Committed to the developing of body life in the church

As the body life goes, so does the health of social action and evangelism.

The church loves their people when they tenaciously work to develop skills, attitudes, and atmospheres not in order to just  cast vision but to gather and empower people in the implementation of their missional vision.

Leaders shape the community to become a place where genuine, transparent and authentic relationship can take place.

They do so in the belief that, without a community faith, they are impotent to the missional task.

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Nurturing a Passionate Life

Dallas Willard shares these thoughts -

"It is almost universally conceded today that you can be a Christian without being a disciple. And one who actually is an apprentice and co-laborer with Jesus in his or her daily existence is sure to be a "Christian" in every sense of the word that matters. The very term Christian was explicitly introduced in the New Testament -- where, by the way, it is used only three times -- to apply to disciples when they could no longer be called Jews, because many kinds of gentiles were now part of them."

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By leading, model faith

Leadership has always been a question of character and substance as opposed to one of technique or skill.  So the core question has been more along the lines of, "Who do you want to imitate?"  That followed by, "What do you want to celebrate?"

The answers to these questions then will reveal the values and measurements of success that you would like to mark in your life as "effectiveness" in ministry.

It is from here that we can work from a sense of self-awareness and intentionally develop personal core values and characteristics that portray the kind of communities of faith that we are called to form.

Leaders modelling these characteristics will see them incarnated into congregational life.

Leaders make ripples like stones thrown into a pool of water, and these ripples reflect that affect on the life of the church and its people, in ever widening circles.  Look for movement in mood, atmosphere and vibrancy, but most importantly, watch it shape the missional IQ and intent of the church.

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Lead with Sensitivity

Scripture references with words like patience, long-suffering and steadfastness portray a sense of quality in relationships.  As the Christian community lives out through the lives of ordinary people, leadership sensitively nurtures the diversity of such a people, both the coming and the going.

Leadership needs to discern when they can push and when they need to back-off.  They need to also discern which battles need to be fought and which ones do not.

The sensitive ministry will have a vision for long-term possibilities and will create an environment that will experience growth and depth.

Lead with your story

Don Posterski shares his own stories from what he has seen in the make up of churches as he has travelled across this country.   He does share on he likes - Future Faith Churches.  The good news is that some churches in every denomination and religious tradition have found ways to embrace faith that is both personal and social. They consistently invite people within the range of their influence to personally experience the living Christ in their lives as well as motivating them to respond compassionately and practically to people who have specific needs. They are high on soul care and high on social care churches.

Focus Group Interviewer: "How are you different because of the influence of this church? How have you changed?

Response: "What do I say? I think it is that now I have a relationship with God which I could not have said seven years ago. Or at least I'm developing a relationship. And I can say that out loud too. But I couldn't have seven years ago."

Gordon MacDonald shares these thoughts -

If you want to think through the subject of the life God blesses, go then to the soul, to the deepest parts of “inner space” where God is most likely to visit with a person, whisper His secrets, establish connections, heal spiritual wounds, generate hope and courage.

The soul is the deeper part of all of us that others cannot see. It is the quiet part where people are most apt to connect with God. In that deeper, quiet place of spiritual geography there was, in biblical times, and is today, dialogue with heaven, events of repentance, praise and worship, and the formation of intentions to life and knowledge that enable people to become what I like to call kingdom-builders.

  Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal (co-author of the classic Corporate Cultures — the 1982 book that popularized the idea of organization culture) conclude, "The signs point toward spirit and soul as the essence of leadership." 

 

It would seem that this kind of leadership style is more rooted in character development than learned technical skills.  Our inner development is focused on integrity, honest, humility, courage, commitment, sincerity, passion, confidence, wisdom, determination, compassion and sensitivity.

http://youtu.be/lGajLG3s0CY
 

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Diverse

The church, as a structure, is a human institiution and system.  People will become part of a church for a variety of reasons, but that will be shaped mostly by their experiences and with those experiences come complex expectations and assumptions.

Pastors must have relational skill sets, spiritual rootedness, and emotional grounding to navigate the white waters of conflict they will ensue.

Hopefully, as a Pastor, you have the ability to access the joy and life of community for without nurtured relational and social intelligence, you will observe conflict and resistance as anomalies rather than realities of life.

