If you had asked me what leadership was about a while back I think would have leant much more heavily towards direction setting rather than culture setting. Not that either is unimportant, but I have always tended to see the role of the leader/s as being that of choosing the direction and then planning how to implement the various strategies to move towards that direction.
And while I still do that stuff to some degree I’d have to say that I’m coming to see culture setting as way more important in the scheme of things. If we get the direction right and the culture wrong then chances are we aren’t going to head anywhere anyway because the people haven’t gelled. But get the culture right and create an environment people want to be part of and my hunch is that the rest will flow out of it much more easily.
By ‘culture setting’ I mean framing up the kind of people we will be and then living that out. Some would say this is just a natural by-product of any leader in a role, but I think we can let the culture of a community shape us, or we can endeavour to shape it.
So these days my question is less ‘where are we going?’ and more ‘who are we becoming?’
As part time paid church leaders its sometimes difficult to see in tangible terms just what Danelle and I do – at least that’s how I feel – but I know that a big slice of it is just this – setting a culture. Its been a couple of years now and I feel like we can see some of that culture taking shape and our identity becoming a little clearer and stronger as a church community.
Choosing a culture means we won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but then we aren’t trying to be and in that there is a great freedom to let ‘church shoppers’ know that if its glitz, pizzaz and shiny happy people with nice teeth and no problems they are after then we probably aren’t ever going to make you happy.
Just when it had gone quiet around here… I was doing some thinking today so here’s a small hand grenade to lob into the conversation…
It was 9 years ago that I wrote my first ever blog post and this was the title – a short reflection on our obsession (as the church) with the weekly Sunday gathering. It seemed we had a belief that if we could just get Sunday ‘working’ with a happening worship experience and some great teaching then that would be the catalyst for everything else in the life of a church community to fall into place.
People would love, give, serve others before themselves, stop sinning and generally morph into disciples because they had been part of such a gathering.
Naïve?… Foolish?…
Perhaps those words are too gentle and ‘absurd’ is more appropriate, but such is the weight of the Sunday meeting in the psyche of the average evangelical Christian that my words are already starting to sound heretical or dangerous to some of you. If nothing else, it sure puts a lot of pressure on one event to shape the lives of those people.
I really cannot imagine Jesus and the apostles ever sitting around during the week and asking the question ‘ok – how are we going to do sabbath this week?’ I don’t see from the NT that their lives revolved around the planning and execution of one major weekly event.
Surely they would have told us about it if it was that important?…
Hmmm…
But I do see that their lives revolved around tight relationships with each other and around questions of how they lived out their radical devotion to Christ in the world they were a part of. I see them very focused on living and demonstrating the kingdom of God in many different ways thru everyday life. And of course there was a need for structure and order (ala appointment of deacons in Acts) but it was as needed rather than prescribed.
That things have formed up as they are is no great surprise because as human beings we like systems, predictability and order, but that things have formed up in their current manner is also a great concern on a couple of fronts. Now anyone can simply attend church on Sunday and feel like they have fulfilled the obligations of discipleship – or for those who don’t get there each week, they can feel like failures because they haven’t made the all important meeting. Contributing to the Sunday event can be seen as the primary form of Christian service with everything else desirable but optional. In this mode it is more desirable to let mission suffer than the Sunday event…
In fact I’d suggest that the more we focus on Sunday the further we stray from the main point of what Jesus was saying.
Jesus called us to a life – a life in community – and that will inevitably involve meeting, but I would forgive anyone who interpreted Christianity to be a weekly commitment to a Sunday event – because so much of what is communicated (often unconsciously) is exactly that.
I was sharing with some friends today that stepping back into a mainstream church has not been a way of me renouncing the views that have shaped this blog over the last 8 years.
Hardly.
But it’s a place where I sit uneasily because I believe I am there to transform rather than conform and on many occasions I have felt myself slipping into the cogs of the machine. When you are tired from another job, when you are already weary from conflict it is tempting to just ‘shut up and go with it’ and when your existing skill set fits the situation fairly well then it is even more tempting.
But at core, gut level there is an unrelenting conviction that for the church to actually be true to its calling as a sign and foretaste of the kingdom we must have some higher priorities than really good Sunday services with as many in attendance as possible.
At times I hold great hope for reform and refreshing and other days I fear I am losing my own soul in the machine. There are days when I want to call people out and challenge them to more and days when I just want out myself.
