Tag Archives: mission

church, leadership, thinking...

leading without power, part 4

3 Comments

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second, that approach to creating a “mission statement” is often produced with outdated (and unbiblical) hierarchical power approaches.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.

church, emerging church, thinking...

leading from values vs. goals

15 Comments

not long ago, i started a discussion thread on the youth ministry 3.0 facebook group about how leading from values is “better” (not sure that’s the right word) than leading from goals. the response was discussion was fantastic, at least for me. so i thought i would bring a bit of it over here for the rest of you. feel free to comment here, or go over to the facebook group and add to it there.

here’s what i wrote to start the discussion (and i’m adding some illustrations here that i couldn’t figure out how to post in the facebook group!):

i was chatting with chris cummings, a young youth worker who’s been active in this group, at the nashville nywc, about ym3.0. i can’t remember what his actual question was (chris, do you remember?) that got me thinking about the difference between leading change from a set of values rather than leading change from a “strategic planning” path, with goal setting and “plans”.

i’ve been meaning to post on my blog about this for a while, and will eventually get around to it are more length than i will here. but i think it could be a good discussion for us.

when ys needed to go through some significant re-engineering a few years back, i took a group of “can do” ys staff on a retreat to palm springs. my “goal” was to ideate — to come up with a list of “actionable” new ideas (this flowed out of my reading of seth godin’s book, purple cow, which i’d had them all read in prep for the retreat). while on the retreat, the conversation turned to values (not by my doing). and making the courageous choice to speak honestly, the staff starting talking about ys’ values, stated and unstated.

we rolled with it, and created a big list of all the organizational values we could think of. some of them were “positive” — but more of them were “negative” (like, “we value control” and “we value compliance”). we spent another two days creating two new lists:
– those existing values that we wanted to particularly re-affirm
– “new values” that we wanted to embody (most of which were positively stated variations on negative values from the list).

then, we used these lists to make decisions, and have for years (though the lists have continued to evolve).

i think the notion of ‘strategic planning’ and ‘goal setting’ are 2.0 practices. they call for these leadership roles and metaphors:
– statistician
– financier
– manager
– police

but leading from values (and decision-making from values, and considering change from values) calls for a different set of leadership roles and metaphors:
– horticulturalist
– environmentalist
– curator
– anthropologist


what do you think?

how do we re-conceive our roles as youth workers in this way?

and (as i’m sure some will ask), how do we live into these roles and metaphors if our church context is enmeshed in and mesmerized by the first set?

joel mayward wrote:

The metaphor of a factory and a garden has been in the back of my mind for awhile. YM 2.0 feels more like a factory, an assembly line faith focused on doing more to reach the next step and accomplish the next goal. YM 3.0 may be more like tending a garden, creating a healthy environment for growth to occur, where maturity happens a bit more spontaneously. Factories look and feel homogenous; gardens are unique to their environment. I hope that makes sense.

mark maines pushed back a bit with:

Strategy and goal setting are not in conflict with value-based leadership. Both are essential and both must be defined in order for the organization to be effective. Its not that one is good and the other is bad. They address entirely different issues. One answers the question, what is important and how will we behave? The other, “how will we get to where we want to go and do what we believe God wants us to do? Effective leaders answer both questions for their organization.

chris cummings wrote a little poem!

Based on goals, there is success and failure
Based on values, there are stories to share

Based on goals, there is a final end point
Based on values, there is an exciting journey

Based on goals, change must take place
Based on values, change might take place (but usually happens naturally and without being purposed to do so)

Based on goals, there is an individual achievement focus
Based on values, there is a communal heart

Based on goals, accomplishing the mission is of utmost importance
Based on values, loving as we are loved is the only focus

then a few of us slugged it out over whether values change or not, whether goals are good or evil (or just distraction), and a variety of other subjects. really great discussion here that is worth plowing through.