Month: January 2011

Posted on

Three Critical Acts of Leadership

Why is the role of the leader important? Consider that all organizations depend on shared meanings and interpretations of reality to facilitate coordinated action. In dynamic Churches the definition of reality and call to shared action is the central role of the sermon. Equally important is how the leader carries him or herself relative to the core values of those who follow. In dynamic companies the definition of reality and call to shared action is often expressed in the communication of the president or CEO and his or her interactions with the employees and board relative to their core values.
For leaders who realize the power of shared meaning in an organization three things become essential:

• Leaders reframe situations demonstrating new perspectives that call others to action

• Leaders articulate and define what had previously remained implicit or unsaid

• Leaders consolidate or challenge prevailing wisdom to suggest new directions

The social upheaval in Tunisia and the mirrored unrest in Egypt in 2011 and the current unrest in Syria demonstrate the power of these three actions and suggest that whoever frames reality or meaning wins the day. This is why entrenched power brokers who hide behind their privilege and/or power to maintain position by force always loose regardless of the context either political, commercial or religious.

Leaders are the kind of people to whom others are drawn – not because of their personalities but because they have:

• a dream,

• a vision,

• a set of intentions,

• an agenda,

• a frame of reference.

This is important to see. New leaders in many organizations or social settings often seem to arise from obscurity to prominence just at the right time or the wrong time depending on where one stands relative to change. But obscurity is usually another way of describing a lack of attention. When power brokers do not listen, do not pay attention they often do not see the opportunity for change nor those who inspire change until the status quo is thoroughly shaken.

Healthy, innovative, vibrant organizations (or churches or countries) are those that provide permission to leaders to leaders reframe situations demonstrating new perspectives that call others to action; articulate and define what had previously remained implicit or unsaid and consolidate or challenge prevailing wisdom to suggest new directions.

The real test of leadership however isn’t in the revolution/change.  The real test of leadership is in how change is consolidated to a new reality that is in fact different than the prior reality.  Some revolutions simply exchange personalities and processes yet do little to bring about significant change.  The only change is in who now controls the power and the privilege.

Who are the leaders in your organization? Are they recognized or unseen? Are they empowered or marginalized? Are they granted permission or shown the door? Are leaders a threat to your organization or do the leaders of your organization tend to attract the truly gifted and engaged into a synergy of innovation and vibrant execution? If your organization’s leaders don’t another group of leaders will.

Posted on

Mentoring Leverages the Power of Relationships and Experience

Developing talent is a de facto management activity.  Managers who fail to recognize that their daily interactions with their employees either develops or marginalizes employee talent are habitually represented in mediocre or failing performance.
Conversely managers who have mastered the skill of developing talent are identifiable in their continuous strong results.

The relational skills, approaches and perspectives high performing managers utilize to improve performance recognizes high performers and transitions low performers either toward greater productivity or out of the company.  Whether these skills are employed intentionally or intuitively they can be described as mentoring.

Mentoring is often popularly viewed as a monolithic activity. However, research indicates that highly effective managers utilize a composite of combined skills and interactions to develop employees in career and personal (psychosocial) feedback. In a multi-generational workforce mentoring offers a powerful tool for the convergence of existing and emerging talent.

Leveraging mentoring within an organization allows the organization to:

  • Leverage knowledge within short time constraints typical of many competitive environments
  • Acculturate new employees quickly and “cross-culturate” older and younger employees to generate new energy and engagement
  • Reinforce a positive organizational culture
  • Connect multiple generations into more effective work teams – an important competitive advantage in today’s multigenerational workforce

Initiating a mentoring approach in a company does not require large capital expenditures or lengthy training periods.  Creating a mentoring environment first requires that key leaders exercise the self-awareness needed to define their most effective contribution and investment in emerging leaders. Mentoring consists of at least twelve discrete functions including:

Career Functions Psychosocial functions
Coaching Discipline
Training Role Modeling
Sponsorship Acceptance & confirmation
Protection Counseling
Exposure & Visibility Friendship
Challenging Assignments Spiritual guide

Experienced leaders do not need to be competent in all twelve mentoring functions – they do need to know what functions they are best suited to employ in developing others.

The power of mentoring is that it recognizes that that learning is a career-long process.  Much of what is associated with effective leadership cannot be fully engaged in a classroom setting.  One must actually lead to learn what leadership is and how the tools of leadership (e.g., communication, vision, decision making, structure, care for others, emotional awareness in personal interactions, commitment to learning, appreciation of functions outside one’s expertise and situational awareness) are expressed effectively.

Creating a mentoring environment does not require a commitment to coordinate mentoring efforts through existing talent development processes or other management communication lines.  This helps if the culture of the organization supports mentoring efforts.  However, even where organizational structures fail to support mentoring effective leaders can employ mentoring as a means of leading change and improving performance.

Creating a mentoring environment is a powerful way to be deliberate about corporate culture and how it can enhance competitive advantage.  Where mentoring is viewed as a corporate activity organizational learning can be accelerated.  It is this learning culture that provides a competitive advantage because it continually allows and encourages emerging leaders to question the status quo by looking at new horizons.  Innovation is rarely a reactive activity (with reference to what may be wrong with the organization) it is a proactive activity in seeing the ways an organization can address needs no one else has seen.  This does not mean that innovation is blind to reality – rather it is brutally clear on one hand and refreshingly transparent on the other.

Most likely your organization already has mentors working in it.  Look around, identify these mentors and encourage their work.  Let them set the pace for influencing a mentoring culture.  Often this move is much more effective than determining that mentoring needs to occur and implementing a program to make it happen.  Programs work as company-wide initiatives in my experience only when they hitchhike on the skills of those already engaged in developing the next layer of leaders. Where this is not happening the chances are leaders are far too insecure to engage mentoring.  If this is the case then a completely different set of challenges needs to be addressed.

Posted on

Figuring Out How the Missional Church Works

Defining the Context of Missional Work

“It is odd,” the pastor noted, “that your company is investing time in a concept that will make your company obsolete.”  “You are stuck” he continued, “in a consumerist perspective and model of the church and so I wonder why you are here.  In light of the radical changes happening in the church the chairs you manufacture will no longer be needed.”

This was a leader of a movement of congregations known to take seriously a missional approach to its ecclesiology.  The affiliation of congregations he represents are Christocentric rather than ecclesiocentric in their practice (defined below) and are on the cutting edge of the thinking about being a missional congregation.  The shift in perspective from ecclesiocentric to Christocentric view of mission has focused them on the working of missio Dei (God’s mission) in all their community. Yet for all the vibrancy exhibited in their fledgling movement they exhibit remnants of a historical and local myopia.

