leadership is changing. and this is a very, very good thing.

the era of the autocratic, top-down leader is gone. a new kind of leader — one who leads without power — is on the rise.

while it’s fantastic to see this new approach to leadership gaining ground in the world of business, it’s sad to me that the church — the place where this jesus-y style of leadership should have been in place all along — is behind.

i’ve just finished a year with my second youth ministry coaching program cohort. and as i wrote ‘growth affirmation and challenge’ sheets for each of the participants, naming the amazing transformation i’ve seen in each of their lives this past year, i was once again struck by how many churches are riddled with lousy leadership. during one of my 1-on-1 coaching sessions with a participant, on the last day, we were talking about leadership, and i surprised myself when the subject of this post came out of my mouth (all starting with the same letter — how rick warren of me!). i said,

great leaders are anchored by three things: conviction, collaboration, and calling.

conviction isn’t about being the sole vision castor.
it’s not about forcing an agenda onto everyone.
it’s not about being the heavy.

conviction is about being a culture evangelist and mission curator.

conviction is about ruthlessly protecting the values, and not being swayed by attractive ideas (financially beneficial, numerical growth beneficial, keeping the peace, pleasing the powerful) that erode the values.

collaboration isn’t about forced fun.
it’s not about tokenism.
and it doesn’t mean democracy.

collaboration is about being a uniqueness dj. collaboration is about creating space and processes and an ecosystem the values meaningful input, and offers active participation at every level.

and calling. calling isn’t about filling seats.
it’s not about manipulation.
it’s not about isolation.

calling is about being a storytelling host, a champion of hope, and a trust guard.

calling is about living into who you were made to be. it’s the self-actualized leader, humble and open, rooted in a spiritual sense of urgency, committed to the mission and unwavering in a sense of movement. it’s about living this, and calling others to this greater purpose.

conviction, collaboration, and calling. how are you living them out this week?

we americans love our self-sufficiency. and in the world of leadership, self-sufficiency is seen as a sign of strength. we are groomed, over years, to believe that asking for help is a sign of weakness. a bigger lie: we are groomed, over the years, to believe that asking for help will push people away from us. and while we often don’t live on that plane of emotion, our deeper needs of connection and relationship drive us to this (counter-productive) “i can do it by myself” approach.

here are two counter-intuitive truths:

asking for help is a sign of a strong, self-actualized leader with a high level of personal awareness.

when a competent person asks for help, she draws people to her, emotionally, rather than driving them away.

these themes were one of the central focuses of the year-long coaching program i went through with john townsend. my cohort had 10 leaders at the beginning. as john started to make these themes clear at the first meeting, two participants couldn’t connect with it. one of them made a presentation at our very first meeting. he talked all about his great success and all the amazing things he was doing. in light of townsend’s themes, i asked at the end of the presentation, “what do you need from us?” he was lost, and uncomfortably said, “i don’t think i need anything.” but that was counter to the entire focus of the program, and he didn’t return for our second meeting. another man dropped out after three meetings (and this one was actually quite needy). but the 8 of us who stuck with it learned so much, and each had major breakthroughs i trusting others, expressing our needs, and asking for help. there were often tears connected to this, as the needs we learned to express weren’t at the surfacy levels of “i need a contact for this” or “i need an idea for that;” but were more along the lines of “i’m deeply wounded and need someone to tell me what happened to me as a child wasn’t my fault,” or “i’m feeling very insecure about this, and need help in dealing with my fears.”

i don’t know that i realized it much during my latter years at ys, but i was stumbling into this learning myself. our leadership team began to hum like none i’d ever been a part of (before or since), as we got truly honest with each other and relied on each other at both personal and work levels. and the broader team at ys seemed to withdraw from me when i presented a “i’ve got it all together” vibe, but was drawn together (and to me) when i was fully, uncomfortably honest.

a week ago, a friend popped up on google chat while i was working one day and simply wrote: “new learning: asking for help is hard, but so much better than going it alone.”

this was from a strong leader, an extremely gifted man. and he’s experiencing a breakthrough into a new level of growth and wholeness that will cause, i believe, his future leadership to far surpass the successes he’s experienced to this point in life.

