By Paul Khosla

Much is said about a leadership crisis in the church today. But what if the problem isn’t a lack of leaders, but a misplaced emphasis on leadership itself? What if the real crisis is that we’ve misunderstood Jesus’s invitation to make disciples? We all long to see more people come to know Christ, and we rightly examine what’s holding us back. But too often, our diagnosis leads us to systems, structures, and leadership pipelines. The New Testament, however, places its emphasis elsewhere. When Jesus called people to follow Him, He didn’t recruit leaders; He made disciples.

Consider Matthew’s calling: Jesus simply said, "Follow me," and Matthew did. No prerequisites, no qualifications. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus worked with whoever said yes. In fact, the term "leader"—as we understand it—is nearly absent from the New Testament. The Greek word often translated as "leader" (hēgeomai) occurs 28 times in the New Testament, but only four times is it translated into the English understanding of the word "leader." In contrast, "disciple" (mathētēs) appears 268 times. Another related word, proistamai, meaning "to lead," occurs eight times, but Romans 12:8 is the only occurrence where the word explicitly conveys the idea of engaging in the act of leading as a follower of Christ. Both of these words are translated in other ways where leadership is implied (e.g., the leader of a synagogue, or the pilot of a ship).

This isn’t just semantics. Words matter. They reflect priorities. Discipleship in the New Testament is the centrepiece of God’s strategy for the church. Jesus didn’t just lead from the front; He walked alongside. Where leadership often says, "Go do this," discipleship says, "Let’s do this together." Leadership might demand its followers to take ownership of their own mistakes; discipleship says, "I’m with you."

Jesus’s parting command in Matthew 28 wasn’t to develop leadership pipelines. It was to "make disciples of all nations" (verse 19). Why? Because discipleship is exponential. Leadership is often additive, but discipleship multiplies. Discipleship movements change the world. Leadership programs build teams. One isn’t inherently wrong, but only one is Jesus’s command.

The early church followed this model. In Acts, we don’t see centralized power structures; we see distributed authority. Decisions are made communally, not hierarchically. The apostles consult one another. Elders are appointed in every city. House churches multiply through Spirit-led initiative. Paul exhorts Timothy to entrust what he’s learned to faithful people who will teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2). That’s discipleship: generational, grassroots, Spirit-dependent.

We see further decentralization in the tearing of the temple veil (Matthew 27:51). No longer is access to God mediated by a priesthood or confined to a holy place. The Holy Spirit now indwells all believers. That shift is big. Power and presence are no longer centralized. Every believer is now a temple of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). Every believer is now called, empowered, and sent.

This decentralization of access to God wasn’t just symbolic—it was structural. In the Old Testament, God’s presence dwelt in the Holy of Holies, accessible only to the high priest. The tearing of the veil at Jesus’s death (Matthew 27:51) signified that this barrier had been permanently removed. The writer of Hebrews affirms that we now "have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus" (Hebrews 10:19). No more intermediaries except Jesus Christ.

The implications are massive. The people of God no longer gather around a single temple or centralized leader but are themselves the dwelling place of the Spirit. Peter calls us "a royal priesthood" (1 Peter 2:9), echoing God’s desire from Exodus 19—that His people would be a kingdom of priests. Not a select few, but a whole body, each member equipped and called to serve.

This idea of the church is inherently decentralized—not disordered, but distributed. Apostolic authority in the early church operated through mutual submission and relational trust, not corporate hierarchy. The Spirit was poured out on all flesh (Acts 2:17, ESV), and the fruit of that outpouring wasn’t tighter structures—it was bold witness, radical generosity, shared leadership, and spiritual multiplication.

This is why the early church turned the world upside down. They didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t build platforms or pipelines. They obeyed the Spirit, broke bread, preached Christ, and loved their neighbours. They may or may not have been leaders in the modern sense. But they certainly were disciples filled with the Holy Spirit, moving in obedience to Jesus.

