Page 2999 – Christianity Today (2024)

Emphasizing Missions in the Home:

1. Pray for missionaries and missions as a family.
2. Read and discuss missionary prayer letters.
3. Correspond by letter or e-mail with a missionary family. Encourage younger members to correspond with a missionary child.
4. Adopt a missionary family.
5. Read missionary books and biographies as a family.
6. Entertain missionary guests in your home.
7. Show an interest in the missions program of your local church.
8. Attend missionary meetings as a family.
9. Make giving to missions a family function.

Emphasizing Missions in Sunday School:

1. Pray for missions during the Sunday school class time.
2. Order an information packet about the current VBS project to be used in Vacation Bible School, Awana, or Sunday school.
3. Introduce and display missionary books.
4. Utilize available videos, cassette tapes, maps, pictures and other multimedia.
5. Present a short skit or role-play.
6. Arrange to have missionary speakers visit your class.
7. Assign students to report on a particular missionary, country, or problem they face.
8. Adopt a missionary child or national student for prayer, correspondence and encouragement.
9. Study a country: religions, dress, language, culture, climate. Make a model home, dress in foreign costume, serve typical snack food.
10. Assign interesting questions and projects for student research.
11. Include missionary songs in your music program (available from church and public libraries).
12. Play a game that children play in a different country.
13. Tell missionary stories. These are one of the most effective tools for encouraging missionary interest.

Praying for Missionaries:

1. Be informed. Learn facts about your missionary, their country, ministry and family.
2. Pray regularly for your missionary.
3. Pray that the Holy Spirit will lead your missionary to prepared hearts.
4. Pray for the children of missionaries.
5. Pray for the Lord of the Harvest to raise up more missionaries.
6. Keep praying!

Corresponding With Missionaries:

1. Take personal interest in the missionary. Read the prayer letters and learn what the missionary is doing. Become acquainted with family interests. Read articles and books about the missionary’s country and culture.
2. Ask for the Communications Guidelines when corresponding with workers in creative access countries.
3. Share about family and church activities, occasionally send clippings and recipes, answer personal and form letters the missionary has sent. Colorful stationery brightens the heart. Try some on your missionary!

Services to Missionaries:

1. Provide a “linen closet” for missionaries when they first return from the field. New linens, towels, kitchen items, cleaning agents, blankets, games, books, etc. are especially appreciated.
2. Send care packages to the missionaries’ college students or missionary kids.
3. Provide makeovers and hair stylists for the missionaries when they first return from the field.
4. Help the missionary find housing and transportation when they are in the U.S.

Promotion Ideas:

1. Strategically place bulletin boards that contain catchy captions, large pictures of missionaries, mission activity, and maps to remind people of our responsibility to share Christ with the regions beyond.
2. Highlight your missionaries, the countries where they serve, avenues of service, and mission projects. Enlist artistic people!
3. Telephone conversations can add an interesting touch to your missions emphasis. These conversations can be recorded or live, though this requires some planning.
4. Adopt a “Missionary of the Month.”
5. Provide bulletin inserts about your missionary.

Used by permission. http://www.efca.org/international/resources/index.html

(This article was excerpted from the BuildingChurchLeaders.com Training Theme Reaching Our Community)

“Growing numbers of Americans say they are spiritual but not religious,” says Robert Wuthnow in After Heaven, his assessment of American spiritual development since 1950. It is a spirituality without truth or authority but filled with belief in the supernatural. It is a trend born of the modern fears of religion.

The church must echo Jesus’ own powerful critique of religion and visibly demonstrate the difference between religion and the gospel. Two questions can help churches think about their core message:

1. Does our church communication clearly distinguish between religion and the gospel?

Jesus condemned self-justification through moral performance, at one point claiming that religion was more spiritually dangerous than overt immorality. Both traditional religion and the new spirituality are forms of self-salvation. The religious way of being our own savior leads us to keep God’s laws, while the irreligious way of being our own savior leads us to break his laws. The solution is the gospel.

The gospel shows us a God far more holy than a conservative moralist can imagine—for he can never be pleased by our moral performance. Yet it also shows us a God far more loving than the liberal relativist can imagine—for his Son bore all the weight of eternal justice. His love for us cost him dearly.

