Leadership in the past age.
The empty tomb. The realization slowly penetrates their confused minds. The ministry is not over. It has only just begun.
The eleven leaders and however many other disciples realized what the message was. It took a few days to digest. I don’t blame them. I like to digest new ideas for a little while until I see all the possibilities.
I wrote recently about succession planning. Sometimes people do not grow into leadership until they actually have to be leaders. Their mentors may have seen the potential. Potential cannot turn into reality until one actually goes to work on it.
Walter Russell Mead is a thinker. Mostly he writes on politics. He’s sort of conservative, but I’m not always sure. This is a good thing. But he has a Christian heritage and writes on the church. Recently, he wrote on the state of Christian leadership–pastoral education. The eleven, he writes, could not have gotten a job in most any church today. You see, they didn’t have a piece of paper telling the world that they had graduated from a seminary.
Their seminary was part from a mentor (OK, the best mentor) and part from the “school of hard knocks” as we used to say. But over the past many years, we have developed the idea that priests and pastors (and Christian educators, music directors, missionaries, and so on) must be educated. It’s like an MBA for churches.
And Christian leadership has become a salaried staff position. Salary, benefits, position in the hierarchy, perks. Once upon a time, I was on the Ohio state Board of Trustees for a Protestant denomination. While attending my first meeting with the others trying to gage who I was and being a young man, most asked me, “What church do you pastor?” None, I replied. I’m a product development manager in industry. Hmmm, they thought.
Mead writes, “It’s time for new leaders with vision and imagination to take the church beyond the blue [his term for an old way of thinking, big institutions, etc.]. Since the colonial era, the genius of American Christianity has lain in the ability of new generations of Christian leaders to reinvent institutions, find an authentic theological stance and voice that appeals to each new generation, and put Christianity in the forefront of individual lives and social challenges from age to age.
“Theology can be debated; liberal, conservative, protestant, catholic, fundamentalist, modernist. There is much to be said for each of these positions, and the debates need to continue.
“But there’s a much more critical difference: the difference between life and death. There is a lot of dead wood in American Christian institutions today, and the carters are coming to clear it away.”
Is it time for people who have talent and are nurtured to assume more leadership in the Christian movement? People like most of us who read this blog? Time for us to stand up and be the leaders we should be–and nurturing and mentoring the next generation–to proclaim the resurrected Christ to the world? Just do it.
Faith Venture 
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