By Adam Miller

Illustration by John Labbe

Youve reached the offices of the Metropolitan New York Baptist Association at 236 West 72nd Street in Manhattan. You ride the lever-operated elevator, a piece of machinery that came with the nearly century-old building. Stop at any floor, pull back the accordion-like gate and the metal door, then peek around the corner. Today you discover that Randy Singer is teaching a leadership class. As special assistant and general counsel for the North American Mission Board, Singer brings to the training both executive and legal perspectives. On yet another floor of the six-story building you find Gary Frost, executive director of the association, on a conference call with Steve Allen, a church-planting missionary who directs the multi-ethnic ministry throughout Greater New York.

Your tour of a sampling of the New York associations development of leaders lasts well into the night. In the evening you meet with David and Lily Gu, church planters from mainland China who are reaching the Asian population in Brooklyn, Queens and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Gus ministry is offspring of the Graffiti Church, a fellowship started by NAMB missionary Taylor Fields.

As a NAMB Strategic Focus City, New York is a nerve center for ministry among multi-ethnic groups, big business and media, college campuses, the rich, the poor, populations representing every area of the globe and just about every other facet of North American missions. Its a microcosm of the world.

We want to engage the culture in every possible fashion, says Dave Howard, NAMBs director of Strategic Focus Cities, who formerly served as the New York associations director of missions. If you define leaders as influencers, then its the Churchs responsibility to take leadership roles into ministry, the marketplace and everywhere else.

236 West 72nd Street is more than an address where church leaders get together and chat about their ministries and the needs of the city. Its a greenhouse where leaders are discovered, developed and empowered to reach a city in need of Christian leaderslay and careerwho will take light and love into the dark places. This is the North American mission.

Leaders wanted

My experience has shown that, if you find the right people, God will develop them into leaders, says Gary Frost, executive director of the Metropolitan New York Baptist Association and a former vice president of NAMB. Thats what Jesus did. He didnt just say who wants to be my disciple? The task of developing leadership is to identify those who have the raw material.

Frost himself is a testimony to how God prepares and develops leaders. Before joining NAMB, Frost served for 18 years as pastor of Rising Star Baptist Church in Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked in urban ministries. His work at NAMB put him in close contact with ministries to diplomats in Washington, D.C., and gave him opportunities to strategize effective ways to reach the urban centers of North America through NAMBs Strategic Focus Cities (SFC) initiative. He brings to his New York position a range of experiences and strategies in reaching people groups in urban contexts, plus leadership development skills and an appreciation for the importance of placing qualified leaders in strategic locations. He has done it all.

Through well-placed leaders like Frost, the SFC initiative and NAMBs training materials called Next Level Leadership, NAMB can assist churches and associations in finding and developing leaders who will take the helm.

They may be ministers, pastors and laypeople at the local church level or missionaries and people in associations and state conventions throughout North America. NAMB assists in developing

leaders among all age, socio-economic and ethnic groups by providing resources and training materials for state- and association-led programs.

Everything we do is through partnerships with our state conventions, says Chuck Allen, NAMBs chief operating officer. One of the obstacles organizations have is always assuming that equipping leaders means just holding some workshop out there. Equipping leaders is at the root of our existence as a convention. We have to have a solid theology of leadership so that at our core we are developing leaders.

You dont develop leaders corporately. You develop them one person at a time. This is why developing leaders is done most effectively through mentorship at the state, associational and church levels.

Leaven needed

Without vision the people perish, and without leadership theres no vision. And without a large number of believers accepting the leadership roles to which God has called them, theres no one to carry out the vision God has given the Church. Leadership is foundational. Without Christ there is no church. Without the leadership of Peter, there is no foundation. Without Pauls vision, the gentile world might have continued in spiritual darkness.

Of course God is not calling all believers to the same level of leadership, but all believers are called to be leaders. When we talk of leadership we talk in terms of circles of influence. No matter who we are there are people in our lives whom we influence. Whether its our family, our friends, or our state legislature, God calls us to take the helm of leadership where we are. We are the leaven who are called to weave salt and light through assisting in church planting, taking part in evangelism projects, heading up Bible studies in our apartment complexes or places of employment or mentoring our children to be on mission.

This is the North American Mission Boards vision as we move further into a new century, a new millennium and an ever growing, ever diversifying North America.

Adam Miller is associate editor of On Mission.