Practically speaking, this means we must be extremely careful to distinguish between general moral virtue and the unique humility, confidence, and love that flow from the gospel. Without the gospel, we can restrain the human heart, but not change the human heart. The gospel calls for repentance over our self-righteousness. The true virtue that results creates an attitude of acceptance toward the poor, the outsider, and the opponent that neither religion nor secularism can produce.

2. Do our deeds demonstrate the difference between religion and the gospel?

Jesus condemned religion as a pretext for oppression: “If you only greet your brothers, what do ye more than others?” (Matt. 5:47). Only when Christians non-condescendingly serve the poor, only when Christians are more firm yet open to their opponents will the world understand the difference between religion and the gospel.

Pushing moral behaviors before we lift up Christ is religion. Religion has always been outside-in—”If I behave out here in all these ways, then I will have God’s blessing and love inside.” But the gospel is inside-out—if I know the blessing and grace of God inside, then I can behave out here in all these ways.”

We, of all people, ought to understand and agree with fears about religion, for Jesus himself warned us to be wary of it, and not to mistake a call for moral virtue for the good news of God’s salvation provided in Christ.

Tim Keller is senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.

This year, the Christian Vision Project asked a select group of church leaders, What must we learn, and unlearn, to be agents of God’s mission in the world? Here is Christopher Wright’s answer—an urge for believers to rethink the meaning of mission, whether your mission field is across the ocean or across the street.

The map of global Christianity that our grandparents knew has been turned upside-down. At the start of the 20th century, only ten percent of the world’s Christians lived in the continents of the south and east. Ninety percent lived in North America and Europe, along with Australia and New Zealand. But at the start of the 21st century, at least 70 percent of the world’s Christians live in the non-Western world—more appropriately called the majority world.

More Christians worship in Anglican churches in Nigeria each week than in all the Episcopal and Anglican churches of Britain, Europe, and North America combined. There are more Baptists in Congo than in Britain. More people in church every Sunday in communist China than in all of Western Europe. Ten times more Assemblies of God members in Latin America than in the U.S.

The old peripheries are now the center. The old centers are now on the periphery. Philip Jenkins brought this shift to popular attention in The Next Christendom. Yet many Christian leaders of the global South resent the implication in Jenkins’s title. They have no desire to be another “Christendom”—wielding monolithic territorial and political power. Nor do they wish to be any kind of threat to the West, but rather to help Western Christians in the struggle to shift from survival mode to mission mode—in their own lands.

Can the West be re-evangelized? Only if we unlearn our default ethnocentric assumptions about “real” Christianity (our own) and unlearn our blindness to the ways Western Christianity is infected by cultural idolatry. It may be more blessed to give than to receive, but it is often harder to receive than to give. That reverses the polarity of patron and client and makes us uncomfortably aware that what Jesus said to the Laodicean church might apply to us in the West: “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:17).

Normal Christianity

Most of the learning and unlearning we must do in this new era is no more than relearning the original nature of biblical Christianity, which very quickly became polycentric. Acts 1:8 can give the impression that the early church spread out in ripples, from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth. But in fact, Acts tells a more complicated story. Antioch was where followers of Jesus were first called Christians, and it became the center of westward-oriented missionary work. Paul saw Thessalonica as a radiating center for the message in Macedonia and Achaia. Ephesus clearly became a key metropolis for Christian witness in Asia Minor. Paul was eager to make Rome a base for planned work further to the west in Spain. Jerusalem was simply one center among many.

Christianity has never had a territorial center. Our center is the person of Christ, and wherever he is known, there is another potential center of faith and witness. So, as mission historian Andrew Walls has said, the emergence of genuine world Christianity and the ending of Western assumptions of heartland hegemony simply marks a return to normal Christianity, which looks much more like the New Testament than Christendom ever did.

