Leadership Virtues for Leading Renewal

What does it take to lead a dying church back to life?

Not skills. Not a turnaround strategy. Not the right demographic or the right part of town. What revitalization actually requires — what it exposes — is character. The long, grinding work of leading a congregation through renewal has a way of surfacing what is really in a pastor’s heart.

After six years of revitalization work at Westwood Baptist Church, and months of walking alongside renewal pastors across our association, I keep coming back to four virtues that Andy Davis identifies in his book Revitalize. These are not personality types or leadership styles. They are graces — Spirit-wrought, prayer-dependent, Word-grounded — that renewal pastors must cultivate if they are going to last, and lead well.

The framing text is Acts 20:17–38. Paul’s farewell to the Ephesian elders is one of the most pastorally intimate moments in the New Testament. He describes his own ministry in terms of tears and trials, humility and boldness, faithful preaching and sacrificial love. He warns of wolves and false teachers. And then he kneels on the beach and prays with the men he loves. That is the picture of pastoral ministry this passage holds out — and it is exactly the kind of ministry that renewal requires.

Humility Toward Opponents

Davis’s warning in chapter 9 of Revitalize is direct: a proud pastor may win the battle but lose the point. You can clear out the opposition, impose your vision, and still have done lasting damage to your own soul and to the congregation’s trust.

Every revitalization pastor encounters opponents. Some are genuine obstacles to health and need to be dealt with firmly. But many are simply frightened — deeply attached to a version of the church that no longer exists, grieving something real, looking for a place where they feel some measure of control in lives that may feel chaotic everywhere else. The temptation is to treat all resistance as obstruction and all obstruction as an enemy to be defeated.

Humility reframes the situation. The people who oppose you are not primarily your problem — your pride is your problem. A revitalizer who cannot bear opposition with patience and gentleness will eventually harm the very church he is trying to heal.

Paul tells the Ephesian elders he served with “all humility and with tears” (Acts 20:19). Revitalization is not a management project. It is a spiritual labor that requires you to weep over people who are resisting their own good. That is the pastoral posture — not merely strategic, but genuinely pastoral.

Humility listens before it concludes. It absorbs unfair criticism without retaliating. It keeps its eye on the souls of opponents, not just on their obstruction.

Courage to Act

Humility without courage becomes passivity. The previous virtue keeps you from becoming combative; this one keeps you from becoming a conflict-avoider. They are not opposites — they are necessary partners.

Revitalization requires courage in particular kinds of moments: preaching the whole counsel of God rather than the comfortable parts, making structural changes that will meet resistance, moving toward a plurality of elders even when no one is asking for it, confronting sin in long-tenured or influential members, and staying when leaving would be easier.

Davis is careful to say that this is not a personality trait you either have or you don’t. Pastoral courage is a Spirit-wrought readiness to act on conviction even when the cost is real. Paul tells the Ephesian elders he “did not shrink from declaring the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). That is the standard — not combativeness, but a faithfulness that refuses to flinch.

The passive pastor who avoids conflict in hopes of keeping the peace is not being wise. He is being unfaithful. Cowardice in revitalization is not neutral — it is costly. It delays the church’s health and puts souls at risk.

What is the act of courage your church most needs from you right now?

Patience for the Long Game

If courage is the virtue that keeps you from backing down, patience is the virtue that keeps you from moving too fast. Davis puts it plainly: significant capital should not be spent on minor changes to the detriment of the larger revitalization project.

Revitalization is not a sprint. It is a long, slow, cumulative work. Most of the meaningful change in a congregation happens over years — sometimes over a decade or more. Pastors who treat it like a turnaround project, expecting dramatic results in eighteen months, will either give up in discouragement or blow up the church through reckless speed.

Patience applies to the development of new leaders (you cannot manufacture mature elders on a timeline), to cultural change (habits of decades do not shift in months), to numerical growth (health comes before growth), and to membership rolls (cleaning the list takes pastoral care, not just administrative action).

But patience is not tolerance of sin. It is not refusing to act because action is uncomfortable. Davis is careful here: patience applies to the pace of change and the development of people — not to the indefinite deferral of necessary confrontation. That distinction is critical, and it leads directly to the fourth virtue.

Patient endurance is not passivity — it is a demonstration of trust in God’s sovereignty over the process.

Discernment to Know the Difference

Discernment is what keeps patience from becoming passivity. It is the pastoral ability to distinguish between what requires patient endurance and what requires courageous action — and to know which you are facing in any given moment.

Davis’s central framework here is learning to separate the hills worth dying on from the ground worth yielding. Not every skirmish is a battle. Not every preference conflict is a matter of conviction. The revitalizer who treats everything as equally urgent will exhaust himself and his congregation.

Some issues require decisive action: biblical authority, membership integrity, gospel clarity, qualified leadership, church discipline. Others deserve patience and flexibility: music preferences, room arrangements, service length, minor programming decisions. The difficulty is that opponents often frame small issues as large ones — “this is about our church’s identity,” “this is about respect for what we’ve built.” Discernment requires not simply categorizing issues in the abstract, but reading the particular dynamics of your congregation, your moment, and your relationships.

Davis roots this virtue in prayer and immersion in Scripture. Wisdom is not a technique — it is a relationship. The fear of the Lord is where discernment begins.

Paul’s charge in Acts 20:28–31 is instructive: be on guard for yourselves and for the flock. Both external wolves and internal false teachers require the same underlying virtue, applied in different directions.

Holding All Four Together

What Davis describes across these four chapters is not four separate traits but a unified pastoral character. The man who is humble but not courageous will never act. The man who is courageous but not patient will act too quickly. The man who is patient but not discerning will be patient about things that demand urgency. And the man who is discerning but not humble will use his clarity of judgment as a weapon rather than a tool.

Revitalization requires all four, held together, sustained over years, by the grace of God and the power of the Spirit.

The Promise Underneath the Work

Acts 20 ends with Paul kneeling and praying with the Ephesian elders on the beach. They weep. They embrace. They know they may not see each other again. The whole scene is saturated with love — the love of a pastor for the churches he has served, and the love of a congregation for the man who gave his life to them.

That is what this work is about. Not programs. Not bylaws. Not metrics. But the love of Christ for his church, flowing through broken, humble, courageous, patient, discerning pastors who are willing to stay.

None of us builds the church. God does. We plant. We water. God gives the increase. And that is a promise we can bank on.

This post is adapted from a session taught to the Pillar Network Revitalization Cohort.

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