Stepping Stones in Leadership

Revd Keith Addenbrooke, St James with St Bede, Birkenhead

I’ve now been an ordained minister for eighteen years, and this summer I changed jobs. It’s taken that long, really, to become someone who’s a bit more of a minister than a manager — and a bit less of a manager who happens to be a minister.

Before ordination, I spent eighteen years in industry — as an industrial manager, senior accountant, and finally a divisional finance director. So I brought into ministry a whole set of assumptions about leadership, strategy, and success that I’ve had to unlearn and relearn. Because the truth is, in Christian ministry, all those words — leadership, growth, strategy — they’re contested terms. You might not agree with what I’m about to say, and that’s absolutely fine. If what I share doesn’t fit your context, my question would simply be: what does?

Just to give you a sense of my old world: at one point, I had the dubious honour of being a finance director in a company that posted the biggest corporate losses in British history. My boss, the Group Finance Director, appeared on the front page of the Financial Times — not as a photograph, but as a rifleman’s target. It wasn’t exactly a career highlight!

Back then, I was a member of St John’s, Knutsford — Nigel [Atkinson, Vicar of St John’s Knutsford, present in the Seminar], who’s known me longer than I’ve been in ministry, might remember fishing me out of that particular hole. So Nigel, thank you.

That experience taught me a lot about what leadership isn’t. Because in industry, leadership was about position, titles, and business cards. But in ministry, leadership is far simpler — and far harder. A leader is someone who has followers. Full stop. They might have influence or significance, but they might never have a title.

The Bible is full of such leaders. Think of Noah — by trade, he wasn’t a boatbuilder. He was a farmer. But that’s exactly the skill he’d need after the flood. God uses people in the strangest and most wonderful ways.

Learning to Lead Differently

I got involved with Leading Your Church into Growth (LYCiG)— a course designed to help churches rediscover mission and vitality. I’ll be honest: I only said yes because I was offered a free place. I work in urban ministry, and that’s the only way you ever get to do anything! But it turned out to be transformative.

The course I attended had a distinctly estate and urban focus, which suited my setting perfectly. I now serve in St James with St Bede, Birkenhead — an area that has consistently ranked among the 100 most deprived communities in the country every time the Indices of Multiple Deprivation have been published since 2004. Generational poverty, social isolation, and low confidence form the backdrop of our ministry.

In that kind of place, you quickly learn that leadership looks very different. Some people in our congregation have never been to a meeting, so it’s no wonder they don’t feel confident speaking in one. Yet these same people have incredible gifts and potential — they just don’t know it yet.

Sister Val and the Laminated Prayers

One of the best examples of this came from my colleague, Sister Val CA, when I was previously in Tranmere. We were running a fresh expression of church — an Open Door Monday evening with a shared meal, followed by worship and Bible teaching [it was called Open Door, grant funded by the CofE Research Dept].

Val created something beautifully simple: a laminated pack of short graces — easy prayers to say before the meal. Suddenly, people were queueing up to take part. “Can I do it this week?” “Oh, someone’s doing next week — can I do the one after?”

That tiny idea — reading a simple prayer from a laminated card — became a stepping stone. For someone who had never spoken in public before, it was a first, gentle step into leadership. Within eighteen months, one of those people who’d once nervously read a grace was leading an entire evening’s worship. Their confidence had grown, one small step at a time.

So we learned something vital: leadership development isn’t about grand leaps across a chasm; it’s about placing stepping stones close enough that people dare to move.

Modelling Imperfection

Another thing I’ve had to learn is that if you want people to take those first steps, the far shore can’t look too far away.

In our church, we have a rule: It’s okay to make mistakes. In fact, the person who makes the most mistakes — and is seen making them — is me. Because when I stumble over a name from the Old Testament, or the slides go wrong, it sends a message: this is safe, this is family, this is worship.

A man once told me, “The reason I like you is you don’t pretend to know all the answers.” I wasn’t sure whether to take that as a compliment or not, but it told me something important. People don’t need flawless leaders — they need accessible ones.

Team and Trust

When Val joined us as a Church Army sister, one of the first things we did was go away — to a clergy conference, leaving the rest of the team to figure things out. We didn’t plan it that way as a clever leadership exercise, but that’s what it became.

While we were gone, the team discovered they could lead without us. They learned that leadership wasn’t about covering for the vicar — it was about shared ownership. When we returned, their confidence had grown. That’s leadership multiplication, not just delegation.

Community Bonfires and Local Faith

Last week in Birkenhead, we had our annual community bonfires — a long-standing local tradition. These events aren’t officially planned; they just… happen. The community organises them spontaneously and brilliantly. This year, the first bonfire was burnt down following a rumour the Council were going to remove it, so they built another in just two days — bigger than before.

You won’t read this in the Liverpool Echo, but when I went down to chat to the lads building it, they asked me to pray for the event. And when, the next day, nobody had been hurt, they told me, “See? The prayer worked.”

That’s leadership too — not the kind that makes headlines, but the kind that grows out of relationship, trust, and presence.

Stepping Stones, Not Finish Lines

Of course, not everything goes well. Sometimes it’s a disaster. My job as a leader isn’t to tell anyone off but to mop up the mess and help us get ready for the next try. Because we keep going.

When something does go well, we celebrate — but not too much. Because I don’t want anyone to think, “Well, I’ve done that, so I can stop now.” The idea is to keep people moving from one stepping stone to the next.

We learn from what didn’t go well. We celebrate what did. And then we take another step.