all of this was floating in the back of my mind somewhere last week when i had coffee with a local ministry leader. we made small talk for a while (you know, “ministry small talk”). then he started into an ask, something along the lines of, “i’d like to figure out how we can help each other. i’m not sure what that looks like, but if we could start meeting regularly, i think we could provide things for each other that would grow both of our ministries.” suspicious, i asked, “like, what kinds of things?” he went on to try to talk about iron sharpening iron and stuff like that. but it was clear to me that he wanted help, and wasn’t comfortable asking for it; so he had to pose it as a mutually beneficial thing.

i went into coaching mode, figuring some honesty and coaching might be more helpful to him than me just blowing him off or agreeing to something i wasn’t going to follow through on. i asked his permission to speak bluntly. with his consent, i said, “the things you’re suggesting you can help me with aren’t things i’m asking you to help me with. and they’re all things for which i have people who provide that help. what i think you’re trying to ask is if i would be willing to help you. and here’s the reality that could be a learning moment for you: when you pose the question laden with soft ideas about how it would be mutual, you drive me away, because i’m not asking for help; but if you would just come out and ask for help, i’d be drawn to you — both emotionally, and as a local ministry leader. don’t try to manipulate me by offering help only to get it. just be honest and ask for what you need.”

since then, he has written me a few emails, clearly re-articulating his ask. and i’m quite sure i will do what i can to meet with him and help him. and it’s very possible that will shift, over time, to a friendship that offers something to me also. it’s possible that i will have requests of him at some point, even.

knowing when you need help, clearly articulating it, and asking is strong leadership, not weakness.

(as an aside, and personal application: i’m currently at a cabin in the desert for a few days (there’s no wi-fi or cell phone reception there – i wrote this before leaving). i’ve had a practice of doing this quarterly for years now. but i’m changing it up this time. when the townsend coaching group ended, 6 of us continued meeting every other month for another year. as that wound down, recently, i felt a need to replace that space of honesty about what i need. so for this trip to the desert, my first 24 hours will be alone; then two friends (both youth workers) are joining me for another 24 hours. we’ll be sharing life and asking each other for help. we hope to make this an every-other-month practice.)

i am committed to growth. i want to be a life-long learner. i want to grow in self-knowledge, become a better leader, a better youth worker, a better husband and father, a better human being, and a better follower of jesus. not that i always nail this growth thing, to be sure. but i’m thrilled when i see growth in my life.

recently, i was sharing a little leadership self-evaluation tool with someone in my youth ministry coaching program, and thought it might be helpful to pass along.

where it came from: less than a month before i was laid off from ys/zondervan, i had an annual evaluation with my boss. by this point, i was under such horrendous stress (trying to keep ys from imploding during the upcoming transition from zondervan to youthworks, and trying to figure out how to remain true to who i was while being asked to be a kind of leader that wasn’t me). it was the single worst year of my life, and i wasn’t enjoying my work. my relationship with my boss was strained, and i didn’t see a way out of that. i knew ys was either going to get broken up and sold, or get shut down, or some other alternative i didn’t see (but didn’t expect would be good). when i sat down with my boss for my evaluation, i said something like, “i hardly see the point of this, and i’m not very excited about it.” she asked why, and i responded, “well, i think that within a month, i’ll either be going with ys to a new supervisor, or i’ll be out of a job; but either way, an evaluation of how my leadership should change here doesn’t seem worth the time or effort.” she said, “i don’t see it that way at all.” and she meant it.

what came next surprised me: an opportunity to grow, and to learn more about myself.

she set our evaluation forms (hers and mine) aside, and asked me to stand at the whiteboard in her office. she asked me to draw a simple 2-axis grid, with low to high will along one axis, and low to high competency along the other axis. this created four quadrants:

then she asked me to think of all the responsibilities, tasks and other roles i played as the president of youth specialties (and a leadership team member of zondervan). with each, i was to place it on the grid. things like “financials” (meaning, staying on top of the details of ys’s budget and financial performance) got plotted in the lower left quadrant. things like championing the values of ys, and understanding youth workers got plotted in the top right quadrant. but the truly fascinating stuff were those things that got plotted in the other two quadrants — stuff i wanted to do, but wasn’t good at; and stuff i was good at, but didn’t want to do. she suggested additional responsibilities and functions i hadn’t thought of, and i placed them on the chart.

