Spiritual Leadership in the Pattern of Gideon

By Theodore Andoseh

Many people long for nominative leadership, but very few people qualify for intrinsic leadership.
When we are first introduced to Gideon, we see a faint-hearted grain farmer sneaking around like a coward hiding in a winepress. He was the most unlikely of potential candidates for spiritual leadership.

What kind of people does God choose and use to do His work?

Throughout Scripture, we see unnervingly real men and women who faltered, struggled, and at times, fell short. In the words of John MacArthur, God worked through them in surprising and incredible ways to accomplish His purposes. Scripture does not hide their weaknesses, caricature their strengths, or spin their stories as a display of human nobility. Instead, it describes these leaders of God's people with unflinching honesty and delivers an unexpected ending: “God is not ashamed to be called their God” (Hebrews 11:16).

In Spiritual Leadership in the Pattern of Gideon, Pastor Theodore Andoseh takes us back to see the times, call, ordination, work, and perils of leadership in the life of Gideon—a weak man made strong. In doing so, it becomes clear how his story applies in our days to anyone who aspires to emerge as a leader of God's people.

what did Gideon do to qualify for leadership?
what did he do as a leader?
what was involved in his leadership?
what were the perils or dangers encountered during his leadership?

In this book, you will see God at work in unexpected ways in what went into the making of Gideon’s call and the timely lessons on the emergence of intrinsic spiritual leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ZTF Books Online
• Release date: May 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005245191

Theodore Andoseh

The current leader of Christian Missionary Fellowship Internation

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WE MUST KEEP TO OUR OBJECTIVES

In all the encounters with the Youth movement of our ministry, I start by stating our objectives, our goal. Why are we building the young people? Why are we developing leaders? This course is a leadership development course. It is a leadership training course. It targets a purpose. We want to produce young people who are spiritual, who will carry the vision that God has given to us. I have stated the objectives so many times. Who would like to come and state our objectives, what I have stated in our previous encounters? That is where the first problem is: activities that are not goal-directed and that have no central purpose become just religious activities.

When a leader forgets where he is going, he becomes a blind leader. Why did we organise this course? Who was supposed to be here? Whom did you people expect to be here because it is critical for the whole super-structure of the vision? There are many new people here and we are happy that there are new people; but who was expected here? This is the third year I am raising it. I told you, you do not have a grip. There is no intelligent building of people. It is all voluntary and from the podium. There is no knowledge that, in Cameroon, these are the people that we are building. It is all dialectical. Anybody can come, the young converts…. Whom are we building? What did we teach last year? What are we going to continue this year? Whom do we know that we have communicated this body of truth to?

There is no intentionality, no intelligent intentionality. That is the betrayal of the Vision. Everything is voluntary. Anybody can come any time. Do you remember that this is the third time I am pointing out the amorphous constitution of this training course? It is not planned; it is only programmed. We do not know clearly who must be there, so that the investments are not wasted. It lacks character. It looks like an evangelistic meeting. This is the third year I am pointing this out, and it is the absence of leadership. People love the stage, and the work of the stage, such that the people in front of them are faceless. You do not know the face that must be there because you are not building with intentionality. There is such little intelligent building. It is not very clear who must be there. And this is the third time I am pointing it out, and you point something out three times and it does not change! There are many leaders like that anyway. Even brother A.T., I told him to give me ten thousand names that he is building. Some will fail, but at least let us settle down to do the work, instead of just talking about it.

That is why I am asking that one of the leaders, come and restate to us the objectives we are pursuing. Does this audience enter into the context of objectives that we are pursuing?

And this is the problem of African leadership—distraction. Somebody sets out going somewhere and along the road he becomes interested with many things. I started a new meditation book yesterday. When I start a new meditation book, the first 10-20 meditations in that meditation book is waiting on God to rewrite where I am going. This is because vision is slippery and you can think you are going somewhere because you have many activities but you are no longer going where you set out to go. Yesterday, my first meditation in that new book was: What were the highlights of 2020 for which I want to thank God?