Multidirectional Mission

With the growth of the multinational church, mission is becoming multidirectional. The U.S. remains the largest single contributor of Protestant cross-cultural missionaries. But which country is the second largest? Not a Western nation, but India. And it is possible that India has overtaken the States in the number of those involved in truly cross-cultural mission—both within and beyond India. There are many more Korean missionaries than British, and some Nigerian evangelical mission organizations are larger in personnel than most Western ones (while operating on budgets that are a fraction of their Western counterparts’). Already, 50 percent of all Protestant missionaries in the world come from non-Western countries, and the proportion is increasing annually. So you are as likely to meet a Brazilian missionary in North Africa as a British missionary in Brazil. Indeed, the ratio of Indian missionaries to Western missionaries in India today is probably 100 to 1. Mission today is from everywhere, to everywhere.

So another piece of unlearning we must do is breaking the habit of using the term mission field to refer to everywhere else in the world except our home country in the West. The language of home and mission field is still used by many churches and agencies, but it fundamentally misrepresents reality. Not only does it perpetuate a patronizing view of the rest of the world as always being on the receiving end of our missionary largesse, but it also fails to recognize the maturity of churches in many other lands.

Christianity probably reached India before it reached Britain. There was a flourishing church in Ethiopia a century before Patrick evangelized Ireland. There were churches in Eastern Europe centuries before Europeans reached the shores of North America. There have been large Christian communities in the Middle East for 2,000 years.

So it is discourteous (at best) and damaging (at worst) when Western mission activity ignores all such ancient expressions of the Christian tradition and lumps all lands abroad as the “mission field,” in comfortable neglect of the fact that the rest of the world church sees the West as one of the toughest mission fields in the world today.

This is not, of course, to suggest that countries of ancient Christian churches need no evangelism, any more than we would exclude nominal Western Christians from the need to hear the true gospel. But the real mission boundary is not between “Christian countries” and “the mission field,” but between faith and unbelief, and that is a boundary that runs through every land and, indeed, through every local street.

Normal Mission

In this, too, we will be relearning the multidirectional nature of mission in the Book of Acts. Our preoccupation with concentric circles has obscured the more complex pattern of mission and movement that Luke shows us in Acts.

For example:

• Philip goes from Jerusalem to Samaria, to Gaza, to Azotus, and to Caesarea (Acts 8).
• Peter goes to Lydda and Joppa (Acts 9:32-43).
• People from Cyprus go to Antioch and initiate a multiethnic church there (Acts 11:19-21).
• Barnabas goes from Antioch to Tarsus to get Saul (Acts 11:22-26).
• Timothy goes from Lystra to Ephesus, while Titus ends up in Crete (Acts 16, 1 Timothy, Titus).
• Priscilla and Aquila come from Italy and end up in Corinth (Acts 18).
• Apollos comes from Alexandria to Ephesus, then ends up in Corinth (Acts 18-19).

What held together these crisscrossing lines of missionary movement all over the international Mediterranean world? Carefully tended relationships of trust. That is what lies behind the letters of recommendation and the exhortations in 3 John to treat traveling church planters and teachers “in a manner worthy of God” and to respect their self-sacrificing for the name of Christ. Indeed, 3 John is a much-neglected missional tract for our times. We need to recapture this relational, partnering, reciprocal style of missional interchange.

God with a Mission

Perhaps what we most need to learn, since we so easily forget it, is that mission is and always has been God’s before it becomes ours. The whole Bible presents a God of missional activity, from his purposeful, goal-oriented act of Creation to the completion of his cosmic mission in the redemption of the whole of Creation—a new heaven and a new earth. The Bible also presents to us humanity with a mission (to rule and care for the earth); Israel with a mission (to be the agent of God’s blessing to all nations); Jesus with a mission (to embody and fulfill the mission of Israel, bringing blessing to the nations through bearing our sin on the Cross and anticipating the new Creation in his Resurrection); and the church with a mission (to participate with God in the ingathering of the nations in fulfillment of Old Testament Scriptures).

But behind all this stands God with a mission (the redemption of his whole Creation from the wreckage of human and satanic evil). The mission of God is what fills the Bible from the brokenness of the nations in Genesis 11 to the healing of the nations in Revelation 21-22. So any mission activity to which we are called must be seen as humble participation in this vast sweep of the historical mission of God. All mission or missions that we initiate, or into which we invest our vocation, gifts, and energies, flows from the prior mission of God. God is on mission, and we, in that wonderful phrase of Paul, are “co-workers with God.”

This God-centered refocusing of mission turns inside-out our obsession with mission plans, agendas, goals, strategies, and grand schemes.