then she revealed a similar chart she had created about me, with almost exactly the same list of responsibilities, roles and functions. to my great surprise, there were only a couple items (out of about 20) where we had disagreement; and even then, the difference wasn’t great.

the process was wildly helpful and insightful. not only was it a good discussion around the differences in our perception and expectations, it was helpful for me to plot myself. i wrote the whole thing down, and brought it home for further reflection. again, the two quadrants i found most helpful to plumb were low will/high competency and high will/low competency. had i continued in that role, it would have been a great tool for making adjustments in the things i spent time on, a great tool for identifying areas i needed help (or needed to delegate), and a great tool for identifying those areas i needed to work on even if i didn’t like them.

i’d encourage you to take 10 minutes and do this exercise yourself. it might be helpful to make the list of responsibilities, role, function first, before plotting them. once you’ve got the whole thing completed, show it to your spouse, or a co-worker, or a supervisor, and ask for feedback. it could be a wonderful opportunity to grow!

i’d just finished leading a seminar on organizational change yesterday, called “the flywheel of change”, when i popped online and saw this video (it’s short – watch it):

given the conversations i’d been a part of only minutes earlier, the video quickly became a metaphor for me. i had presented adizes’ model of organizational life-cycles (see this post for a little unpacking of that model). we’d talked about the hard path of rebooting an organization (business, church, youth ministry) that is already into entitlement and bureaucracy. we’d talked about the courage and challenge required for the first couple pushes on a flywheel of change, which have to (counter-intuitively) occur when everything seems to be going well, and most leaders want to ‘stay the course’. i’d shared stories of this from my youth specialties days, and consulting work i’ve done with churches and other organizations. and participants in the seminar shared stories of their attempts, as well as the organizational inertia or outright opposition that resisted their change efforts. it was encouraging, in the sense that we were all acknowledging the difficulty, as well as suggesting pathways to new vitality and life. but it was also discouraging in some ways, because change is hard and slow, and fraught with blind alleys and saboteurs, human and systemic.

the poor three-toed sloth just wants to cross the pickin’ road, for goodness sake. but even getting to the road (the metaphorical transition space of change) is a plodding effort. stepping (or crawling) onto the road is to offer himself up, unknowingly, to become likely roadkill. really, without the intentional, careful, knowledgeable (did you notice how the guy knew where to grab the sloth?) assistance of a gracious guide, the sloth would likely not have reached the other side of the road.

but… but, when the guy picks him up (did you notice this? watch it again if you didn’t.), the sloth becomes superman in flight — reaching out to the lush life on the far side.

in our attempts to bring change to the organizations in which we work and serve, we need help. the helper dude is a metaphor for many things:
- the holy spirit, on whom we must rely for discernment while crossing the life-threatening space and duration of change.
- the community of people who enter into change with us. leading organizational change (from a position granted that responsibility, or from a “leading up” position) is not, cannot be, a solo endeavor. in order for change to occur with both minimized risk and minimized damage, it absolutely has to be a collaborative process.
- outside input, wisdom and ideation from others more familiar with the road.
- hope. belly down to the road, the sloth could barely see the other side, and certainly couldn’t see all the oncoming threats. but from his elevated superman, flying position, hope rears its head. this isn’t x-games, no-fear hope; nope, this is peeing my slothy underparts fear mixed with a view of the destination. this is biblical hope: choosing confidence when it doesn’t feel logical.

the sloth can’t hop the road or run to the other side. change isn’t quick or easy. it’s slow and arduous and risky. how wonderful that (if we are wise) we don’t have to cross the road alone.

what are you dreaming of changing?
what are the risks you see?
who might have a better view of the risks you don’t see?
who is joining you in moving toward change? who’s on your team?
what role can/should the holy spirit play in your process of change?
where is your hope placed?

