Ep. 1 - The Urgency of Leadership Development in the Local Church

The Urgency of Leadership Development in the Local Church 

Host Mark Warnock introduces the Church Residency Podcast with a discussion of the urgent need for new Christian leaders of all types: pastors, missionaries, church planters, and others.  

Key topics: 

• The rising median age of pastors from 44 in the 1990s to 57 in 2020, and what it means for church leadership succession 
• The demographic decline of younger generations in the church and its impact on future leadership pipelines 
• The importance of churches owning the leadership development responsibility rather than relying solely on seminaries 
• How residencies serve as an effective model for training future pastors, missionaries, and church planters 
• The biblical foundation from Jesus and Paul for developing leaders within local churches 
• Practical steps to start a church residency, even for small churches, including partnerships and resources from Send Network 
• The value of community and shared learning among residency leaders to improve programs and avoid imposter syndrome 

Timestamps:  

00:00 - Welcome and overview: why leadership development is urgent for the church  

00:28 - The current crisis: median pastor age rising and implications for church continuity  

01:25 - Statistical snapshot: age shifts and future leadership gaps  

02:21 - The looming retirement of a generation of pastors and the church's need for new leaders  

03:47 - Demographic and cultural factors reducing the pipeline of future pastors  

04:44 - The challenge of seminary pipeline and church-based leadership cultivation  

09:52 - The biblical model: Jesus and Paul’s methods of developing leaders during active ministry  

10:20 - Practical example: churches of all sizes implementing residencies today  

13:38 - How to start a residency: resources, workshops, and partnerships. 

15:32 - Encouragement for churches outside SBC to create their own residencies  

16:30 - The vision: every local church raising up leaders from within  

17:29 - The importance of leadership training for the next generation’s church continuity  

18:51 - The sharing of different approaches to residency programs and community building among leaders  

20:42 - Calls to action: listen, share, and start or improve your church residency 

Resources & Links: 

• Send Network Residency Builders 
• Church Residency Starter Kit  

Connect with Mark Warnock: 

• Email 
• LinkedIn 
• Facebook 
• Instagram  

Click here to access the FREE Church Residency Starter Kit.

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Sign up to attend the Residency Builder Event in Jacksonville, Florida

