The Problem With “Natural” Leaders
Church Planting, Formation, and the Long Obedience of Leadership
When my wife and I moved to Mexico City we struggled with having a bit of time on our hands. It turns out that as much as we initially enjoy this, it began to get a bit tedious. Now, this was in 2007, and we didn’t have smart phones, iPads or streaming services.
But we did discover DVD box sets!
Now, for anyone of a younger vintage than me, box sets were physical DVDs of TV series. Our schedule was packed in some ways as we were language learning, so we got up and left home by 6am to fight the traffic, descend into the metro, and arise into a chaos of people and smog. All narrated by the various smells of street food vendors reheating the previous day’s food for sale… Ah, street tacos. Delicious but deadly!
When we returned home, we were physically and mental shattered. Six hours of language learning, multiple cups of coffee, a return journey in the bedlam of travel, (and perhaps a few street tacos), made us feel like zombies! So we would grab a cold coke, fall down on the sofa, and insert a DVD of CSI, or 24, or a show where we were entertained by didn’t have to think that much. When we returned home to Ireland after our time in Mexico, we didn’t have language to learn, but we did still watch a series together. In 2011, one of my favourite ever series was released, Lie to Me. It had a short run, was fun and intriguing, and it starred Tim Roth basically acting as Tim Roth!
Lie to Me was a kind of crime series based around a ‘specialist’ like many others. In this case a behavioural analyst who could find a truth which is always just beneath the surface, hiding in the flicker of an eyelid or the twitch of a lip. At the centre of the story was Dr. Cal Lightman (Roth), a brilliant but troubled human lie detector who leads a small team of specialists hired by everyone from anxious parents to federal agents, all desperate for answers that only the face and body can give.
Stay with me, I’m probably not doing a good job at selling it!
The interesting bit for me was that it drew on real psychological research into micro-expressions and body language.
Science, so you know it’s true!
For three seasons this premise drove a steady stream of cases and moral dilemmas, until the show’s run came to an abrupt end when the network cancelled it, leaving the world of The Lightman Group frozen mid‑investigation, and me lamenting it’s loss in light of how terrible shows like Desperate Housewives got 45 series returns.
What Has This Got To Do With Church Planting & Mission?!
If you are still with me, and are wondering where I’m going with this, the series also highlighted something that intrigued me in the formation of people for the work of ministry. One of the more perceptive dynamics explored in the television series was the tension between instinct and formation. The show centres on professionals trained in behavioural science, people who have devoted years to the disciplined study of micro-expressions, deception patterns, and cognitive tells. Their expertise is technical, acquired, and defensible. Alongside them is the character Ria Torres (Monica Redmond), whose ability to read people appears almost untrained. She sees things before the ‘experts’ do. She reaches accurate conclusions without being able to narrate the method that led her there. Her insight is immediate rather than constructed. She is a ‘natural,’ and this causes a mix of chaos, jealously and friction. She can ‘do’ naturally what people spend their life studying to acquire. It’s a theme akin to other movies, Good Will Hunting for example. Those who just ‘have’ that special something struggling how to cope with it, while those shaped by formation struggle with what comes natural to them.
What makes the series interesting is that it refuses to romanticise either position. Ria’s instincts are often correct, but they are also volatile. Without interpretation, accountability, or restraint, her insights become reckless. Conversely, the trained experts, for all their data and frameworks, sometimes miss what is happening directly in front of them because they are looking for confirmation within their systems rather than attending to the human reality of the moment. Truth emerges most reliably when instinct is disciplined and training remains flexible.
Church planting and missional approaches to ministry inhabit an interestingly similar space. It is a form of leadership that exposes assumptions about calling, gifting, and readiness very quickly. In pioneering contexts there are few inherited structures to lean on. Leadership is visible, formative, and consequential from the outset. As a result, differences between those who appear “natural” leaders or missionaries and those who have been slowly shaped through training feel sharper here than almost anywhere else in ministry. The question is not whether these differences exist. The question is whether the church has learned how to interpret them faithfully.
Why This Tension Persists in Church Planting & Mission
The naturals-versus-trained conversation refuses to disappear because church planting itself acts as a crucible. (Thanks Dr Wilson!) It reveals what leaders trust under pressure and what churches reward when outcomes are uncertain. In settled and established congregations, leadership deficiencies can be absorbed by systems, traditions, or inherited grace. In a plant, leadership is the system, at least initially. When something works, it is immediately attributed to the leader. When it fails, there is nowhere else to look.
It’s hard to blame someone when you are the only someone!