We ask, “Where does God fit into the story of my life?” when the real question is, “Where does my little life fit into the great story of God’s mission?”

We want to be driven by a purpose tailored for our individual lives, when we should be seeing the purpose of all life, including our own, wrapped up in the great mission of God for the whole of creation.

We wrestle to “make the gospel relevant to the world.” But God is about the mission of transforming the world to fit the shape of the gospel.

We argue about what can legitimately be included in the mission God expects from the church, when we should ask what kind of church God expects for his mission in all its comprehensive fullness.

I may wonder what kind of mission God has for me, when I should ask what kind of me God wants for his mission.

We invite God’s blessing on our human-centered mission strategies, but the only concept of mission into which God fits is the one of which he is the beginning and the end.

Relearning the Cross

Most of all, we need to go back to the Cross and relearn its comprehensive glory. For if we persist in a narrow, individualistic view of the Cross as a personal exit strategy to heaven, we fall short of its biblical connection to the mission purpose of God for the whole of creation (Col. 1:20) and thereby lose the Cross-centered core of holistic mission.

It is vital that we see the Cross as central to every aspect of holistic, biblical mission—that is, of all we do in the name of the crucified and risen Jesus. It is a mistake, in my view, to think that while our evangelism must be centered on the Cross (as of course it has to be), our social engagement has some other theological foundation or justification.

Why is the Cross just as important across the whole field of mission? Because in all forms of Christian mission, we are confronting the powers of evil and the kingdom of Satan—with all their dismal effects on human life and the wider creation. If we are to proclaim and demonstrate the reality of the kingdom of God and his justice, then we will be in direct conflict with the usurped reign of the evil one. In all such work, social or evangelistic, we confront the reality of sin and Satan. In all such work, we challenge the darkness of the world with the light and Good News of Jesus Christ and the reign of God through him.

By what authority can we do so? On what basis dare we challenge the chains of Satan, in word and deed, in people’s spiritual, moral, physical, and social lives? Only the Cross. The Cross must be as central to our social engagement as it is to our evangelism. There is no other power, no other resource, no other name through which we can offer the whole gospel to the whole person and the whole world than Jesus Christ crucified and risen.

Christopher J.H. Wright is the international director of Langham Partnership known in the U.S. as John Stott Ministries.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today international. Originally appeared in Christianity Today.

Picked up in a Vermont “used book” store: David McCullough’s The Great Bridge (Simon and Schuster, 1972). As usual McCullough (among the best of modern writers) tells a great story, this time of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which arched the East River and joined Manhattan to Brooklyn.

In June 1872, the Chief Engineer of the project wrote: “To such of the general public as might imagine that no work had been done on the New York tower, because they see no evidence of it above the water, I should simply remark that the amount of the masonry and concrete laid on that foundation during the past winter, under water, is equal in quantity to the entire masonry of the Brooklyn tower visible today above the water line.”

The Brooklyn Bridge remains a major transportation artery in New York City today because, 135 years ago, the Chief Engineer and his construction team did their most patient and daring work where no one could see it: on the foundations of the towers below the water line. It is one more illustration of an ageless principle in leadership: the work done below the water line (in a leader’s soul) that determines whether he or she will stand the test of time and challenge. This work is called worship, devotion, spiritual discipline. It’s done in quiet, where no one but God sees.

Today there is a tremendous emphasis on leadership themes such as vision, organizational strategy, and the “market-sensitivity” of one’s message. And it’s all great stuff (stuff I wish I’d heard when I was real young). But if it is all about what’s above the water line, we are likely to witness a leadership crash of sorts in the coming years. Leaders blessed with great natural skills and charisma may be vulnerable to collapse in their character, their key relationships, their center of belief, because they never learned that you cannot (or should not anyway) build above the water line until there is a substantial foundation below it. A re-read of the life of Moses (which I’ve just done) is the best example of this. The man spent 80 years preparing for his more visible work.

My opinion: the test of a leader is less what he or she accomplishes before 45 years of age and more what happens after. Call it sustainability! The trick is to last and grow stronger, wiser, more focused with the years.

These thoughts stimulated from reading about an old bridge.

