Growing Leaders for 2020
by Viv Thomas
This article is adapted from one published in ‘Global Passion’ (2003) Authentic
Lifestyle
Outline: What are the critical issues in developing Christian Leaders
Avoiding the blind alleys of Conservative-Evangelical, Charismatic-Prophetic,
Contemporary-Cultural models of leadership.
Critical Areas
Character as Building Blocks
Key quotes:
‘A leader who cannot develop and sustain friendship of loving communion with others
will ultimately be a destructive leader.’
‘Great leaders are great listeners, they know that they live their lives in response
to the articulation of God through the Word and Spirit.’
Different times demand different types of leaders and what looks like great leadership
in one set of conditions can be inappropriate in another. Therefore leadership development
can be slippery and complex. We have to carefully watch how we grow leaders because
ultimately leadership is about power and how it is operated in a church or organisation.
Styles of leadership promoted and developed in the West in the 1940’s will not work
well in the early part of this new century in a Trans-cultural organisation. You
cannot just take a Canadian leader and drop them in North India and tell them to
lead or vice-versa. What works at one stage of an organisation will not work at
another. To accomplish Leadership Development and do it well, you have to keep moving.
This will be particularly so with all the challenges offered to us through technology,
globilisation and post modernity.
So what sort of leaders do we need to develop? Just looking at ecclesiology does
not help. There are many models of ecclesiology in which Evangelical leaders are
called to operate. Roman Catholics, the Methodists and the Presbyterians all draw
on the same verses of the Bible for how the church should be organised, led and
put into action. Therefore our task is not an easy one and needs to be worked through
with boldness, imagination, cultural sensitivity and wisdom.
Before we can answer what sort of leaders we need to develop it is worth looking
down a few blind alleys which Evangelicals are walking down in their search for
good leaders. The first one is what I would call the Conservative-Evangelical. This
is where it is felt that all leaders need to know is the Bible. The idea is that
the more they know of the Bible the better leaders they will be. This is a good
idea but inadequate. Why? Because knowledge of the Bible does not mean knowledge
of God even if you can do a really good exposition of Biblical text and call yourself
an Evangelical. The second blind ally is what I want to call the Charismatic-Prophetic.
Leadership here is to believe that leading is to do with the feelings associated
with the moving of the Spirit. The idea is that ‘Spirit led’ leaders will know the
mind of God and that through their feelings or an impression regarding what God
is saying they will be able to lead. It is good as far as it goes but the dangers
are self-indulgence, tendencies towards totalitarianism and lack of discipline.
The third blind ally is cultural; what I want to call the Contemporary-Cultural
model. In this the emphasis is on cultural relevance and communication. In this
the great shame is to be behind the cultural pace and therefore irrelevant to what
is going on around. Leaders are to be seen primarily as communicators. From this
another set of problems arise. If you merely focus on the culture and relevance
you become thin in your approach. You have no substance because the point becomes
the communication of the message rather than the message itself. Image triumphs
over substance and all that is left is a shell of leadership empty and hollow.
To learn how to understand as well as teach the scriptures, to hear the voice of
the Spirit and be contemporary in our communication are all-important for leaders.
But to pursue one of these alone unnecessarily narrows the vision and will lead
to poor leadership. Over the long haul a deformed church and organization will result.
What then are we after when it comes to leaders? I suggest that we need leaders
who have a relationship with God, do their tasks with skill and commitment and have
healthy relationships with themselves and others. So the crucial areas are Spirituality,
Task and Community. If we are able to live adequately in response to these three
areas then we will not be so blind if we wander up the ally of our choosing. So
our first area is Spirituality.
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Spirituality: Relating to God
Leadership is about relating to God. Without this understanding a Christian leader
is the SS Titanic steaming towards an iceberg in the dead of night. You can relate
to God in joy, anger, frustration, humour, praise and silence but you need to relate
to him. Yet to do well in this area the first thing you find is that you cannot
rush. There is no fast track to relating to God. There is no efficient way to a
life of relating to God. Many have learned all the right Bible verses and principles
but have developed little in their understanding of God or personal maturity. Secondly,
you have to learn that God is in control. This is difficult for leaders as leader
types like to control, build and envision. The first thing to learn in Christian
leadership is inadequacy not adequacy. It is this which marks us out from our contemporary
secular brothers and sisters. They begin with human potential and we begin with
human inadequacy. We move to being adequate leaders by first visiting our inadequacy
and seeing what God will do with it. Thirdly, you can put yourself in the way of
God through the basic disciplines of the Christian life. You cannot control God
but you can be ready for his initiatives. Fourthly, developing a knowledge of self.