My surprise at the statement emanated from the fact we met in a gathering sponsored by the several companies that work primarily with churches across the United States and who have partnered together to leverage each others’ strengths.  In our case we manufacture sanctuary seating serving both a domestic and global market.  Sitting where we do at the nexus of commerce and the church we all enjoy a fascinating perspective of the church in action.  The network of companies that sponsored these particular meetings represent men and women of deep conviction about the relevance and vibrancy of the local church.  Because we have a trans-local perspective of the church we see the need to bring together pastors and consultants from across the United States to share their insights and experience in leading missional congregations and to interact with some of the leading authors writing on the concept of the missional church.

This leader was personally oblivious to the background and stories of the men and women sponsoring the context of these meetings. He seemed at first ready to dismiss us all as antiquarian dinosaurs of a dynasty that has long outlived its usefulness. I could not help but recall the painful rebuke I once received from a more mature saint I had similarly dismissed in my radical youth, “Ray,” Sue noted, “before you write off the church that birthed you in faith you should consider that you operate as you do on both its resources and more importantly its heritage.  You should review the admonition of Hebrews 13:7 to remember the leaders of the past and to imitate the outcome of their faith.  You act as though you are the first to discover the dynamic of walking in faith.”

The corrective hurt then, now I am thankful for the broadened perspective that Sue and her husband Chuck helped me grasp.  Both were educated at Wheaton, they were active in the church, they were dynamic in their faith and Chuck was an engineer who introduced me to a much deeper spiritual formation and spiritual disciplines than I had known up to that point.

I love the conversation and the vibrancy that exudes from congregations wrestling with what it means to be the church in mission.  The conversation is important and the change (read repentance) it brings to how local congregations see themselves relative to their community is critically important. The conversation I had with this radical leader is also important. Three things hit me as I thought about the conversation I had that night over diner with this leader.

The Stumbling Stone of Western Dualism

Today’s missional reflection needs to reflect on its own historicity and the ongoing problem of dualism in western thought.  Jeff Van Duzer’s recent interview in Christianity Today titled “The Meaning of Business” addressed the one of the stumbling stones of our inherent dualism.  Moll writes:

Despite many books and conferences in the past decade that frame business as a divine calling, churches still wonder how best to support the businesspeople in their midst, many of whom feel demeaned for not doing “real” ministry.[1]

How is it that a concept that focuses rightly on the concept of communitas still exhibits the contradiction of treating business people as second class believers or reducing them pejoratively to mere consumers of faith?[2] Practitioners of missional ecclesiology still wrestle with ways to differentiate their understanding from those perspectives and views that represent the entropy of the church in the west.  Clearly the church in the west faces a crisis of identity theologically and institutionally. So I do not dismiss the need to rethink the church’s relationship with its context or to its theological assumptions.

However to relegate business people to second class believers is simply a result of inherent cultural dualism rather than a result of critical theological reflection. So what is dualism?  When it is used in reference to the human mind then it means that there is more to existence than mere materialism.  In this meaning of the word there is no particular problem.  In fact the scriptures clearly argue that a spiritual dimension is part of our material universe.  The problem arises in the nuances of how the relationship between the material and spiritual aspects of our existence relate.  Is the material world de facto evil?  In some traditions this seems to be the case.  This sets up an impossible tension that often works to diminish the impact of the gospel or the scope of God’s mission (missio Dei). Should the church only be concerned with the spiritual well being of others? Do we discount the social, environmental and economic forces that make up our existence and that contribute to oppression, imprisonment and misunderstanding?

Our theological traditions in the west are deeply influenced by Plato the Greek philosopher whose schematic of form and substance was utilized by the early church.  The problem is that Plato’s love of pure disembodied form runs counter to the creative activity of God and God’s pronouncement that creation was good.  When our current thinking uncritically adopts a dualistic perspective that assumes all material issues are either evil or less holy than what we consider spiritual issues the kind of tension cited by Van Duzer in Moll’s interview emerge. The point is that it is important to allow the scriptures to challenge our deepest assumptions rather than proof text our way to affirming our own cultural assumptions. Herein also the problem of historicity pops up.  We are not always conscious of the distance between ourselves and the authors of the scriptures. We are not always conscious of the impact our cultural social upbringing has on how we read the biblical texts. If we do not exercise a rigorous hermeneutic then we run the risk of creating a different gospel – one that is truncated between the physical and the spiritual rather than holistic.  A truncated gospel becomes biblically unrecognizable at best and at worst it becomes a contradiction to the mission of God.  In all fairness the reverse is also true.  If one spends their time working for social justice without the power of the redeeming and transforming work of Christ then a different kind of truncation occurs – it is also a distortion and one that would benefit from the holistic approach modeled by Christ.

The Blind Spot of an Ecclesiocentric Hermeneutic of Mission

Today’s missional thinking needs to be encouraged in its pursuit of a hermeneutic that pursues a Christocentric versus ecclesiocentric approach to mission (i.e., a pursuit of fresh theological reflection).  What do I mean by a Christocentric view of mission?  By this I mean that the confession that Jesus is Lord becomes the center of the life of the church. When lived out this confession does not recognize a distinction between secular and sacred realms as become evident in a dualistic approach to thinking. If Jesus is Lord of all that I do then work as well as worship is the context of God’s mission.  How deeply does the dualism I discussed above impact the way we think about church?  Consider the ramifications of starting the definition of mission with the church (i.e., an ecclesiocentric perspective of mission). If mission starts with the church then people tend to experience God as a church-based deity disconnected from the public realm.  God and faith become relegated to private life and offer nothing of substance to the public domain.

If faith is merely a private matter then it runs counter intuitive to the incarnation.  If faith is merely a private matter how does its expression correspond to the mission of God?  It does not correspond well. When the focus of the church’s mission is to create uniquely spiritual or separate contexts in which people express their faith then the church’s missional impulse is divorced from the incarnational model demonstrated by Christ and simply becomes an attempt to separate the sacred from the secular – this is an easy trap to fall into when one starts their definition of mission with the church (i.e., an ecclesiocentric model). In my discussion with my pastor friend I experience the remnants of an ecclesiocentric hermeneutic of mission when he expressed total shock at my statement that our executive team had devoted hours to discussing how we could appropriately and effectively demonstrate live out our commitment to Christ among our employees, vendors, partners and customers.  But why is this shocking?  Believers committed to Jesus as Lord live out their faith and missionary calling in all aspects of their lives. However where an ecclesiocentric perspective of mission is normative then such activities are demoted to second place in comparison with the activities that occur in the institution of the church.  Why diminish any aspect of incarnational ministry?  Why not celebrate all aspects of incarnational ministry?

My own pastor once taught a fabulous sermon on spiritual gifts. I made special note however that the only application of spiritual gifts he mentioned revolved around volunteering in the ministries housed on the campus or sponsored by the congregation in homes.  After the sermon I noted how encouraged I was with the content and that I had been challenged to rethink the use of Christ’s gifts in me. However I said, “Dennis, clear Wednesday for me.  I need you to be with me from 6:00 AM to about 8:30 PM. Will you do this?”   Dennis agreed to clear his day because of our great respect for one another and the fact he could see I had something unique in mind. “Meet me at the train station at 6:00, I will be in the front car” I said.  We parted until Wednesday.