This became uncomfortably real for me during my own ministry. Like many, I’ve leaned on leadership best practices—they work. Whether transactional, transformational, or servant in style, leadership techniques produce results. But they often leave us longing for something more. Something miraculous.

That’s where we return to Jesus. If He had a leadership style, it wasn’t servant leadership—a modern theory developed by Robert Greenleaf1—but something far more radical: sacrificial empowerment.

Philippians 2:6-8 tells us that Jesus, "being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing … becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross."

The imagery of a servant in this passage is not the main point—sacrifice is. Jesus held nothing back. He decentralized power at every turn. He didn’t simply delegate authority and retain control; He gave power away:

By not using His divine status to His own advantage.

By sending out His disciples to do what He did.

By dying for our redemption.

By ascending so the Spirit could empower us.

True discipleship does the same. It gives others choice, autonomy, space to fail, and the mercy to try again. It invites others into extravagant grace, not just helpful instruction. It doesn’t measure success by productivity alone, but by spiritual maturity.

And yet, many churches are tempted to measure only by numeric outcomes. Numbers. Growth. Visibility. Influence. These are not inherently wrong, but they can be misleading. If we bypass spiritual formation for strategic success, we may build large ministries on shallow foundations.

We’ve seen this firsthand at Faith City Church. When I became lead pastor during the pandemic, our active engagement dropped from 300 to around 180. Less than four years later, by God’s grace, we’ve grown to more than four times that number. But more important than attendance is transformation.

We didn’t build a leadership pipeline. We built a discipleship culture. No formal recruitment strategies. No leadership fast tracks. Instead, we followed the Spirit’s leading. That resulted in 30+ small groups, three locations, four main services, triple the programs, increased giving, an expanded local missional footprint, and increased global missions support.

One example is Simba. When Simba told me he was ending his board term early to follow God’s call to Alberta, it hit me hard. He had been instrumental in many initiatives over the years, including getting our livestream off the ground. People would say, "If only we had a guy like Simba…."

But they missed the point. Simba didn’t just show up and start leading. He was discipled. We walked together. We failed together. There were risks, trust, and vulnerability. Discipleship created fruit that leadership alone could not have produced.

The point isn’t that Simba was exceptional. The point is that discipleship unlocks God’s potential in ordinary people, like me. When he left, no one "replaced" him. Two others stepped up, not because they were recruited, but because they had been walking closely with Christ, and Simba was along for their journey. That’s the fruit of a discipleship culture. It’s not about backfilling roles. It’s about raising people up through our presence and pointing them to Jesus.

And we’ve seen it again and again—worship leaders raised from youth, elders developed from those who once sat in the back, new location pastors who never imagined themselves in ministry. This isn’t strategy; it’s spiritual formation, multiplied over time.

The challenge is that all leadership styles produce results. But if we measure only by numeric outcomes and not by spiritual formation, we set ourselves up for unsustainable ministry. Discipleship is God’s sustainability and multiplication plan. What discipleship requires—and what leadership styles often bypass—is sacrificial trust over time.

Jesus’s model was not to consolidate power, but to lay it down. He gave up heaven, then family, then His life. Not because He was weak, but because He loved. And because He trusted His followers with the mission.

And it worked. The church exploded across cultural, economic, and geographic boundaries—not through strategic planning but through Spirit-empowered obedience. There were no celebrities, no pipelines, no programs—just people who had been with Jesus (Acts 4:13), sharing what they had received.

If there is a crisis in the church today, it’s not the absence of leaders. It’s the absence of discipleship. Real, Christ-centred, power-sharing, life-on-life discipleship. That’s what changes local churches and their communities. That’s what births revivals and sustains them. That’s the Christ-initiated method of spiritual formation.

I don’t think we need better leadership pipelines. I think we need to give it all away in discipleship. That’s how the kingdom multiplies. That’s how Jesus did it.

1. Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader (Robert K. Greenleaf Publishing Centre, 1970).