John Calvin told us that the two crucial issues for us were a knowledge of God and
a knowledge of ourselves. Although the two are closely related we have often lived
with the fantasy that we can know God without knowing ourselves. This is dream world
and particularly dangerous for the followers of leaders who have no knowledge of
themselves. Leadership is not just about knowing God but about knowing who we are.
They are two sides of the same coin.
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Task: Doing what you do well
Organisational leadership is about change. It is about the transformation of something
into something else. Leaders are intended to make a difference through influence
or impact as they engage in their tasks which will produce change. This may be long
term or short term but it is change which is the focus regardless of how long it
takes.
This is the easier part of leadership as so many of the skills needed to do the
tasks of can be learned. It is startling what people can learn if they really want
to. This is one of the great wonders of our age. Through the deluge of information
coming out of institutions, the world wide web and the media so many training courses
are available which teach us how to do what we are intended to do and how we can
contribute to helpful change. You can learn how to treat the Bible properly so you
can teach it and not abuse it; how to develop a strategic plan; how to motivate
people and empower them. We can also learn how to integrate the new technologies
into our leadership structures so that work can be handled well and a contemporary
edge remain sharpening all we do. It is pivotal that we develop organisational cultures
of life long learning so that we are able to grow and flex with each new situation.
I am also convinced that we can learn to develop that most central characteristic
of leadership – vision. All leaders are not necessarily visionaries but all leaders
need some sort of vision. I spent some time in India recently and it was a joy to
see one leader realise that his vision was the facilitation of other visions. All
of this can be learned through the correct exposure to God, the world in which we
live and the bringing of the two together.
Yet, here is the Christian leaders danger. Aiming to complete your tasks as you
see them can lead you into a world of control. Such can be the focus on the task,
such can be its all-consuming power that it has to be completed at all costs. This
tumbles leaders into power fantasies and ideas which are totalitarian at the root.
In the end leaders can become addictive and totalitarian if they only engage with
God and their own skills. This often happens without them being aware of the process
or the result. How can we avoid this particular danger often demonstrated in Evangelical
leadership? How can we avoid the addiction to the task dominating everyone in the
name of God and causing considerable damage? I think the answer is engaging the
community not in merely doing the task.
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Community: Living with your friends
This is where the great shift has to take place if we are going to have the right
sort of leaders developed over the next decade and connect with the generations
of leaders to come. This is especially so for leaders brought up within a Western
worldview.
I was eating lunch with a few Christian leaders and one of them asked me, ‘What
would you pick as the one main characteristic of people who are leaders’? After
grumbling about the limitations and unfairness of the question I answered, ‘The
ability to make friends, the ability to sustain loving relationships’. The answer
did not impress my lunch partners and while I was speaking the answer it did not
impress me. For leaders are to stride the globe, create dynamic organizations and
cultures, are they not? Making friends and sustained loving relationship sounds
weak in the presence of contemporary ideas of leadership. Yet, I am convinced that
making adequate friendships goes right to the heart of leadership. And the reason
why it is true is because of the nature of God. God is community, he is three in
one and one in three. His power and authority in producing creation and redemption
all come from a God who is not the isolated ‘one’ distant from any relationships.
He is the Father, Son and Spirit who are in eternal and mutual love towards each
other. His power comes out of this eternal community of love with himself. So, if
leaders are to reflect the image of God in all they are and do they have to reflect
this in their relationships. A leader who cannot develop and sustain friendship
of loving communion with others will ultimately be a destructive leader.
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Character as Building Blocks
How can we develop leaders who are spiritually mature, do what they do well and
can sustain loving relationship with others? The question is impossible to answer
in one article but we can note the key areas which will be the basis for growing
leaders. What is the strategic vision of leadership development onto which we can
add our specific and local tactics?
Firstly, we have to see leadership formation
through the lens of spiritual formation
It is just not good enough to take secular models of leadership, baptize them with
Christian enthusiasm and vocabulary then let them loose on an unsuspecting church.
The result will be disaster. Eugene Peterson has noted the problem when Christian
leaders just take the values and goals of secular leadership and lead. The values
of consumerism turn the church and her accompanying organisations into ‘a company
of shopkeepers’ and abandon their call and ‘while asleep they dream of the kind
of success which will get the attention of journalists’.
What does it mean to be spiritually formed in the sense I am using the idea here?
It means that the leader is in the process of becoming fully human, that they are
growing in all that God has intended them to be in the various dimensions of life.
