About Arrow Leadership
You can become a better strategist and still become a worse leader.
You can grow an organization while neglecting your own soul.
You can learn how to manage people, communicate vision, raise money, solve problems, and make difficult decisions—and somewhere along the way become so consumed with leading for Jesus that you aren't spending much time being led by Jesus.
Arrow Leadership believes Christian leadership has to begin somewhere deeper.
For more than 30 years, Arrow has helped Christian leaders develop the character, skills, relationships, and spiritual foundations they need to lead well without separating leadership development from discipleship.
Their approach can be summarized in three movements:
Be led more by Jesus.
Lead more like Jesus.
Lead more to Jesus.
Before You Lead Others, Who Is Leading You?
Leadership usually focuses outward.
Your team needs direction.
Your organization needs a strategy.
Someone needs a decision.
Another problem needs your attention.
Arrow starts by turning the question around.
What's happening inside the leader?
Christian leadership can become unhealthy when someone's identity becomes inseparable from their position, performance, or ministry results.
Arrow wants leaders to develop from a different foundation.
Before leadership is about what you accomplish for Jesus, it's about your relationship with Jesus.
That means developing spiritual rhythms, understanding your identity in Christ, learning to discern God's direction, and allowing Jesus to continue transforming the parts of your character nobody else necessarily sees.
Arrow calls this being led more by Jesus.
Leadership Should Look Like the Leader You Follow
Then the focus moves outward.
How does Jesus change the way you lead people?
Arrow believes Christian leadership shouldn't simply borrow the latest leadership techniques and attach Bible verses to them.
Jesus Himself provides the model.
He led with courage without making leadership about Himself.
He served.
He developed people.
He spoke truth.
He demonstrated compassion.
He invested deeply in relationships while remaining focused on His mission.
To lead more like Jesus means allowing those qualities to influence the way leaders handle responsibility, relationships, conflict, teams, decisions, and organizational challenges.
That doesn't make practical leadership skills unimportant.
Arrow teaches those too.
The difference is the center.
Leadership competence and Christlike character are supposed to grow together.
Transformation Takes Longer Than a Weekend
There's another thing Arrow recognizes:
Deep leadership development takes time.
You can leave a conference inspired on Saturday and return to the same habits by Monday.
That's why its flagship Arrow Leadership Program isn't built as a quick leadership event.
The experience unfolds over roughly 15 to 18 months.
Participants move through learning experiences while receiving assessment feedback, creating personalized development plans, meeting with mentors or coaches, and learning alongside peers.
Arrow offers different streams for emerging and executive leaders so development can meet people at different stages of responsibility.
The extended format gives leaders something a weekend seminar can't easily provide.
Time to practice.
Time to reflect.
Time to discover weaknesses.
And time for transformation to become something deeper than inspiration.
Leadership Can Be Lonely
There's something else leadership books don't always prepare you for.
The farther you move into leadership, the harder it can become to find people with whom you can be completely open.
People look to you for answers.
Your team expects direction.
Your organization depends on you.
Eventually, a leader can become surrounded by people and still feel remarkably alone.
Arrow intentionally develops leaders in community.
Participants build relationships with peers who understand the pressures of leadership and seasoned mentors who can ask deeper questions.
That creates room for conversations that aren't simply about organizational performance.
How are you actually doing?
What is God teaching you?
Where are you stuck?
What are you afraid to admit?
Sometimes becoming a healthier leader begins by finally having somewhere safe enough to answer honestly.
Sharpening More Than the Individual
Arrow's work extends beyond individual leaders.
Churches, ministries, nonprofits, and other organizations can use Arrow's coaching, workshops, consulting, assessments, team development, and longer leadership initiatives to strengthen groups of leaders together.
That matters because organizational problems aren't always solved by another strategic plan.
Sometimes the people carrying the strategy need development themselves.
A healthier leader can influence a healthier team.
A healthier team can help create a healthier organization.
And a healthier organization can become better positioned to fulfill the mission God has given it.
Leadership That Multiplies Around the World
Arrow's vision has also moved beyond North America.
Rather than trying to export one rigid leadership program everywhere, Arrow Leadership Global works with nationally led programs that adapt the Arrow model within their own contexts.
Leaders share a commitment to Jesus-centered leadership while developing other leaders within their own countries and cultures.
It's an approach Arrow describes as:
Kingdom seeking, not empire building.
The objective isn't simply making the Arrow organization larger.
It's seeing more Jesus-centered leaders developed around the world.
Leading More to Jesus
Eventually, Christian leadership has to point somewhere.
For Arrow, becoming a more confident executive or capable ministry leader isn't enough.
The final movement is leading more to Jesus.
Leadership becomes an opportunity to help other people experience God's love and participate in His Kingdom.
That might happen through a church.
It could happen through a nonprofit organization, ministry, mission agency, business, or another sphere where a Christian has been given influence.
The setting changes.
The destination doesn't.
Leadership should ultimately point beyond the leader.
Lead Different
Arrow Leadership began in 1991 when evangelist Leighton Ford recognized something missing.
After decades of ministry alongside his brother-in-law Billy Graham through the Billy Graham Association, Ford became concerned that his generation had spent enormous energy doing ministry without investing enough in developing the generation that would come after them.
The sudden death of his 21-year-old son, Sandy, became another deeply personal catalyst.
From that season came the Arrow Leadership Program and a commitment to developing the next generation of Christian leaders.
Decades later, the question Arrow asks leaders remains remarkably relevant.
Not simply:
How can you become a better leader?
But:
Who are you becoming as you lead?
Because Christian leadership isn't only measured by the size of an organization, the strength of a strategy, or the number of people willing to follow you.
It also matters whether you're following Jesus.
At the heart of Arrow Leadership is the conviction that the most important development in a Christian leader doesn't begin with another leadership technique. It begins with Jesus—learning to be led by Him more deeply, allowing His character to reshape the way you lead others, and using whatever influence you've been given to ultimately lead people back toward Him.
