The most important thing a church leader can do is to simply meet with God. Solitude. Silence. Listening. Intimate fellowship with the divine.
The second most important thing that a church leader can do is to take a younger leader-in-training along with them to meet with God.
The most important thing that a younger leader-in-training can do is to learn how to meet with God. To apprentice in the ways of solitude, silence, listening, and intimate fellowship.
The second most important thing that a younger leader-in-training can do is to stay in “the tent of meeting” long after the older leader has left. To double down on meeting with God rather than rushing out into all the busyness of ministry.
If the value of meeting with God is ever superceded or pushed out by any other “important business,” then we’ve lost the plot.
If the Church of the future is to have any effectiveness in a post-Christian, technology-saturated, depersonalized and disconnected world, it is going to be because it’s leaders know how to be with God better than and before doing anything else for God.
(See Exodus 33:7-11).