When we met on the train car I explained that I wanted Dennis to see what my day was like.  My daily commute was an hour and a half to work one way to a company in which I served as Vice President of Administration.  During our day together Dennis sat in on our executive planning session, observed me coaching management staff, answering a deluge of emails, and even firing an employee.  One of my managers even collapsed into my arms in grief and Dennis watched me pray for her (it was her first day at work since her husband had died of a heart attack). Other than the rather dramatic encounter with the manager the day was a normal day for me.  On our way back home after a ten hour day I asked Dennis two questions.  “Dennis I asked you to come with me today to ask you two questions.  First, what part of my day was not ministry in your mind?  Second, you see what my daily commute is like.  We won’t get home until 8:30 PM, when do I have time to come by the church office and volunteer?”

There was no question about my commitment to Jesus as Lord.  There was no question about my support of the church financially, emotionally and spiritually.  But in what Dennis described on the Sunday he taught on spiritual gifts there was no sense of authentication or acceptance of the kind of schedule and impact an executive or professional like myself had on the community in which I worked.  I participated in Sunday morning worship as a point of refreshment and encouragement as much as I participated as an expression of giftedness. Were people like myself to be reduced to mere consumer status who are simply required to pay to play?  Or is there a well of wisdom extant in many congregations that pastors simply have not yet learned to draw on?  Dennis by the way jumped on the conversation with his usual creative and energetic pursuit of learning.  Dennis and I share in ministry it is a partnership.  We enrich each other, encourage each other, pray for each other and find that the contexts in which God has called us to work offer a rich insight into the fullness of God’s mission in the world.

However, among some leaders an ecclesiocentric perspective of mission remains a significant blind spot.  Pastoral leaders who are burned out, bummed out and tired of the machine that consumes them have two significant challenges in front of them.  The first is to refocus on why they are believers in Jesus Christ.  Jesus called this a summons to return to one’s first love (Revelation 2:4, 5).  Recalibrate activity not around the demands of the institution but the risen Christ.  The second is only possible as the first occurs: reinvigorate the adaptive work that summons others to true communitas together.

Heifetz and Laurie argue that adaptive work is required when “…our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge.”[3] This certainly describes the position many congregations find themselves. Effective pastoral leadership in the kind of rapidly changing social environment we find ourselves in leads people through the distress of adaptive work i.e., leading them toward change when they don’t want to change.  This requires that pastoral leaders break from the pattern of leadership in the form of solution or answer giving to shift the locus of responsibility for problem solving to the congregation. (cf., Acts 6 for a model of this).  This represents a significant shift in how pastors view themselves as leaders. It moves pastoral leadership from being the center of the life of the church to a position that works to equip the ministry of the church.  In some traditions (new ones as well as older ones) this represents a great leap of change. Leading adaptive work involves: the ability to view patterns, identification of the adaptive challenge, regulating distress, maintaining disciplined attention, giving the work of ministry back to people and protecting the voices of leadership from below.  These activities redefine how the traditional pastoral role is often defined but it seems to line up to the expectations outlined in the bible for leaders (e.g., Ephesians 4: 12-16).

The Shallowness of a Limited Historical Horizon

Today’s missional reflection needs a dose of historical perspective. The emergence of missional thinking and the struggle with how to describe the church as a missional entity is a predictable continuation of the reformation’s understanding of ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda (the church is always reformed and always reforming).  My friend in the discussion I cite at the beginning of this paper seemed to view missional activity in what I term missio intermitto (i.e., the idea that the mission of God is sometimes on again off again depending on the theological purity as viewed by the latest attempt to recapture the vibrancy of the early church).  While apparently true at the level of particular and local experience the historical intervention of God in the affairs of human kind is far less subjective.  The case in point is Elijah who upon complaining of the absence of vibrant vital prophetic activity in the nation of Israel was reminded that seven thousand others had not compromised their faith in light of the prevailing cultural view of Baal worship (1 Kings 19:18).

Today’s conversation on the missional church is needed, it is promising, and it is pregnant with potential for true reformation of the church.  But, it is not new.  It is a continuation of the work that commenced in the Garden, was exhibited and focused on Christ and continues to today.  As Mark so pointedly infers in his gospel “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God” recognizes a continuation and that continuation is the ministry of Christ reflected in the church. (Mark 1:1)

Alan Hirsch is fond of reminding us that the discussion around the missional church is really a summons to things forgotten, things that have been lost to experience but have always been a vital and vibrant part of the outworking of the church of Christ.  Why is this important?  History has so much to teach us – things to emulate and things to avoid.  The conversation God has with human kind is always a fiercely honest one – one that reveals the majestic as well as the disappointing.   The current conversation is no different and we do well to remain students as well as teachers in the midst of the conversation.  If we fail to retain a long historical horizon (i.e., to pay attention to the lessons of history) we walk with one eye shut and the other dim. We stand on the shoulders of others, we should leverage that perspective.

Engage the Fierce Conversation

By the time my pastor friend and I had completed our conversation we felt a mutual sense of respect and curiosity about how the mission of God was unfolding in front of us.  This result was not by accident.  Author Susan Scott identifies the qualities of conversation needed to get to the kind of understanding my friend and I began to enjoy, she calls it fierce conversation.  She describes it this way:

…robust, intense, strong, powerful, passionate, eager, unbridled, uncurbed, untamed.  In its simplest form, a fierce conversation is one in which we come out from behind ourselves into the conversation and make it real.[4]

True progress toward the adoption of a missional perspective (a Christocentric view of mission) and its practical implications on the way we live as the church is limited only to the extent we fail to engage the conversation.  But engaging the conversation requires that we master the courage to interrogate our present reality, come out from behind ourselves to make the conversation real, be engaged now and prepared to be nowhere else, demonstrate a willingness to tackle the toughest challenges, obey our instincts (the nudges of the Holy Spirit) and take responsibility for our own emotional wake.  Too many pastors and too many business professionals have disengaged the conversation under tidy rationale and accusatory conclusions.  I like the summons of the hymn that still resonates in my soul from the days of my childhood.  It is my prayer for the present for both men and women called and gifted by the grace of God;

Rise up oh men of God! Have done with lesser things;
Give heart and soul and mind and strength to serve the King of kings.
Rise up oh men of God! His kingdom tarries long;
Bring in the day of brotherhood, and end the night of wrong.[5]

[1] Jeff Van Duzer and Rob Moll, “The Meaning of Business” (Christianity Today, January 2011. Source http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/january/21.24.html; accessed, 16 January 2011).