September 29-30, 2026

https://www.sendnetwork.com/events/residency-builder-jacksonville-fl/

Transcript

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Whose problem is this anyway? We have this fall-off in Christian leadership. We have this dwindling number of rising Christian leaders. Whose problem is it? And the answer is that it is our problem. And if we don't own it, well, I'll put it to you this way: I'm afraid to stand before God and say to him that I did nothing about it. I do have really good news is the crisis is really severe and really important, but the solution is right in front of us. It's not a new solution, and I believe it is completely attainable by every church. What I want to suggest to you is that it is the New Testament normal pattern for ordinary local churches to raise up, develop, and send out new pastors, missionaries, church planters, and other kingdom leaders. Where else are they gonna come? Hello, friends, and welcome to episode one of the Church Residency Podcast. My name is Mark Warnock. I'm your host. I'm a church planning catalyst with Sen Network, which is the church planning network of the Southern Baptist Convention. And I'm also the director of the residency program at Family Church here in South Florida. I've been teaching in this residency since 2015, and I've been leading it since 2019. And in those years, I've been able to connect with other people, other pastors and churches who have residencies, and I've been discovering how they're training new pastors and church planters and missionaries and leaders at their churches. And so super fired up for this opportunity to have this podcast and to be in this conversation with you today. To kick us off, I want to talk about two things. First, I want to talk about why residency is so critically important. I think it's way more important than we think it is. And I hope to convince you that if your church doesn't have some way of developing leaders, that you should start a residency right now. And after that, uh, I want to talk about who this podcast is really for. So let's begin with why. There is a crisis in leadership in the church today. It's been rising like a tsunami, slowly building over decades, but now it's cresting and it's starting to crash. And I want to illustrate this with a statistic. Back in the 1990s, when I began my ministry career, the median age of pastors was around 44. And what that means is about half the pastors in America were younger than 44, and about half of them were older than 44. So we had we had in those days a good mix of seasoned veteran pastors and younger, fresh blood pastors with new passion and new vision. Well, that number has slowly been climbing for the past few decades. At last check in 2020, the median age of pastors was 57. I've read a few people who believe that it has crept further upward in their intervening years, and it might even be closer to 60 by now. But let's just stick with 57. So this means that half of the pastors are older than 57, and half the pastors are younger than 57. And just for comparison, the median age of everyone in the U.S. is 39 years old. Back in 1992, only a quarter of the pastors were older than 55, but today half of them are older than 55. And so this hits me because I'm 55 today. I've been in vocational ministry for over 30 years. And it is crazy to me that I'm still in the young half of pastors. In fact, I could even need five more years of experience to get to the old half of pastors. But that's not the really important point. The really important point is that over the next 10 years or so, half of the spiritual leaders in America more than likely are going to step into retirement or into heaven. And so the question quickly follows, friends, is do we have enough rising young pastors, not to mention student pastors, kids pastors, worship pastors, church planters, missionaries, do we have enough coming up to replace half the pastors in the country? Well, let me end your suspense. We do not. We're not talking about growing or expanding the kingdom or starting new churches or ministries. And this, friends, is why it's a crisis. And so unless something changes dramatically, we are looking at certain decline for the church. If you've been part of a pastor search team recently, or for that matter, really trying to find any church staff position, you will quickly realize that the pool is not very deep. And in some places and some contexts, it's nearly empty. There's a denomination other than mine. I spoke to some of their leaders a couple years ago, and they told me that they've had congregations go years without so much as one application for a vacant pastor position. And friends, if we do not find a way to address this problem, you and I, us, this generation of Christian leaders, if we don't find a way to address this problem, my fear is that we may leave as our legacy that we presided over the largest contraction in the Christian footprint and influence in the history of America. Because if we don't have pastors, we're not going to have churches. They're going to close and they're going to become 7-Elevens. If we don't have disciple makers, we won't have disciples. If we don't have evangelists, we won't have evangelism. And if we don't have church planters, we won't have new churches. And boy, do we need a lot of new churches. So this is really burning inside of me, and I hope that it burns inside of you too. So let's talk for a minute or two about why this is happening. There's a number of reasons for it, and some of them really have nothing to do with the church. One of the key factors is demographics. So you have the baby boomer generation that is really big, and then Gen X, my generation is a little smaller than that. And the millennials kind of brought the numbers back up, larger than X, but smaller than boomers. And then the rising younger generations, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, are smaller still. And the other thing that's true about these rising generations is that they're more secular. They're less religious. They're less Christian as a whole. Now, there has been a recent rise in religious interest among Gen Z that I find very encouraging, to be honest. But that has not risen high enough that it has impacted the statistics enough to make us think that there's a reverse to this general demographic decline that we're facing. So you have fewer young people, fewer Christians among them, which means fewer numbers of them who are going to sense a calling to Christian ministry, which means you're going to have fewer new pastors, fewer new church planters. Now, uh, this has been in the news. There are other industries that are facing this kind of demographic squeeze as well. So it's not just the church. This is everybody's having to deal with this in some way. Another factor, and honestly, this is an impression that I don't really have data for. So feel free to take this with a grain of salt. But my impression is that the baby boomer generation of pastors in America as a whole has not generally prioritized calling out and training up new generations of pastors. And now there are glorious exceptions to this rule, and so I don't want to be unfair to