Years ago I wrote a fable about a problem no one would solve. I didn’t realise I was writing about myself. There is a social phenomenon called the “bystander effect”. It is attributed to a diffusion of responsibility. In the fable a whole village agrees to turn their fountain into a lemonade fountain by everyone bringing just one cup of lemonade each. In the end everyone brings water thinking that one cup won’t matter, everyone else will do their part. The bystander effect happens when everyone owns a problem, nobody does. When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.

In the last few months I keep finding myself in rooms full of church leaders — pastors, para church leaders, Bible college faculty, university ministry staff workers — and the subject that keeps coming up is the leadership pipeline. Everyone is asking: “Who is raising the next generation of ministry leaders? Where are the ministry apprentices? Who is responsible?”

The conversation seems to follow a pattern.

It starts well. There is genuine energy. Everyone agrees we need to do something, everyone agrees we need to raising new leaders. There is often talk of ecosystem thinking — the idea that churches, campus ministries, and theological institutions need to work together, not in parallel silos. Heads nod. The vision is compelling.

And then the meeting ends. And nothing changes.

I know this because I talk to these same leaders afterward, one on one, in the carpark or over coffee. And privately, away from the room, the language shifts. It’s “really hard,” they say. Or: “It’s really more someone else’s lane.” Or: “I don’t have anyone to train” as if they appear out of the ether. The ecosystem that seemed so promising an hour ago has quietly become a way of distributing ownership so thinly that nobody carries any of it. Everyone owns the problem and so assumes someone else will do it..

I was convicted of my own culpability here. I heard a Bible college lecturer put it with unusual candour. The leadership pipeline, he said, was “a little further downstream” from where he operated as if this wasn’t something he could do something about.

I remember the thought I had in that moment: No. It is exactly your job. If you are training the people who will lead the church,  they should be training up others as a part of their job. The pipeline runs directly through your classroom. You are not downstream. 

But here is the thing I had to sit with afterward: while I was not wrong about him, I was incomplete. Because everyone in that room — the para-church staff worker, the senior pastor, the denominational leader — everyone had the same job, the same responsibility. The pipeline was not downstream from any of them. It ran through all of them.

Including me.

I could not point the finger without realising my own lack of responsibility here. My work sits at a specific and seemingly narrow point in the ministry world: church planting recruitment and development. It is not, on the surface, an apprenticeship training role. I am not on the front line of ministry. I am not a youth pastor pouring into a teenager who might one day lead a congregation. I work with adults who are already in the process of planting churches — people who are, frankly, stretched thin. They are often underfunded. They are time-poor. They are doing the work of three people on the budget of one. If anyone had an excuse not to train people, it would be them.

And yet. 

Church planters are often the single most formative influence in the lives of the emerging leaders around them. The apprentice watches a church planter do all the things that a senior pastor has to do, with less resources. He has to build everything from scratch, or close to. If anyone is training apprentices to think from first principles of ministry it will be a church planter. 

My job, I have come to understand, is partly to remind church planters of this. To tell them: “I know it stretches you to take on an apprentice when you are barely making ends meet and you do not really have the time to stop and explain all that you are doing to someone else. But you are in the best position to train others, to help them understand ministry from the inside out.” If a planter has a responsibility to do their part in training others, how much more the rest of us.

I need to take my responsibility to help to get what they need to make that happen. 

The good news is that research into the bystander effect has shown that the effect can be broken. All it takes is for one person to stop diffusing responsibility and start assuming it. Once one person acts, others follow. The paralysis dissolves.

The leadership pipeline problem in our churches is not a resource problem, or not primarily. It is a responsibility problem. It is not assuming that everyone else will do it.

The question is not who owns the pipeline. The question is whether you — wherever you sit, whatever your role, however stretched your bandwidth — are willing to stop waiting for the answer and start acting like it’s you. What is the way you can contribute to the pipeline of new gospel workers heading to the harvest fields? Just start with one name.