Nuggets #13

An Unstoppable Force by Erwin McManus
(As mentioned yesterday, today we'll look at the six different areas in which you as a leader have a direct impact in the ethos of your congregation.)

Character
The people you serve will be able to summarize who you are in one core idea or one central characteristic. You need to listen carefully to how they describe you. They may describe you as a kind and caring, visionary and courageous, empowering, or something else. Hopefully you will appreciate the description you hear.

When we consider character, we usually think of attributes such as integrity, humility, and trustworthiness. All of these are obviously critical to spiritual leadership. But the kind of character I'm speaking of is more than that. Every leader makes a distinguishing mark, which is the best way to define what we call a character. A character is a distinguishing and defining mark or imprint that communicates something to those who see.

Stories
If your stories are never personal, it will be very difficult for people to embrace a personal faith. People want to know what you're committed to. They want to know how you experience God. They want to know what you know about God, not simply what you've learned. Whatever topic you preach on, the story you choose to tell will reel your heart.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that even when I teach about tithing, I tell a story about evangelism. I love telling stories about people I meet and the conversations we have about God. It doesn't matter to me what the topic is. These stories are always relevant and fit in with the subject. Your stories of faith, your stories of risk, your stories of failure - all these stories shape the ethos of the congregation. Borrowed stories just don't work as well. Stories communicate what really is important and what kind of experiences others in the community should aspire to have.

Experiences
People want to know about your experiences - even the bad ones. They want to know when you've failed; they want to know when you've been disappointed; they want to know what you've struggled through; they want to learn from your life. Genuine ethos cannot be developed without genuine communication.

Reward
Another way leaders shape ethos is by what they reward.
Once when I was a young pastor, I found myself creating an environment in which only those who did the wrong things were receiving my affirmation. They were the people I always spent time with. The more you sinned, the more you disobeyed God, the more of my time I would give you. If you did what you were supposed to do you received very little of my time. I was essentially rewarding disobedience and dysfunction rather than affirming obedience and servanthood. I realized that who I gave my time to demonstrated what was important.

I also began to realize that whenever I affirmed someone through a story, it helped shape the culture. If I told stories of the secret servanthood of members in the body, it inspired everyone else to serve. When I celebrated sacrificial giving by individuals, it inspired others to give sacrificially.

Battles
Everything worthwhile has a cost, and the ethos of a community is worth fighting for. Establishing a value system that honors God and reflects his heart is the most important battle in spiritual leadership. All spiritual leaders must be warrior-poets who lead both through courage and suffering.

Advancement
I believe that the resume-style selection of leadership has detrimentally affected the development of an apostolic ethos in the church. The church overwhelmingly hires from the outside.

It seems abysmal that in a church of ten thousand, you wouldn't be overwhelmed with emerging leadership, and yet these churches tend to hire proven leaders from other congregations. We seem to be better at growing congregations than at developing leaders.

The development of indigenous leadership is critical to creating and shaping ethos. It is also essential in generating first-century church momentum. One reason for this is that when you identify leaders from within, everyone realizes that he or she could be the next leader identified. It gives everyone a sense of inspiration and hope that he or she might be selected and invested in. If you're always hiring from the outside, it becomes a mystery how one every grows to that level of leadership. The obvious conclusion for someone interested in leadership would be that he or she has to leave the church to find a place where that level of leadership could be obtained.

In an organization, leaders must be brought from the outside. In a movement, leaders emerge from within. A genuine movement is a leadership culture. It values the identification, development, and empowering of new leaders. A central component of a movement's success is not the selection of accredited leaders but of proven leadership. Leadership is not about how much education a person has attained but how much they have actually accomplished in a ministry context. In many congregations the only role that members can aspire to is to be a good follower. In the first-century church, there were no other churches to take leaders from. Everybody had to be homegrown.

At the end of each chapter of this book, Erwin gives several questions. I'm going to include a few below for you to ponder.

1. Is your leadership more spiritual or secular? Are you leading from biblical or business principles?

2. Who are the emerging leaders in our community (congregation), and what do we need to do to prepare them for spiritual leadership?

Let's look at number 2 for a minute. How do you determine who the emerging leaders are? What is the criteria? In a future blog, Erwin talks about discipleship. He says there are two types of discipleship: the stage theory or new building metaphor, and the new baby metaphor. In the stage theory, people are taught a proper theological foundation, next a layer of faithful church attendance is added, then they are trusted with serving. Layer upon layer, systematically, to grow an individual to spiritual maturity. The other way is to nurture what is already there in an individual. Just as a new baby has everything they need already, a new believer has everything they will need for their spiritual journey. It just needs developing. Some have an unusual connection through prayer, some are overtly generous, some are willing to pick up and move to another country for the Gospel. Everyone has gifts, we just have to discover and nurture them.

So, how do you identify a future leader and how do you prepare them for spiritual leadership? You spend time with them. You love them where they are and see their potential. You get to know their level of faithfulness. You discover their gifts and passions with them. Woven through this relationship are times when you serve with them, correct them, encourage them, stretch them, teach them, and most of all you show them you trust them.

There is a very wise man in our church. I think of him as the father of our church, having built it with his own hands with a handful of faithful individuals who had a call and a dream. This man knows how to show people he sees their potential in a very surreptitious way. When he began recruiting people for a missions trip to Brazil that he was leading, he walked up to someone he wanted to go on the trip with him and say, "I hear you're joining us on the Brazil trip." In at least one instance the person had never considered going. They hadn't gone on a missions trip before. But just by planting that little seed in their heart, they started to see the possibility of them going, serving, and seeing already the approval in this man's eyes that they were worthy of the challenge. They began to pray, and save, and commit, and train, and they they went. It was like butter to see how smoothly he discipled this team to go all the way to the Amazon for two weeks, build two churches and have several adventures. True, this leader has the gift of discipleship, but anyone can do it. It's amazing how much impact you can have on someone's life when you are willing to pour a little of yourself into them.