More used books: The religion section of the same store yielded a copy of Joan Chittister’s Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope (Eerdmans, 2003), a much newer book and full of rich insight. Sister Chittister, no stranger to tough struggles in her life, writes, “The great secret of life is how to survive struggle without succumbing to it, how to bear struggle without being defeated by it, how to come out of great struggle better than when we found ourselves in the midst of it.” No whining or complaining in this book, rather a “blunt-facts” view of life and where one discovers the grace of God in the midst of it.

Pastor and author Gordon MacDonald is also chair of World Relief and editor at large of Leadership>.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today, Leadership Journal. October 04, 2004.

Donald Seibert has seen the inside workings of not only churches but high-pressure corporations. As chairman and chief executive officer at J. C. Penney, he gained a reputation as an effective organizer and peacemaker. And in peace, the company prospered.

In 1981, a year when most retailers were taking their lumps, Penney’s earnings rose 44 percent on a mere 4.5 percent increase in sales. What was the secret? Business Week pointed to a new management style “keyed to group decision making … consensus management.”

Seibert, architect of that new atmosphere, is now retired, but his philosophy remains unchanged: develop a team that can continue without a hitch when key individuals leave.

Here are his reflections from a lifetime of service within the complex organizations of church and business.

What leadership tensions are common to both business and the local church?

In business, tensions arise when the chief executive’s objectives somehow differ from those of long-standing workers in the business. In the church, the same tensions arise when the pastor wants to do one thing, and some of the church pillars—Sunday school superintendent, chairman of the board of elders—want to do something else. The tensions are further compounded by misunderstandings about where the business—or the church—is really heading.

Can you give an example?

I was involved in a church that had a strong commitment to foreign missions—a high-profile missions conference, large missions budget, and so on. A few years after I joined, the pastor was succeeded by another man who shared the commitment to missions but also felt our church’s involvement in local ministries was not what it should be. So he tried to motivate us in the direction of local ministries, and his effort was completely misunderstood as a denunciation of foreign missions. The situation grew dramatic, with people raising their voices in meetings. The whole problem could have been avoided if the pastor’s intentions had been communicated successfully to all levels of the church.

So pastors have an obligation to articulate direction clearly, to educate the church on what they’re trying to do and how they want to do it.

Exactly. At J. C. Penney, whenever our management team prepared to issue a statement, whether it was a press release or an internal memo, we asked ourselves two questions: (1) Is this easily understood? (2) Can this be misunderstood? These questions are quite different, and often our original statement failed the second test and needed to be rewritten.

How do you measure whether you as a leader are getting your ideas across?

We use a number of techniques: attitude surveys, informal visits by members of the senior management committee, discussions with people at different levels of the company. If you take time to ask questions, you find out quickly what your people understand and do not understand.

Isn’t this all rather basic?

Yes. Communication skills are based on common sense. But often they’re so simple you ignore them.

Suppose a pastor communicates to a church that God’s purpose for them is to live holy lives and preach the gospel to the world. They decide to send out x number of missionaries, build new Sunday school facilities, etc. What happens next?

First, as the pastor, I would want to know exactly how equipped I am to handle these ministry goals. If Sunday school facilities are inadequate and need expanding, I put that down as a goal. If my missionary outreach needs expansion, I put that down. I find out how financially able the church is to meet these goals, and whether we have the potential to raise the money. I ask specific things like, “Is labor available in the church?” “Will we have to hire outside help?”

Then I ask some more difficult questions: “How many people are committed to these broad ministry objectives? Where is the support going to come from?” If I don’t have a lot of people behind me, it would be foolish to go ahead with a building program. Instead, the first objective would be to spend a year doing nothing but building support and developing understanding for the programs within the church. It’s absolutely critical to know you and your people are together in your goals and objectives.

Good sports teams have at least two things in common: a coach or quarterback who calls good plays, and players who understand their assignments. It’s interesting that a team that works together without a highly visible star will usually beat the team that depends solely on the superstar.

Finally, I’d try to keep goals simple and within reason. To illustrate, I’ve worked with several volunteer choirs. A group of amateur singers may not be able to do justice to some of Handel’s music, but if you select material within their level of competence, they sound magnificent. It may take lots of time and effort, but you can gradually raise their level of competence. Perhaps in a few years, you’ll be able to come back and have these people sing Handel.