in this series of posts (part 1, overview; part 2, competency facilitator; part 3, culture evangelist; part 4, mission curator, part 5, storytelling host, part 6, champion of hope, part 7, uniqueness dj, part 8, contextualization czar) i’m ruminating on the suggestion that leadership in the church needs to move away from the traditional notions of hierarchical power we’ve embraced for so long. and i’m unpacking 9 new metaphors for “powerless leadership”. here is metaphor #8:

Trust Guard

trust is, perhaps, the single greatest factor in leadership. and, while trust is so rarely present in hierarchical power structures (in churches or businesses), the funny thing is that it’s one of the few facets described in this blog series that is possible within traditional hierarchical power structures (btw: if you want a good book on this — trust in the context of traditional power structures, that is — i recommend stephen m.r. covey’s the speed of trust). and the reason boils down to this: trust is 100% dependent on honesty. if a hierarchical power-based leader is fully honest and transparent (an extremely rare occurrence, to be sure), it’s possible to instill trust. but more often than not, the mindset of a leader in utilizing role power and hierarchy has a mental mindset that says, “i know things you cannot and should not know; they are not your job to know them.” if the leader were, somehow, able to be completely honest with himself or herself (another rarity), the truth would be closer to, “being less than transparent and fully honest with you protects my position of power, control and authority over you. you are more dependent on me when i know more than you do.”

ah, but this tactic just doesn’t work.

a moment of honesty myself: i have not been a superstar on this. i think my leadership team at youth specialties had a high level of trust in me and my leadership; but that was directly connected to the level of honesty we shared. but for the rest of the staff of youth specialties, their trust of me vacillated greatly. at times, it was high and strong; at others, extremely questionable. in my 20/20 hindsight, i can see the pattern clearly: when we were in seasons where i was being ruthlessly honest, trust was high. when we were in seasons where i was withholding, or spinning them, trust was low (or at least weakened).

if we want our organizational teams (and, again, this applies to volunteer teams as well as groups of employees) to experience the kind of wholeness and full embracing of the organizational mission, we have to place the value of alignment in a place of preeminence. in youth ministry 3.0, i wrote about the goal of “communion” – a combination of authentic community with christ in the mix. pulling out the essence of that into a workplace, i can envision a kind of missional alignment experienced in community by all members of the team.

and, without trust and safety, there will be no communion or missional alignment.

without communion (or missional alignment), the ministry or church staff culture or business culture will be clubbish and/or wimpy.

what if one of the primary ways we leaders exercise our power is by being honest?

i’m reminded of this as i write, as i’ve been looking at a case study over the past few days. a particular mission board (ABWE) received information, decades ago, about one of their missionary doctors perpetrating pedophilia on young teen missionary kids. they responded by covering it up. the issues were brought up at multiple points over the last 20+ years; and each time, they promised action, but took none. not only is the wrong perpetrated in this example horrific on many other levels, the result has been – as i’ve watched this unfolding in real time – a systemic and complete breakdown of trust. trust in the organization and its leaders has been shot for a long time for those closest to the crime; but now that the story is coming to light, trust has been eroded at levels that reach far and wide, including affiliated churches and donors. the likely result will be leaders losing their jobs and a big shake up. justice, in situations like this, gets more and more difficult without honesty. (btw: if you’d like to read more about this story, or help throw your voice into the mix of people calling the board of the organization to action, read this fairly comprehensive blog, hosted by some of the MKs impacted.)

i’m also reminded of one of the (rare?) times i think i got this right: when it was brought to our attention at YS that we had published some blatantly racist content in one of our books, and we were called out by the asian american church community. in this case (as would have been true with ABWE), it would have been better had we not allowed the offenes to occur in the first place. but we screwed up; and the only right response was full disclosure, complete honesty, and swift action. now, you could say that this was all external, and more about our interface with customers. but the impact on our staff was significant; and the way we handled it (both in how we talked about it internally, and the steps our staff saw us taking) had an enormous impact on the level of trust internally. it was — counter-intuitively — one of those times when our screw-up resulted in more missional alignment (and communion) for our staff team.

back to my question: what would it look like if, as a leader trying to lead without power, that your primary expression of the power provided by your title or position were the relentless pursuit of honesty?