For if not, you will try to take on the toxic forces through reasonableness, love, insight, role-modeling, inculcation of values, an striving for consensus, when in fact you should be taking a stand that sets limits to the invasiveness fo those who lack self-regulation.  Gary Nelson

http://youtu.be/P2RnkPkfN7Y

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Accessing too much information

Being informed is highly overrated.  Clergy leaders study the trends and read every book on the church that is offered.  They attend the seminars offered to help clergy and church leaders envision and manage ministries more effectively.  The result in some cases is information overload.  (Gary Nelson)

Irrelevance

When a clergy leader feels irrelevant outside the walls of the church, such a leader will have more at stake in what happens inside.  One's identity, feelings of worth, and significance are placed on a narrow one-dimensional platform.  The result is a stark vulnerability not previously experienced in pastoral ministry, causing clergy leaders to put pressure on congregations to meet their needs for significance, needs that are emotionally and relationally unrealistic. - Gary Nelson

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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.)…”

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What is this Community like?

Imagine pinpointing the poorest community in your neighbourhood and creating an incarnational presence there.

It is there, in that one act, we no longer are people who have said things, we are people who display those words and what they mean in the way we live and worship.  Of course, once displayed, they cannot be denied, only rejected or entered into.  So the persuasion if you will are living displays of truth, not rational one-on-one arguments.

The seeker-sensitive church was an interesting approach, but it was a marketing approach and did not shape itself around the church and its mission.  We can be influencers in our community as the church by being the Church.

Cardinal Avery Dulles, in his book, Models of the Church, presents some interesting thoughts along these lines.  Take a look by following this link, http://www.buildupourparish.com/home.php?page_id=62

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Discoveries on the Journey

"The role of the church is to cultivate a people who can risk being peaceful in a violent world, risk being kind in a competitive society, risk being faithful in an age of cynicism, risk being gentle among those who admire the tough, risk love when it may not be returned, because we have the confidence that in Christ we have been reborn into a new reality."
- Darrell E. Guder, editor, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America

Found this quote on a church website and fell in love with it because these are the things that were found in the early church and what turned the world upside right - these were the things that were found in the Roman Empire that moved them from persecuting Christianity to opening the transportation system to the good news be shared to the then conquered peoples of the world.


A missional church intentionally pursues the mission of Jesus for His glory among all peoples by engaging the culture with the gospel.  Then I found another quote from the same new friend I mentioned above...

"Mission is not just a program of the church. It defines the church as God’s sent people. Either we are defined by mission, or we reduce the scope of the gospel and the mandate of the church. Thus our challenge today is to move from church with mission to missional church."

The church that has been our home church over the past 11 years is right now stuck in a "come to" our church framework and it is becoming more and more painfully obvious that this is inadequate as a missional operation in the community.  Do not get me wrong, every Sunday, both day and evening services, there are calls made for decisions to be made and they are made.  Friends bringing friends is the "come to" approach, but I know what the community at large is saying about our church and it hurts.  Their perception is the view of the love of Jesus that we show them by not showing up in the community and therefore they want no part of that kind of love.

I read this blog - http://nakeddoggy.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/come-to-us-strategy/ - and did not realize that maybe the emerging church was trying to change their brand from emerging to missional - but that is not the case.  There is a very big difference between the two functions.

What we do need to realize is that the unchurched, those who have never been to church, and that might not be very much of the adult population, but it must account for a predominantly large percentage of our older teens and young adult population, would no more drop into church for a casual visit than you or I might drop into a mosque or a gay bar for a casual visit.  Either way, we wouldn't quite know how to behave and may wonder what other people are thinking.

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"as you are going"

I think we stress ourselves out to much with planning.

Jesus words are more clearing recognized when the sense of making disciples didn't come from a planned evangelistic campaign, it came from life, from giving.

So when he was among the prostitutes, He showed them what true love was like, when He was among the religious establishment, He showed them what true love was like, when He was at work, He showed those He worked with what true love was like.

I do not think you have to "get involved" in your community to show love, you probably already involved.  While you are in your community, show the love of God because they surely think they know it, but how can one understand the emotional feelings of adoption, of finding a home, brothers and sisters, taken off the streets, hugged every day - unless we invite them to come and be adopted into the family of God.

Then you realize that the bread you are feeding them with, the water you are sharing to quench their thirst is just that, bread and water.  Life is in Jesus - as you go - give Jesus.

The link here is a advertisment, but I think it really shows what I mean by, "as you are going"
http://youtu.be/o6kresN_wBI

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