The church needs leaders who have been with Jesus

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

There was a room in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, where a little over a hundred people gathered together. They had no plan. They had no org chart, no deacons, no committees, no nonprofit paperwork. They didn't even have a name for themselves yet — they weren't "Christians." They were just people who had been with Jesus.
All they had was a commission to go and make disciples of every nation. And they had the scriptures, prayer, and each other.

That's it. And yet today, because of that small group of people, there are disciples of Jesus in nearly every nation and people group on earth, and his words have been translated into almost every language on the planet.

Think about the audacity of that. A room full of people with no name, no funding, and no track record actually believed that what happened among them could reach the ends of the earth. God can do more with a faithful few than with any number of competent, well-resourced people operating without him. He can do more than any of us can ask, think, or imagine — but notice what the first church had going into that: not a strategy department, not a marketing plan, but a commission, the scriptures, prayer, and each other.

That's the setting for Acts 1:15–26, where Peter stands up among the believers to address a problem: Judas, one of Jesus's own handpicked twelve, had betrayed him and was gone — his end so public and disgraceful that people started calling the place where he died "the Field of Blood." Peter quotes the Psalms, and the group nominates two men to take Judas's place. They pray, cast lots, and Matthias is added to the eleven.

Buried in that short, strange episode is a case study in something every church — and every person trying to discern what God is calling them into — eventually has to face: how do you prepare for what God has for the future?

Start by being honest about the present
Notice what Peter does first. He doesn't manage the story. He doesn't soften it into a vague announcement about a "leadership transition." He names exactly what happened, in front of everyone, and lets it be part of the record.

That's rarer than it should be. It's easy to gloss over hard realities — in a church, in a family, in your own life — because honesty feels riskier than a polished version of events. But the commentator David Guzik notes that the early church modeled something worth imitating before they ever made a major decision: obedience, unity, prayer, immersion in scripture, a desire for God's will, and what he calls "sanctified common sense." Peter's honesty about Judas is part of that same posture. He agrees with what's true, publicly, before God moves them forward.

That's really what confession is — not an emotional performance, just agreeing with God about what's real. If you want to prepare for whatever God has next for you, you have to start there: not with a plan, but with an honest diagnosis of where you actually are.
The right people, not just more people

The number 120, historically, was understood as the minimum size for a fully functioning Jewish community — it's why the modern Israeli parliament still has 120 seats. Luke isn't just giving us a headcount; he's telling us this group had enough people to be a real community. What they were missing was someone stepped into the gap left by Judas — one of twelve, a number that intentionally echoed the twelve tribes of Israel and pointed to the full restoration God was doing among his people.

Any church walking into a new season eventually has to ask the same question: do we have the people we need, in the places we need them? Often the answer isn't "we need more people" — it's "we need the people we already have to step into what they've been prepared for." Leadership author John Maxwell puts it simply: you can have a clear vision, a solid plan, and real resources, but without the right people in the right places, you won't get anywhere.

Leaders who have been with Jesus
Here's where Peter's qualification for Judas's replacement is worth sitting with. It wasn't charisma, credentials, or communication skill. It was this: someone who had been with Jesus the whole time, who could testify to his resurrection. Peter could have consolidated authority in that moment — after all, if Jesus's own handpicked disciple could betray him, who's a safer judge of character than Jesus? Instead, Peter brought it to the community and pointed to Christ, not himself.

That matters because church leadership exists to display Jesus, not a personality. It's tempting — for churches and for individual leaders — to lead with the confident, the competent, and the successful. Tim Keller once said it plainly: "What you most need in a leader is someone who has been broken by the knowledge of his or her sin and an even greater knowledge of Jesus's costly grace." Competence is useful. It's just secondary.
One pastor tells the story of visiting another, much larger church shortly after a disaster had displaced his own congregation. Pulling into what he'd been told was a reserved parking spot, the attendant working the lot didn't believe him, and after a tense back-and-forth with cars piling up behind, muttered an expletive under his breath. It's a small moment, but it raises a real question: what if that had been someone's very first encounter with a church — someone genuinely wondering whether Jesus could change their life, met instead with contempt in a parking lot? Even the smallest points of contact in a church are opportunities to either reflect Jesus or obscure him.

Character, not just competence
Paul's list of qualifications for elders and deacons in 1 Timothy 3 is worth reading slowly, because of what it doesn't say. It doesn't ask for a dynamic communicator or an impressive resume. Nearly every qualification is about character: above reproach, self-controlled, hospitable, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money, someone who manages their own household well and has a good reputation even among outsiders.

That standard cuts against how a lot of us actually choose who to follow now — including online. It's easy to sit under people whose public content is polished and compelling, while knowing little to nothing about their private character, sometimes following people whose private lives, if we're honest, would disqualify them from leading in a local church. Jesus's own warning to his disciples was about exactly this: people who do impressive things in his name and still hear him say, "I never knew you" (Matthew 7:21–23) — because doing things for Jesus and actually being with Jesus are not the same thing.
Position affirms leadership. It doesn't grant it.

Before Matthias was ever appointed, he was already known — the community had watched him follow Jesus, serve, pray, and love people. The appointment didn't make him a leader. It recognized what was already true. That's a meaningful distinction: a title doesn't create character, and the absence of a title doesn't mean God isn't already forming someone into a leader.

It's worth remembering that the early church became known for including people status and money would have excluded everywhere else — women, slaves, people with no social standing at all — because the only real qualification was faithfulness to Jesus. Craig Groeschel puts it well: one of the biggest myths of leadership is that you have to be in charge in order to lead.

So maybe the honest question isn't "am I in a position of leadership." It's simpler than that, and harder: have you actually given Jesus your whole yes? Not the parts of your life that are convenient, but all of it. The future any church steps into isn't ultimately built by better strategy. It's built by ordinary people who've spent enough time with Jesus that it shows.