this past year in my youth ministry coaching program, i have gotten more and more adamant about the role of values in leadership. it’s not like this is a new idea in the least. and i’ve been talking and blogging about it for years. but i’ve refined my thinking, and it slowly became the central teaching/coaching component of the ymcp. for the first cohort, their final project involved articulating in written form both personal and professional values. (for an example of this, here are joel mayward’s personal and professional values.)

another ymcper, brian berry, recently sent me the link to this video, which has so much to say about the role of values (even though the video never once uses that word). you will not, i promise, regret the couple minutes you spend watching this video (in fact, hundreds of you will be repurposing it for youth group within a week):

so. i’ve got a challenging decision on my plate, one with vocational implications. i spent a couple days in the desert last week, seeking god. and, at one point i thought to myself, “you idiot. you made everyone else write out their core values, but you’ve never written out your own!” duh. admitadly, seperating personal and professional values is a false dichotomy (i wanted my ymcpers to think about the two spheres and what might be similar or different). but, i chose to create one list, more along the lines of “personal values that have vocational implications.”

here’s what i came up with (btw: i considered this a process of spiritual discernment, not an exercise in brainstorming):

• My family comes first. Without meaningful connection to them, I’m useless for anything else.

• Personal growth and transformation is the best life. I want the ‘fullness of life’ that Jesus promises in John 10:10, not the life of a cog, a maintainer, or a yes-man.

• I want to change the world. I believe in my gut that I am invited into the ongoing restoration work of Christ in the world, and I want to actively participate in that Kingdom work.

• I love the church, and want to see her change. I believe that, through Christ, the church is God’s plan for the world. We are the equipment. Let’s stop wasting time and get to it.

• I want to lead collaboratively. Powerless leadership is both biblical and more effective. Nurturing a culture of team, empowerment, collaboration, and risk are core to how I aspire to lead.

• Change is non-negotiable. Upheaval, starting new things, risk and failure are all necessary and good, both for the organization I’m a part of and for my own level of thriving.

• Uniqueness is better than conformity. Honoring and celebrating initiative and unique gifting, in alignment with the values of the whole, creates excellence and life. Conformity only leads to death.

in this series of posts (part 1, overview; part 2, competency facilitator; part 3, culture evangelist; part 4, mission curator, part 5, storytelling host) i’m ruminating on the suggestion that leadership in the church needs to move away from the traditional notions of hierarchical power we’ve embraced for so long. and i’m unpacking 9 new metaphors for “powerless leadership”. here is metaphor #5:

Champion of Hope

i’ve been doing more than my normal share of thinking about hope in the last year or two. in some ways, at all started when i was asked to speak on the subject of hope at a youth ministry event very early in 2010. i did some thinking and praying and digging, and realized that there are a handful of things that often rob us of hope in our churches:

• optimism and pressure to be content. it’s not that optimism is a bad thing.  it’s just that we’ve spiritualized it in the american church and re-labeled it as hope.  but they’re not the same thing.
• being well-resourced. honestly, what church leader would choose being under-resourced over being well-resourced.  but as i meet hundreds — thousands, even — of church leaders and youth workers around the globe, i’m amazed how being well-resourced can lead to a variety of destructive things (hoarding, protecting, confidence in things) that make hope impossible.  because hope has embedded in it some longing.
• living without pain. i’ll expand on this a bit more in a second, but pain seems to be the necessary b-side to hope.  or maybe it’s the other way around: hope is the b-side to pain.
• technique. we loves us some technique in the american church, don’t we?  technique is a distraction, and quickly becomes (in many, if not most cases) the object of hope.

but my perspective on hope was rocked by my trips to haiti this past year (which i have blogged about extensively). and that idea that suffering and hope are two sides of the same coin really started to click for me.

as i wrestled with this more (including developing a book proposal that’s under consideration at some publisher or another), i read more on hope — particularly some stuff by bruggemann. and i saw the biblical pattern: honest and healthy dissatisfaction with the way things are –> crying out to god, admitting your need for god and dependance on god for a rescue –> the gift of hope. it’s most clearly seen in the exodus. and it’s seen again in the exile. it’s even seen in jesus’ cry from the cross.

