Leader Development Pathways
The Missionary, Local, and Fellow Worker pathways exist to equip and mobilize the priesthood of all believers for God’s mission in Southern California. We define a leader as any baptized believer living out their identity in Christ as part of the royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9) — serving, witnessing, and participating in God’s mission.
These pathways follow the New Testament pattern: some believers pioneer new works, others shepherd congregations, and still others come alongside to strengthen and multiply. They do not create new offices, but operate within the bounds of the confessions, where the pastoral office is honored and the gifts of all the baptized are activated.
Together, lay and ordained leaders serve side by side so that the church not only survives but expands — rooted in Christ, faithful to the confessions, and sent into every community.
Which path is right for you?
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Mission Leaders
These leaders are sent tandems or teams who together intentionally engage neighbors where they live, labor, laugh, and learn. They identify and develop new “mission bases” where they share Christ, disciple new believers, demonstrate hospitality, and gather people together who either form the community foundations of what may become new churches, or grafted into existing churches that are re-establishing. What they start is typically entrusted to other local leaders when they have the opportunity to start new ministry or relocate to a new neighborhood to engage in evangelistic groundwork.
Local Leaders
Local Leaders are those entrusted with recent- or once-planted congregations as they grow into maturity. Following the example in Acts, they provide care, teaching, and stability in the life of a church. Typically, prospective local leaders preparing to become elders, deacons, and ministry leaders join this pathway, and ordained pastors are invited into this pathway to participate.
Local leaders’ calling is not merely to maintain what exists, but to help congregations become healthy and continue on in their establishing. They anchor a congregation in faithfulness and prepare it to raise up and send others.
Fellow Workers
In Paul’s latter missionary journeys, he continued in to engage people in daily life, but his strategy developed. His focus became more about strengthening these new believers and churches and networking them together. He equipped them to engaging in continued groundwork and long-term pastoral oversight, thus multiplying his efforts.
Among Coastal partner churches and leaders, Fellow Workers form bands of both ordained pastors and lay leaders who work alongside the other two leader types to strengthen the entire movement. They involve a combination of practical helpers and seasoned missionary leaders who have a strong track record of reaching the lost and establishing new churches.
How the Roles Work Together
These three leader types are not separate silos but an interdependent family of leaders. Missionary Leaders pioneer new gospel work, gathering and discipling until new congregations are ready to be entrusted to Local Leaders. Local Leaders then shepherd, teach, and guide those congregations into maturity so that they become healthy, multiplying churches. Fellow Workers serve among both Missionary and Local Leaders, bringing the combined strength of helpers, experienced missionaries, and seasoned church planters. They train, coach, and reinforce the whole system, making sure new churches are strengthened in faith and prepared to send out more Missionary Leaders.
This framework does not create a new ecclesiology or office. It rests firmly within our confessional bounds, as witnessed in the Augsburg Confession and the Small Catechism, which uphold the pastoral office as instituted by Christ. What we are activating is the ancient, biblical function of the priesthood of all believers — ordinary Christians, together with pastors, serving as witnesses, gatherers, and co-laborers in the gospel. In this way, we are reclaiming the pattern seen in Acts and the epistles: pioneering, shepherding, and strengthening — all working in unity for the expansion of Christ’s church.
After a half-century of mission models that equipped only a few gifted, but probably burned out leaders…
Over the past few decades, church planting pipelines often centered around raising up a single gifted and entrepreneurial leader who could carry nearly all responsibility for founding, resourcing, and leading a new congregation. If you passed some quick, usually 1-5 day assessment and interviews (typically focused merely on pragmatics or merely theology), you were deemed “approved” for planting. Past models have often “parachuted” a man and his wife into a community with a Bible in hand, attached funding, and hoped for the best. Funding was typically a three year decreasing contribution that carried with it the expectation of meeting standardized numerical benchmarks with little to no coaching, adequate training, and rarely any support and care necessary for such an endeavor. While there are a few who are gifted and daring enough for such a task, they are far less common than we’d like to think. In fact, our leadership team at Coastal have started referring to them as golden unicorns, because they cannot be the norm of those we’re preparing for mission work as we re-evangelize the coastal Southern California region. Will we work with and resource the golden unicorns. Sure, but probably not in the way it has been done the past few decades where church planter burnout, flame out, and epidemics of substance abuse, infidelity, and suicide became far too common. While this approach of the latter 20th and early 21st centuries has borne significant fruit, it can just as easily create bottlenecks, burnout, and fragile congregations built around one personality, not to mention that church planting efforts have not been able to keep up with population growth or growing secularism and paganism that now defines the “spiritual” landscape of most people groups along the West Coast.
By contrast, the Missionary–Local–Fellow Worker pathways draw directly from the New Testament pattern, where the work of planting, shepherding, and strengthening was shared across many kinds of leaders. What if, instead of screening individuals through narrow pipelines, we equipped teams of the priesthood of all believers — some gifted for pioneering mission, others more likely to thrive in the stability of a local congregation? What if existing and legacy churches were strengthened toward a sending rather than a survival posture, placing around them experienced and equipped missionary leaders, evangelists, administrators, and roving ordained pastors who could support and supplement the expansion of the church?
This interdependent model produces healthier leaders, more resilient systems, and stronger congregations, all while giving a vibrant place to the Spirit’s ongoing movement. Instead of relying on a single “church planter,” this approach develops whole teams of leaders who together pioneer, establish, and multiply congregations.