Dr. Robert E. Logan has over 40 years of ministry experience, including church planting, pastoring, consulting, coaching and speaking. Bob has authored many books that have proven valuable to trainers. Among them are Coaching 101, The Discipleship Difference and Leading and Managing Your Church. Bob earned his DMin from Fuller Theological Seminary. He counts it a privilege to walk alongside ministry leaders and help catalyze their ministries toward fulfilling the call God has placed on them, and he thrives in developing holistic and transformative resources that can easily be implemented in any context. Bob enjoys cycling and volunteering in a recovery community. For more information, visit www.loganleadership.com.
Before listening to the Bob Logan podcast, take this simple self assessment. Use the following scoring schedule.
1 – Never.
3 – Rarely.
5 – Sometimes.
7 – Usually.
10 – Always.
___ I have developed specific skills and techniques that I use to monitor energy level whenever the training involves group activity.
___ I know how to be a non-anxious presence when the people I am training need to vent.
___ When I am training, I consciously seek to minimize the amount of content I give because I want to say “just enough.“
___ As a trainer I seek to only model what the members of my cohort can do also.
___ The church planters that I am training know that I also have authentic relationships with lost people in the harvest.
___ Your total
- Now, grab a journal for taking notes and answering the following questions. Listen to the podcast featuring Bob Logan. As you listen, look to learn about how to make your training more reproducible.
- A prominent theme of Bob Logan‘s comments in this podcast is that we should make our training reproducible. Bob echoes the sentiments of the architect of Send Network Training, Mac Lake, who says, “When leadership development become reproducible it becomes unstoppable.” Which parts of your leadership training do you think are most reproducible and why? Which are not and why? What does that tell you about your next steps?
- Bob says, “The more gifted you are in a particular area the more you have to dial it back to demonstrate how non-gifted people can do it also.” In what area of training are you particularly gifted? How might your giftedness be hindering the reproducibility of your training? How might you “dial back” your giftedness in order to “dial up” reproducibility?
- One of the challenges for those of us in ministry leadership is the challenge of staying engaged in the harvest. To help him build relationships with the lost, Bob rides bikes with lost people and volunteers with the Salvation Army. He said, “As we train church planters, our personal involvement in the harvest makes us practitioners and fellow journey-ers. That’s when we will understand the challenges planters are facing. That’s when we won’t come across as a know-it-all. We will be encouragers and we will ask better questions. The planters will know if we have that integrity.” So, how do we increase our personal involvement in the harvest? When he was concerned about his own level of harvest engagement, Bob was asked by a mentor, “How can you free up one hour a week? What’s the best use of that hour?” Then He was asked, “How can you free up 3-5 hours a week? What’s the best use of those hours?” How would you answer those questions?
- We asked Bob how we can leverage our pain and suffering as trainers. He said that we need to make sure we 1) engage it, 2) process through it and 3) allow God to bring us comfort. He told a story about being deeply and wrongly wounded. He sought help from a counselor. He began to pray that God would bless the person who wounded him. He knew he was healed when God blessed the person and he was happy. Bob said that when we process our own pain well, we can be blessings to planters who have been wounded. Is there some pain in your life that you need to engage and process? Is there some unfinished business? What steps can you take to begin to deal with that pain so you can be a better trainer?
- Remember that our transformational training philosophy in Send Network Training is the Four E’s: 1) Explore – Think, 2) Experience – Try, 3) Evaluate – Talk and 4) Equip – Train. We want the planters to equip others on their own planting teams with what they are learning. That’s reproducibility. Bob says that he involves church planting teams in his training environments. He says that “Some church planters don’t have the capacity to translate the training to the team. Sometimes, the planter himself is the blockage.“ With our Send Network Training, the training of the team is not our model or approach. However, we realize that the entire team needs training. As you think about your training, what tools could you put into the hands of your planters so that they can reproduce the same process with their people?
- In wrapping up the podcast, Bob gave us two critically important questions to ask planters in order to increase reproducibility: “What’s next?” and “Who else?” How can you remind yourself to use these questions in your training in order to increase the likelihood of multiplication happening?
Write down your answers. Tell someone—a team member, a fellow trainer, or your Regional Send Network Trainer—about the changes you want to make. Ask them to pray with you and encourage you. Now, develop a strategy—your next steps— to make those changes a reality. Then answer the question, “Who else?” for yourself!
J.D. Payne has written an excellent academic paper about the missiology of Bob Logan. You can find it here: https://northamericanmissions.org/files/Bob-Logan-Article.pdf .
Published February 27, 2018