In my leadership, every year I select two things I did or God did—not many things, just two things. In leadership, if there are many thanksgiving topics, you will deceive yourself because you will not know whether you have accomplished any major thing in the path you have taken. So, for last year, I thanked the Lord for two main things: firstly, the 316 prayer nights I had for the kick-off of phase 3. If you know my programme, you may think that I will thank God for the 39 programmes at the headquarters, the 10 trips to Yaoundé, the 54 localities that we visited in Cameroon… No! These are the miscellaneous. So, I ask myself, what did I actually do with regards to the impulse towards the vision? I summarized it: 316 prayer nights and 3 long fasts to kick-off of phase 3. That is the first thing I thanked God about for the year 2020.

I read the Bible five times; Bible reading is to nourish you to do something. Bible reading is not for achievement and for testimonies. You read the Bible the way you eat. If I ask you what you did last year and you say, I ate 1200 meals in 2020, I think all of us here, even the mosquitoes will shout at you. We eat to live and to work. You do not stand up and say you ate 10 meals last week. That is what the brethren are saying, I ate 200 chapters last month. Now that you are a glutton of the Bible, what did you do? Why do you read the Bible? A man ought to read the Bible for the same reasons for which he eats. Nobody eats for eating sake. We eat to live, to work and without a vigorous life and a clear work, all the eating is just indolence.

So, when I look at my year, I do not say I read the Bible five times, I need to read the Bible for what I must do. But what is it that I must do? What did I do? Last year, there was only one burden: the take-off of the phase 3 goal, to overcome the inertia of fear and hysteria, so that our community should accomplish its God-given assignment.

Why did we invite you here? And after this meeting, what do we expect from you? Because we are building people intentionally, we want you to become something. You cannot just come and attend a programme, go away and come back another time, thanking God that your employer gave you some time off. We are building the superstructure of our vision and you cannot build with mobile blocks. You must have bricks that are fixed, that take their place forever. If all the bricks in a house move around, do you have a house? Then one day, one brick just decides, I have stayed too long in the house of a poor man, I need to be in the house of a rich man. In this house, the only paint that ever touches me is smoke, I want to be a brick in a house where I will be polished, and then moves. If bricks were moving, there would be no house. So, when you come here, it is a commitment to God. You are somebody that we are depending on.

Pray that this youth work will stop being brainless; pray that there will be leadership.

We have too much exhortation. We encourage people, we motivate people, we exhort people to come to programmes, to activities, but we do not build people. We do not take a person from one level to another level intentionally. That is why there are many people there and there are many empty posts, because we are not building people. Exhortation, encouragement, but no edification, no building! It is an African syndrome. In almost every African nation, a president begins a project and when his term of office is over, the next president comes and begins other projects. He does not accomplish the projects of his predecessor because the credit thereof will not be given to him. They do not build the country; they build their names. A president ought to build the country. In Nigeria, there are many white elephants—many unaccomplished projects because of changes of government.

Who ought to be here? If it is the youth leaders, where are the youth leaders? Why would anybody accept the title of a youth leader, and, where the youth leaders are needed, he is not present? If it is student leaders, why would anybody accept the responsibility of a student leader, and, when he is needed in God’s own assignment, he does not show up? At that rate, how shall we accomplish the vision, when it is rooted on voluntary behaviour?

Those of you who are coming here for the first time, know that you are entering a recruitment.

When I was about to come, somebody told me to preach an evangelistic sermon because there are many new people. What is the purpose of this meeting? When we are praying and preparing for a meeting, what is it for? We build! We build!

Even if you have to schedule like the brethren in France, planning who must go for which course, at least you know who has been built, and in what! You are young, and many presidents have reduced the potential of Africa. Do not reduce the potential of the Kingdom of God in our hands by an absence of leadership. That is being in an office without being a leader or leading with an empty head. At this rate, you will always be at Genesis, you will never reach the Psalms, then what about Revelations? Each year, there will be new faces and we will teach something this year in continuity with what was taught last year, and it is new for the newcomers. Then those who were here last year and who are not here this time will not have what it takes to continue and become better. Thus, there is no capacitation because there is only exhortation: this person encouraged me and I repented from masturbation, I encountered God at the camp, and I was delivered from pornography. Should you even bring pornography here? It is as if we are so fascinated by sensationalism that we do not build.