[2] Communitas can be differentiated between three types of social interaction (a) existential – a transient personal experience of togetherness as is often the catalytic event the draws people into the exploration of relationship with Christ; (b) normative – group experience organized into a permanent social system as that which grows up around missional communities committed to Jesus as Lord and (c) ideological – any number of utopian social models as seen in various attempts by groups of disciples who experiment with the meaning of koinonia as part of normative discipleship.

[3] Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie. “The Work of Leadership.” Harvard Business Review, December 2001,6.

[4] Susan Scott. Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time (New York, NY: Berkley Books, 2004), 7.

[5] William Henry Walter (1825-93).

Posted on

You Did Sign Up for This – It’s Called Leadership

The Effectiveness Lament

Leadership complexity“I did not sign up for this.” The “this” in the sentence refers to the work involved in attempting to hobble together the seemingly mutually contradictory demands of loving the community, caring for the hurting, discipling the responsive and complying with tax, zoning and employee regulations.  “I just wanted to communicate to my city about the power and goodness of God.”

I call this the effectiveness lament.  Every pastor I know who launches into ministry with the objective of being a vital, authentic and missional church has ultimately reached a zenith in their travels in which they feel that the gravitational pull toward tradition and distraction becomes wearying. The congregation started by my friend Doug emerged from an evening discussion with friends around a coffee table. The gist of the conversation was frustration and disgust with the traditional concept of church.  They committed themselves to be something different, to be involved in a missional thrust in their community that resulted in true discipleship and they succeeded at this.  They began to see lives in their community transformed, they experienced what social researchers and theologians call communitas.

Communitas is a term used to describe both the unique character of the church’s experience of living together and the aspects of that shared experience.  As Hirsch outlines it communitas describes the

…dynamics of the Christian community inspired to overcome their instincts to “huddle and cuddle,” and instead to form themselves around a common mission that calls them onto a dangerous journey to unknown places, a mission that calls to the church to shake off its collective securities and to plunge into a world of action.[1]

Communitas can be differentiated between three types of social interaction (a) existential – a transient personal experience of togetherness as is often the catalytic event the draws people into the exploration of relationship with Christ; (b) normative – group experience organized into a permanent social system as that which grows up around missional communities committed to Jesus as Lord and (c) ideological – any number of utopian social models as seen in various attempts by groups of disciples who experiment with the meaning of koinonia as part of normative discipleship.

Communitas opened a flood gate

Doug and the team he worked with began to see people liberated from psychological/spiritual prisons they saw people physically healed and powerfully transformed.  Communitas lead to an outbreak of grace in hundreds of social networks that all wanted to converge with the epicenter to share what they had experienced and to find some explanation for their experience.  The way things took shape looked more and more like an apostolic movement.  By this I mean that the perspective, energy, impulse and outcomes surrounding these emerging social networks were more and more characterized in the attributes of the church i.e., (one, holy, catholic, apostolic).

I visited Doug shortly after his congregation had doubled in a weekend from 400 to 800 people.  The air around the neighborhood was electric (the congregation had bought an entire block of houses to facilitate the need for office space, single mom housing and child care).  The church did not displace their neighbors they became integrated in the neighborhood.  But as Doug and I walked out of the reception area to go to his office he paused went back in and asked the receptionist where his office was.  I thought he was joking…he acted like he had been clubbed on the head.  It was no joke, exponential impact lead to exponential chaos – Doug could not keep up with the changes.

Communitas is Contagious – Eventually

My own experience in pastoral ministry mirrored aspects of my friend’s.  I left my staff position to assume the reigns of a dying congregation with the goal of finding like minded people who wanted something other than church as usual. A dying congregation meant that I simply could not fail. You can’t kill a dead church.  I wanted to know what a church could really be in a community if it was unshackled from the weight of dead tradition and needless bureaucracy.  It did not take me long to suffer frustration. The board of the congregation had been reduced to fretting over how to pay the electric bill and apologetics for why I could not be paid.  When they weren’t decrying the failing finances they engaged in querying how I would grow the congregation and why I did not focus on salvaging their youth. In desperation for change one night, I crammed them all in my station wagon and drove them to a neighborhood.  “What do you see?” I asked.

They answered with the obvious, “I see houses” one said.  “I see a house that is poorly maintained” another replied.  “I don’t get it” another said while the rest grunted approvingly at this not so subtle statement about wasting precious meeting time.  “That woman with the stroller there, what do you see?”  I pressed again.  Finally one ventured, “I think she is single and hurting.”  In an “aha” moment a voice from the back of the station wagon suggested, “I see a single mom who has no hope, who needs to know that God knows her.  We can make a difference for her and her children by loving them – by demonstrating how much God loves them.”  This finally unleashed a torrent of new ways of “seeing” our community.

After several more stops we returned to the building and spent time talking and praying about the kind of church we wanted to be.  In a moment of refreshing and unguarded transparency they all admitted that they were tired of business as usual, they found the church irrelevant to their daily experience and they were bored with Christianity as they knew it. We had our own coffee table discussion.  The result?  We began to act like the church, to love our neighbors, to engage in honest conversation (versus religiously correct conversation) we grew into a new intimacy with Christ.  Like my friend Doug’s experience we saw the same powerful change in people and simultaneous contagion begin to manifest in dozens of social networks.  We began to enjoy communitas together.  We saw God working in our community in new ways.  We engaged a relationship with Jesus as Lord in a way that began to impact every aspect of our lives.

Radical Breakthroughs Happen Slowly Over Time

We went for several years blissful, manageable spiritual and numeric addition occurred.  Then one September the numbers of people who showed up on Sundays more than doubled and before long I was as disoriented as Doug had been.  I felt that we had lost control of the warm, authentic, intimate, organic congregation we had become.  Yet, everyone who now showed up as strangers to me had a rich personal connection somewhere among the people in the congregation I knew well.  We were also in the midst of exponential chaos that seemed engendered by communitas.

I had wanted to grow a large church but I wanted to do it while also avoiding the chaos of rapid expansion I had seen Doug endure.  I wanted nice authentic (read, controlled) community.  I began to realize the oxymoron involved in combining “controlled” and “organic”.  There is no such thing as controlling the organic nature of the church…one can warp, twist, injure, starve, sicken or nourish, nurture and enjoy the organic nature of the church.  The church once unlocked in its fullest DNA is unpredictable, irrepressible and transformational. It jumps across social and cultural boundaries.  It cannot be domesticated by systems and structures instead it will grow around and through systems and structures transforming them and re-purposing them.

