One of the first lessons in
leadership I learned was taught by a pipe fitter in South Bend, Indiana. I was
fresh out of IU, a weekend youth director at a UM church on Ewing Avenue, and
our group was supposed to be getting into vans and station wagons. People were
milling around in the basement fellowship hall even though it was ten minutes
after our scheduled departure of 6 p.m.
Paul Rogers came up to me and
asked, "What are we doing?"
I answered, "Well, we're
supposed to be going, but no one is going to the cars."
Paul looked at me and said
simply, "You're the leader. Tell them to go get in the
cars!"
So I said, "Let's go outside
and load up." In three minutes I was standing in an empty fellowship hall.
Everyone had gone outside to get into the vehicles! As I turned the lights off,
I thought, "I think I just learned a lesson tonight."
Leadership is a vital ingredient
in human society, in athletics, in business, in education, in families, and in
the church. Paul Borden, in "Direct Hit," says "The Church faces
a dearth of leadership. Pastors and others, he writes, are "often
unwilling to assume the role of leadership." (Because leaders are often
pay a price for leading!)
Some leaders are made, he
observes, but for most leadership is about learning the art of leading.
Leadership is a practice, he says, and not a gift.
Leith Anderson says leadership
involves a person "seeing a need and taking the responsibility to see the
need is met."
Here are some of the keys Borden
says are key to effective leadership:
- At the heart of leadership is
passion about God's work in our lives or a prophetic burden.
- A leader's first task is to be
clear about the mission. A leader must ask if the mission is worth dying
for (a willingness to lose one's job).
- Effective leaders have the
courage to take on the existing culture of an inward focused, "take
care of us and keep us happy" community. (Effective leaders are
surrounded in the church by courageous allies and partners.)
- The world is changing quickly and
so leaders require enormous flexibility. Plans change, situations change,
and congregations vary.
- The most effective church leaders
are missionaries at heart. They think strategically and mobilize the sheep
to the "best advantage to accomplish the mission."
- Biblical leaders are wise. Good
leaders understand their times, their people, and the mission. (And wise
leaders know themselves.)
- Wise leaders stop dysfunction
when it happens.
- Leaders are best when leaders are
positive. They are always showing others what God can do and wants to do.
They lead by casting vision, assuming the best, and develop new leaders
and disciples.
When you think of leaders, what
names and faces come to mind? When you think of leaders in the Bible and in the
church, who were they...and what did they do? What do you notice about them?
Are we a community that
encourages leadership? Are we developing a new generation of leaders who will
work with God to change the world and shape the future?
Paul Borden ends his chapter on
leadership with this paragraph: "A congregation is desperate for leaders
who are filled with passion, have already demonstrated courage, see flexibility
as a virtue, are missional because of their passion, are wise, really believe
God expects them to win with a whole group of saints who feel the same, and who
take bottom-line responsibility for what God will do through them."
What will you do to help us
become a community that grows leaders?
In Christ and for Christ,
Mark
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