Spiritual Leadership

I wrote this column two weeks ago and it was published in our weekly newsletter on the back page of the Alabama Baptist. I received a very affirming email from one church lay leader, so I thought I would post it here. I have added a couple of sentences since I am not as restricted by length of article requirements. I hope it is a challenge for you.

Who are the lay (non-staff) leaders in your church? What are they leading? Are they “running the show,” keeping the organization and activities going, or are they offering real spiritual leadership to the congregation as she seeks to move forward in Kingdom work? Not too long ago our staff honed in on four barriers that keep our churches from being effective Great Commission (Acts 1:8) churches. The four barriers we identified were (1) lack of spiritual vitality (need for revival/spiritual awakening), (2) lack of Holy Spirit-led leadership, (3) lack of effective disciple-making, and (4) lack of strategic framework and direction. In addressing the second of these, the lack of Spirit-led leadership, I want to first note that this is not intended to be a slam on any current church leader. All too often we have placed people in leadership positions because others are unwilling to get involved. In fact, one pastor a few years back lamented the fact that a woman in his church would always volunteer to take a position "if no one else will do it." He knew that sometimes it was better to leave a position empty than to fill it with someone lacking the gifts, calling, and passion to make it work.
Many of our elected church leaders do exactly what is expected of them. Most of the time a failure of leadership is both a failure of leadership and a failure of “followship.” We don’t hold high spiritual expectations of our leaders. We don’t foster an environment where they are encouraged to deepen their spiritual walk but rather engage in incessant complaining and criticism. If we expect Spirit-led leaders, then we have to strive to become Spirit-led followers.
Perhaps the time has come to redefine the roles of our lay leaders. We need to hold them accountable for their personal spiritual development and maturity, not just running our church organization. We cannot do that unless we are striving to be all we can be in Christ ourselves. I think concerted effort on the part of both followers and leaders to grow in our understanding of our calling in Christ would move us a lot further along the road toward spiritual renewal and revival. When was the last time you reminded one of your lay leaders that you were praying for them? When have you been on your knees asking God to encourage and strengthen them? When have you encouraged them to listen to the Lord? Only when our lay leaders are focused on being Kingdom citizens and Kingdom leaders will me begin to turn around the declines we have experienced in recent years. Only when we have become more transparent in our spiritual walk will we be able to offer the kind of spiritual leadership to lead our churches forward. Your prayers for them will help instill in them a humility necessary for effective leadership. Your prayers will serve to remind them they are called to serve God first and the congregation second. I invite you to join me in praying for our churches leaders in the coming months.

Creative Thinking

What is it? How do we do it? Why is it so hard a practice to develop? Look for some comments coming soon.

Words of Wisdom from Others on the Journey

Every now and then I run across something someone else has written that I want to share. Having been a pastor and having occupied myself a good part of the time (and I’m giving honest confession here!) calming the waters and trying to keep people happy or comfortable, I found the following word from Dr. Bill Wilson, president of the Center for Congregational Health in Winston-Salem North Carolina, to be appropriate. Here is what he wrote.
"Don't you want to be part of a church that challenges you to be more than you are? To do so will require some amount of pain and inconvenience. If not, where in the biblical text do you find yourself? If your church simply exists to make you happy, is it actually the church of Jesus Christ?

A far more rewarding model for leadership and church membership is to "speak the truth in love" to one another. Compassionate confrontation is how Jesus operated with those He loved. He never saw His role as one of making His followers comfortable, but of helping them become the persons God intended them to be. To think that we can do that significant work without challenging one another or pushing each other out of our comfort zones is at best naïve.

God's people, the church, will only be able to flesh out the kingdom agenda (thy kingdom come here on earth as it is in heaven) when we accept the fact that our task necessitates each of us agreeing we are not all that God intends us to be. What if discomfort is a prerequisite to finding genuine meaning and purpose?

When we understand that truth and join with other believers to discover the joy of costly discipleship and followship, then clergy and laity alike will find the harmony we seek in the midst of meeting challenges – and the discomfort they bring.”
Did you find those words challenging? When we compare ourselves, not to others, but to the biblical standard, we come up lacking. When I reflect on so much of my experience as a church leader, I recall a much greater weight given to “avoiding a discomforting situation” than “doing the right thing.” What challenge is your church facing? Are you avoiding them because addressing them would be uncomfortable? Are they the “elephant in the room?” I pray for God’s Holy Spirit to convict us to do the right thing, even when it may be uncomfortable. I also pray for spiritual growth that comes when we are obedient in spite of the temporal costs. I pray for our people to “discover the joy of costly discipleship.”

GCR Task Force Additional Reflections

There has been a lot of discussion from fellow directors of missions/associational missionaries, state missionaries, and some pastors regarding the preliminary report of the SBC Great Commission Resurgence Task Force released last month. Last week I had the opportunity to listed to a recorded conference call with several members of the task force hosted by the Network of Baptist Associations, a group I have been affiliated with for the past four years. I must say that I was more encouraged by the clarifications I heard in the conference call than I was by the written preliminary report. That being said, however, I still have concerns about a process that originates from the floor of the Southern Baptist Convention, and what impact a national statement and subsequent realignment of national entities can have on the work that belongs to the local congregation.

