying to bust into relationships with people who had relationships for years.

14:46 I was always the third wheel. In every relationship I went into, the way church was being done impacted my life as a kid. I hated the church. For those of you that, for those listeners who don't know, you grew up with your dad being a pastor, right? Yeah. But he was a church planner. So he would go, the model was every two years you moved, three years you moved.

15:09 So I was always the new kid trying to break into relationships where everybody else had deep roots and I never did. And so trying to build relationships was, I mean, hard when you were going to move in a little while. And that impacted my family. All my family struggled with Christianity to one degree or another because of the way it was being lived out.

15:31 Secondly, my dad was, it was like, rather than him raising up people, he had to be the one that ministered to however many people there were. And so there was always a fire. My dad, if there wasn't a fire at home, he just thought, well, I'll just focus on fires everywhere else. Well, that led to a reactive relationship.

15:58 You're there when there's a problem, but there's not a lot of proactive to keep a problem from ever happening. Right. And so my dad, and actually he really did try to equip saints and elders and everybody else to some degree. But it's hard to do that when you're gone after a couple of years. Yeah. If you do it for a while, you get it up to a certain point where they're now ready to actually take ground, but now you're moving and you're starting over again.

16:24 Right. And so the model wasn't good for me, for our family as kids. It wasn't great for my parents. It didn't lead to long lasting from the bottom up churches. He would get started, then leave and started again. And then that church would hire some pastor from the system that would preach sermons and do it himself.

16:48 And it would top out or die. And it was very personality driven. And so the whole system, when I started looking at it from a from a even a sports mindset, if you're going to be a head coach in a high school, for instance, you have to raise up people from within. You can't recruit from without. And you have to start from little kids up and you have to have coaches year in, year out to build a system so that if they started when they were five, it's the same system when they're 15 and they can just live it out really, really well.

17:23 And it becomes year after year after year after year. Right. Yeah. And when I started looking at the scriptures. That local church raising up people from within, raising up people then where the church continues. But some people may go from place to place to place. One thing that my dad didn't understand, and even back then they didn't understand is using the Paul model.

17:50 Paul didn't have a family yet. Peter's ministry looked different. He had a wife. Yeah. You know, we don't know if he had kids or not, but there's if you're married, there's a different system you can run than if you're a single person that can bounce all over the country every two years. And they were, in my view, misapplying what was happening there.

18:12 And it was leading. It's led to a weak local church. Yeah. And so a strong local church raises up people from within with a culture. So now I have like right now, if I leave, I have like 12 speakers right now that can all preach. They could all go plant a church. They could all go lead a church. The pressure's not on me.

18:36 The people don't go, oh, Jim's not preaching. No, they actually go, hey, that guy, I actually like him better. I'm going to make sure I'm there for that. Right. If something were to happen to me, it continues on right now. I'm, you know, I'm 59. I'm actually thinking about retirement now, which I never, you know, I never thought I'd say that, but they've got five or six guys who can take my place.

19:03 Yeah. They've brought us from within all proven. They're going to have to pick which one. Yeah. Yeah. Which is beautiful, Jim. Honestly, that's that is so rare in a church, honestly, even large churches. It's so rare. They usually have to hire outside in order to get somebody who has the leadership experience and level of maturity needed.

19:25 And so that's really good, man. Well, it it's I just want to see churches survive the loss of personalities. Yeah. Right. I want to see churches where the senior pastor has relationship and accountability, which means he has to be living out a mature disciple is not just one who can know and do with his hands, head hands.

19:50 It's a heart. They have deep relationships that hold them fast. We were meant to have a book called Relationship for Pastors. Because they're the loneliest people on the planet. And it's because they're they're like we call it rock skipping relationships are moving so fast, they bounce off a relationship.

20:08 They don't go deep. They're at risk relationally, emotionally. They're at risk spiritually. The devil loves to isolate people, either because they keep everybody in an arm's length or they're so busy. They have all surface relationships. Yeah. And they're at risk. Their churches are at risk because it's built on their personality.

20:30 And there's a healthier way to do church. Yeah. And it's in it. And it raises up leaders to write stable leaders who have stable boundaries around them to hold them fast. Yeah. Yeah. That's really good, man. So if somebody is listening right now, Jim, they lead a church and they don't have a system right now at all.

20:49 Maybe they have a couple of people within their system that, yeah, maybe they've got some leadership potential or whatever, but the reality is they don't have a farm system. They don't have a homegrown leadership system like what you're talking about. What could be maybe a first couple of steps that they could think through if they want to start building a system like that?

21:12 And is there help out there for people that are wanting to really try to create something like this in their local church? Yeah, I would say always the first step for every leader. And we say this, I'm part of, we started the relational discipleship network. And that takes the principles that we learn here.