but here’s how this applies to ‘leading without power”: organizations need to have hope (not just individuals). while this isn’t talked about often, it’s intuitively true. we’ve all been part of, or visited, organizations (churches, business, whatever) that lack hope, and ones that seem to be bursting with hope. really, this isn’t just christian organizations — my visit to zappos.com, the online shoe retailer, gave me a visceral experience of hope embodied.

but the leader who wants to lead without power (because, really, there’s NO WAY to hierarchically force someone to have hope!) becomes a champion of hope in the organization. the powerless leader listens for and is present to suffering — not brushing past it or sweeping it under the rug (easier said than done, btw). and in the midst of that safe articulation of struggle, the powerless leader points people to the source of hope (jesus), rather than cul-de-sacs of optimism, technique, and other hope thieves.

a few practicalities:

1. remember Romans 5:3 – 5 — …we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

2. provide reminders of who we place our hope in; reminders of what our hope feels like; reminders of why we have hope.

3. cultivate a language of hope with your team, and with parents.

in this series of posts (part 1, overview; part 2, competency facilitator; part 3, culture evangelist) i’m ruminating on the suggestion that leadership in the church needs to move away from the traditional notions of hierarchical power we’ve embraced for so long. and i’m unpacking 9 new metaphors for “powerless leadership”. here is metaphor #3:

Mission Curator

we’ve all heard the importance of leaders articulating and embracing the mission of the organization. but i see three significant flaws in how this often plays out:

first, this often merely means creating a mission statement that gets stuck on a website — a mission statement that sounds nice, but doesn’t actually shape how things are done. while creating a mission statement necessarily bad, this surfacy approach misses the point. the mission of the organization (business, church, youth ministry) is difficult to fully capture in one or two carefully word-smithed sentences. those sentences are often cerebral; while the real mission is more gut. real mission is the embodied fuel of why we exist. it’s something that needs to be felt more than written into a sentence (i’m not suggesting that articulation is misguided; but mission is more than that).

second, that approach to creating a “mission statement” is often produced with outdated (and unbiblical) hierarchical power approaches. a real mission is discerned. and, i would suggest, should be collaboratively discern, not brought down from the mountain on stone tablets.

third, real mission (the kind that can be lived out) has an unrelenting core, but liquid edges. real mission has some fluidity. real mission assumes a posture of humility and openness to change — not only in the implementation, but in the mission itself. real mission says, “this is who we believe god is calling us to be, for now; and we hope god will continue to reveal newness.”

mission provides rails for “where are we going?”

curator is an important word choice here. a curator doesn’t create everything. a curator creates space for interaction, participation and enjoyment. a curator understands that her power is in the role of ‘host’, not ‘dictator’. a curator points to others, to works of beauty and discomfort, and never points to self.

listening to a dozen speakers at last year’s willow creek global leadership summit, i had one take away. it was bill hybels’ point that leaders can’t merely say “this is where we’re going;” leaders have to start by helping people understand “why we can’t stay here,” why ‘here’ is not acceptable.

i’ve railed against our goal-setting obsession before; and it’s because i think we all too often get the cart before the horse. here’s the progression that is essential:

mission → values → goals

in other words: why we exist (leads to) what we’re passionate about (leads to) how we’ll embody this.

the powerless leader doesn’t dictate this progression; the powerless leader curates the process, hosting the dialogue and discernment, showcasing beautiful examples of the mission as well as examples that bring discomfort and move us toward the mission or away from things that are off-mission.

in this series of posts (part 1: overview; part 2: competency facilitator) i’m ruminating on the suggestion that leadership in the church needs to move away from the traditional notions of hierarchical power we’ve embraced for so long. and i’m unpacking 9 new metaphors for “powerless leadership”. here is metaphor #2:

Culture Evangelist

i’m becoming more and more convinced that one of the most important skill sets for a 21st century leader is the ability to lead in the area of culture creation. in youth ministry 3.0, i talked about the increased need for leaders (youth workers, in that case; but this is true for all church leaders) to move toward differentiated, contextually appropriate, discerned ministry values, structures, methods, approaches. for that to happen (particularly if we’re moving away from top-down power structures), we have to re-learn the spiritual art of discernment. and we have to learn to practice discernment using a collaborative approach, as opposed to going off to a cave to get a ‘word from god’.

