1. People holding wrong assumptions about what the church is:
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All of which affects morale and willingness to embrace the future if they are received negatively. Likely consequences and coping mechanisms include: fighting change, confusion, criticism
In all of this the leader is the key factor for minimising the negative and leading for the positive. Therefore the key question is: what does the leader need to bring to the table to build trust and confidence in new direction?
There are all kinds fo factos that make change much more difficult in a church than in other kinds of organisations:
Or, to summarise:
All of which are likely to demotivate change and paralyse.
Whatever it is that Christian leaders bring to the table to help change happen, it has to derive from basic biblical principles: the godness of God, the glory of Christ, the wonder of the biblical gospel. I like to think of the leader being the following, therefore:
If gospel change is resisted, then we need to carefully analyse where the barrier is. It will usually be lack of one or more of the elements above. For my money I would spend most time on what are the motivation factors and whether people’s motivations are aligned to Christ.
]]>So how do we know? The answer is given in a general principle in Colossians 1:9, where we find Paul praying that God will fill them with the knowledge of his will through giving them spiritual wisdom and understanding. We know his will because God reveals it.
A critical question is to whom does God reveal his will and under what circumstances? In 1:3-8 we discovered that the Colossians:
The gospel was working. They didn't just believe but then produce no fruit. Neither were they producing fruit without the foundation of gospel hope. No, gospel hope was being used by the Spirit to produce gospel fruit. And therefore Paul says in v9 "ever since we heard about you we haven't stopped praying that God will reveal his will to you."
Or, in other words, we can confidently expect that God will reveal his will through spiritual wisdom and understanding to people who are living in the three points above. "I have heard God has done this in you, therefore I pray with confidence for knowledge of his will for you."
You can't pray with confidence that God will show his will to those who haven't embraced his grace and his hope, who aren't evidencing it in faith and love. That is the general principle. Neither can you say "I think the will of God might be as follows" if you disconnect it from the Bible, the message of grace in all its truth. If you want to know the will of God, you have to embrace the gospel of God.
1:10-11 then give ... examples of what it will look like when God reveals his will, giving wisdom and understanding so we live a life worthy of the Lord that pleases him:
Then he finishes in v13-14 with praise for how the Father qualified us: by rescuing us from the dominion of darkness, bringing us into the kingdom of the son he loves, redeeming and forgiving the sins of those who are in Jesus.
How do we know the will of God? Basically by embracing the biblical gospel of his grace and asking for wisdom and understanding from God about how to live it out. His will is not just that we understand the gospel, but it is never anything other than living out the gospel of grace in the circumstances in which we find currently ourselves - or into which he directs us to move next.
]]>All organisations plateau when there isn’t a constant requirement to change. In the business sphere it’s easy to see where the drivers come from, because everyone knows the environment is competitive. Constantly adapt to new challenges or die. It is the same on a battlefield.
The Christian life is a battlefield, but unless missional priorities are always at the fore, led and taught and practiced all the time, it is the easiest thing for the mindset of the church to shift from battlefield to care home. External mission is replaced with internal church life, missional priorities with comfort and maintenance. At that point your church is dying, even if it currently has a good semblance of life.
Kingdom growth involves constant change by definition. A church that wants to be in exactly the same place in 10 years time is extremely complacent and will atrophy. Leaders are the people who mainly expect to receive and shape God-given vision and direction for where the church and its mission can and should be in the future. Change, however, is the biggest threat to stable organisational life so being able to lead through change is critical to church and kingdom growth. Whether leaders are allowed to lead for change, and how they do so, will determine whether a church develops for future gospel extension or concretises itself in a past reality.
If spiritual leadership involves knowing what God wants for people in his local congregation, using God’s methods to get them there, and relying on God’s power to do it, then the process of change and the methods of initiating change that are available to us are not necessarily the same as they are in a business or other organisation. It doesn’t start from the same roots and it doesn’t have the same goals.