21:32 And we create coaching groups for people that are trying to shift their church to a disciple making church. And what we say there is always, don't go back and announce the revolution. Don't go back and, you know, from a conference and go, we're changing everything. Go back and go, I'm going to become a disciple maker.

21:49 Before I ever talk about this, I'm going to live this out. I'm going to be asking other people to do something they've never done before. So I'm going to go first. A good leader figures out what's right and goes first, models it. And so what does that look like to step in and start to be a disciple maker and have the mindset of, not only am I going to try to disciple everybody here, I'm going to create a disciple making culture where now multiple people can disciple.

22:19 So discipleship is happening. Then I want to be able to identify who here has a calling and capability in their life. Not every mature disciple is a leader. There's a difference. Yes, they can disciple a person, but that doesn't make them a group leader. They can have the gift of hospitality. They can have other gifts where they're just loving on people and encouragement and shepherding people.

22:45 Yes, they disciple, but not every disciple is a leader and not every leader is the same kind of leader. I got plenty of people that they can lead a small group, but they can't coach small group leaders. I got people who can coach small group leaders, but they can't handle 10, 20 groups because they don't have the leadership capability to pour into the 10 and 20 group leaders instead of trying to shepherd and go to the hospital.

23:11 You want people to disciple people and shepherd people. I'm not the player. I'm the coach and I make sure this is done, not I'm going to do it mentality. It starts with them becoming disciple maker first because you might have a good system of raising up leaders, but if they're not disciple makers, now you have people in leadership roles that aren't able to do the grit and the grime of a daily disciple making relationship.

23:35 So it's both and not one or the other. I know guys who are raising up leaders from within, they're focusing on leaders. They're not focusing on disciples. And the problem with that is that the people are just there to help raise up leaders. They're not there to be disciples wherever they work, live, and play.

23:52 You're here so that the leader can learn to lead. No, you're the front lines wherever you work, live, and play. And so you're unleashing everyone to do ministry and identifying leaders and helping them find their God-given role in your local community. And so it's a mindset, again, as a college coach, you can go all over the country recruiting high school state champions all over the place.

24:19 As a high school coach, you can't recruit outside of your, you can recruit in your school district to raise up people, but you can't go find them somewhere else. A lot of churches are like college coaches trying to recruit some already developed persons from somewhere else, instead of raising up a program from within using a sports analogy.

24:39 Yeah, that's beautiful, man. And you're, I mean, what a, what a, I mean, you've basically pegged the, the, the, the good and the bad of that. You know, I mean, sure. I'm sure college, I'm sure certain high school coaches wished they could do what college coaches do, but they can't, right. And so you've, you've hit it, you've hit it on the head, man.

25:00 And the reality is, man, if, if more and more leaders and church teams would have that high school coach mentality that, Hey, this is what we have. This is what God's given us. And we are going to pour our lives into these people and raise them up and help them to become all God's created them to be, man, what a, what a beautiful image of what the church was designed to be.

25:22 I mean, that's really a part of Jesus's dream of the church was that, you know, that it's a tight knit group of people that are family, that are pouring into one another and helping each other become the disciples he's created them to be. And so, honestly, if you're listening out there guys today, I hope you, I hope your heart is burning inside of you that you're longing for your church to be like this.

25:47 Cause it really, every time you kind of feel that burn, it's because the Holy spirit is placing something inside of you of, it's almost like a flash of, this is, this is what I dreamed of when I created this, like, this is what I want to take you into. And so Jim, thanks for leading from the front here, man, and challenging people that just saying, Hey, maybe the system's broken.

26:09 Maybe we're not doing it exactly the way the Bible calls us to. Maybe we need to go back to the gospels and the book of Acts and the letters that Paul wrote and really look at what, what was the church designed to be? What was the blueprint of the new Testament? How do we get back closer to what God created this to be and what he dreamed of?

26:28 And and so thanks for just consenting to push us in that direction. I think it's so, so important, man. And you're going to be at our forum in April, right? This awesome. So for, for those of you listening, we have our national disciple making forum coming up in April in Houston, Texas. You can find out more info at discipleship.org, but Jim is going to be speaking.

26:50 We're going to have other incredible leaders that are sharing the stage and really just casting vision about what it really looks like for us to own this mission of disciple making and becoming disciples who make disciples, but also creating culture within our church to do the same thing. And so you'll be able to get a lot more info.

27:08 Definitely come check us out. You'll get a chance to meet Jim and his team. I know Jim and the team does incredible breakouts as well at the forum every single year and, and really helps kind of coach the people that attend in this direction. And so if you're able to come, we'd love to see you, Jim, we are almost out of time, man.

