Leadership Shift

What are you learning about leadership? 

One of my goals is to be a learning leader. That I don’t settle for “what I know” and am always open to experimentation, exploration, and tweaking of practices.

Here is what I’m currently learning:

The old model of leadership is all about having the answers. According to the theory, you get to the top by being able to answer the tough questions and come up with compelling answers – usually on your feet.

I was raised in this model of leadership. I saw this model of leadership modeled. Top-down, centralized leadership.

But I am noticing that that a new model of leadership is taking root in many organizations, including our own here at Lafayette First Church of the Nazarene.

In this model, the leader’s primary role is to initiate conversations that bring out the best thinking and direct those conversations toward a positive outcome. 

This is a challenging shift. It requires practicing good communication skills, nurturing healthy relationships, and the ability and desire to listen. 

What are you learning?

About Stories and Leadership

Our daughter is 2. She loves to read stories. Entire evenings are spent reading Maisy, Olivia, Noah’s Ark, Little Critter and random books from the 70’s that my Grandma sends her (she loves them). At home, parents are storytellers.

But I’m also learning that is one of my main job functions as a pastor. I’ve been fortunate to be pastor of Lafayette First Church of the Nazarene since September. I’ve tried really hard to learn the stories of this church – the overwhelming ways that God has moved in the past, the visions that led them into their present, the dreams they have had for the future, and the experiences that have become legendary.

To learn those stories, I have to ask. It’s way too easy to remember how things happened but forget why they happened. New pastors often remark that they hear “this is how we’ve done it” and they feel limited to that.

But how is not the story.  Why is the story. If, as a leader, you don’t know why you certainly better not change how. In fact, if you don’t know why you’re really not the leader. You’re the supervisor.

It’s my responsibility to keep those stories and to retell them as consistently and creatively as possible so that they become part of our culture; so that they form the vision of the future.

Leading From The Future

This past week at our church we talked about Mark 1:14-15. Specifically, “the kingdom of God is near.” At the same time that I was preparing for our conversation I was reading an article about organizational leadership.

The Kingdom of God. Organizational leadership. I’m intrigued about the interaction between the two.

It reminds me of some words that Dr. Dan Boone once said about pastoral leadership. He advocated that pastors align themselves with the Kingdom of God and “lead people from the future.”

From my notes:

Leading from the future—establishing a compelling goal that draws the organization out of its comfort zone— means placing ourselves in the new future and then taking a series of steps, not in order to get there some day, but as if you are there already, or almost there, now.

This is exactly the perspective of the Kingdom of God in the New Testament. In saying that the future (eschatological) Kingdom of God is already present in our midst, we are called to act in the knowledge that it is already here now and yet will be completed then. And so we are drawn up into God’s future for the world.

Great visionaries speak from the future and call us to places that are not yet. From Martin Luther King Jr. to a local church plant with a vision to see people come to Jesus.

The power is this: that a compelling vision of the future is one way of generating genuine community spirit by developing a corporate sense of mission that in turn ‘creates’ the future.

It’s more comfortable to lead from the past (how did we do it then?), easier to lead from the present (what should keep us busy today?), than it is to lead from the future (who is God calling us to become?).

People Pleasing

As a pastor, I often counsel with people who have an inner motivation to constantly please other people. To a degree, I think most people have that. But for some, it is oppressively strong and it’s power needs to be broken.

Pastors, speaking generally, consistently fall prey to this issue. We know we are (ultimately) called to serve God but the motivation can become unclear – especially so in denominations where a pastor’s “job security” depends upon rapport with the leadership of the congregation. Without fully realizing it, Pastors can get caught up in pleasing people rather than God.

Here are some characteristics of people pleasing Pastors:

• They revel in comments after sermons. Preaching, viewed this way, turns into performance art with the congregation being the judges.
• They take criticism personally. As if any suggestion is a personal attack.
• They ask themselves questions such as: Did they like the job I did at the funeral? Or, did you like my sermon? The focus of these questions is “me” not “God.”
• They can’t say “no.” The desire to make people happy leads to over-commitment.

A pastor is called to name the presence of God in the midst of the people, to serve the servants of God, to equip the people of God for ministry, and to prophetically critique evil. In order to do that, a pastor has to have a clear motivation.

Personally, I want to ask “What will God think?” more frequently than I ask “What will they think?” As I do, I’m praying for the grace to live that direction.

Do you deal with any of these? If so, what helps?