Faith Venture

I’m in Hannover, Germany. My room overlooks the beautiful Machsee (a little lake) with the sunrise streaming over the lake. Beautiful morning. I’ll probably be walking several miles at the famous Hannover Fair (Hannover Messe) with about 23 buildings on the fairgrounds filled with exhibitors talking about the latest technology for industry. Always cool.

My meditation this morning included the latest Andy Stanley leadership podcast. This one on trust.

There are at least two points-of-view to look at the trust issue.

Trust is essentially doing what you say you’ll do. Living up to your commitments.

Do you say you’ll make the 9 am meeting, yet you don’t arrive until 9:15 or 9:30? Or you say you’ll be somewhere and then fail to show? Or you promise a report by end of day Wednesday, yet when Friday rolls around, no report?

In this gap between expectation and reality, how do those affected react? Do they suspect your motives, or do they give you the benefit of the doubt.

Suspicion is one real problem in an organization where there is often this gap.

Have you ever worked in an organization where people are suspicious of others’ motives? Constantly?

I have. Many times. I’m sure you have too. It’s never healthy.

A leader needs to perceive and deal with this attitude quickly. Have a conversation. Do some fact finding. Discover the cause of the gap. Deal with the facts. And if the facts are that the individual just cannot perform or be relied upon, then deal with that.

If you are the one who creates the gaps, transparency is your friend. Address the gap before anyone else has a chance to react. Let people know that you are aware and will change.

Suspicion in a church or any organization is like a cancer. It starts small and then it eats away at its health. Stop it before it can start.

Leadership in the past age.

I just picked this image yesterday a little at random while surfing the Web. But it seams to represent the old “command and control” leadership developed with the industrial age.”

Churches have that, too. Catholics have had that a long time–although not without bumps along the way. Protestants thought they got away from it a few hundred years ago, but they just have fewer levels of hierarchy.

It’s still often a one-to-many style. There is a place for a good teacher who can teach to many. I listen to a few of these people every week–Bill Hybels, John Ortberg, Andy Stanley. They keep me grounded.

But even among Catholics, the idea of entering the “full-time Christian ministry” as a profession is weakening. They are consolidating some parishes in our area due to lack of priests. Seminaries are hurting all over the country. The high price they charge is seldom seen worth the reward. I look at some of the curriculum from time to time and cringe. Not from a liberal v conservative v fundamentalist v whatever point of view. More from a “they’re charging this much money for this type of class!?” point of view.

Leadership mentors promising people. Providing education as the need arises.  But also practical work of helping others–either in ministry or missions (inward to the brothers and sisters or outward to the world).

Except for those teaching times, that picture should be more like all blue and one grayed out.

• Empower people to do ministry
• Develop teams
• Collaborate on projects
• Mentor others (or seek a mentor)
• Get out of the building
• Do ministry and mission you’re passionate about
• Be passionate in living with-God every day
• Leaders say, “How can I help you”

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.

Jesus was an enigma to his contemporaries. No one figured him out. Even today, people have a tough time figuring him out.

Sometimes he was a teacher in the Wisdom tradition. Many of the sayings he taught came straight from the book of Proverbs. Sometimes he gave sayings with a twist–as in adding “mind” to the Shema, and then adding the second commandment “like the first” to love your neighbor.

But he didn’t look like a Wisdom teacher when he acted out his inner Old Testament prophet. As in his last week. He cursed the fig tree that was barren. Like the prophets of earlier time, this was a prophetic act of pointing out the barrenness of religious life under the leaders of the day. And the symbolic act of driving out the money changers and merchants from the Temple.

Sometimes a person just has to be strong. Send a message. He was thoroughly disgusted with the state of religion in his day.

We can learn from this. Even today, we have religious leaders who are exposed as shallow chasers of power and wealth. Who bow to prevailing political winds rather than living out the Gospel of Jesus.

Worth pondering as we approach Easter. What do we place above having an intimate, passionate relationship with our God?

I will be taking a few days to hike in the hills of southern Ohio. There is no Internet at the lodge. They say mobile phones work only intermittently. I’ll take a Sabbath for reflection, if you will, before the Easter celebration.