I found the lament of effectiveness flowing from my own mouth, “God, I did not sign up for this….”  My time faced demands I had no idea existed before.  The city had noticed we existed and I was faced with zoning hearings, police visitations over decibel levels emanating from the youth who gathered each week to share their experience with Christ and traffic flow patterns that had begun to choke the driveways of our neighbors. Some of my peers in the pastoral community became hostile and distant.  New demands sprung up on our systems with regard to discipleship, financial management, staffing, volunteer training, facilities management, insurance, employment records, risk management assessments, property transactions and background checks. Some of the people who had joined the congregation complained at my lack of pastoral skill while others simultaneously declared me to be the best pastor they had ever seen.  Some loved the worship services while others complained at the lack of traditional services.  I sat staring out my office window one day feeling like a prisoner and longing for the simple days we sat in the station wagon together seeing the community with new eyes.  How in the world could I get back to that day when the whole thing now felt so out of control?

Inescapable Complexity in Organic Growth

In light of all that is being written about the missional church, the simple church, the organic church etcetera it seems that one thing is consistently overlooked – something that should be as obvious as our own existence.  Organisms don’t develop from complexity to simplicity but from simplicity to complexity.  The transition I needed the day I sat in my office was not an escape from complexity but a reconnection with the DNA that drove the changes I was seeing.  If the missional church movement is an attempt to escape complexity of social interaction and especially the exponential complexity inherent in large numbers of people being together in the same place then it will die a deserved death of irrelevance like so many other concepts.

That day in the office I began to reflect on one of Jesus’ more peculiar miracles, the feeding of the five thousand.  The event is a great one to introduce the challenges inherent in leading a missional church. Recall, that a crowd (invaders in the communitas the disciples enjoyed with Jesus) had gathered drawn by the fact that they had seen the signs that Jesus performed on the sick.  Jesus characteristically “…seeing that a great multitude was coming to Him….”[2] engaged Philip in a mentoring moment according to John’s record.  “Where are we to buy bread, that these may eat?” Jesus asks.[3] The complexity of the need and the logistics to meet the need obviously concerned the apostles who may have been more than a little taken aback that Jesus seemed to place the responsibility for addressing the need squarely at their feet.  In case the reflection of John is not clear enough on this point, Luke’s record makes it crystal clear.  When the apostles suggested that people be sent away to find food Jesus said, “You give them something to eat!”[4]

As I reflected on the event I found Jesus’ words remarkably contemporary and disturbing.  I wanted to disengage from the complexity I faced because missio Dei was happening around me.  I was seeing the signs that Jesus performed on the broken, the sick, the isolated, the successful and the downcast.  A crowed had invaded our communitas and I wanted Jesus to dismiss them.  Jesus wanted me to assimilate them into communitas.  The very complexity I wanted to avoid Jesus was asking me to embrace as a way to draw more people into communitas.

Embrace a New Definition of Capacity

I was struck by the extreme differential between my capacity and God’s.  My capacity was the small group I had grown to love and share life with.  God’s capacity was to love the whole world. I was rapidly moving to an “us four no more” focus that sought to isolate my closest friendships from those challenges and complexities introduced by strangers or outsiders. I wanted control over who, when, how and where complexity entered my life. I possess a limited capacity defined by my own abilities, time and resource.  This is the essence of what missional church writers call a traditional or an attractional church. When we rely on our own capacity or comfort to define what a faith community looks like toxicity is de facto loaded into relationships. Writing on what it means to be a missional congregation Hirsch makes a similar observation:

As we shall see, structures are absolutely necessary for cooperative human interaction as well as maintaining some form of coherent social patterns.  However, it seems that over time the increasingly impersonal structures of the institution assume roles, responsibilities and authority that legitimately belong to the whole people of God in their local and grassroots expressions.  It is at this point that things tend to go awry.[5]

This tendency for things to go awry or become toxic is evident in three successive encounters between the apostles and Jesus in events recorded by Luke just after the feeding of the five thousand.[6]

The first event is an argument over who would be the greatest.  Jesus reinforces the reality that the focus in communitas is on responsiveness not position or power.  The illustration of the child contrasts sophistication and superiority (adopting an attitude of condescension toward others) with response and engagement.  Capacity cannot be enlarged if one’s pursuit is the power to control or dominate.  Capacity is released when complexity is embraced with responsive curiosity that asks questions previously either unasked or unpermitted. Until leaders embrace the perspective of play and characteristic engagement of children capacity remains consistently limited.

The second encounter was the unnamed disciple rebuked by the apostles for casting out demons because he was not part of the communitas of the apostles proper. Jesus made clear that the criterion of communitas is relationship not parochialism.  Capacity cannot be enlarged if room is not made within the leadership circle for new people who demonstrate an intimacy with Christ.  Capacity is limited when entrance into leadership is restricted to a false criterion limited by personal connections to the familiar rather than to Christ.  The central criterion is demonstrated intimacy with Christ as Lord not demonstrated connections with the right group or power structure.

The third encounter emerges from the rejection suffered by the apostles at the hands of a Samaritan village.  The apostles wanted to call fire out of heaven to consume those who had openly resisted them. Jesus made clear that the agenda of communitas was liberation not destruction. Capacity is never enlarged when the focus is how we are personally received. If leaders look more to their own feelings of rejection (the need to be right) rather than the need for reconciliation then capacity for what God is doing is constricted to the point a congregation becomes toxic rather than redeeming.

A Metamorphosis not a Destination

A capacity for dealing with complexity (the condition of being made up of many interrelated parts) is imperative to being a missional church.  Yet this capacity to being the missional church is reduced when one possesses a misaligned focus, a poorly defined criterion and a faulty agenda.  It is impossible to fathom engaging the complexity resulting from the works of Christ when one is more concerned; (1) with their role in the plan rather than knowing Christ in a more intimate way; (2) with who is like them and therefore in or out rather than seeing others relating to Christ as lord and (3) why outsiders should be judged and condemned instead of seeing what God is doing to liberate them.

For leaders who do pursue the concept of being a missional church two things seem unavoidable.  First they enter an engagement with the living Christ that irreversibly alters how they see the church and the community around them. Second, they enter a relationship with Christ characterized by exquisite transparency – the awareness of God’s penetrating gaze that simultaneously judges sin and frees the guilty.  Being a missional church is not a destination, it is a metamorphosis engaged by living a life style of repentance and discovery.

[1] Alan Hirsch. The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006), 277.

[2] John 6:5 (NASV)

[3] John 6:6 (NASV)

[4] Luke 9:13 (NASV)

[5] Hirsch 2006, 23.