I will be the first to admit that most of our SBC churches, while they may affirm verbal and even financial support for the Great Commission, do not act like Great Commission churches. For several decades we in denominational life challenged our churches to get with the "program." Many, if not most of them did get with the program. However, somewhere over the past 20-25 years, the "program" stopped being effective-- culture was changing at an increasing pace, and methodologies in use fell way behind the times. The focus was inward, on sustaining the organization, having good programs, bolstering attendance finances, but little attention was given to encouraging individual churches and individual members to fulfil the Great Commission in their world and their lives.

In 2004-5 the North American Mission Board rolled out the Acts 1:8 Challenge/strategy, an effort to challenge churches to focus on becoming a Great Commission church in the context of Acts 1:8- Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. Because it was presented as a strategic framework based on scripture for the local church, I was encouraged. I prayed it would not just become another "emphasis" or another slogan. I still pray that prayer and continue to believe that for many churches, an Acts 1:8 strategy can move them out of their lethargy into significant missional engagement.

Since most of the preliminary report of the GCR Task Force focuses on the work of the North American Mission Board, those recommendations have generated the most discussion. Most people I have talked with have little objection to the tenor of the report and to many of the recommendations. However, there is concern about the development of a "national strategy for church planting" and the phasing out of the cooperative agreements with the states. I personally have no problem with reworking these "cooperative agreements" and even with phasing out some of them. However, my colleagues in Pennsylvania/S. Jersey, Michigan, or Nevada will know far better how to develop a church planting strategy for their regions than would a group of NAMB missionaries in Alpharetta. While "decentralizing" NAMB might sound good on paper, would not these regional offices be seeking to supplant the existing conventions and associations in those areas. I am very reticent to give any more control to a national agency when in reality, the real control needs to be at the local level where missionaries are in touch with the real issues and have real relationships.

Likewise, I am convinced that a top-down "national strategy" will have little or no impact on local churches. Obviously we need revival. Obviously our churches need to get busy doing the Kingdom work Jesus has called them to do. Perhaps a coalition of the willing among those who have a passion for impacting lostness will be what brings about resurgence, not a national strategy.

In our association of churches, we are always looking for those churches that are being creative in how they impact their communities with the gospel so that we can highlight their work and encourage others to do similar things. It is slow, but it is catching on. We don't try to get any church to do any program, but simply challenge them to pray, seek God's vision for their church, and let us come along side and help resource that vision. We only are asking them to do what God tells them to do. It's hard getting them to buy into this after all those years of promoting programs, but I am convinced that is the only way we will impact lostness in our area.

Think Tanks Don't Always Arrive at the Best Solutions

There has been a lot of talk about the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force since that Southern Baptist group released their initial report. I have read reports/links from the Network of Baptist Associations site that many of my colleagues have written. Let me add my own comments.

First, much of the report brings a focus that we need to engage. We are losing the battle in impacting lostness in North America. We do need confession and repentance and revival that leads to spiritual renewal. However, developing a "national strategy" that works from a top down approach to reach the lost and plant churches is not best acheived from Alpharetta, GA when it pertains to Los Angeles, Minneapolis, or New York. Strategies need to be developed from the grass roots in those areas. NAMB needs to listen, assist, and resource. The reason our previous efforts did not succeed is not because there was not enough accountability, it was because outside people with the money came in and told the local folks how they had to do the work.

Nuff said.

Disciplemaking Part 2

I raised the question in my previous blog, "What happened to disciplemaking?" Recently I attended a seminar session where an individual who had written a book on discipleship was leading. A key approach involved a personal self assessment of church members as to how they were growing as disciples. The aspect of self assessment is critical, but this individual's approach had all the questions in the assessment geared overwhelmingly toward church program activities. Instead of the old six point record system, you could not have a 40 point or an 80 point record system.

Let me say clearly that church program activities are not bad except where they keep the individual from being involved in the best activities. I am convinced you cannot evaluate a person's level of commitment to following Jesus by gauging how many church events or activities they participate in. Neither can you simply ask about their "quiet time" or daily Bible reading or study and get a clear answer.

First, we must ask, what does a committed follower of Jesus look like? The answer is "Jesus!" Our job is to encourage people to grow their lives so that that think like Jesus and act like Jesus. Are they compassionate? Do they love even their enemies? Are they outwardly focused? Do they engage the world's people where they are? All of these are good question to ask.

What happened to disciple making?

If anyone is wondering, as I have been, what ever happened to the spiritual formation task of making disciples of Jesus, I think I have the answer. Decades ago we turned from a process to a program and almost destroyed our opportunity to grow disciples. We developed a system that led people to become simply religion consumers rather than committed followers of Jesus. We moved from one study to the next study with no accountability for life development. We measured attendance instead of impact because that was easier. We structured ongoing classes and programs because that was easier to manage, promote, and control. We trained people for church service rather than for community service and now we wonder why the world ignores us.

One pastor has led his congregation to ask of everything they do, "Is this Jesus?" If its not, they stop doing it. My staff and I developed a diagram from the old Serendipity model of small groups, a triagle with each side representing the essential components of disciplemaking - koinonia(including accountability, encouragement, support, affirmation, etc.), mission (what we do out in the world for Christ using our giftedness and passion) and content (what we did in all those programs for decades). I really don't think you have disciplemaking without each of those three equally balanced. If you have a better idea, please let me know.