Well, I knew the intensive was going to be good, but this one was bloody brilliant. Speakers were great, conversation and sharing ideas, meeting new and wonderfully interesting people doing some great things in the name of the kingdom of heaven.  I took about 12 pages of notes, so rather than simply regurgitate those notes I propose to write up each speakers section and post each separately (I think this would help in making conversation easier as well).

I came away from the 4 days believing that it will be possible for the church to change the way it operates (there will be those who choose a slow death over deep change – http://www-personal.umich.edu/~acaza/Quinn%20&%20Caza,%202004.pdf) and that individuals can and must be a part of that transformation. 

The common theme from this intensive was on apostolic leadership and each of the speakers brought their own perspectives and experience as well as their understanding of the bible to bear on the subject in ways that challenged as well as inspired – even those I didn’t agree with (only one speaker and I still agreed with many of the things he spoke about).

Mike Frost opened things up with a session on leadership types:

Positional: related to being in a position – CEO, Senior Pastor etc
Relational: may not have a position as such but people naturally listen to and seek out this person
Spiritual: a person who exudes their leadership in a spiritual sense – someone like Gandhi or M L King Jr
Skilled: someone who leads because of the skills they possess that others need

Mike suggested that we need to revisit the way we do leadership in church; the major paradigm is the one of senior pastor or CEO leading through position when what we need is  leadership that is a combination of each of the types, but certainly not positional alone.

We need to be asking the question whether simply being effective equates with being good – just because it works does that mean it is biblical or Godly?  Mike told the story of outlining the Forge/emergent/apostolic methods of church growth and leadership to the  pastor of a large church who suggested that yes they were godly and biblical but just wouldn’t work in a large church!  Shouldn’t that make you wonder if God ever intended for churches or communities to grow beyond a certain size?The choices I leadership styles we need can be viewed as:

Truthful                   Spectacular
and            vs          Excellent &
Godly                      Dynamic

The sorts of metaphors that best fit the type of leadership Mike was talking about would be words such as :

Midwife
Gardener and
Angler;

people who aren’t necessarily carrying or producing life (having all that is needed within themselves) but rather know their environment and can work the conditions to produce birth growth and life in others – a Midwife assists in the birth process,  a Gardner plants the seed and nurtures it but the seed produces it’s own life, the Angler knows where the fish are, what bait brings them in best – they don’t produce the fish, the fish are already there (we aren’t talking about evangelism here, rather fishes are a metaphor for the latent missional energy within each of us.

My next post will be on Mikes continuing talk about pioneering leadership and Jesus as a model for leadership.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 12:01 pm by Greg the explorer and is filed under Forge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.