Organisational change in churches starts with spiritual roots. Roots of Godliness, and spiritual perception and hunger for God. That is the baseline starting point. If you meet situations where it seems impossible to bring necessary change because of the sheer degree of resistance, that is the first area we have to question and pray and teach into. Gospel-centred change emerges out of gospel-centred convictions about God, about ourselves, about the church and its purpose.
If you don’t believe that the purpose of the church is to declare God’s excellencies to a dying world, then any call to change it to produce that is threatening. If you think that activities are good in and of themselves regardless of any connection with glorifying God, magnifying him and drawing attention to him, then you will never be able to stop those activities or replace them with ones that do.
Unless the reality of God’s promises grip people they won’t adjust their lives to base all they do on them. Unless the grace of God in Christ is thrilling them, they won’t attempt new things with an attendant risk of failure, because they are content with the way things are.
In the process of change we are inviting people to embrace a different concept of themselves, their role, their purpose for being in the church, their interactions with others, the purpose of the group, their reputation. We are inviting them to move from:
Paul says that he prays for the believers in Colosse with thankfulness because he has heard:
this faith and love spring from, emerge out of, have ther origin in the hope that is stored up for them in Heaven.
This is worth pausing over. In English today "hope" has become a vague and wishy-washy word. An unsubstantiated feeling of longing that something good may happen in the future. This is absolutely not what it means in Colossians. Here hope refers to something that already exists in Heaven and is already waiting for us.
I picture it like this. Imagine a child asking their parents for their first bike for their birthday. The parents agree and together they go and choose the bike. "Now," say the parents, "we are going to put the bike in the shed until your birthday next week and then you can have it on the day." The child's hope is not a vague feeling or longing that she might get a bike - that is absoutely certain. It already exists, in the shed! The concrete, certain hope now is the bike. "Hope" is a word that now means "bike." She has seen it, heard about it, been promised it. The fact that she doesn't possess it quite yet is irrelevant - she she is going to.
So Paul is saying that we have hope in this way. We have concrete things stored up for us in Heaven and our knowledge of them cause faith in Jesus and love for believers to spring forth. Two questions:
In reverse order, we get to kow about it in v5 in the word of truth, the good news that has come to us. This is fleeshed out a little in v6 where it is described as the message of "God's grace in all its truth." You can check out lots of other posts on my blog about grace, but there it is again. The gospel, God's good news is the true message of grace. Truth-soaked grace. Grace-saturated truth. The message that Christ has died, becoming sin, in order that we become the righteousness of God in him.
What, then, is the inheritance stored up in Heaven? The simple answer is God himself. The parallel passage in Ephesians talks about being God's possession to the praise of his glory. The gift is being united to his son in glory and wonder, enjoyment of the most satisfying person, forever in complete delight. It is receiving everything he is and everything he has for us (in Ephesians 2 the incomparable riches of his grace) expressed in his kindness to us in Jesus Christ.
To summarise, then:
We might want to say that this faith and love are evidence that we have grasped the hope. If there is little of either it is probably that there is no appreciation of or wonder at the message of grace. Non-Christians aren't full of faith and love precisely because they don't know about this hope and haven't received the message of grace.
Let's nail down one last thing. Why does faith and love in the present spring from this hope in the future? Simply that the hope makes us excited. We fix our hearts on it. Our hearts want to live in accordance with it. The hope is objective but it produces subjective feelings in us that change our ambitions, actions and attitudes to others. This, says v8, is produced by the Holy Spirit.
For those of us who want to see the Holy Spirit at work among our believing friends and churches, this is how to work to that end according to Colossians 1: show people the hope they have stored up in Heaven, through proclaiming the message of grace. When you see people starting to ignite, when you see faith and love starting to emerge in greater and greater measure, that's not us doing it, that is the Holy Spirit of God.
]]>He knew that they weren't going to be involved to much noticeable degree in God's great purposes for winning the world. They would merely be pew-filling, passively receiving services in church. How different to Jesus' expectation when he said to potential disciples "come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." With Jesus there was an expectation right at the very start that if they followed him they were going to get involved in something. He was going to turn them into something, train and equip them and include them in his Great Cause.
