11.26.09

leadership.. what I really think..

Posted in formation, leadership at 9:10 am by len

Yesterday was one of those depressing days when I am honest with myself. The outcome is really nasty. It happens to me every few months, and yesterday it went like this.

Scene One

I cracked open the copy of Cutting Edge that arrived last week while I was at the Congress. A few good articles, a few that rehash issues that are well hashed already, and a short interview with Vineyard pastor Charles Park. Ouch. This one hurt. In short it reaffirmed that in terms of leadership development for the Canadian church (broadly defined I might add) we are way behind the eight ball. Working from some ideas in Blue Ocean Strategy, Park argues that the Vineyard has tried to operate in the big sea of seeker sensitive, when God has designed it to operate in the small sea of postmodern ministry and mission. He notes that entering the big sea means less impact, and skews the development of leaders toward a culture that is dying. Where then will they find leaders equipped for the new culture? In my head I am hearing, “this is a call to Canada.”

Scene Two

I was looking for something else and stumbled across a blip penned by Jordon Cooper about three years back. Jordon is one of the brightest thinkers in Canada, and also happens to be more widely read than thirty million of us. Jordon’s outlook is very bleak also (but not without HOPE mind, but our hope isn’t in the church now is it?). In that blip he writes,

“We look for [the] defining locations and people for a lot of different reasons.  The main reason is that most church leaders are not church leaders.  As George Barna said a couple of years ago, most pastors are wonderful people but are not leaders and so we naturally want to appoint leaders to go where we are afraid to go ourselves.  Charlie Wear said something to me years ago in a Denny’s in Fullerton and it was something like, “If you have God’s calling, why are you waiting on the permission of someone else?” but that is strongly built in to how we see ourselves in the big scheme of things.  Despite everyone calling themselves a visionary leader, very few people are that.  Most are followers, even among “leaders”.  Even on Resonate there has been two discussion threads that start with, “Where is Canada’s Brian McLaren ?” or in other words, why won’t someone tell me what to do within my church?

“My other reason for why we do this comes from our own intellectual laziness or fear of making a mistake.  A couple of years ago I read the amazing book [The Ingenuity Gap] by Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon who introduced me to the idea of a global ingenuity gap ..  In it he points out that all over the world, the experts don’t know nearly as much as we think they do and make decisions based on too narrow a knowledge.  This leads to the wrong answers, partly because they haven’t looked at all of the questions yet.  After a while it is easier to follow someone else that has had success and assume that they have it all figured out.  Coming out of a post-theology modernity, the temptation is to follow the lead in the area of programming.  The results are a bunch of clone churches based on Axis or whoever else is edgy and cool.”

Scene 3

I am remembering a few weeks ago when a bright and rising young MB leader spoke at the main Kelowna campus. He had been reading Ravi Zacharias (he didn’t say so, however).  He did a great job, and he did it with passion. It was a poignant moment. I was reminded strongly of the little aphorism: “Generals lose new wars because they are still fighting old battles.” And I wrote this,

“The young leaders growing up in the cloistered world of church walls that we defended are formed within it. As a result they do not understand or work within the new world any more than their mentors. Where will we find the young leaders we need: those who are “digital natives” and postmodern pilgrims to use Len Sweets terms?  Some of the existing leaders will eventually make the transition. Many will not. [And in the time it takes them to discover the need and make the transition we will have lost more ground.] We will have to find them out there on the streets, because most of the young leaders raised in the Christian subculture are wearing the wrong clothes and humming the wrong tune.”

Scene 4

A few days ago Jordon quoted Dan Whitmarsh like this:

“So, to recap, the strategy is: do something fun/cool/outrageous to get people in the door, then tell ‘em about Jesus.

“Let’s be clear about one thing: the motivation is great. Telling people about Jesus is our highest calling. Creating opportunities to tell people about Jesus is a wonderful task.

“But there was a dark side that very few people really wanted to talk about: this ‘wow ‘em and tell ‘em about Jesus’ strategy doesn’t do much in the way of creating disciples. Instead, it creates instant flash with no long-term impact. The fact that even 70-80% of Christian kids leave the church after high school ought to tell us we’re doing something wrong. That we’re not growing Followers, that we’re not raising Disciples. Instead, we’re creating Consumers who will always chase after the next big fix, wherever that comes from. We’re not raising young people who understand such basic tenets of Christianity as sacrifice, service, humility, forgiveness, love, grace and mercy. We are, in fact, temporarily distracting young people with smoke and mirrors, sneaking the gospel in there, assuming that, since they ’said the prayer’ following the pizza and root-beer gorge, they’re ‘in.’

“And here’s today’s problem: those raised in this world are leaving their youth ministry days behind and moving into senior leadership in churches across America. . .and they’re using the exact same strategies in the larger church…”

I don’t know how to end this post. I’m not usually this honest about my feelings about all this, because frankly I think most Canadian leaders are still way in denial and if they saw the issues clearly they would be depressed and jumping off bridges. I hope if you read it you are gripped by the urgency of the problem. I hope it drives you to your knees..

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