Mike Wilkins is the vicar at Holy Trinity, Huddersfield. After leading the Growing Leaders course in a previous church in Winchester, Mike has recently decided to bring the course to Huddersfield, where he has a desire to develop younger leaders.
He states: 'As a church, we were seeking to articulate our vision, and as part of that process we had a desire to grow new leaders from our congregation. A number of people within the church didn’t initially see themselves as leaders, but in them we could see real potential and wanted to give them the opportunity for development and to step up into leadership roles.
'We realised that a lot of our current leaders were in their 50s and 60s, and we really wanted to focus on growing some leaders in their 30s and 40s. So as a result we decided to run Growing Leaders. In total 16 people took part and completed the course over a 10 month period, which worked really well for us. We alternated who ran the course – one month it was my wife and I, the next was our curate and one of our readers.
'One of the recommendations of the course is that participants meet with a mentor between sessions. For us this came as a huge encouragement as were able to 'provide' each participant with a mentor from within the congregation. This was beneficial on both parts, as the mentors really valued serving in that vital role, and also the feeling of involvement in the process of growing these new leaders. Many of these mentoring relationships have gone on to continue to this day, as both parties have found it to be such a positive experience.
'We quickly found the course was highly valued, and that participants saw it as a big personal investment and felt it was really worth committing to. If more people in our church show an interest in developing their leadership skills, or we see gifts in others in the near future, we would definitely run the Growing Leaders course again.
'For me I really like the emphasis on character development in the course, which is so integral to somebody's leadership potential. Personally, I think character and relationship with God are the two most important things when looking to grow a leader - much more important than competence, which can be learnt.
'Since running Growing Leaders, we have actually restructured the leadership within our church, and some of those who took part in the Growing Leaders course are now in leadership roles. It has genuinely been so wonderful to see the leadership in our church being shared, and to see those people who we knew had a clear gifting being able to really use it and shine.
'I would have to say that the biggest shift since running the course has been bringing our church small groups to a close and instead launching new 'life groups', many of which are led by the Growing Leaders’ participants in our church.
'Though Growing Leaders is produced by CPAS, an Anglican Evangelical mission agency, I know of a nearby Elim church that is currently running the course, which really says something about the effectiveness and flexibility of the resource.
'I can't think of anything else that compares to Growing Leaders, in terms of what it achieves. We've learnt so much from doing it.'