anybody. But I think by personality, the boomer generation, they were activists, they were excited to build ministries and churches and do the work themselves, and were so excited about doing it that they have not, as a group, given as much thought to legacy, to passing the baton and to the importance of the longer-term impact of developing leaders. Um I don't know. Maybe the thought is that whenever they decide to retire, that their church will just go get a committee and go find someone just like they did when they came to their church. But we are not in those realities anymore. Finding people with a search committee is much, much harder than it used to be. Now, seminaries used to crank out plenty of new graduates aspiring to full-time ministry. But the challenge that seminaries are facing is the same as the rest of us. They are dealing with the same demographic realities and declines that everybody is. There are fewer people, there are fewer Christians among the fewer people, and fewer people pursuing ministry callings. And it used to be that churches would just depend on seminaries as that pipeline of new leaders, but I think a lot of times they didn't think about where those seminary students came from in the first place. All those seminary students came from churches who called them out and encouraged them and gave them leadership opportunities and responsibilities and uh poured gas on the fire of their calling, and then finally uh sent them out for training uh to study at seminaries. And so my point is not to criticize seminaries. I'm connected to several. I think the ones in my tribe, the SBC, are doing really, really good work. But the seminaries are not solving the problem, they're not the solution to the problem. And I I don't know about you, but I feel a responsibility for this, and I think that you should too. It's a problem. Whose problem is this anyway? We we have this fall off in Christian leadership, we have this dwindling number of rising Christian leaders. Whose problem is it? And the answer is that it is our problem. And if we don't own it, well, I I'll put it to you this way I'm afraid to stand before God and say to him that I did nothing about it. All right. Well, enough gloom and doom, because I do have really good news is the crisis is really severe and really important, but the solution is right in front of us. It's not a new solution, and I believe it is completely attainable by every church. What I want to suggest to you is that it is the new testament normal pattern for ordinary local churches to raise up, develop, and send out new pastors, missionaries, church planters, and other kingdom leaders. Where else are they gonna come from? I'm very encouraged to tell you that one of the things we've discovered here at Family Church, and I've seen this at other churches as well, is that seated in our churches every Sunday morning are people who feel a desire to serve God in a greater way. And if we will call them to it and we will equip them for it, they will rise to the challenge. There are probably men in your church, as there are in mine, who felt a stirring to pursue ministry when they were young, but then maybe they got married and then they got a job and then they had kids, and life just sort of like took them in a different direction. But man, if we provide them a pathway and we provide them some training, they can come back to that calling again. Uh, another group of people that we're finding some traction with are people who are approaching retirement after a successful career. There are some faithful, godly men who want to make their last chapter really count for Jesus. And I think all of those folks are worth developing and investing in. Now, I do think that most of our churches are good at developing Christians in their leadership to a point. So I think the evangelical church is really good at getting people saved and getting them baptized and becoming members of the church and being involved in a group or on a serve team or something like that. But then beyond that, the discipleship record kind of gets shaky and a little uneven. But even in churches that do a good job developing leaders, everybody is feeling the leadership pinch. Back in 2022, Lifeway Research released a study where they looked at 17 different areas of struggle that were reported by pastors as problems that they were facing. Guessed what was the number one area of challenge and struggle. At 77%, developing new leaders and volunteers was the number one challenge faced by pastors of ordinary churches. That by itself should motivate you to seriously consider residency, which is simply an intentional development process for new leaders. Because the same pinch that you feel at your local church for finding new small group leaders and leaders for students and kids and other areas, the overall church is feeling for pastors, for missionaries, uh for church planters. In Sin Network a few years back, we recognized this leadership crisis in the church planting space in particular. We discovered at that time that we had more resources to support planters than we had planters. There was a real pinch in the number of planters. And so one of the things we started to do is to encourage churches to start residencies. So the term residency is borrowed from the medical field where a medical student becomes a resident, and he has a chance in a residency to practice medicine under qualified supervision so that he can grow in skill and competence and be able to do it on his own. And so a church residency does the same kind of thing. It trains new leaders under qualified supervision of experienced pastors and ministry leaders so that they can grow in skill and competence, so that they could plant a church or pastor a church or start or lead a ministry of some kind. I believe that the first churches to have residencies like this tended to be large and influential churches with lots of resources. But I'm very happy to say that in recent years, there are churches of all sizes that have started residencies. And as it turns out, it's really not that complicated to do. For a small church, a residency could be as simple as having one guy who's a pastor apprentice who shadows and assists the pastor and learns from him as they go. I mentioned Syn Network. One of the things that Syn Network does for SBC churches who want to develop residencies is they host residency builder events. A couple of leaders from your church can come to a two-day workshop and leave with an outline and an action plan for a residency specifically designed for your church, your leadership DNA, and the mission that God has called you to. And so let me invite you. I will be leading a residency builder along with Gus Hernandez. He's down at Reality Church in Miami, and he is a genius at these things. We're going to be hosting one in Jacksonville, Florida coming up September 29th and 30th, 2026. Um, I'll put a link in the show notes. You should totally register and come to it. If the dates don't work for you, you can go to synnetwork.com/slash events and see what other residency builders there are. There are dates and locations around the country. But it's really one of the fastest ways to get a residency