[6] Luke 9: 46-56 (NASV)

Posted on

You Did Sign Up for This – It's Called Leadership

The Effectiveness Lament

Leadership complexity“I did not sign up for this.” The “this” in the sentence refers to the work involved in attempting to hobble together the seemingly mutually contradictory demands of loving the community, caring for the hurting, discipling the responsive and complying with tax, zoning and employee regulations.  “I just wanted to communicate to my city about the power and goodness of God.”
I call this the effectiveness lament.  Every pastor I know who launches into ministry with the objective of being a vital, authentic and missional church has ultimately reached a zenith in their travels in which they feel that the gravitational pull toward tradition and distraction becomes wearying. The congregation started by my friend Doug emerged from an evening discussion with friends around a coffee table. The gist of the conversation was frustration and disgust with the traditional concept of church.  They committed themselves to be something different, to be involved in a missional thrust in their community that resulted in true discipleship and they succeeded at this.  They began to see lives in their community transformed, they experienced what social researchers and theologians call communitas.
Communitas is a term used to describe both the unique character of the church’s experience of living together and the aspects of that shared experience.  As Hirsch outlines it communitas describes the

…dynamics of the Christian community inspired to overcome their instincts to “huddle and cuddle,” and instead to form themselves around a common mission that calls them onto a dangerous journey to unknown places, a mission that calls to the church to shake off its collective securities and to plunge into a world of action.[1]

Communitas can be differentiated between three types of social interaction (a) existential – a transient personal experience of togetherness as is often the catalytic event the draws people into the exploration of relationship with Christ; (b) normative – group experience organized into a permanent social system as that which grows up around missional communities committed to Jesus as Lord and (c) ideological – any number of utopian social models as seen in various attempts by groups of disciples who experiment with the meaning of koinonia as part of normative discipleship.

Communitas opened a flood gate

Doug and the team he worked with began to see people liberated from psychological/spiritual prisons they saw people physically healed and powerfully transformed.  Communitas lead to an outbreak of grace in hundreds of social networks that all wanted to converge with the epicenter to share what they had experienced and to find some explanation for their experience.  The way things took shape looked more and more like an apostolic movement.  By this I mean that the perspective, energy, impulse and outcomes surrounding these emerging social networks were more and more characterized in the attributes of the church i.e., (one, holy, catholic, apostolic).
I visited Doug shortly after his congregation had doubled in a weekend from 400 to 800 people.  The air around the neighborhood was electric (the congregation had bought an entire block of houses to facilitate the need for office space, single mom housing and child care).  The church did not displace their neighbors they became integrated in the neighborhood.  But as Doug and I walked out of the reception area to go to his office he paused went back in and asked the receptionist where his office was.  I thought he was joking…he acted like he had been clubbed on the head.  It was no joke, exponential impact lead to exponential chaos – Doug could not keep up with the changes.

Communitas is Contagious – Eventually

My own experience in pastoral ministry mirrored aspects of my friend’s.  I left my staff position to assume the reigns of a dying congregation with the goal of finding like minded people who wanted something other than church as usual. A dying congregation meant that I simply could not fail. You can’t kill a dead church.  I wanted to know what a church could really be in a community if it was unshackled from the weight of dead tradition and needless bureaucracy.  It did not take me long to suffer frustration. The board of the congregation had been reduced to fretting over how to pay the electric bill and apologetics for why I could not be paid.  When they weren’t decrying the failing finances they engaged in querying how I would grow the congregation and why I did not focus on salvaging their youth. In desperation for change one night, I crammed them all in my station wagon and drove them to a neighborhood.  “What do you see?” I asked.
They answered with the obvious, “I see houses” one said.  “I see a house that is poorly maintained” another replied.  “I don’t get it” another said while the rest grunted approvingly at this not so subtle statement about wasting precious meeting time.  “That woman with the stroller there, what do you see?”  I pressed again.  Finally one ventured, “I think she is single and hurting.”  In an “aha” moment a voice from the back of the station wagon suggested, “I see a single mom who has no hope, who needs to know that God knows her.  We can make a difference for her and her children by loving them – by demonstrating how much God loves them.”  This finally unleashed a torrent of new ways of “seeing” our community.
After several more stops we returned to the building and spent time talking and praying about the kind of church we wanted to be.  In a moment of refreshing and unguarded transparency they all admitted that they were tired of business as usual, they found the church irrelevant to their daily experience and they were bored with Christianity as they knew it. We had our own coffee table discussion.  The result?  We began to act like the church, to love our neighbors, to engage in honest conversation (versus religiously correct conversation) we grew into a new intimacy with Christ.  Like my friend Doug’s experience we saw the same powerful change in people and simultaneous contagion begin to manifest in dozens of social networks.  We began to enjoy communitas together.  We saw God working in our community in new ways.  We engaged a relationship with Jesus as Lord in a way that began to impact every aspect of our lives.

Radical Breakthroughs Happen Slowly Over Time

We went for several years blissful, manageable spiritual and numeric addition occurred.  Then one September the numbers of people who showed up on Sundays more than doubled and before long I was as disoriented as Doug had been.  I felt that we had lost control of the warm, authentic, intimate, organic congregation we had become.  Yet, everyone who now showed up as strangers to me had a rich personal connection somewhere among the people in the congregation I knew well.  We were also in the midst of exponential chaos that seemed engendered by communitas.
I had wanted to grow a large church but I wanted to do it while also avoiding the chaos of rapid expansion I had seen Doug endure.  I wanted nice authentic (read, controlled) community.  I began to realize the oxymoron involved in combining “controlled” and “organic”.  There is no such thing as controlling the organic nature of the church…one can warp, twist, injure, starve, sicken or nourish, nurture and enjoy the organic nature of the church.  The church once unlocked in its fullest DNA is unpredictable, irrepressible and transformational. It jumps across social and cultural boundaries.  It cannot be domesticated by systems and structures instead it will grow around and through systems and structures transforming them and re-purposing them.
I found the lament of effectiveness flowing from my own mouth, “God, I did not sign up for this….”  My time faced demands I had no idea existed before.  The city had noticed we existed and I was faced with zoning hearings, police visitations over decibel levels emanating from the youth who gathered each week to share their experience with Christ and traffic flow patterns that had begun to choke the driveways of our neighbors. Some of my peers in the pastoral community became hostile and distant.  New demands sprung up on our systems with regard to discipleship, financial management, staffing, volunteer training, facilities management, insurance, employment records, risk management assessments, property transactions and background checks. Some of the people who had joined the congregation complained at my lack of pastoral skill while others simultaneously declared me to be the best pastor they had ever seen.  Some loved the worship services while others complained at the lack of traditional services.  I sat staring out my office window one day feeling like a prisoner and longing for the simple days we sat in the station wagon together seeing the community with new eyes.  How in the world could I get back to that day when the whole thing now felt so out of control?