Pray that the Lord will help us take ourselves seriously because the Lord takes us seriously.

See, brother J.N. At the end phase 2, before getting into phase 3, the Lord insisted that I have 12 other evangelist-leaders who pursue what I had been doing in phase 2. I identified your brother-in-law, brother J.F., you, brothers A.K., A.T., J.Y … 12 leaders who will continue pursuing Santa-Cruz and teaching. Each one is to produce for me 1000 evangelists, so that what we have started will not just end. You are in a follow-up tour of what JF did here last year. In the second half of this year, I told him that he will repeat what he has done here in Cameroon in Guinea-Conakry. Next year, he will go on a tour in Cameroon in a short time because he ought to leave you, A.K. and the others here to continue, and go to Guinea-Conakry to do the follow-up, and he will do in Burkina-Faso what he will have done in Guinea. Do you understand? You plan the work.

After 7 years, he himself will have held 10,000 evangelistic campaigns and produced 100,000 evangelists to plant evangelism in Christian Missionary Fellowship International, with proofs of people added to the churches. So, I plan like this to know how to lead. If we do not do this, we will run a lot, but on the same spot. This would mean that as soon as the Lord gives us a different burden, all that we were already doing, we would forget. It would be like a football match where the 22 players are running after the ball and the goalkeeper is catching the ball anywhere. Would you have a real match? Would you have something to watch? We should learn to build.

This is our second WUPF session after sister Emily left. We are holding it under the pressure of great spiritual responsibility. There can be no succession when people are not even available, and we do not even know on whom we are counting. In the absence of a targeted audience, you cannot really talk about succession. You do not pick succession like stones; what it requires is not zeal. Someone cannot arrive today, the Holy Spirit falls on him and he becomes a successor. Succession is built up. It is not a matter of benevolence; it is an intelligent process. You cannot replace someone when you have not been built.

Most of you are big degree holders (Bachelor’s degree, Master’s and PhD). So, it is not brains that are lacking but consecration, and just the inner quietness which says, God has granted me something to do for Him, and I have decided that it will be done.

In the light of what we are going through in the ministry now, many of our older leaders are going. I said in the convention that many of the leaders that were standing in front will not be the same leaders when we will have the next convention, there will be a massive leadership shift. For a leadership not to be a degeneration, there must be the building of succession. Succession does not just occur spontaneously.

Last time, I told you people to close your eyes, imagine the person that you will replace and see whether you are ready. Since sister Emilia died, many young people are writing to me. I think many have killed me over and over, and instead of rising to leadership, they have killed me and now they are afraid. Their minds are fixated on the death of leaders, and they are imagining, who will die next? We now have many sorcerers thinking about the death of leaders, and they are offering the devil a lot of soulical energy to attack the leaders. I was planning an exercise to awaken people to a sense of responsibility. I did not intend to produce witches and wizards. Now, the boldness of young people… Somebody just takes a pen and paper and writes to you, I begin to imagine that if you died…. The flippancy… it is just stupid. It is neither spiritual nor responsible. It is the frivolity of having no content, and that we have a lot of jargon without content. So, it is easy for somebody to just say, ‘I imagine that sister Céline dies… since brother Theodore said…." The stupidity, the boldness, the lack of mental and spiritual brakes, and the profanity of bold thoughts in a mined field! And you do not know that when you conceive a thought, you have offered Satan a prayer. Now, instead of producing a generation that arises, we have a generation of people who are afraid because they are busy killing their leaders in their minds. Instead of a focus on the goal, there is a focus on death. Instead of a focus on emergence, there is a focus on the demise of those who are there. No inner ethics. If someone told you that he has been thinking about your death… That is why one should not throw gold to pigs.

We may be saying many things to people that do not have a background, and then they ramble through words without any content. Why do life issues in discussion become speculation?

I was the one that told the young leaders, when they embraced the responsibility of becoming the ‘Judah’ of our ministry, that I do not know whether they understood it or it was just one of the slogans of that course.