27:27 I would love, is there, is there anything on your heart, brother, that if you had kind of a final word on this particular episode to leave to the listeners or something you want to challenge them with or something that they should be thinking about, what would it be a brother? Well, what's been on my heart for the last several years is, I believe everything God says is for our good, every command.

27:56 And when we miss something, it actually has a real life, real world impact. I'm seeing a lot of Christians right now, really struggling emotionally, mentally, lot of pastors. And they're living a life that, you know, it's the hard thing about being a pastor is people have been, I use the analogy of if I feed my kids Fruit Loops every single day and I go to a conference and find out Fruit Loops are rotting their teeth out, it's not good for them.

28:29 And I come back and go, we're not eating Fruit Loops anymore. We're going to eat a healthy cereal. You raise those kids to like Fruit Loops, and they're not going to be happy about a healthy cereal. Right? Yeah. And you're going to have to lead through that. We've raised up a culture of Christians who expect certain things from pastors that are killing the pastors.

28:51 And in order to lead, in order to change things, you're going to have to go back and even face your own people who got used to wanting what they wanted. They wanted an hour and 15 minute brilliant sermon one day a week. And that just leads them in this unhealthy place. They don't know it. That's what they were raised up to do.

29:11 They didn't know that they were supposed to get in the game. And so when you come back and you go, we're going to change things and I'm going to be different. It's for your good as a pastor, but you're going to have to face your own people who have been raised to like Fruit Loops. And it's going to take leadership, but for their own good, this culture will completely unwind you.

29:31 Our people are going to get more and more stressed and more and more struggle. And pastors, it starts at the base of the tree. If you're not healthy, if the branches get too big, it'll kill the base. And we got to get back to the base and then build churches where people are strongly abiding in Christ, abiding in relationship with other believers in a healthy way of life.

29:57 Adding Jesus to your life where it fits in for you will never, that was never Christianity. Denying yourself, following Jesus and following the ways of Jesus means abiding in Christ and abiding relationship with others that makes you strong enough to bear fruit. Right now, more than ever, we got to get back to real Christianity as it's defined in the scriptures and that's going to make you strong enough to handle things.

30:23 And so I just want to see people be relationally mature disciples of Jesus. Yeah, that's beautiful, man. Thank you for that challenge. For those listening, I mean, may we take some time after listening to this and look deep in our hearts, look deep in our church culture and really ask, is this matching up with what scripture says?

30:44 And are we creating an atmosphere that's just adding to the problem or are we slowly beginning to work our way upstream in order to make sure that we're, as Jim said, getting our people away from fruit loops and on to something a little bit more healthy. So that way we can help them become the people that God's called them to be and really lifting them up before Jesus and helping them encounter Jesus, fall in love with him and then live the way he's called them to live.

31:14 And that's going to be a game changer in churches across the country. So Jim, if somebody wants to learn more, if they want to check out this book or learn more about RDN and all of that, what's the best way for them to find out more? Just go to rdn1.com or my Facebook or Real Life Ministries or a lot of the books.

31:35 You just got to Google my name and it'll show you a bunch of the books we've done. We built a team and it's time to live out here. When does Homegrown Leaders come out? It's already out. You can go get it online right now. Awesome. Awesome. So yeah. So go check it out online, guys. Homegrown Leaders by Jim Putman.

31:52 And then Jim has a lot of other incredible books, guys. And so please check those out, too. Many of them have been pivotal in paradigm shifting in a lot of leaders' lives, including my own. And so please go check that out. Several years ago, Jim and Bobby Harrington did a book called Disciple Shift that was also incredible to help us shift in that direction.

32:14 So I could name many, guys. So go check them out. But this one, Homegrown Leaders, is the one that we really talked through some of the principles on this podcast. And so if you're wanting to create that system in your church, then definitely check that out as soon as possible. But Jim, thanks for being on, man.

32:30 I'm so grateful for your friendship. I'm grateful for your leadership and just super thankful that you were able to join us today, man. Thanks for being on. Hey, it's great to talk to you, Josh. Say hi to your family for me. Hey, you do the same, okay? And for those listening, hopefully we will see you at the forum.

32:47 Jim and I both will be there. And so we'd love to meet you and chat with you at the forum in Houston, Texas in April. But if we don't see you there, please check us out at discipleship.org. Check Jim's materials out on the Relational Discipleship Network. Did I mess that up, Jim? That's all right. Already in.

33:07 Already in. There you go. Already in. And until next time, guys, let's just be disciples who make disciples and make sure that we're living this out with all that we have. We love you guys, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.