Inescapable Complexity in Organic Growth

In light of all that is being written about the missional church, the simple church, the organic church etcetera it seems that one thing is consistently overlooked – something that should be as obvious as our own existence.  Organisms don’t develop from complexity to simplicity but from simplicity to complexity.  The transition I needed the day I sat in my office was not an escape from complexity but a reconnection with the DNA that drove the changes I was seeing.  If the missional church movement is an attempt to escape complexity of social interaction and especially the exponential complexity inherent in large numbers of people being together in the same place then it will die a deserved death of irrelevance like so many other concepts.
That day in the office I began to reflect on one of Jesus’ more peculiar miracles, the feeding of the five thousand.  The event is a great one to introduce the challenges inherent in leading a missional church. Recall, that a crowd (invaders in the communitas the disciples enjoyed with Jesus) had gathered drawn by the fact that they had seen the signs that Jesus performed on the sick.  Jesus characteristically “…seeing that a great multitude was coming to Him….”[2] engaged Philip in a mentoring moment according to John’s record.  “Where are we to buy bread, that these may eat?” Jesus asks.[3] The complexity of the need and the logistics to meet the need obviously concerned the apostles who may have been more than a little taken aback that Jesus seemed to place the responsibility for addressing the need squarely at their feet.  In case the reflection of John is not clear enough on this point, Luke’s record makes it crystal clear.  When the apostles suggested that people be sent away to find food Jesus said, “You give them something to eat!”[4]
As I reflected on the event I found Jesus’ words remarkably contemporary and disturbing.  I wanted to disengage from the complexity I faced because missio Dei was happening around me.  I was seeing the signs that Jesus performed on the broken, the sick, the isolated, the successful and the downcast.  A crowed had invaded our communitas and I wanted Jesus to dismiss them.  Jesus wanted me to assimilate them into communitas.  The very complexity I wanted to avoid Jesus was asking me to embrace as a way to draw more people into communitas.

Embrace a New Definition of Capacity

I was struck by the extreme differential between my capacity and God’s.  My capacity was the small group I had grown to love and share life with.  God’s capacity was to love the whole world. I was rapidly moving to an “us four no more” focus that sought to isolate my closest friendships from those challenges and complexities introduced by strangers or outsiders. I wanted control over who, when, how and where complexity entered my life. I possess a limited capacity defined by my own abilities, time and resource.  This is the essence of what missional church writers call a traditional or an attractional church. When we rely on our own capacity or comfort to define what a faith community looks like toxicity is de facto loaded into relationships. Writing on what it means to be a missional congregation Hirsch makes a similar observation:

As we shall see, structures are absolutely necessary for cooperative human interaction as well as maintaining some form of coherent social patterns.  However, it seems that over time the increasingly impersonal structures of the institution assume roles, responsibilities and authority that legitimately belong to the whole people of God in their local and grassroots expressions.  It is at this point that things tend to go awry.[5]

This tendency for things to go awry or become toxic is evident in three successive encounters between the apostles and Jesus in events recorded by Luke just after the feeding of the five thousand.[6]
The first event is an argument over who would be the greatest.  Jesus reinforces the reality that the focus in communitas is on responsiveness not position or power.  The illustration of the child contrasts sophistication and superiority (adopting an attitude of condescension toward others) with response and engagement.  Capacity cannot be enlarged if one’s pursuit is the power to control or dominate.  Capacity is released when complexity is embraced with responsive curiosity that asks questions previously either unasked or unpermitted. Until leaders embrace the perspective of play and characteristic engagement of children capacity remains consistently limited.
The second encounter was the unnamed disciple rebuked by the apostles for casting out demons because he was not part of the communitas of the apostles proper. Jesus made clear that the criterion of communitas is relationship not parochialism.  Capacity cannot be enlarged if room is not made within the leadership circle for new people who demonstrate an intimacy with Christ.  Capacity is limited when entrance into leadership is restricted to a false criterion limited by personal connections to the familiar rather than to Christ.  The central criterion is demonstrated intimacy with Christ as Lord not demonstrated connections with the right group or power structure.
The third encounter emerges from the rejection suffered by the apostles at the hands of a Samaritan village.  The apostles wanted to call fire out of heaven to consume those who had openly resisted them. Jesus made clear that the agenda of communitas was liberation not destruction. Capacity is never enlarged when the focus is how we are personally received. If leaders look more to their own feelings of rejection (the need to be right) rather than the need for reconciliation then capacity for what God is doing is constricted to the point a congregation becomes toxic rather than redeeming.

A Metamorphosis not a Destination

A capacity for dealing with complexity (the condition of being made up of many interrelated parts) is imperative to being a missional church.  Yet this capacity to being the missional church is reduced when one possesses a misaligned focus, a poorly defined criterion and a faulty agenda.  It is impossible to fathom engaging the complexity resulting from the works of Christ when one is more concerned; (1) with their role in the plan rather than knowing Christ in a more intimate way; (2) with who is like them and therefore in or out rather than seeing others relating to Christ as lord and (3) why outsiders should be judged and condemned instead of seeing what God is doing to liberate them.
For leaders who do pursue the concept of being a missional church two things seem unavoidable.  First they enter an engagement with the living Christ that irreversibly alters how they see the church and the community around them. Second, they enter a relationship with Christ characterized by exquisite transparency – the awareness of God’s penetrating gaze that simultaneously judges sin and frees the guilty.  Being a missional church is not a destination, it is a metamorphosis engaged by living a life style of repentance and discovery.

[1] Alan Hirsch. The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006), 277.
[2] John 6:5 (NASV)
[3] John 6:6 (NASV)
[4] Luke 9:13 (NASV)
[5] Hirsch 2006, 23.
[6] Luke 9: 46-56 (NASV)
Posted on

Leading to a New Future: A Leadership Case Study

Facing Reality – Where Leadership Starts

The situation at San Antonio Community Hospital (SACH) in Upland, California had become critical. San Antonio Community Hospital (SACH) faced a loss of profitability in 2004 and endured a climate brutalized by conflict between the administrative and medical staff, pomposity on the part of key administrative personnel, a loss of trust throughout the system and a sterility in leadership from the administration as evidenced in their command and control perspective, opaque processes and squashed board and management interaction. With another year of operating in the red the board of SACH determined that change was needed immediately. So, in 2004 they fired their Chief Executive Officer, their Chief Financial Officer and their Chief of Nursing Operations. Simultaneous to these changes the board hired a new Vice President of Human Resources. They promoted the Nursing Director to Chief of Nursing Operations (CNO) and the Director of Planning to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) position. Then they began the search for a new CEO. Clearly the environment was favorably disposed to significant change.

Addressing Reality – Where Leadership Executes

In stark contrast to the situation San Antonio Community Hospital (SACH) in Upland, California faced in 2004 the hospital was named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals® by Thomson Reuters in 2009. The award recognizes excellence in clinical outcomes, patient safety, patient satisfaction, financial performance, and operational efficiency.

Steven C. Moreau, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of SACH said, “This is a culmination of many years of hard work by our great physicians and staff who are dedicated to providing the highest quality of care.” What the statement does not reveal is the impact Mr. Moreau’s own presence and philosophy of leadership had on transitioning SACH from loss to profitability. “It is part luck,” he stated, “I was in the right place at the right time.” But luck had little to do with the transition SACH.