Money, sex, prayer, emotion, culture, discipline, politics, vision and many more
areas fit under this idea of spiritual formation. It is to do with all of what we
are before God. Our mistake in the past has to merely focus on a spirituality which
is to do with lofty feelings of goodness and pious sensibilities. This has led to
a rejection of the material reality of our organizational lives and it has caused
us endless confusion and continual problems. Leadership has to be approached from
Spiritual formation, the formation of all that we are before ourselves and the world
in relationship to the love of God expressed through the Word. We can then go on
and take leadership models from others but frame them in the context of what they
do to our own spiritual formation and the shaping of those we lead.
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Secondly, we need to see the development
of leaders who can listen
Leadership is often seen from the perspective of the power of the leader who can
communicate well to the ones she is called to lead. This is important. Leaders need
to be able to communicate well so that people know how to dialogue with the leaders
they choose to follow. Yet the key to being a good communicator is that you are
an even better listener. Leadership is about the process of listening to the many
messages which surround. So the developing of leaders will be teaching a series
of questions which will be continual and life long. These questions will vary from
person to person and may not be asked in a formal way but they will need to be answered
in any environment a leader encounters. Questions such as ‘What is God saying to
me through my friends or those I perceive as enemies?’ and ‘What is going on beneath
the surface of this person or organization?’ and ‘Why am I really doing what I am
doing?’ will be the sorts of questions which will open up a leader to enable a life
of listening. Listening to God through revealed scripture, listening to your own
heart, listening to the friends you have and the culture you are in, and listening
to the Spirits voice through all of this is right at the core of developing leaders.
Great leaders are great listeners, they know that they live their lives in response
to the articulation of God through the Word and Spirit.
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Thirdly, we need to engage an open life
of vulnerability and avoid a preoccupation with image
Leadership is surrounded by myth. It is usually the myth of the super-hero who defies
all the odds and comes through from the most extreme circumstances and not only
survives but flourishes receiving every accolade from an adoring public. The myth
is driven in our contemporary world through Hollywood in the West and Bollywood
in the East in the desire to create consumers of this myth and make pots of money.
I am one sucker who has spent to much of his money on watching the myth of the super-hero
and a sucker I remain. I will pay good money to watch Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood
and Tom Cruise. Yet it is not real. Super-heroes do not model leadership reality
and the mythmakers know it better than we do.
Leadership comes from humans who interact appropriately with their world. They look
at the world in which they are called to live and seek to live for God in the middle
of it. Leaders who lead well engage with the reality around them, they enter into
a dirty world and are made dirty in the process. Developing leaders who know how
to be vulnerable in the realities of their own lives is crucial for the church in
the opening decade of this century.
Linked with this is image. We are becoming more and more obsessed with image. In
this obsession reality is often ignored. Reality is more and more being understood
as how we appear rather than how we are. In this world of image repentance is not
needed. All that is needed in the world where image dominates is a new surface to
replace the fading old one and suddenly we are free. This can come through a new
dress, the purchase of some cosmetic surgery or new car. Yet, image is important
and one of the keys to developing leaders is the creation of the right image.
Where is the source of this image? The image will not be a series of masks or faces
which can be worn for particular audiences. It is rather the response to the image
of God offered to us through creation and redemption brought about through the Cross.
Yet if leaders are to be made in the image of God and continue to be remade into
that image it will mean vulnerability and an openness to let the image be made by
God and not ourselves. There is no problem with image if it reflects the reality
of what is inside.
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Fourthly, we need to develop leaders
who are generous
Leadership is about generosity. It is about the ability to give and keep on giving.
This will work its way through into an extravagant belief in people. If a leader
does not believe in the people they are called to lead then much is lost. We become
mere functionaries of organizational life and everyone else follows becoming mere
functionaries in their turn. This characteristic of generosity is underplayed and
yet is foundational to a Christian understanding of what leadership is all about.
Developing leaders will necessitate teaching potential leaders how they are to give
themselves along with their time and resources to others. Sectarian, mean and merely
tribal leaders will always lead us into one mess or another even though they may
be very good at what they do given the narrow confines of their world.
What can we say in conclusion? We are called to develop leaders who know God, can
do their tasks well and be in continual interaction with the community. I also suggest
that the sort of leader we develop has to be well formed spiritually becoming fully
human as God intended, be adepts at listening to God, themselves and the world,
able to live with their own weakness and process them well without running for the
cover of some illusory image. Finally I suggested that leaders have to be generous
if they are going to lead well. I truly believe that this is not some impossible
vision but within our grasp if we encounter God through the Word and listen to the
Spirit. After sorting this out we can then go on to our training courses, mentoring
programs, leadership retreats, reading schedules, hard targets and all the other
décor of leadership development.
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