HERE is a great discussion. This question was posed…
Anyway, If there was one thing you (regardless of if you are a church “leader,” a pastor, a church member, a church hopper or a church hater) if you could tell the people who are leading our churches one thing…what would it be?
Follow that link and read the comments at the bottom. If you care to add yours here, have at it.
If you ARE a pastor or church leader, you REALLY should follow that link.
That’s the name of a conference I’m headed to this weekend.
Sunday morning will be a chance to worship with the Mars Hill community, and then the conference will run until Tuesday.
Quite honestly, I’d kind of like to stay home because home feels pretty good right now. But I’m not complaining about opportunities to take advantage of either, so I’m going and I’m intent on absorbing all that I can.
More later…
What follows isn’t mine. It’s from the blog of Charles Kiser, who works with a church plant in Dallas
He speaks of attending a conference, where he had the chance to share a table with Neil Cole, who’s written a book called “Organic Church”. Basic idea of this book: Church is most what it’s supposed to be when it’s small and highly reproductive. Cole focuses on making disciples who make disciples and start new churches – even in the confines of people’s homes or in coffee shops.
Kiser then goes on to reflect on his church’s leadership challenges, which I’ve only observed in… oh… every church I’ve ever seen. But his is unique in the sense that their needs are pushed to the forefront by their rapid growth. Yeah, I don’t see that in every church–my own included.
So take it away, Charles…
We’ve been facing leadership development challenges in the Storyline Community — in a good way. More people are participating than we have leaders to lead. So, wondering what might be ahead for us, I asked Mr. Cole: “How long does it take before a person becomes a disciple and is able to lead and care for a house church?”
Cole said, “Well, that’s easy: 3 years, 6 months, 29 days, 8 hours, 22 seconds.”
And he stared at me. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You know I’m making fun of you, right?” I
said, “Yeah, I got that.”
He went on to say that there’s no formula or identical pattern for developing leaders. Then he said something very profound that I’ve been chewing on this week. “In the institutional paradigm, leadership development is about getting people to do something for you (e.g., lead a group, teach a class, preach a sermon, develop curriculum, etc.). “In an organic paradigm, leadership development is discipleship. Leadership is about following Jesus so closely that other people want to follow you because they think by doing so they might also be able to follow Jesus more closely. Skills and logistics flow out of a disciple’s relationship with Jesus.” Then he put in a plug for his new book, Organic Leadership.
He’s right. The easy part is teaching people the skills of event planning, conversation facilitation and connecting with people.
The hard part is seeing passion for God cultivated in people such that it’s contagious and other people follow because they want that passion.
It challenges me as a leader, too. Am I contagious? Are people following because they see a passion for God in me that they want? Am I a person of character? Those are much deeper questions than “Can I run a leadership development group well?” I thanked Neil Cole for being patient with me.
I’m still deprogramming from institutional ways of envisioning leadership.
I always knew it wasn’t just about doing, but this gave words to a few of my fuzzy thoughts. This makes the quest to invest in leaders more challenging; it also makes it something that actually looks worth doing.
As for the deprogramming from institutional ways…
That’s likely a post for another day.
What follows is an unholy union, I’m sure. It’s mostly the Phillips translation of Ephesians 1:15-23. But not exactly. What follows is the text as J.B. Phillips meets J.B. Me.
(There was some I-thought-helpful formatting below, but WordPress doesn’t seem to be having any of it. Time’s passing me by, so I’m pushing “publish”.)
Since I heard of
this faith of yours
in the Lord Jesus
and the practical way in which you are expressing it
towards fellow-Christians,
I thank God continually for you and
I never give up praying for you;
and this is my prayer.
That God,
the God of our Lord Jesus Christ and
the all-glorious Father,
will give you
spiritual wisdom and insight
to know more of him:
that you may receive that
inner illumination of the spirit
which will make you realise
the greatness of the hope
to which he is calling you –
the magnificence and splendour of the inheritance
promised to Christians –
the tremendous-ness of the power
available to us who believe in God.
That power
is the same divine power which was demonstrated in Christ
when he raised him from the dead
and gave him the place of supreme honour in Heaven –
a place that is infinitely superior
to any conceivable command,
authority,
power or
control,
and which carries with it
a name
far beyond any name that could ever be used
in this world or
the world to come.
God
has placed everything under the power of Christ and
has set him up as head of everything for the Church.
For the Church is his body,
and in that body
lives fully the one who fills the whole wide universe.
—
—
So the “Jay’s Notes” version…
Pray for wisdom and insight to see what you’re apt to miss.
Pray that what you cannot afford to miss will be illuminated to your sight…
The undefeatable hope that is found in God,
The magnificent sharing of all that is His with all who are His,
The vastness of the power available to all who believe in Him.
Pray this prayer for those you love. Pray it for those you do not know.
Pray it for yourself.
For Christ is over all things, for the sake of the church.
That’s not the institution or non-profit organization that you think you know.
That’s the people of Jesus,
who have worn his name through the ages, and
in whom the universe-filling God does His darnedest to dwell.
So keep praying that prayer.
Pray it for those you love. Pray it for those you do not know.
Pray it for yourself.
In my cynical moments, I like posters like that one. But not all my moments are cynical, gratefully.
Much of my inner “tradition discussion” has to do with faith and how it plays out in my life or in the life of my faith community. I struggle from day to day, bouncing from stances that would seem anti-traditional to others that would seem ultra-traditional. Call me bi-polar if you wish, but that’s where I am.
A reading today brought some valuable thoughts on the subject, from J.I. Packer…
“Nobody can claim to be detached from traditions. In fact, one sure way to be swallowed up by traditionalism is to think that one is immune to it…. The questions, then, is not whether we have traditions, but whether our traditions conflict with the only absolute standard in these matters: Holy Scripture.”
He continues…
“All Christians are at once beneficiaries and victims of tradition–beneficiaries, who receive nurturing truth and wisdom from God’s faithfulness in past generations; victims, who now take for granted things that need to be questioned, thus treating as divine absolutes patterns of belief and behavior that should be seen as human, provisional, and relative. We are all beneficiaries of good, wise, and sound tradition and victims of poor, unwise, and unsound traditions.”
And now to know the difference.
And now to act upon that knowledge wisely.