Sun 26 Oct, 2008
This Week in Mission – Oct 6, 2008
I led a seminar on “Spirited Leadership” at Green Lake Conference Center in Wisconsin … guiding leaders to implement the servant empowering organization model. The mixed group of independent, evangelical, and mainstream leaders generated great discussion … but it was interesting to see how regardless of institutional orientation they still shared many of the same problems.
Even churches that began as “polity driven”, and churches that began as “pastor driven”, still ended up several years down the road burdened with bureaucracy. Why? I think it is because North American culture is addicted to power and suspicious of trust.
The exercise of power is normal, but obsession with power is not. Reasonable skepticism about leadership is normal, but chronic distrust is not. I suspect that the extreme selfishness of the “me” generation has undermined the integrity of pastoral succession and institutional procedure, so that the only “fall back” position has been “bureaucracy”. Obsessive power leads to chronic distrust, which leads to bureaucracy as the compromise.
It became apparent to all of us in the seminar that team-based, bottom-up, high-impact organizations are only possible if rigorous expectations of spiritual growth allow power to be shared … “given away” in an atmosphere of reasonable trust. Accountability for mission attitude and high integrity must have a higher priority than accountability for skills and competencies. Unfortunately, in the “boomer” world, it is often just the opposite. Selective mediocrity requires more courage than quest for quality.