Western evangelical culture has tended to exacerbate this by celebrating and platforming immediacy. We tell stories of rapid growth and decisive vision. We platform leaders who gather people quickly and speak compellingly about the future. Over time, this forms an implicit hierarchy. At the top sit those who appear to possess an instinctive capacity for leadership. Below them are those who needed time, training, and formation to grow into similar responsibilities. Don’t believe me, attend a Christian conference, and see if you can spot the often invisible (sadly not always) velvet rope.
This hierarchy is rarely articulated, but it is deeply felt. It shapes who is trusted, who is fast-tracked, and who is quietly advised to “keep learning.” The irony is that Scripture offers little support for such ranking. Biblical leadership is rarely affirmed at the point of first competence. More often, calling is clear long before character is ready to carry it. Yet the church repeatedly mistakes early effectiveness for maturity, particularly in high-risk, high-visibility contexts like church planting or cross cultural mission.
The Attraction and Danger of the “Natural”
There is no virtue in denying the reality of natural gifting. Some church planters arrive with an unusual capacity for risk, vision, and relational connection. They communicate the Gospel with ease. They are comfortable acting amid ambiguity. They gather people quickly, often before they have gathered an idea on what to do with them. In unsettled environments, these instincts can be profoundly useful. They plant a ‘church’ quickly, and yet the proof of the pudding is how it sustains, how decisions are made, and who else is developed. We would do well to remember that a crowd is not always a church. (For more on this read this, read my article Church Planting Without The Church) [LINK]
What is often overlooked is how these natural gifts shape a leader’s formation environment. Natural leaders receive affirmation early and often. Their instincts work well enough that they are rarely forced to slow down, explain themselves, or submit their decision-making to others. Over time, this can produce a subtle independence. They trust their read of situations more than communal discernment. They rely on intuition where Scripture or tradition might require patience.
In Lie to Me, Ria’s insights are powerful precisely because they are unmediated. But that is also what makes them dangerous. She knows what she is seeing, but not always how to interpret it or how to act responsibly upon it. Without formation, her gift would not mature into wisdom, it would ‘mature’ into reactivity.
In church planting, unformed gifting often becomes impulsiveness, and it does so quickly. Charisma almost always accelerates influence before character has been tested. Momentum masks fragility in both the leader and their community. So, when difficulty eventually arrives, and it always does, the leader may find they have not developed the internal resources or communal habits required to endure it. Burnout, isolation, and moral failure are rarely the result of doing too much. They are more often the result of carrying influence without formation. We have seen this play out over the last 30 years in small rural churches and on the platform of big city mega-churches. Scale is not the issue. Affirmation of ‘naturals’ too early is.
The Slow Authority of the “Trained”
By contrast, other church leaders come to leadership through a slower, more deliberat path. They are aware of what they lack. They read widely. They are shaped through apprenticeship rather than accelerated connections. Their confidence, such as it is, develops after practice rather than before it. These leaders often learn theology not as a step on the road to ministry, but as a framework for discernment. They think about ecclesiology because they know that their personality will not carry a church through conflict or rapid growth. They attend to systems often because they love structure, but also because they understand their own limitations. As a result, they frequently build cultures that are shared rather than centred on personality, and structures with good administrative purposes.
The danger for these leaders lies elsewhere. Less pioneering exuberance, and more cautious restraint that leads to inertia. I’ve seen this is church planters who talk about plans, processes, strategy, vision plans, and never take the step of doing these things in real life. As one mission leader told me once, paper plans are always great until you add people to them. Preparation can become a refuge from risk. Endless training courses to make ready can quietly replace obedience. When comparison with more visibly gifted leaders sets the pace, trained leaders may internalise the belief that confidence must precede calling, rather than the other way around. The other danger is that they struggle to develop more ‘natural’ leaders as they are fearful of their apparent chaos and see it, sometimes rightly, as immaturity that would prevent them from leadership.
In Lie to Me, the trained experts sometimes dismiss Ria’s insights because they do not arrive through recognised method. In doing so, they miss truth that is genuinely present. Over-reliance on process can become its own form of blindness. Formation is meant to serve attentiveness, not replace it. They understand something, but they just don’t get it.
The Church’s Mistaken Ranking of Leadership
The church’s failure has not been in recognising these differences, but in ranking them. Gifting has been treated as primary, formation as secondary. Training has been framed as something you undergo until you are ready to lead, rather than something you submit to because you are leading. We might parrot the ‘God equips the called, He doesn’t always call the equipped,’ but whereas both of these might be true, they both have their issues. Scripture consistently undermines this logic. Moses is hesitant and slow of speech. David is overlooked. Jeremiah protests his youth. Peter’s confidence outpaces his maturity. Paul’s early zeal requires years of reorientation, and a little journey into blindness! In biblical terms, formation is not an interruption to leadership but the means by which leadership becomes trustworthy.
