Filed under: Institutional Church, Missional Church | Tags: Church, Church Leadership, Disfunctional Church, Missional Leadership, Service, Volunteers, Youth Ministry
Well in case anyone is still interested I have officially ended my self imposed blog exile. It took some good topics to get me out of it and I think I found a few to write about in the next couple days. This is a repost of a blog by Mark Riddle over on the Youth Specialties blog site. Here’s what he wrote about the other day with my thoughts following (bolding mine):
“I got off the phone this morning with John, a youth pastor, who will leave his church in 20 days because of the church’s financial situation. He’s built a big youth ministry with lots of kids and very few volunteers. “The church isn’t interested in working with teens,” he tells me. John is truly heart-broken for the kids and is reaching out to me to see if I can help the church in some way after he leaves. He doesn’t want to see it all fall apart and he knows it will after he leaves.
I didn’t tell him this. It’s probably for the best.
You see, somewhere along the way we youth pastors bought into a lie. We believe our job is to make things happen, to build programs, to attract youth all in the name of ministry, or building the kingdom. We bought into the idea that our job, our ministry is to make things go. We believe that somehow, our success or failure as a pastor is dependent upon our ability to motivate people to follow through and implement our plans and our dreams in the name of vision. In fact, we in the church are infatuated with visionaries who make it happen. The lie is pervasive these days.
Chances are this is a small reason why you love being a youth pastor. You have ideas, and you get to inspire and envision people to produce your programs. Chances are you are evaluated by how efficiently you bring others on board with your vision and how well you produce the goals and objectives you declared.
But this is a deeply flawed understanding of leadership and is destructive for church staff, and those within the church as well. This is a flawed perspective because it has unintended consequences. This kind of thinking is highly colonial and creates a level of isolation, entitlement and passivity that enables congregations to abdicate their responsibility to the leaders, who often gladly take it.
The leaders become strangers and distant from the people they are called to lead in this environment. In extreme cases people can become cogs in the details of a leaders mechanistic plans. Service is reduced to volunteer positions that must be filled.
It’s important for you to understand something.
You aren’t called to make things happen in your church.
Oh, you may be paid to make things happen, but it’s not God calling you to plan, lead and pull off all that unsustainable stuff. It’s not God calling you build it all, or convince others to build your vision either.
You will always have more ideas, more dreams, more hopes, more plans than your church should pull off in your ministry. You will always see more than can be done right now. You must learn to live with this tension.
* Your job as a leader isn’t to make plans and then have others buy into them.
* The role of a leader is to declare the mission, and create an environment in which people can dream and live into it.
* By making things happen you are robbing people from the God given responsibility they have to children in your church.
The difference is in the level of commitment of the people you lead. Take John for instance. John created a lot of great experiences, but the people within his church weren’t committed to it outside of a paycheck to a staff member. When John leaves in 20 days, his ministry will crumble and it will be a beautiful thing for his church. Because it will force them to make a decision about how engaged they will be for teens.
I know what you are thinking. His church won’t step up. They will lose kids.
Could be. It’s pretty common.
This is the commentary on how well we lead in the church though, not so much on the church itself. The people of the church are being faithful to how they were led. They are living out their ministry teens the way it’s been expected of them.
How many of our churches are this way and how many churches would lose people if the staff stopped making things happen? There is an entire culture of leadership within the church rising up based on this faulty understanding of leadership.
You see, not only is top-down leadership often manipulative, colonial and patriarchal, but it’s also reactive. It only creates more of the same problems that it’s trying to solve.
Whereas leadership that declares the mission and then cultivates an environment within which it can happen is restorative. It produces energy, not hype. It confronts people, and forces accountability. The kind of leadership creates accountability, without directly calling for it.
So is this the end of visionary leadership? Absolutely not. It is simply a change in the way churches approach the role of staff and the way the mission blooms within your church. There’s a difference between helping your community imagine a world beyond their currently reality (vision) and convincing them to live it your way.
What kind of leader are you? Do you feel the need to make things happen? Have you always been this way? If not, what taught you that this was the right way?
Or do you cultivate an environment in which people can engage deeply, or superficially? An environment where you let go of the implementation to the people of your church?”
Wow! “Service is reduced to volunteer positions that must be filled.” While Mark is directing his comments to youth pastors it is very easy to extrapolate them to leadership within the church as a whole. In my 7 plus years in vocational ministry I’m not sure I ever viewed service any other way. It’s not that I didn’t want to, it’s just that I was never challenged to think outside that box. The weekly (daily) complaint was the need for volunteers to help run all the programs that were going on in the church. Not once (that I can remember) did anyone (myself included) ever ask, “Maybe we need to redefine, what we are asking of the people in our community. Maybe we need to free them up to serve out of the overflow of their hearts rather then what we think they need.”
I’m slowly learning a new paradigm of leadership (and service) that comes out of the community. That isn’t top down and authoritative, but rather is open, communal, and grace-filled. It seeks to cultivate passions and ideas rather then plant my own. I’m not very good at it yet, and I’m certainly in a learning/failure mode, but I believe it will eventually reap benefits beyond what I can imagine. Reading Mark’s words inspire me to think of all kinds of churches with that kind of leadership. Multiple congregations of people serving out of their passions and energy rather then compulsion and guilt. What a beautiful thing that could be.
Make it so God for you glory, make it so.
Filed under: Missional Church, Quotes | Tags: Christianity, Church, Faith, God, Jesus, Religion
I ran across this quote the other day and thought it was interesting enough to write it down. Let me know what you think.