Attributes – How Leadership Actualizes Excellence

Three things became apparent in an interview with Mr. Moreau and those who work with him. First, successful organizations exhibit clear and simple values. How did Mr. Moreau’s leadership  philosophy contribute to San Antonio Community Hospital’s fast rate of improvement over a five‐year period? Mr. Moreau’s leadership of the 279 bed San Antonio Community Hospital created the synergy needed between the board, executive team, physicians and staff to develop long‐term strategies and execute them with the extraordinary skill needed to produce extraordinary results. He exhibits three critical leadership attributes:

  • Self‐Awareness – Mr. Moreau leveraged a growing self‐awareness and situational awareness to establish an environment and organizational culture needed to build momentum around three core values: excellence, engagement and execution.
  • Trust – Mr. Moreau modeled and established transparent processes that built trust and “ownership” for change by exposing employees at all levels of the organization to the information that makes the hospital work. This respect saw the board and the physicians as partners in the vision rather than antagonists and recruited them to create a new vision for the hospital.
  • Belief – the conviction and courage needed to commit to a preferred future with the tenacity and grace to insist on that future regardless of the apparent challenges and barriers to getting there. Mr. Moreau demonstrates that power of belief in others, himself and the opportunity presented in the challenges was a highly potent fuel to cultural change.

Second, successful organizations possess a deep commitment to excellence. The SACH board drove the commitment for change as seen in the removal of the previous administration. The board created a work environment predisposed to transformative change. If the only action had been to replace the CEO, San Antonio Community Hospital most likely would not have achieved the excellence it has. The conclusion here is not that boards should disembowel their organizations to get real change. Rather boards should possess the kind of internal commitment to change that the SACH board exhibited in taking the risk to create disequilibrium in the organization’s culture that they exhibited in shaking up their executive administrative structure in order to excise behavioral malignancies that impeded execution.

Third, successful organizations leverage the use coaches/consultants to focus and accelerate learning and change. Coaching was a significant factor in the focusing and sustainability of the changes that Mr. Moreau and the board sought to engender. Coaches engage executive leaders and managers from outside the organizational political and symbolic realities. As a result they are often able to intrude into areas in need of change or refinement without the imagined or real threat of retaliatory or marginalizing behavior.

Want to read more? 

Visit www.leadership-praxis.com and download this case study in entirety.

Posted on

The Power of Reflection – 2010 in Review

 
It is always interesting to reflect on a year just completed.  I do three things when I reflect:

Relish Accomplishments

First I relish accomplishments.  Among the most interesting things I did was to follow through on a commitment to blog as a way to exercise my thinking, and engage others in conversation about critical leadership concepts.   So how did this work?  Well, the stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

The Leaning Tower of Pisa has 296 steps to reach the top. This blog was viewed about 1,000 times in 2010. If those were steps, it would have climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa 3 times

 

In 2010, there were 12 new posts, not bad for the first year! There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 75kb.

The busiest day of the year was October 9th with 24 views. The most popular post that day was Finding a Mentor.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were leadership-praxis.com, facebook.com, leadership-praxis.squarespace.com, employmentfor.com, and cordless-homephone.info.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ray wheeler blog, test “developing leadership” leadership power influence creating vision strategic direction shaping culture values leading change, servant leadership, and ray wheeler dmin. california.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Finding a Mentor October 2010

2

About June 2010

3

Leadership Capacity in the Missional Church November 2010
2 comments

4

Missional Churches: The Problem with Definitions December 2010

5

Servant Leadership: Increasing Performance October 2010
1 comment

 

What Did I Learn?

Second, I think about what I learned. The most significant thing I learned in the last year was the joy of exercising my own voice and finding a greater focus in how leaders develop.  The successes and failures (I had a couple of great failures in 2010 one of them resulting in a tongue lashing by the CFO of great client) of 2010 encouraged me to continue…leaders and organizations need what I have to give.  Set backs are neither fatal nor losses, they are opportunities to find greater focus and drive.  Successes are great affirmations of direction but also provided me with opportunity to see how interdependent my skills and knowledge is to those around me.

The most important leadership development insight was the affirmation in practice that leaders don’t develop linearly they develop in simultaneity.  Spiritual, personal and skill formation all occur simultaneously in a leader and it is in stopping to reflect on the focal point of each situation that a leader has the opportunity to leverage development. However, I have also discovered that many leaders withdraw from spiritual development.  The commitment to rationalism seems to diminish the potential of many leaders leaving them “soul-less” in how they approach challenges and relationships.  The greatest leaders I have opportunity to engage are those who integrate spiritual, personal and skill development. I saw a great example of that this year in a new college that seems determined to approach education from an integrated perspective see http://www.stkath.org. I am excited to see the kind of leaders that emerge from this institution.

What Next?

The third thing I do is prayerfully consider how my focus will sharpen.  In 2011 I will give greater attention to my coaching practice and my writing.  The classroom and the consulting I do in the non-profit religious world confirms the need for a new book on Church Administration from a Missional Perspective.  The skeleton of this work is done, I have a couple of chapters completed.  The draft will be completed in 2011 and published.  There are several support pieces to this book that I am working on now with several of my students that will provide a great learning tool for those preparing for service in the church.

I have a couple of articles in the works that will also be published this year.  One looks at leadership development in the principle of simultaneous development. I see the application of this in both the private and the non-profit sectors.  Once leaders understand that difficulty or feelings of inadequacy are actually boundary opportunities in development a whole new world of growth and empowerment in leading occurs.  This is as true for line managers in a manufacturing firm as it is for C-Suite in healthcare (the range of my current client base).

In an unrelated goal I plan to play more in 2011.  Janice (my wife of 36 years) and I are enjoying our relationship.  I have several great dates planned for 2011.  So we will not only invest in our own relationship and enjoy life together but we are also praying (yes we talk to God and what’s more God does talk back) about what young leaders we should invest in this coming year.  We had some great mentors as we grew up professionally and personally and we look for opportunities to invest as a couple apart from our professional commitments to develop others.   I expect some exciting and challenging times ahead.

I also look forward to those times I am enriched by and get to enrich my own children – all professionals now and out away from our home. I am proud of their character (and they have accomplished some great things).  They are developing into the kind of leaders and individuals one would want to know and more importantly one would dare to trust – this is an uncommon characteristic too often in some of the work places my work takes me.

I am thankful for the clients who have trusted me this last year.  I cherish that trust and remain committed to service that is characterized by the professionalism, attentiveness and competence that they have come to expect from me.

Finally, I am thankful for the love, discipline, insight, and joy that exudes from knowing God in Jesus Christ.  I am unabashedly Christian and I am unashamedly a learner. I have learned and experienced much of God’s grace but have so much more to learn, to know and to share. I love the visionary statement of Paul in his letter to the Ephesians “For he [Jesus Christ] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us…that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility…” (2:14-16)  Here is my vision for humanity, it is reconciliation not hostility. May 2011 see this move even closer toward reality for everyone I have the privilege to work with.