Jesus was upfront before they followed him. I explored this with the evangelist. He pondered whether he is tempted to explain to not-yet Christians all the benefits of Christ's death - forgiveness of sins, being made right with God, being rescued from judgement and Hell, having a new home in Heaven and a great saviour who intercedes for us - which are received entirely by faith. We get them simply by repenting, asking God to forgive us, trusting Jesus to save and committing our lives to him.
However, he started to realise that in so doing, what he wasn't doing was also presenting the fact that they were going to live in Christ's life. The Holy Spirit would come and live in them if they become Christians, empowering them to win the world for Christ, including them in one of his local teams (churches).
The former things that he included are all essentially passive. That is they don't require you to actually do anything. Indeed we can't do anything to merit or earn salvation. We can only receive it. But it is only half the story. Living as a Christian is not only about the historical and legal consequences of receiving Christ's death on our behalf. It is also about what it actually means for our lives to be committed to him, for him to own us. And that is far from passive.
I asked the man why he didn't tell people about being invited and included into God's big purpose before they become Christians. Why he didn't mention the fact that the Holy Spirit will be given to them, that Christ will empower them, that they will be given spiritual gifts and included in a team for Jesus.
He replied: what if I tell them that and the reality doesn't match up? What if they then get involved with a church where there is little sense of being a family on a mission for God?
So his fear of people getting involved in mediocre church life was impacting his evangelism. Unbeknownst to him he had been subtly tailoring what he told people according to what he thinks the reality actually is on the ground in churches, not according to what it ought to be. And thereby falling into a vicious circle: if you don't expect too much then you won't teach others to expect it either lest they be disappointed. And the whole thing becomes self-reinforcing.
Jesus was upfront. I will make you fishers of men...Go into all the world and make disciples... This is an amazing cause for people to be included in. We shouldn't be upfront about the passive benefits of Christ's death and not upfront about what Jesus expects people to then do and be involved in. It should almost be the other way around, telling people "God has some amazing things for you to do in his Kingdom. You need to become a disciple first, get reconciled to God and have him forgive you. But when you do, this is what he wants your life to be about..."
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Will 2011 turn out to be the year that finally dispels that most pernicious of myths, that there is no connection between the ability to provide good leadership and what a person does outside of the public eye?
Will a combination of MP expenses scandals, phone hacking revelations which go right to the top, and looters claiming their behaviour is no worse than bankers perhaps begin to impress on us that the link between the private and public integrity of leaders is, in fact, indelible?
The myth that there is no connection is dangerous because it divorces leadership from character. It turns it into merely a combination of skills to be exercised, opportunities to be pursued and networks to be leveraged. Of course, with that combination it is possible to create, for example, a very profitable business. But what it is not possible to do is help people be the kinds of people they should be and do the kinds of things they should do. Because that kind of leadership isn’t driven by values, only by end results, with leadership ‘success’ being defined by a very narrow and inadequate set of criteria. It doesn’t have to be honourable, compassionate, moral or even honest in order to seem to work.
The devastating result is that a large percentage of the population believes that leaders are only in it for themselves. When the link between public leadership and private character dissolves, credibility and trustworthiness are the inevitable casualties.
It would be easy to think, ‘well, that’s just politicians and greedy bankers, surely the same isn’t true for Christian leaders?’ I am pleased to report that by and large it isn’t. But it raises a very important question: what do we value most in our leaders? If they just have to be a good preacher, theologically acute, able to deal well with people and put on a good show to get bums on seats, we are perilously close to making leadership into merely a combination of skills. Take one non-leader, impart the necessary skills through a training programme and, lo and behold, Christian leadership! With no necessary connection to whether or not the Lord has their heart in a serious and deepening way.
Roots of leadership
In his book The Spiritual Formation of Leaders (Xulon Press 2007), Chuck Miller suggests that God-glorifying leaders must root their life in the ‘soul room’ - meeting with and being transformed by God, receiving and appropriating His saving, strengthening grace - before they spend time in the ‘leadership room’ - the place where they develop, hone and use their leadership skills. Everything they develop in the leadership room is founded on and informed by what they receive in the soul room. Godly character comes first.