“The religious suppose that only the religious know about God or care about God, and that God cares only for the religious. Characteristically, religion is precious and possessive toward God, and institutes and conducts itself as if God really needs religion, as if His existence depends on the recognition of religion. Religion considers that God is a secret disclosed only in the discipline and practice of religion. But all this is most offensive to the Word of God. The best news of God is that He is no secret. The news of God embodied in Jesus Christ is that God is openly and notoriously active in the world. In this news the Christian Church is constituted; it is this news which the Christian Church exists to spread…The Church, unlike any religion, exists to present to the world and to celebrate in the world, and on behalf of the world, God’s presence and power and utterance and action in the on-going life of the world.”
From 1962; “A Private and Public Faith”, by William Stringfellow
Filed under: Missional Church | Tags: Christianity, Church, Cultural Change, Post-Christian, Spirituality
I just sent this little tidbit out in an update letter to some of my friends, but as I thought about it more I’d really like to hear your thoughts on it. As we engage the world around us we must always remember that each of us comes from a particular world-view (or paradigm) that shapes how we approach life, respond to challenges and relate to others. As you may know a paradigm is an assumed or underlying grid of values and beliefs about life and reality . Whether we are conscious of it or not we all live with them (Cross your arms, now cross them in the other direction. I rest my case), and the “church” has been no different. The Western church has, for the most part, been operating from the same given paradigm since Constantine (AD 312). With the legalization of Christianity the church went from a rag-tag group of underground, persecuted, marginalized, Spirit-empowered people living out a subversive faith to a professionalized and legitimized institution who’s role became to educate people in and validate a new comprehensive Christian world-view. There is nothing inherently wrong with this paradigm, but, as well all know we are no longer operating in a “Christian culture” where the church is accepted as the guardian of truth and hope. In fact we, in the West, now live in an increasingly post-Christian culture where knowledge is relative, value is based on gratification and consumerism is the new religion of choice.
When any paradigm shifts (be it in business, culture, art, or technology) there are basically four possible responses:
Maintain a marginalized state-Hold on to the past and become increasingly irrelevant to changing culture
Embrace the center of culture-Become very relevant, but compromise on values
Create transitional environment-Move forward in small increments (Become a bridge to new forms)
Become a transformational model-Lead culture by bringing strong values with relevant expressions.
Each of these responses has it’s own inherent values and pitfalls, and each can be a valid response to change. In fact I would bet that each of us could think of instances of each model in existence today. What we must remember is that while one model might be preferential to who we are and how we process information, the other 3 are equally important for others. Let us never think that there is only one correct response to change. What we all must come to grips with is that change is occurring, and for the “church” to be an effective entity with maximum impact in culture, we must each make a conscious decision how we will respond.
Filed under: Bio, Institutional Church | Tags: Church, Church Politics, Dysfunctional Church, Faith, God, Life After Church, Post-Christian, Spirituality
My dissatisfaction with my role in the institutional church came to a head in April of 2007. After numerous years of battling within myself about whether or not I should continue working at that church I realized something had to change. I felt the church had no vision, no direction, no purpose. In my opinion we were not making the world a better place or living in such a way that people were experiencing how amazing life with Jesus was. For the past four years it was like living in a dysfunctional family. Everyone knew it was unhealthy, that things and relationships were not right, and regularly when this was pointed out, promises were made to change, new conversations began about direction and purpose, and I would convince myself that things were going to be different. Every few months a crisis or issue would arise and we would begin the cycle all over again. While in the short term, things did change, each time we always seemed to end up back at the same issues only worse. It was at the end of one of these patterns in April that I told my wife that I really wasn’t sure I could take it anymore.
I’m not laying this all out here to bash the church. Every church, like every family has issues like these. But I am putting it down to paper so as to remind myself (and anyone reading) how good God is.
My wife, Liza had been faithfully listening to me complain about things in leadership since I started working there in 1999. She had heard me declare I was quitting, and seen me struggle through tough situations many times. And each time, like this one, her answer was always the same. “Just do your best, do your job, and if God wants to take you out of there He will.” The next day I went to lunch with the new senior pastor and told him I was struggling with what I perceived as a lack of vision and direction for the church, and that I wasn’t sure I was a fit there anymore. I shared my heart and my frustrations and let him know that Liza and I were really seeking God’s direction in this. We agreed to continue the conversation and search after what God was doing.
Then I started meeting with the elders.
Filed under: Bio | Tags: Church, Community, God, House Church, Jesus, Life After Church, Missional Living, Spirituality
I’ve never started a blog before (or read the first post of a blog for that matter), so I’m not really sure how these things go. Let me introduce myself and fill you in on a little of what makes my heart beat.
My name is Darrin, I’m almost 33 years old. I love Jesus. I live in Reno Nevada, and I recently “left” my youth pastor job at a large local church. I had been working there for over 12 years and over that time I became more and more troubled by the institutional church. It seemed we were really good at providing programs for people “like us”, but making little impact in our overall community. How was I bringing the kingdom of God (His love, grace, forgiveness, joy, and peace) to Reno? If the church disappeared would it make any difference to the people around us that didn’t attend there? Was God’s concept of “church” intended to be a social club or elite society that told outsiders how wrong they were? These questions began to haunt me and so I began to dream….
I dreamt about what our community would look like if followers of Jesus were known by their love. I dreamed about a group of people who were dedicated to living the way of Jesus and impacting the larger community. I dreamed of building bridges between people with different viewpoints and different understandings of God, and I dreamed of moving the concept of “church” away from its association with a building (I go to church) and back to it’s connection with God and His people (We are church together, and when we bring grace, love, and hope we “do” church together). I shared these dreams and frustrations with the leadership at the church I worked at and they listened, agreed, and finally fired me. I don’t blame them. I would of probably fired me too. My dreams didn’t (and don’t) fit in the concept of an institutional church that is focused on attracting people into a building.
This was the best thing that ever happened to me. But that is a different story…
