Off-the-Grid

Unplugging from traditional services. No longer a customer.

Jason Coker recently said, “The books I’d been reading on church planting didn’t help. They all basically boiled down to, “10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, over-bloated, top-heavy, pastor-dependent bureaucracy.”

Yep. I would add…

“10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, relevant, soul-patch wearing, expert-dependent bureaucracy – The Emerging Version.”

“10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, outward-focused, soul-patch wearing, expert-dependent bureaucracy – The Missional Version.”

“10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, non-institutional, authentic, expert-dependent bureaucracy – The Organic Version.”

If you want to join the ranks of the experts, staying up-to-date with the latest-greatest conferences and books is important. Or maybe someone just needs you to think it’s important.

The simplicity of faithful Christian living doesn’t require expert help. Those who imply that it does have something to sell.

Disclaimer: Not that you shouldn’t enjoy the encouragement and wisdom of your favorite thinkers.  There is a difference between that and marketing hype.

Things I Didn’t Learn About Leadership in Church

Leadership originates in response to the needs of others. Leadership is not the response of people to the vision of an influential person, but rather their response to the leader as he or she articulates their wants and needs. It can not occur without truly knowing and understanding the needs of those one presumes to lead.

When a leader speaks the language of the hopes of others, the followers’ response is what initiates the leadership relationship. When a leader knows the underlying needs of others, a shared vision and mutual relationship that produces transformation can be created.

Leadership is not the articulation of what we assume others need. Which means that I can not really enter into a leadership relationship until I know someone well enough to know their needs and am willing to serve them in response to their needs, not to mine. This is a fair gauge for assessing whether a true leadership relationship exists.

Positional leadership can create a platform of influence for an individual, and it can be organizationally effective. However, it is not typically transformational to the lives of followers. To the degree it is separate from relationship with followers, it is a perversion of leadership, no matter what you call it.

I find most material on church leadership to be a confusing mixture of organizational management cloaked in servant language preserving hierarchical relationship. Because of that, I believe we are still mostly confused about what leadership is within the church. My thoughts about leadership within the church are further explained in the post A Relational Ethos of Leadership.

As an organization, churches require managerial leadership, and I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. There are many things a person may do that are important and good, however not everything should be lumped under the label of leading.

Real, transforming leadership can occur in the church. However, true leadership is rooted in the needs of the follower, not the needs of the leader or the organization. Possibly that is the reason that transformational leadership in many realms, religious, political, societal, most often occurs outside the margins of established structures of power.

Leadership is not dependent on position but on the actions of one who is responsive to need. Therefore, real leadership can exist at any level both within and outside of a particular system, organization, or structure.

Permission granted. Anyone can lead. But few will.

Hauerwas on Leadership

I’ve been wanting to write a few things about leadership, but haven’t had the opportunity. In the meantime, let me share some of my favorite thoughts from this video of Stanley Hauerwas.

“It’s always persuasion.”

“Many of the proposals about leadership are quite perverse, exactly because it gives the impression that you know what leadership is abstracted from communities that make leadership possible.”

(3:50) “Don’t lie. Very simple, don’t lie to me. Just don’t lie to me. It kills you, it kills me, and it kills the community.”

(4:20) “The bottom line – politics is people. For any person that wants to be in leadership, if they try to lead in a way that means they don’t have to deal with people and to tell the truth to people, they automatically defeat community.”

Someone to Blame

I am convinced that people are born with a longing for relationship with God, a homing device if you will. I am also convinced of the persistence and power of the self-revealing nature of God. We saw with the incarnation of Christ the attraction of the lost and broken to the true revelation of God.

Now the church is the incarnation of Christ’s body, His light shining in the earth today. However, statistics show massive hemorrhaging from the Body, vast numbers of people saying they don’t want anything to do with the church. Yet often in their next breath they reveal spiritual hunger and longing.

As the church, we often march out the typical scapegoats – “The world will hate us, Jesus came to bring a sword, We are being persecuted.” Near the end of this video, O’Reilly asked Brit Hume, “What do you think drives the negative comments about Christianity?” That is a great question! Brit’s answer was a bit of a Fail, but the question is something we should all be asking.

The first response when the church is confronted with its failure to represent the love of God to the world should not be to blame them but to look in the mirror and assess what we are reflecting. One characteristic of the emerging movement, according to Richard Rohr, was the conclusion that “many of the major concerns of Jesus are at major variance with what most of our churches have emphasized.”

I have only recently heard “the emerging church” mentioned locally. In my neck of the woods, it is still relatively unheard of, and each time it was mentioned as something scary and bad. I was thinking about this when I ran across this video by Bickle and Engle. They have concluded that the “emergent church” is the greatest threat to and the cause of the crisis in the church.

Ron Cole nailed it when he said, “It’s obvious they should have left their fortresses and camp and done some real reconnaissance.” This is no more helpful than blaming the lost. What I hear Bickle saying in this clip is that in spite of the fact that 96% of people are rejecting what the church has offered, his proposal is for everyone to try harder and do more of the same.

Being forced to the margins gives the church an opportunity to refine its message to more accurately reflect Jesus and the love of the Father. It is vital that we grasp our calling to be a true embodiment of kingdom life here and now. The instinct for blame or any form of institutional self-preservation must be cast aside in favor of honest self-examination about whether the content of our spiritual lives, both individually and corporately, reflects “life.” This is the only thing of lasting value we have to offer.

The emerging and missional movements were both spirit-led responses to needed transformation of the church. They describe the widespread response of many people in obedience to an intentional shift they perceived in what God is doing. They are taking the message of redemption and reconciliation outside of traditional expressions of church into the avenues of the world, bringing the kingdom to those who are outside the church. Both emerging and missional are temporary descriptors of changes occurring within the church at this particular time, describing a shift in focus and emphasis.

Am I naive enough to think that everything about the emerging or missional movements is pure and true? Absolutely not. Anyone who has taken the time to be familiar with the conversation understands the diversity of beliefs and practices associated with these labels. I am also not suggesting that anyone must be associated with these movements. However, in completely dismissing them, you lose valuable insight from those who have already been listening to why people are rejecting traditional expressions of church.

Is the emerging church a threat to the church? Is it a movement or a conversation? Is it dead or no longer radical? At the end of the day, the label or brand doesn’t really matter. Do we represent and reflect the light of Jesus, the life of the Spirit, the love of the Father? This will be the church that is becoming, regardless of what we call it. And if we don’t, that will be the church that is dead, regardless of what we call it.

So back to those people who don’t yet know that they are loved and embraced by the Father – we must deal with the many ways in which we’ve failed to communicate the most relevant truth. Why haven’t they recognized the answer to their longing in the incarnation of Christ in the earth today?