Critical strategy
There is no doubt at all that there is a pressing need for new leaders at all levels in churches across the UK. The number of new emerging leaders is falling and the number leaving leadership prematurely is rising. The average age of the main leader in most congregations is now in the 50s and going up. Within 15 years many will retire and there won’t be nearly enough replacements. It is critical, therefore, that every church develops a strategy for identifying and releasing new leaders. The church that doesn’t is unlikely to have any in 15 years’ time.
But the kind of new leaders we need are people who spend time in the soul room, whose worship and prayer life are genuine and who make the Scriptures their daily delight and joy. We need leaders whose walk with Jesus means they are known for the depth of their love, forgiveness, wisdom and kindness - people who overflow with the grace of Christ and who work with others for their joy in God.
In short, leaders who know that there is an unbreakable link between the value of their leadership and their invisible character before God.
]]>In conversations after the talk it was obvious that for many of the evangelists this was nothing like the reality of their situation. Indeed most of them were persuaded that their local church wasn't interested in being a witnessing community and that they didn't have the ability to change it. So they were getting on with doing semi-detached evangelism, reporting back occasionally, but essentially leaving their churches to it.
Then I got talking to three vicars who all said something similar: "we have been sent to churches that are a long way from the glorious picture of the church in Ephesians 3+4. But we simply can't change them, so we will simply knuckle down and do what is expected of us - Sunday preaching and pastoral visits - until we retire. This is the best we can hope for so we had better just put up with it."
Talk about depressing!
The interesting thing with the vicars is that they all had "the living" in their church (ie nobody could throw them out for doing something unpopular). So I asked them all why they felt they couldn't change the situation when, strictly speaking, they had the authority so to do. Was it:
All three instantly said answer 3.
Church cultures settle into ruts for all kinds of reasons. But once in them they can be exceptionally difficult to shift out again. Particularly where people have joined for reasons other than being a biblical church, trying to draw them back to that picture often feels like inviting them to embrace a completely different understanding of themselves, their purpose in life, their future. It invites them to go from the comfortable and familiar to the unknown. From walking by sight to walking by faith. If the majority of people don't have a lot in their hand spiritually speaking you can expect them to resist like crazy.
The vicars reinforced something I already knew: individual leaders leading on their own (almost) never manage to change a resistant church culture. One person simply doesn't have the resources, capacity or ability to handle the criticism that comes to do so. People only have to dig in their heels for so long and they know that you will wear down before they do.
This is yet one more example of the wisdom of the biblical pattern of plural leaders acting as close teams in a local church. A team has the ability to press through difficulty together that a sole leader simply doesn't. A team is able to deal with wounding criticism in a way one person can't. A team changes the critical mass pushing for biblical Christianity and biblical church in a way that one person can't.
If you are leading a church on your own and wondering how to press through to new breakthroughs, developing a team of leaders with you is an essential step along the way. Without it you will go a certain way and then stop. The team is bigger than you. If it pleases God the team will last longer than you (and you will last longer with it than you would on your own). The team brings a greater range of gifts and skills than you. The team will change a resistant culture when you cannot.
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Starting with a very simple premise from Ephesians 4 - that the goal of all Christian leadership ministry is to equip and facilitate disciples of Jesus who make more disciples - the planning team started with a blank sheet of paper and a single question: what does the leadership programme look like that serves that end? What does it look like to be a leader - and train other leaders - to both make disciples themselves and to nurture and train others to do the same? What would it look like for every leader in every church to have disciple-making (including, yes! active engagement with non Christians) at the heart of their DNA?
This raises an uncomfortable question for some of us on the planning team. Even some of those of us with a missions background have spent so long making Christian organisation work over the last few years, and so intense have the demands been to do everything that is needed by the flock, that we have fallen into the trap of stepping out of mission-focussed leadership and instead shifted into organisational leadership. Therefore in training and Discipling new leaders to keep being mission-focussed, there may be some component of identifying why we fell into the trap and doing our best to help them not do the same.
