I can’t deny it. There was a smirk on my face as the vaccination doctor explained to my wife Nora the series of shots she was about to receive.

I really tried to appear sympathetic. Really.

It’s just that having been vaccinated myself a year earlier it meant I could simply sit back and read a magazine while Nora received vaccination shots against all manner of exotic diseases. I just found that to be somewhat, well, funny.

In a few weeks Nora and I are privileged to be traveling with World Vision to experience some of the work they are doing in South Africa. Now, having made this trip myself a year earlier and having been vaccinated at that time, I somewhat smugly pointed out that I didn’t need to get shots again this year.

The doctor looked at my file and clarified an important point. “The reason you don’t need to be vaccinated is not just because of the shots you received a year ago,” he explained. “It’s because of what happened afterwards.”

Closing the folder on his desk the doctor looked up and continued. “You see, you came in for a follow up booster shot six months later. With that follow up shot you’re good for 20 years.”

Here was yet one more example of something I’ve been thinking, and writing, a lot about recently; the importance of the follow up. I’ve been especially emphatic about the importance of follow up as it relates to The Global Leadership Summit.

Every year I see thousands of Canadian church leaders attend the Summit, and I’ve realized that those who get the most out of it always have some sort of follow up ‘booster shot’.

I recently talked to one of our Summit host pastors, Jeff Lockyer, about the importance of the follow up booster shot. Check out what he had to say in this short video clip.

My vision is to see every leader who attends the Summit receive some sort of follow up booster shot in their leadership. So roll up your sleeve and let’s get at it!

What does your Summit booster shot look like?

Several years ago my dad served as an unpaid staff administrator at a medium-sized church near Vancouver, BC. Fresh from a top level corporate career, some of what he encountered on a church staff left him a bit puzzled as to how things work in the church world.

For instance, on one occasion he had to ask one of the pastoral staff to carry out an assignment slightly outside his usual “job description”. Now, while my dad clearly had the authority to issue this assignment, the pastor gracefully declined. He explained that he simply didn’t have a burden for such a job.

“I didn’t know you could say this to your boss when you work in a church,” Dad would later mention to me.

What he didn’t realize, but would quickly learn, is that sometimes church leaders play the “burden” or “calling” card, when what is required is the “servanthood” card.

A burden, or calling, is that God-given passionate holy discontent that drives you to make a significant Kingdom impact with your one and only life.

Servanthood is an ongoing posture of doing whatever it takes to get the job done.

Here are a few guidelines:

• When you’re mapping out where God is directing you to go in the long-term, it’s time for the burden card.
• When it’s all-hands-on-deck cleanup day at the church, it’s time for the servanthood card.
• When you’re making ministry career choices, play the burden card.
• When your supervisor asks you to help another department complete a project, play the servanthood card.

Managing the tension between these cards is an important part of leadership development. When we get it wrong the Kingdom feels the strain. But when we get it right God can leverage our leadership and submission for maximum results.

Add to this list of burden versus servanthood guidelines and I’ll post them at a later date.

During our recent strategic planning process we came to a point where we had to call a “time out” and address the fact that something fundamentally had shifted in the local church in recent years.

As a ministry we always have been, and always will be, about equipping leaders to build an Acts 2, “prevailing” church. But what we were recognizing was that God was doing such a new thing in the local church that the very definition of what it meant to “prevail” was changing.

Not long ago we would have identified the hallmarks of a high-impact church as one whose various sub-ministries were firing on all cylinders. We would look for a church where the children’s ministry was rocking, where the youth department was leading kids to Christ, where small groups were flourishing, and so on.

And while we still want to see these things happen, something has changed.

Here’s the way we articulated this change in our planning process:

The local church in Canada is reaching her full potential not based solely on having robust ministries, but more so by virtue of her robust leaders, on mission, wherever they are.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that one of the indicators of a prevailing church is that her people are living life fully on mission for the King in the workplace, in their neighbourhood, at school, wherever God has placed them. In other words, that person might very well be living out their Kingdom call not by serving on the finance committee of the church, but by impacting the lives of the finance department in their office.

It’s a new day for the local church. And we’re re-calibrating The Leadership Centre Willow Creek Canada to help church leaders build a new kind of prevailing church.

How do you think the “missional movement” will impact the local church in Canada?