one of the most important things we need to discern (remember: that means an active reliance on the holy spirit, not our own brilliance and insight) is culture. we need to collaborative discern the current culture of our church (or youth group), and the culture we aspire toward.

once this culture is understood, the powerless leader becomes an evangelist for that culture.

my new friend, donavon roberson – a former youth pastor – is the lead culture evangelist for zappos insights, the corporate training arm of zappos.com. i love donavon’s title. church leaders need to unofficially adopt that title.

we evangelize: this is who we are!
we evangelize: this is who we are called to become!
we evangelize: these are the things that are most important to us (our values)!

at a gathering of junior high pastors several years ago, my friend eric venable made the comment that, in their youth ministry, they tried to embrace the idea that “the feel of the ministry is the content”. last night, i happened to be with eric, and he said he’d later heard a professor state that phrase with better terminology: “the method is the message.”

what does culture creation look like in your context?
how can you move toward it, then evangelize it?

yesterday i started a series of posts on a shift in thinking about and application of power in leadership. my framing contentions are:
power-based leadership has no place in the church.
(and: power-based leadership is a culturally-waning paradigm in all contexts, because we live in a wiki, prosumer culture.)

church leadership needs to move from a paradigm of control to one of facilitation.
in this context: facilitation = identifying and nurturing competencies

with that in mind, i’d like to suggest nine new metaphors and mindsets for powerless leadership. here are the first three:

Competency Facilitator

i admit this is a little repetitive of the paradigmatic shift i just suggested. but “competency facilitator” is such a potent metaphor, such a pregnant imaginary job title.

as a competency facilitator, my leadership role is to be curious about strengths, potentialities, and each person’s unique made-in-god’s-imageness. i am not exerting force on people, but am leading through nurturing. my greatest leadership is to call out what others might not (yet) see, or even what the person might not (yet) see about herself. and, more than only calling out these competencies, my role is to create supportive spaces for the person to test-run these competencies. i support, offer feedback, and continue to point out growth and development.

i posted this quote once before, but it’s such a great reminder of my natural proclivity to be the opposite of a competency facilitator. it’s from max depree’s brilliantly-title, but otherwise somewhat mediocre book called ‘leading without power’:

Esther and i have eleven grandchildren. One of them born weeks premature is now in 3rd grade, and while she has some special challenges, she is really doing quite well. One day when she was three years old, she came to visit me in my office, which is in a small condominium. She said, “Grandpa, would you like to see me run?” And I must tell you, my heart jumped. I thought to myself, this little girl can hardly walk. How is she going to run? But like a good grandparent, I said, “Yes, I’d like to see you run.” She walked over to one side of the room and started to run, right across in front of my desk and directly into the side of a refrigerator. It knocked her on her back, and there she lay, spread-eagled on the floor with a big grin on her face. Like any good manager, I immediately went over with a solution. i said, “honey, you’ve got to learn to stop.” And she looked up at me with a big smile and said, “but, grandpa, I’m learning to run.”

i’ve been challenged in recent months about the importance of meaningful responsibility, particularly in terms of teenagers and young adults moving to adulthood. i am witnessing a real-life example of this with my daughter. liesl (almost 17, a junior in high school) is passionate about the environment. she was one of two participants on the dwindling ‘planet team’ in our church’s high school ministry. the team’s primary responsibility is to collect recyclables from the church, to provide funding for some sponsor children. the team was without an adult leader. and, while all the other leadership teams in our high school ministry had an adult leader, our astute high school pastor saw liesl passion and competency, and took a chance on her. he asked her to lead the team. she has completely risen to the responsibility, recruiting a larger team, producing a recruitment video, training the team and hosting them for social stuff, and ensuring the work gets done. it has been a major win in terms of her development, and a great experience of owning meaningful responsibility.

of course, this isn’t just about competency in teenagers – this applies to all our leadership relationships, not the least of which is with volunteers in church ministry.

next up: Culture Evangelist