Why might pastors fall into this kind of trap. All kinds of reasons. Here are a few:
1. The church wants/demands it. In the case of a church appointing a young pastor, it may even be the job description. It is very hard for a new young minister to challenge the prevailing church culture that appointed them
2. Churches almost invariably staff retrospectively rather than prospectively. Ie they wait until their staff are doing far more than anyone should actually be doing to lead the church as it already functions, before they will think about increasing the staff team. So most churches are understaffed or, at least, not staffed for a mission-focus on growth
3. Churches have a picture of what a "minister" should look like and do, and it isn't leading and releasing all the believers as witnesses for gospel growth. It is delivering sermons and doing pastoral visits and a few people doing all the spiritual business for everyone else to consume. Again, church culture constrains biblical vision more readily than vision constrains culture
We could go on. My plea to all leaders who don't currently have capacity to encourage new leaders who think with mission-focus is to do everything in your power to create that capacity. Do whatever it takes. It is wonderful when leaders have a vison for multiplying more leaders, but it isn't the whole story. If the vision is simply to replicate exactly what we already have for serving groups of Christians only and not to produce a different kind of leader who is mission-focused then we will only produce new leaders for the situation as it currently exists. We won't release people with a passion for changing the nation and winning the nations.
Let's build leaders who make disciples who make disciples.
]]>The reasons aren't hard to see. After all if you question the leadership paradigms in your church or denomination it is quite possible that you might not be able to lead within it. But what that points to is that environment can easily condition what it is possible to even think about leadership - or any other matter of church life - more so even than the scriptures. The local church then reads its practise back into the Bible and confuses how it does things with orthodoxy. At that point church culture has taken over from the Bible as the chief determining factor in church life. And, as I say, it can be very hard to challenge. Traditional ways of doing things are not just the preserve of atrophying churches that are past their sell-by date. The church that is flourishing and full but concludes that the critical thing is to keep doing everything exactly the same in order to remain where it is at present is in just as much danger.
A observation following up from my last post on the efficacy of preaching. The above argument makes it very hard indeed for preachers to step outside themselves and evaluate their preaching method. This is particularly so if your theological framework allows you to justify not seeing God at work. One line of reason goes like this:
1. The Bible is the Word of God, it is literally God's words, God speaking by the Holy Spirit (correct)
2. Therefore interacting with the Bible is what brings people (by the work of the Holy Spirit) under the good news of Jesus Christ which is the power for salvation (also correct)
3. Therefore people only need to hear the Bible being explained for the above process to kick in (argument starting to get a little thin here)
4. From the perspective of the human preacher the job is simple, therefore: just put in the work understanding for yourself and then explain it, and the rest is just done by God. This is, presumably, even true when you can't see any evidence for point 2 above (incorrect)
5. Because you have made not experiencing God - but rather mentally appropriating facts about God - the touchstone of whether this framework is correct, you needn't be concerned if you and your congregation experience nothing. You have decided that isn't how God or the Bible or the Holy Spirit work, so you don't notice any absence. Indeed if someone tells you something is missing you may be suspicious that they are wanting to add something to the plain testimony of scripture (argument incorrect)
There is real danger in the above. Namely that preaching and teaching the Bible is turned into a comprehension exercise, a matter of mere epistemology, and that exercise is confused with work of the Holy Spirit. The preacher who believes this easily assumes therefore that improving your preaching is only a matter of more accurate comprehension.
Now, does any preacher actually believe the above? In theory perhaps not. In practise a whole lot. As evidenced by how few expect to see God actually at work (remember that the framework allows - even encourages - low levels of expectation) or how much effort is giving to praying over the message as opposed to reading and studying for it. Many preachers' real practise reveals they secretly believe what Jonathan Edwards railed against: there is no real difference between the Holy Spirit working through the act of biblical preaching and the operation of their own minds. They assume he will only work secretly, silently and indiscernibly both because they have no other experience and because they adopted a theological framework that validates that lack of experience.
Beware the preaching that never seems used by God to actually produce anything discernible and yet has a framework which validates never examining itself.
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