Fundamentals of Church Leadership
It is necessary to grasp the fundamentals of church leadership and to acknowledge the ways churches require leadership that is unique.
Why church leadership is unique
Even though congregations resemble other institutions -- with physical assets, human resources, budgets, markets and products -- the interplay of a transforming God and a change-resistant constituency, a Savior who suffered and died and constituents who avoid suffering and fear death, and a Spirit who is making all things new even as Christians are grounding themselves in tradition, makes for a complex organization.
Its various activities aren't all that complex. Anyone who has planned a pageant, taught a class, drafted and managed a small budget, made home repairs, and hired a contractor can handle the basics of church management. What confounds normal management procedures, however, are the intensely personal and rarely stated reactions that people have to those activities.
A faith community draws people close to their deepest yearnings, their most vivid fears, their wounds and their triumphs, their doubts about everything, including themselves, and their native optimism or hope that life can be better. As a result, many people who perform competently and maturely in other settings walk through a church door and behave in self-destructive and dysfunctional ways, as if they had parked their capability and adulthood outside.
Such is the nature of humanity's encounter with God. As the Hebrews showed while whining in the wilderness and the disciples showed while maneuvering for favors, walking with God can be a discomfiting and humbling journey. The effective church leader accepts this complexity, tries to understand it, works within it, and exercises both patience and determination in trying to help people get beyond their flaws.
That is demanding and often confusing work. Little in the rest of life, except the challenge of living in a family and raising children, prepares one for the challenge. Hence the best practice of training and being sure to recruit leaders who will accept training and not just assume they already know everything they need to know.
The ways church leadership is unique
It requires less managing and more nurturing. People can be directed to attend a meeting, but they can't be directed to take it seriously or to draw the best out of others. Church life, from attending meetings to doing ministry, requires at least a measure of self-sacrifice and self-denial. The effective church leader realizes that a solid plan and a solid agenda are no substitute for the nurturing of people so that they will want to behave in other-oriented ways.
It requires acceptance of risk and failure. As any teacher or coach knows, embracing risk is the only way to grow and failure is a much better teacher than success. Once we leave childhood, however, we find ourselves in few venues that encourage risk or reward failure. We manage our resumes to present spotless accounts of our lives. We shrink from criticism, rather than seek it. The effective church leader will establish an environment where standing still and safety aren't highly valued, where risk, danger, failure and frustration are all seen positively.
It is concerned with servanthood, not advancement. In Christian servanthood, the other person is valued, loved, listened to, encouraged to grow, and fed, clothed, picked up and protected, as needed. In most other venues in life, the other can be an obstacle to advancement, an enemy to be conquered, a competitor to be mastered, an intrusion to be ignored. In the so-called "economy of scarcity," meeting the other person's needs means losing out on one's own needs. In those venues, mastery and winning are the highest value. Churches certainly can play by those rules, and many do, but they don't prosper.
It seeks transformation, not comfort. Change is rarely comfortable, and meaningful personal change can be profoundly painful. Leaders who prevent discomfort from happening end up stifling the personal growth that faith promises. The effective church leader values change, not smiles, and learns to work within the conflicts and complaints that the pain of growth can stir.
It seeks renewal, not continuity. Although churches, like other institutions, place a high value on their survival, their constituents often fail to see that a dynamic community survives and thrives by constantly renewing itself, not by perpetuating what it has and knows. At the risk of alienating some constituents, leaders need to lead the way forward in constant renewal. No facet of a religious institution is more sacred than its God or its call to serve humanity. Church leaders, therefore, aren't conservators of an institution's continuity, but are willing to risk that continuity if God or humanity's needs seem to point in a new direction.
It seeks repentance (change of mind), not status quo. The essence of the Gospel, as John the Baptist and then Jesus said, is "forgiveness" through "repentance." It is "change of mind" (coming to a new mind) that enables us to seek forgiveness. Standing still and preserving the status quo tend to block that change of mind. The effective church leader, therefore, supports ministries and situations in which change of mind can happen.
It encourages freedom and discourages control. Faith is picked up, not compelled. Ministry is accepted, not forced. Self-sacrifice is a choice. Love is a choice. Any worthwhile purpose that a congregation seeks will require the exercise of free will. For that reason, the effective church leader nurtures an environment of radical freedom, without any attempt to shortcut the process by compelling this behavior or banning that behavior.
It defends the weak, rather than reward the strong. Most institutions show preference for the strong, disregard the weak, and often prey on the weak. A healthy church declares its fundamental orientation toward the weak, the dispossessed, the outcast and the victim. This frustrates the strong, and they often try to manipulate their churches to reward winners. The effective church leader works intentionally to restrain that tendency of strength to reward itself and asks the strong to join in serving the weak.
It forms circles of friendship, not hierarchies of power. Even though he lived in a world that valued hierarchies of power, Jesus formed circles of friends and opened them to all sorts and conditions. It was radical then and is no less so now. The healthy church adopts a different organizing principle -- open circles -- and needs leaders who will do the counter-intuitive and counter-cultural work of keeping those circles open and power dispersed.
It values self-organizing networks, rather than directed systems. As we laid out in the essay on church leadership, the healthiest form of church organization is free and self-organizing networks. People have ideas, imagine ways to serve God, coalesce around those ideas and ministries, and pursue them as best they can. Effective leaders establish an open environment where imagining and network-forming can occur, and monitors the activities and conversations to make sure persons aren't being hurt and reasonably worthwhile ends are being pursued.
