Remember in Exodus when Moses is getting absolutely hammered in taking care of all the Israelite problems? Finally, his father-in-law, Jethro, pulls him aside and has the “come to Jesus” meeting with him that probably started like this: “Honestly man, if you don’t change something or slow down, you’re just going to keel over and die.”
He then gave some very shrewd advice in Exodus 18:
But select capable men from all the people — men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain — and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.
What Jethro seems to be suggesting is this (and Paul perhaps alludes to it as well): There is a grace that sits on people up to a certain threshold. Some people have a leadership threshold of 10. Some 50. Some 100. Some 1,000 (and so on).
But because we’ve bought into the Western myth that bigger always equals better, many assume that our grace is bigger than it actually is (or hope that it is). Here’s another way of putting it: It’s pretty important that, for the most part in your time of leadership, you operate in your grace sweet spot.
Some people operate best while leading only 10 people. That’s where they truly shine and feel most alive. For others, it’s 100. That’s where it all clicks for them: their grace, personality, gifts, experiences, skill set, etc. all come together.
As it relates to church planting: For people who have a grace that might exceed that of 100, church planting will probably be really hard. I mean epically hard.
And that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it if they are called to it, but it means they may need to understand going in that the skill set they have isn’t necessarily the greatest match for the skill set needed for starting a church out of nothing. There are people who are simply going to blossom and shine when they are leading larger groups of people — not because bigger is better, but because they just flourish there. That isn’t a value statement. But those same people can quickly look completely helpless and incompetent when trying to start a church plant with 10 or 50 people.
This isn’t to give them an excuse or to allow them to shrug off what is difficult.
I also don’t say all of this to discourage certain people from church planting. I think you can actually learn skill sets that don’t come naturally to you, and in many ways, God uses those times of weakness to train us, refine our character and draw us closer to him. But you should probably expect it to be a much slower process than for others.
I’m big on people understanding things as they are experiencing them or making sense of what they have already experienced. That’s how we learn.