It’s not that running a church is hard. I actually think that for anyone with basic leadership skills, ‘running a church’ is pretty straight forward if you are prepared to follow the formulas and play the game.
However shifting people’s deeply entrenched understandings of church, mission and the kingdom is something I baulk at because it inevitably involves pain and conflict. It inevitably involves being misunderstood and maybe even cast in the light of a villain who just wants to screw things up. And very few people are intentionally obstructive – its just how we have been trained to think…
So some days I sit and wonder. Is it worth it?
I know that getting Sunday right is not the answer but the primary platform to speak to this expression of church is… you guessed it… Sunday…
I got asked the other day if our church is growing by ‘conversion’ or by ‘transfer’ which is pastor speak for ‘are people becoming Christians or just moving from other churches?’
Well – neither – our growth has been by immigration. Its hardly a ‘strategy’ but it seems that over half of the people who have come to QBC have come from another country. The biggest group by far are the South Africans who seem to flock to the far north of Perth and then of course there are the Brits. I think Aussies are a fairly strong minority in our church community at the moment and that takes a bit of getting used to.
FWIW I have really enjoyed the SA crew and the guys who have joined us have been great value. With the exception of one very bad experience at the start that I have had to work hard to put behind me, we have all got on well.
The different cultural and theological backgrounds have made it interesting as we have realised there are South Africans from a very strict rigid background in church and then those who come from that but are happy to be part of something more casual and relaxed.
If we do anything well at QBC then its being casual and easy going. So it will be interesting to see what the future holds. The old saying ‘a crowd attracts a crowd’ reverbs in my mind and I imagine we may see a larger group of immigrants form the core of the church.
In that I see our role as leaders as being a church that fits this context and is effective in reaching the people who live around us. So ‘where you’re from’ is less important than if you gel with the vibe of the place and want to be about the same things as we are.
Invariably when I find myself presenting to Christians an idea that challenges the status quo I find myself confronted with a response somewhere in the crowd that says ‘Ah yes, but don’t forget XYZ…’ where ‘XYZ ‘are our old ways of seeing things – the familiar and safe – and invariably I want to ask ‘why not?!’
Why should we be ‘careful’ not to negate an old way, or at very least question it, especially if its a flawed way, or an inefficient way, or even a theologically defective way?
I’ll tell you why we are told to be careful.
Because new ideas scare us. New ideas unsettle us and disturb the ground we walk on – and have walked on for years and decades. We like that ground. It makes us feel safe and sometimes we’d rather safety and error or safety and irrelevance, rather than the possibility of discovering a new and maybe even liberating truth.
New learning might end up calling a new response out of us and it could be beyond our capacity to respond because we have become so entrenched in a way of thinking and behaving.
I love evangelicalism’s commitment to biblical authority and the desire to live out of that, but it seems to be offset by unhealthy phobia that we might actually live contrary to scripture at some point and so we protect our inherited truth like a mother bear her cubs.
The simple fact is we are wrong about some things and we are committed to other things more from tradition from any biblical mandate.
And where it gets really tricky is when its ‘big’ things’ that we’re screwing up.
I’ll pick a safe example. The term ‘missional church’ is almost historic these days, but when it was first mooted that churches had lost their missional imperative, it was met with both heartfelt cheers from the frustrated missionaries, but also vicious resistance from those who saw that their forms of worhip may need to change. It was a bizarre response, but it seems that fear does that to people.
To use another example, those who have introduced contemplative worship practices into protestant churches have been viewed suspiciously and accused of bringing ‘Eastern religion’ into the church, (like Christianity isn’t that) when in fact they have been freeing people from an overly left brain, cerebral way of engaging in spirituality and helping people encounter God in fresh ways.
One of my great hopes is that we can create communities where we can reflect, learn and grow rather than simply protecting what we have or agreeing to compromise and keep people happy.
Of course there’s such an enormous cultural shift in that alone that I just might be shooting for the stars.
Steve (who titled his post ‘Landslide Victory For Fresh Expressions in Australian Churches’ writes:
Some 66% of church attenders agreed that the traditional established models of church life must change to better connect with the wider Australian community (only 11% disagree).
For an even larger majority, this was personal. 82% claimed that they would support the development of new initiatives in ministry and mission in their church (3% disagreed).
So why on earth would there be resistance?
My own reflection is that people would rather hang on to what little they have got rather than risk losing it. To try something new is to risk pissing off the faithful few who remain and that would be suicide. But to do nothing is to choose a slow and pointless death.
