Leadership and the Church

Kester at The Complex Christ has been posting some great stuff on leadership. His latest post is especially worth a read. It's important because he is one of the few people who is actually discussing the place and role of leadership in the emerging church. One of my questions of Pete Ward's Liquid Church is what does this mean for church leadership? This is some of what Kester says:

This will call for distributed leadership in which different people take a lead as their gifting requires.

Leadership is not communciation. It is facilitating communication.

Leaders have huge power-potential, but, as servants, constantly devolve and distribute it.

Leaders in the current model of church have been seen as 'do it all' people. Multi-gifted people who can preach, teach, pray, minister, pastor, lead forward, visit sick people, chair meetings, organize services, plan committes, arrange flowers, conduct weddings ... And thus have had an easy time arranging an aura of power and authority. Leaders in the new model should be seen as having one gift: the ability to facilitate other people's gifts ... And thus will be dis-interested in power.

Some of this I really like and think yes. Part of me wonders whether it is too idealistic, but then as Brueggemann might say, when we imagining some different we are giving it space to become reality. Some of this still leaves huge questions concerning where this leaves the ordained minister of word and sacrament.  I wonder whether this is something which works in emerging church because they are smaller, how would it work on a larger scale. I can give testimony that not every leader I know is interested in 'arranging an aura of power and authority'. Is this a Baptist thing, where leadership in many places (although not exclusively) is more shared among elders and deacons? And also, it is in the church meeting where decisions are made - although these can be easily manipulated.  I'm looking forward to reading John Colwell's new book Promise and Presence (out in November), which has a chapter of ministry as sacrament. I wonder also whether the language of church as organization and leader as facilitator describes the church as we should. On my mind is also the idea of leader/minister as theologian who's task is to narrate the church's story theologically (see my post here).

Comments

[Eric Beach]

Denise, my wife, is a teacher of nurses and has recently taken on a course in leadership in nursing at the RCN. One of the ideas that she has talked to me about is the idea that there are leaders and there are managers and that there is a difference between the two. In my role at work I act as a leader - I move things on probably by getting people talking together in the sort of way that is talked about on the Kester website. But I am not a manager - shame really because it means less pay! [But perhaps I shouldn't be thinking that way!! ;-) ]. And I have no real desire to be a manager - there are others who do that much better, people who are political animals, who are happy to crunch numbers, who will take decisions and make ideas work. Me, I'm more of an ideas man who identifies what needs to be done - who has the vision.

What I'm wondering is whether the church could learn something from this. The early church had the apostles and prophets and it had the deacons. Were they making a distinction between leaders and managers? And do we tread on dangerous ground when we expect our 'ministers' to be 'do it all' people; men and women who are both leaders AND managers?

[ash]

I've been reading A Short History of Christianity recently, and was interested in the character Pope Gregory the Great.

It seems to me, here is a man in the middle of some of the hugest ecclesiastical power-struggles in history. Where you have the Romish church conducting itself as an Imperial super-power.

And there is a man who tries to flee town to avoid being made Pope. A man who, when written to by the Alexandrian patriarch then berates him for addressing him in too lofty terms. Who first coined the term "a servant of all servants of God."

That's a very good and very clear model of leadership. It's not at all suprising that Gregorian monasticism survives today.