started with intention, um guided through a really uh well-tested process to get it going. And if uh if you're in the audience, you're not part of an SBC church, I still want to help and encourage you. And uh, I've been putting together a free church residency starter kit. It's basically a basket of resources that'll help you on the journey. And I have a link to that in the show notes as well. So check that out and get it and uh avail yourself of it. All right. So I've talked about why for a little bit. Uh I hope that you feel the urgency in the same way that I do. Um, I just think this is the most important work that we could be doing. And I could talk about it for a long, long time. But let me get to the second thing that I wanted to say in this episode. And this is my goal and my hope for the podcast. I hope that every church in America will establish some kind of residency or leadership training so that they can discover, develop, and deploy from inside their own congregation new pastors, church planters, missionaries, and other Christian leaders. It requires intention, but it's really not that difficult to do. We have a strong model for it, both in the ministries of Jesus and of Paul. So think about Jesus. In his earthly ministry, he went around preaching and teaching and healing and ministering, but at the same time, he was developing the apostles who he would entrust with the leadership of his church down the road. And I would argue that Jesus probably spent more time on leadership development than in other areas like preaching and teaching. But the point is that while he was doing his ministry, he was developing leaders at the same time. When you look at Paul, Paul went around as a missionary. He's preaching, he's starting churches, he's sharing the gospel. But at the same time, he was training new pastors and missionaries to grow the movement. You know the names: Timothy, Titus, Epaphras, Silas, Barnabas. And I kind of think that in our day, we think that being a pastor means that we do the preaching, the teaching, and the ministry, but the leadership development is like an optional thing over on the side. Friends, it is not optional. If the church is going to advance to a new generation, it's not optional. Who's going to lead the church when we're done? Who's going to lead the church for your kids and your grandkids? And the answer is the leaders that we develop are going to lead the church for them. So the format of this podcast, beyond this first episode, where it's just me talking, what I do is I interview people who are leading residency programs in churches of various sizes around the country. Some of them are small new church plants in pioneer areas just getting going. And I also talk to people at historic legacy churches who have a lot of resources and a lot of institutional power. And so my heart is to serve two groups of people. Number one is pastors who are thinking about starting a residency in their church. My hope is that you'll listen through to how these different churches are doing it around the country, that you'll get ideas and inspiration for developing a residency that suits your church, and you'll get going and start developing those leaders. All the churches that I talk to are developing leaders in their residencies, but we're all doing it a little bit differently. So, friends, there's no magic formula. There's no one size fits all approach or special curriculum. I think as you listen to the different ways churches are developing their people, it'll give you some vision. It'll give you some ideas for developing one of your own. And the second group I want to encourage, frankly, are people like me who are leading residencies around the country. Most of us are doing it alongside plenty of other responsibilities that we have. And one of the things I've discovered is that all of us, no matter how successful our program is, how big our church is, how long we've been doing it, all of us feel a little bit like we're making this up the best we can as we go along. We have a little bit of imposter syndrome, and it's pretty common for us to wonder if we're really doing it the right way. To be honest, one reason that I wanted to do this podcast is so that I could learn from other people who are doing it and find out what the heck I'm doing wrong. Uh, people who are doing it differently from how we are here at Family Church, and in many cases doing it better than we are here. So I encourage you to listen through to this season and get some inspiration from other residencies and their leaders. And if you're listening, if you're leading a residency, I would love to get to know you personally. Um, I kind of hope to see an informal community of those of us leading residencies come out of this so that we can know each other and encourage each other and learn from each other. So if you're leading a residency, please drop me a note and tell me about what's happening at your church. Uh, you can email me at residency at gofamilychurch.org. Well, thanks to your attention uh to this first episode. Let me uh conclude with just a few calls to action. First, uh season one is out. So listen to the podcast. Feel free to skip around if you want to. Don't miss episode seven where we talk about church seminary partnerships. I think that's a key piece that needs some attention. So uh so listen and enjoy. I hope it hope you get some value out of it. Second, if you know of other churches or pastors who might benefit from this podcast, please take a moment and share it with them. And finally, if you're starting up a residency or you want to, check out the starter kit in the show show notes. And then if you can come to the Residency Builder in Jacksonville, man, I would love to meet you. And Gus and I would love to help your church get started. Um, there's a link to the registration information uh in the show notes. Uh, I would love to see you there. So, friends, thanks for joining me here for episode one of the Church Residency Podcast. I'm Mark Warnock, your host, and we'll see you next time. A couple quick things before we go. First, if this podcast is helping you, please let us know. We've recorded this first season as a trial run, and your feedback will help us to know how to shape it in days ahead. You can send me a quick email at residency at gofamilychurch.org. I'd love to hear what you think. Second, if you want to get a residency started at your church, we want to help. We've created a church residency starter kit with resources, articles, checklists, including a couple of curriculum options, all free to you. Follow the link in the show notes and we'll send it right over. There's no hidden sales pitch, no subscription. We just want to help. Finally, for churches in the SBC, Gus Hernandez and I will be leading a residency builder event in Jacksonville, Florida on September 29th and 30th of 2026. Bring a couple of key leaders from your church, and you'll go home with a blueprint for a residency customized to your church, your vision, and your values. We'd love to see you there, but space is limited, so follow the link in the show notes for more information and sign up today. Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you next time.