What a choice…
Seriously its a lame choice, but in the face of that, the vast majority still choose a slow painful death. Why?… My guess is because change is difficult, time consuming and painful. The status quo might be lame, but we know how to do it.
Its the ‘club’ mentality overriding the missionary heart. The path of least resistance wins out and the possibility of change evaporates with the desire to simply do what comes easiest. In a busy world its an easy default position. “It may not be effective, but we at least know how to do it!”
.
The research seems to say people want change, but I am actually not convinced. I think people think that they want change, but its usually change without risk, or change without any impact on the current state of play.
Low cost change.
Its a hedging of bets so that if the new initiatives don’t cut it we can always steer back to the tired (no spelling error)and tested expression that will see us thru to our graves even if our kids will find it bizarre and maybe even abhorent.
The research gives me hope, but I also know that people don’t like pain, risk and uncertainty… so it may be a much greater stretch than we would hope.
As I gathered in a room last night with 6 other blokes all committed to growing in their practice of spiritual disciplines I felt like we ‘turned the flywheel’ just a bit… With 4 others keen, but unable to be there this week for a variety of reasons we have managed to get a great core of men wanting to shift the balance of their own faith. I will explain the concept of the flywheel later but for now let me mention the source.
One of the best books I have read on helping organisations get their butts into gear and become more than just another blip on the radar is Jim Collins Good to Great. Although written for the business sector, it has been immensely valuable in thinking through how we make progress in what we do as a church.
Collins made a study of a heap of mediocre organisations that made the shift to being ‘great’ and identified a number of key principles. Some of them are a bit counterintuitive and some of them make perfect sense but are hard to do.
In leading an established church I accept albeit reluctantly that we do need to embrace some elements of organisational life and that if we are to be more than a social club for religious people we need some sense of shared purpose and direction. While that doesn’t require great formality I have found the principles Collins mentions helpful in working with a group of people larger than would meet in a home.
Collins diagram is explained fully in his book but for now I’ll make a few comments on the key elements.
Level 5 Leadership – in the ‘great companies’ there was a clear move away from superman, visionary, heroic leaders towards more empowering and humble leaders. These were leaders who didn’t want the future of the organisation to rest on their charisma. I’ve learnt to value this form of leadership much more over the last 10 years, but also observed that people feel safer when the ‘level 4 leader’ is in charge – the one who carries everything on his own back. I functioned that way in my youth ministry days, but I refuse to do that now as I actually feel its counterproductive in the longer term. I discovered Collin’s book after my time in youth min, but it has affirmed some of what I feel is a healthier (and more biblically faithful) way to lead a community.
First Who Then What – Collins says ‘get the right people on the bus’ and then get them ‘sitting in the right seats’. This is always hard because the bus comes pre-loaded and you don’t always know who the right people are until you’ve been around for a while. I don’t like asking people to get off the bus and so far haven’t had to, but the people ‘on the bus’ has changed over the last couple of years. We have some great people on the bus and I reckon there may be one or two more who we can find a seat for.
Confront The Brutal Facts – I am not sure if we have done this well yet. I get the sense that we know the facts are brutal – ie we are pushing uphill with mission/evangelism and therefore church in its current form – but I am not sure we are quite ready to confront them. I feel part of my role over the last 10 years in Forge and now in a local church is to state, re-state and keep stating the brutal facts. The challenge is to do this in a way that challenges and inspires people rather than just makes them want to quit or pisses them off. That’s hard when some days you just want to quit yourself! I don’t like the role of ‘brutal facts presenter’, but I’m absolutely convinced that no one makes change if they are unaware of the facts. Why would you?
The Hedgehog Concept – is to simply hone your focus and energies on to the one thing that you can be the best in the world at and to say ‘no’ to the many other good things that compete for your time and energy. Again I think we are unclear on this one and it is needing some further work. Its easy to scrabble around and pursue all kinds of good ideas in our efforts to do something worthwhile, but unless the energy is focused we can just end up tiring people out. I imagine that with the right people in the right seats and some dedicated attention to the brutal facts and the situation in front of us this will come clearer.
A Culture of Discipline – and Collins adds ‘with an ethic of entrepreneurship’. I like it. A focused disciplined bunch of people who are able to ignite the creative spark and take risks as they need to. A culture of discipline on its own might be diligent, but hardly inspiring. I like the balance he suggests here and it is something I want to work towards also. However perhaps a little reframing so that we create ‘A culture of
discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship in a spirit of grace’. Too much church based discipline can turn to legalism and get very very ugly.
