During the last year I've spoken at conferences and at celebrations organised by just about every kind of Protestant church. I do a lot with leadership training. I'm co-Chair of Baptist Mainstream, and chair a group for the Evangelical Alliance UK which seeks to find ways of releasing younger men into ministry. Right across the evangelical world we face a generation of leaders growing older together, until eventually they become too old. Then you have a crisis, a younger bloc come into power and history repeats itself.
Leadership is there to be given away.
It's not enough simply to train younger leaders in a theoretical way. Without that all that we will do is breed more frustration. Leaders need to take the right kind of risks and know if it doesn't work out, that doesn't mean that they're a failure. We have to avoid the survival mentality which cripples some parts of the church. Evangelicals overall are becoming the majority of Protestant churchgoers in Britain and charismatic evangelicals are likely to become the majority of evangelicals within a couple of years.