When early effectiveness is used as a proxy for readiness, churches train leaders to perform rather than to endure. The result is not simply burnout, but instability. Churches planted on under-formed leadership inherit that fragility whether they acknowledge it or not. However, the pendulum can swing the other way, and I have been beating this drum over the past 10 years. We should be wary of ‘naturals’ to an extent, but not to the extent that our leaders are encouraged to be ‘safe.’ It is no surprise therefore to see missionary sending from churches down, recruitment to cross cultural mission agencies reducing, and church plants in familiar places rather than pioneering settings. Perhaps we’ve lost a bit of our apostolic zeal in the desire to produce steady leaders.
Formation as the Missing Category
I think, and rightly so, we are beginning to move away from the word training and more into formation. Many times in my ministry, people have come to us to investigate a path towards pioneer church planting. They’ve been to conferences, read books, listened to podcasts, and are ready and raring to go. These have been both ‘naturals’ and ‘trained’ people. Yet, the answer I give to both is that they don’t need released as naturals, or more training for the already trained, but they need formation. What both naturals and the trained require is not affirmation of their starting point, but submission to this formation. Formation is the slow shaping of perception, desire, and reflex. It teaches leaders not merely how to act, but how to discern when action is faithful, and when it is not.
Training, properly understood, is not remedial. It is protective. It introduces friction into leadership development, and friction is where discernment grows. It forces leaders to articulate why they do what they do. It exposes assumptions. It interrupts instinct with reflection. And it’s interesting in academic settings to see the students who do, and do not, struggle with more reflective type assigments. Naturals because they are more impulsive than reflective, the trained who can be more theoretical than personal.
Ironically, the most gifted leaders often require the most intentional formation. Their strengths allow them to bypass processes that would otherwise shape them. It’s often interesting that the leaders of mission and church planting networks with superb assessment processes have often not passed through these processes themselves. Yet, without formation, instinct remains powerful but shallow, effective but brittle. Character, in this sense, is not moral flawlessness, as if that were possible. It is the capacity to receive correction without collapse and to remain teachable under pressure. That can’t be found in a book or gleaned from a course, but from deep formation and formative experiences steeped in God’s grace. And it is the great developer of one of the most important trait for a leader, resilience.
Integration Rather Than Balance
Ok, I’m trying to get us to a place of of ‘So What? What do we do now?” The answer is not balance, as though gifting and training were competing powers to be evenly distributed. Or to make sure you have equal numbers of these people on your team (although this isn’t a bad idea to think about!) The answer is integration. Gifting must be interpreted through formation, and training must remain responsive to lived reality rather than abstract method.
In Lie to Me, their insights become trustworthy only when instinct and discipline informed one another. Watch the series. Occasionally this causes problems, but they always come to join forces, develop understanding, catch the bad guy, and save the day.
It’s TV remember, not real life, as my kids remind me!
Of course, ‘real life’ church planting and missional ministry does require this same integration. Vision without formation becomes reckless. Formation without courage becomes inert. Sustainable leadership and mission emerges where instinct is shaped, not suppressed, and where training serves patient obedience rather than replacing it.
The healthiest church plants often reflect this integration at a team level. Visionaries alongside builders. Starters alongside sustainers. Pioneers alongside plodders. (Ok, I’ve ran out of these now!) This is not as strategy per se, but as acknowledgment of human limitation and shared dependence.
Developing & Becoming the Kind of Leaders the Church Needs
Church planting and mission does not need more impressive starters. It needs leaders who can endure complexity without collapsing into either arrogance or fear. The most dangerous leaders are not the ungifted or the untrained, but the unformed.
If you are considering church planting or missionary service, talk to folks who will help you process both who you are, and the type of formation you might require. Whether leadership came to you instinctively or through long preparation, the call of God is the same, and many of the expectations.. My advice is that we submit to the slow, demanding work of becoming Christlike in public first. Develop a missional life, exercise wisdom in sharing the Gospel in your own context. Allow your gifts to be shaped in a church setting. Allow your training to be embodied by serving the people God has placed you in.
If you are currently in leadership, ask yourself the questions I’ve been asking myself. This article came from a series of questions that God has been poking into my head and heart in the last year as I’ve been seeing our church transition into a healthy sharing of leadership. One of the best pieces of advice in doing this came from a friend when he said, “allow your leadership to remain accountable.” This works for both ‘naturals’ and the ‘trained.’
In the end, the question is not how naturally leadership came to you, or how long it took you to learn it. The question is whether you were willing to be formed by God for the sake of his church. That work is slow, often unseen, and rarely celebrated. But it is the only foundation strong enough to bear the weight of planting something meant to last.