To be honest I didn’t think Collins work on technology accelerators was all that applicable to our church life and as I’m writing all this from memory I can’t even remember what was relevant. I’m sure it was of value to someone!
So these elements actually form something of a process and it has been one that I have been at work on for a while now. But back to the flywheel. Collins likens changing an organisation to spinning a very big flywheel. It takes a slot of effort to get going but once that baby’s moving – ‘look out’. Collins suggests that the movement of the flywheel doesn’t depend on catalytic events, but rather is a summation of all that has gone into making it move.
I’m not so sure I agree there. I reckon a series of catalytic events can actually produce momentum and so long as the energy behind it is sustained, then the flywheel is going to keep gaining steam. Last night felt like one of those significant moments when most of the men in our church community turned up to a group that was explicitly promoted as a place where you would be challenged to grow spiritually by the practice of spiritual disciplines and by training yourself to be godly.
I got the clear sense that our blokes wanted more than just a beer and a chat and that we had hit on a real desire to ‘step up’, hence the feeling that maybe the flywheel is in motion and maybe we are going to see some significant change.
As with any momentum based activity it is as easy to lose momentum as to gain it so we will need to keep encouraging one another and spurring one another on. But I think we may have reached a ‘tipping point’ there (to use another author’s term), but maybe that’s food for a different post…
“The interest of the people of God in transmitting their faith will not be much greater than their interest in the Christian congregation in which they actually live out their faith” Miroslav Volf
I came across this great quote in a Resonate (GIA) magazine tonight and it inspired me to write some reflections.
Being in Christian community is not an option for disciples of Christ. I’ve said this many times because I think it needs to be heard and in the busy/slack world in which we live it sometimes becomes an option.
And by Christian community I don’t mean having a few Christian friends you catch up with occasionally and share a bit of life with. I mean being deeply committed to a local community of people some of whom you ‘click’ with and others who you don’t, some who are like you and some who are very different, but whom you choose to journey with anyway.
Our church is like our ‘family’ (actually biblically it is our family) and like most families there are those siblings and relatives who you have an easier time with than others. This community may change from time to time as we move geographically, but it will always be there in some shape or form. If its not then they were are missing a key element of our faith.
Caveat: I understand people transition for brief periods but personally I don’t see being out of community as having any biblical currency. Argue with me if you like…
But Volf’s quote is where all of this gets really challenging. I’m sure many of us have been in situations where our church community has been less than inspiring, where maybe we feel embarassed or even repelled by our own church. Volf is right that it is very hard to be inspired for mission if the community we are likely to lead people into is one which leaves us cold and disinterested. I know that was my experience as a teenager and has shaped much of my own ministry focus as an adult.
So what do you do?
Suck it up?
Opt out?
Be a change agent?
Well… option one isn’t going to be a long term solution. Unless you are a very patient person there is only so much ‘upsucking’ you can manage before you go insane. Opting out simply isn’t an option. (Seriously I put ‘sucking it up’ as 100 times better than just doing a runner.)
Not everyone can be a change agent and nor should they. Even those who can be, may not feel it is right to impose change on a community who may be blissfully unaware of their own cringeworthiness. But this is one valid option for people who simply don’t want to church hop. Stay around and make a difference. Be patient. Hard.
Then perhaps the other option is to start a new community. I think we have made this way easier than it sounds. On one hand it is easy – very easy. Anyone can gather a group of people, but that group can become as irrelevant as the original group unless there is a very strong sense of focus and clarity of vision. Starting something is not for everyone and brings a whole new set of challenges that can be bigger sometimes than changing an existing group. Try it and see…
But the fact remains that Christians only exist in community. There are no ‘solo’ disciples and nor should there be. However the challenge of being in a community that we can be proud of is a big one.
This is a post with no easy solutions. I don’t believe the answer is a monochrome church where ‘like people’ meet and hang out. The homogenous unit principle has some value in birthing new communitys, but overall I don’t see it as a healthy expression of the kingdom.
If I had to invest all my ‘church’ eggs in one basket I’d throw in the basket of being an exceptionally loving, gracious and accepting community – a place where people are genuinely free to be themselves and where grace is rich. I reckon real love trancends musical style, bad sermons and all the other things that make church hard at times.
These days I really don’t care much what we sing or what order we do things in, but I do care that I am part of a community that oozes love and grace. That’s a winner I reckon.
