The Challenge of Leading

If you are a leader in a church, you are living in a new landscape and require a new tool kit of strategies comprised of a new understanding of your role, and honest evaluation of yourself, and the ability to create a variety of secure places of relationships.  Think about your leadership in the frame of apprentice-pastor-theologian-missionary.(Gary Nelson)

Why?

With new ministry expectations sparked by consumer-driven congregational life, the shifts and pressures strip away the feelings of security that simple faithfulness might evoke.

The critical need is for you to find safe and secure places in which you can find rest and from which you can lead as leaders who are socially aware and emotionally intelligent.

We may be contributing to our own stress and burnout by buying into the illusionary idea that we are somehow "different." Conviction that the pastoral experience is unique makes us believe that our lives are busier, more complex, and more stressful than any others.

That is what brings us back to the need for deep self-awareness and honesty.  Without it we are easily deceived.

Eugene Peterson describes how this works as he reflects on religious leaders. He says, “Deception is nowhere more common than in religion. And the persons most easily and damningly deceived are the leaders. Those who deceive others are first themselves deceived, for not many, I think, begin with evil intent. The devil, after all is a spiritual being. His usual mode of temptation is not to an obvious evil but to an apparent good. The commonest forms of devil-inspired worship do not take place furtively at black masses with decapitated cats but under the bright lights of acclaim and glory, in a swirl of organ music (or in our day to the music of a worship band.)…”

Related articles

• Being Unbusy In Order To Be Fruitful In Pastoral Life (via Joel Willitts) (garyware.me)