Choosing Your Leader
You don’t have to run this. You only have to pick who does.
The curriculum is already built. The leader training is already built. The one piece of this that can’t come from a DVD or a downloadable guide is deciding, personally, which men will carry it. That’s not a delegation task, it’s the job.
I have yet to see a truly effective ministry to men where the senior pastor wasn’t all in. Ideally, that means leading it himself. Where that’s not possible, it means being its most visible, most vocal champion — because this doesn’t work if the pastor goes quiet on it.Vince D’Acchioli
Being that champion starts right here — with who you personally call, sit down with, and hand the vision to. Get this one decision right and the rest of the model runs the way it’s designed to. Get it wrong and no curriculum fixes it.
Right now, you’re picking one man — not building an org chart.
This page is about identifying your Men’s Ministry Leader: the man you personally call, interview, and hand the vision to — the one who will own this ministry under your endorsement and help you build out the team around it.
He will, in time, help you recruit others and eventually put trained men in charge of each weekly table. That’s a real decision, but it’s his and your team’s to make later, once he’s in place — not something you need to solve today. Your job right now is simpler and more specific: find the one man you trust to carry this.
And when that time comes, he won’t be starting from scratch either — OTM provides free training videos to prepare Table Leaders for that role.
Treat the interview like you’re hiring an executive — because you are.
Start small. Prayerfully think of two or three men — in a larger church, as many as eight to ten men — who carry real spiritual maturity and a genuine desire to be involved. Then:
- Call each man individually. Don’t announce it from the pulpit or leave it to a sign-up sheet.
- Ask him directly if he’d consider helping you steward the most important ministry in the church.
- Bring him into your office for a real, scheduled, one-on-one interview.
- Treat it with the weight of hiring a staff member. That seriousness is itself part of the invitation.
- Share your actual vision and passion, then ask him, explicitly, to join you.
This isn’t a formality. The seriousness of the ask is what tells a good man this is real.
You’re not looking for a man who has arrived. You’re looking for one who’s moving.
- Spiritually maturing, not spiritually perfect — actively and visibly growing is the actual bar.
- Teachable and willing to be trained — OTI’s facilitation training exists because leading a group is a learnable skill, not an innate gift.
- Relationally consistent — the kind of man who follows through on a phone call he said he’d make.
- Willing to be discipled himself before discipling others.
Don’t hold out for a man with no rough edges. Hold out for a man who’s honest about his rough edges but still shows up.
Once your Men’s Ministry Leader is in place, help him build the team around him.
This is the “recruit others” step mentioned earlier: it’s his Men’s Ministry Team, not Table Leaders yet. This team is the broader group who help him steward the ministry day to day. Table Leaders come later: they’re trained and appointed from within this same team once there are enough men to split into multiple weekly tables.
With your leader identified and installed, ask him to prayerfully name ten to fifteen men (scaled to your church size) who carry the same passion and maturity you saw in him. Build your own list too, independently. You may know men he doesn’t know.
- Bring your lists together to review candidates honestly and prayerfully, together.
- Agree on who gets invited to join him.
- Use the same real-interview approach he experienced. The goal is still to plant vision, not fill a roster.
- Give the group a name: a Men’s Ministry Team, or something that fits your church. It should feel like something worth being part of, not just another committee.
Your ministry will only be as good as the men leading it.
We teach what we know, but we reproduce who we are.
Meet with your leadership team — at least weekly, even briefly — with a real agenda:
- A structured way to help them grow spiritually and as leaders, not just a status update
- Real time for prayer and encouragement — know where each of them is actually struggling
- Model transparency yourself first — they will only go as deep as you do
- Have the hard conversation when a man isn’t ready yet — ask him to grow before you hand him a room full of men
- Know your team’s real strengths and weaknesses, not just their willingness
- Use real facilitation training — this is exactly what OTI’s leader training video curriculum was built for
- Build a plan together for the next year, not just the next meeting
Poor group facilitation is the single biggest reason men quit small groups.
What is the one thing most likely to sink this? Not lack of interest. Not bad curriculum. It’s a room that isn’t well run. Men stay, and lean in, when they can tell the group is organized and the leader actually expects something of them. That combination reads as being cared for, not managed. It’s worth weighing directly in your interview: does this man value that kind of care enough to insist on it once he’s the one leading?
This is exactly why OTI doesn’t hand your Men’s Ministry Leader a workbook and walk away. Real facilitation training comes with the curriculum, both for him, and eventually for the men he puts in charge of each table.
Start with one honest phone call.
You don’t need a finished org chart today. You need one name and one phone call — the first man you already trust enough to ask. Everything above scales from that single decision.