I think Jerry Maguire is still my all time favourite movie.
I realise its never destined to be a classic, and some of you will find me unbelievably shallow about now because of this choice! But I find myself identifying strongly with the character of Jerry, who comes to a point in life where he finds himself asking ‘Who had I become?… Just another shark in a suit?…’
This jaded but successful sports agent with more clients than he can manage, suddenly does a stocktake on the shape of his life and in a night of frightening revelation writes what he calls his ‘mission statement’, appropriately entitled ‘The things we think and do not say’.
Impulsively he races down to the local print shop in the early hours of the morning and has them run off enough copies for everyone in his office. As he places a copy of his dream in the mail-boxes of his co-workers hoping to share his vision with them he says ‘I didn’t care. I had lost the ability to bullshit. It was the me I had always wanted to be.’
His ‘mission statement’ becomes the catalyst and the vision for where his life heads from there on.
In his night of realisation he came face to face with the startling fact that he hated who he had become – that he had lost contact with his true identity.
‘With so many clients we had forgotten what was important.’
In his quest to acquire more clients and make more money he had moved away from the core ethic of his business – caring for the athletes. The words of his father and mentor Dicky Fox echoed in his ears ‘The key to this business is personal relationships,’ and somewhere along the line he had forgotten that.
The answer was going to be fewer clients, less money and more personal attention.
It was a beautiful dream – a moment of calling back to what a sports agent really ought to be – one who looks after the best interests of the player, rather than a schmooozer who sees people as just another dollar sign destined for exploitation.
Do I need to point the parallels for those of us who have served in local church ministry?
And its especially true for those of us who have led larger churches, where people become faces in the crowd and we learn how to live with and manage that situation.
It was about 4 years ago that I had my own ”Jerry Maguire moment’, the culmination of several years of living a conflicted existence as a pastor who questioned the shape things were taking in his church and who he was becoming in the midst of it.
There is no question that it wasn’t all bad. In fact much of it was good. We were good people attempting to do good things, but somehow I had lost touch with the core reality of who I was called to be and what we were supposed to do. I had started to become concerned for things that really shouldn’t have mattered as much as they did. I was starting to lose touch with the things that really needed to matter and along the way I was increasingly cognizant of the dissonance of my life.
The journey that hasresulted in us living here in Brighton was sparked because of that need to come back to living with integrity and being who I was called and created to be.
If you remember the Jerry Maguire story you’d know it was almost the complete undoing of Jerry as he sought to stay true to his sense of calling. At times the dream faded to a distant memory and he was simply in survival mode, while he sought to look after his one remaining client and clung by his fingernails to his disintegrating life.
My own experience has been nowhere near the dramatic downward spiral that Jerry experienced, but neither has it been a fairy tale. Dreams are wonderful things and I doubt many of us would even consider getting off our backsides and trying anything at all were it not for the power of the imagination and the hope of a better future. But to leave the comfort and security of what we know to try and live in a counter-cultural way (both in society and in church culture) is both difficult and lonely.
There are many times when I am tempted to give the dream away and go back to the conflicted but secure life that I used to have. It is what I know best and it is what I did well for many years. But I am also aware that in doing so I will not be satisfied. I don’t think I have completely lost the ability to bullshit, (do we ever?) but I am hoping that the longer I try to live out of a sense of congruence with my calling and identity the less I sound like a sales rep for ‘church inc’ and the more I sound like someone who genuinely loves God and loves people.
Jerry’s is a story with a happy ending as ultimately those who laughed at him see the pleasure and the fruit of a life that is lived with integrity and seek to emulate it.
Of course life is not the movies and the chances my story will end like Jerry’s is somewhat unlikely, but I continue to be inspired by someone who didn’t just dream of a better way. He ‘hung his balls out there’ and gave it his best shot.
Then again, shallow as I am, I’d do it all just to get the chance to be that close to Renee Zelwigger!”
I had been pondering this exact topic when I flipped to Mark’s blog this morning and watched this clip. He says it well.
Over the last 10 years I have read and learnt a lot about how the church can express itself as a missional community and how we can creatively engage with the world around us. Mark describes this as the ‘panorama’, but then there is the question of how does this translate to real life in the context in which I live and work – the ‘practical’.
Some great ideas just aren’t worth a pinch of poop in ‘real life’ and they only reflect how detached the conference speaker has become. The other tension is that of getting so bogged down in the nitty gritty of our everyday work that we lose a sense of hope and vision for what may be possible.