Is there a difference between management and leadership?

Here’s a distinction I make. Management is the process of assuring that the programs and objectives we have set are implemented. Leadership, on the other hand, is the process of motivating people.

Both are strategic skills, for business people like myself and for pastors, too. Every pastor needs to know what he has to work with before any work can get done. This means taking inventory of resources, understanding the congregation’s strengths and weaknesses, reviewing all personnel—the human resources—noting where they’re placed, and eliminating structural impediments. These are basic management tools.

If a pastor or a business person is not strong in motivating, he can enlist key people who have demonstrated over time that they have influence with others. If you can identify these people and get them committed to your objectives, they can help sell your programs and motivate others to put them into effect.

What management principles tend to be missed by the local church?

In the churches I’ve attended, one of the biggest conflicts has been between lay stewardship leaders and lay spiritual leaders—typically the trustees versus the elders. Ideally, trustees raise and manage money and tangible resources; elders provide spiritual leadership. These two functions aren’t mutually exclusive, but too often lay people can’t see how their goals and objectives are common. It’s a chronic problem.

Any solutions?

Well, let me tell you what we did at Penney’s. We used to agree on our main objectives and then turn each division loose to plan: the retail division produced a plan, the buyers produced a plan, marketing produced a plan, and so on. Even though we were all working from the same objective, we often found things just didn’t mesh. We weren’t synchronized. And when the results weren’t productive, we had a lot of finger pointing as to whose plan failed.

We moved to a team-management approach. We gathered the leaders from each division into a room and said, “Don’t come out until you’ve produced one harmonious plan.” Not only did we start to get good results, but the finger pointing stopped, because each leader was co-author of the plan.

I don’t want to oversimplify, but is there any reason why the same principle can’t work in the church? The boards of elders and trustees, for instance, could put together leaders from both boards and produce one good plan. Of course, for the plan to work, all board members must fully understand the plan and be sold on it. Again, communication must prevent misunderstanding.

What about the oft-repeated line “You can’t run a church like a business”? In what way should business principles not be brought into the church?

Businesses exist to make financial profit; without profit the business dies, and no other objectives can be accomplished. So I would say that in running a church, you should not use business objectives.

But in administering church programs, you should consider using good business principles.

One of those principles is to treat people with respect. I believe it’s not only questionable morally but counterproductive to run over people in any kind of situation, church or business. You may produce short gains that way, but you’ll pay the price down the road in alienated and departed parishioners.

Is the pastor the chief executive officer of the church in the same way as a CEO is in a corporation?

I think the pastor is the church’s CEO, but the two positions are not parallel. As the CEO of a corporation, everyone reports to me either directly or indirectly. The CEO of a church is more like the CEO of our nation—the President. He leads, but only with our consent.

What do you expect from the pastor in this unique leadership role?

I expect the pastor to be the initiator of clearly defined, easily understood spiritual goals. I don’t expect him to develop all the programs to accomplish these goals, but he has to initiate them.

Over the years, have your various pastors successfully done this?

Not all of them. In some places I was never sure, not only of what I was expected to do in the church but of where the church was going in general.

In fact, if you asked the members of a typical congregation to write in 25 words or less where they think their church is headed, you’d get many different answers.

In addition to the role as initiator, how does the pastor function as church administrator?

The buck stops with the pastor, who must assume final responsibility for the way the church is administered. That’s not to say every pastor is a good administrator. You have other functions to perform, and you’d probably like to spend more time on sermon preparation and counseling, for instance. But, regardless, you have to be accountable for how the church is run. You can delegate administration, but you can’t delegate accountability. The big danger in delegating administration—if you then walk away from it—is that the wrong administrator can gradually change the whole program of your church.

Does that mean a pastor must supervise each ministry of the church?

Certainly not. I feel I’ve been a more effective leader when others have actually done the work. And I want everyone to know who accomplished what. It’s the same with pastors. The feeling that you can do the job better yourself makes delegation difficult. But delegation is a must in any organization, and I believe people will execute a plan more successfully if it’s their plan too.

As a leader, how do you overcome the feeling that you can do the job better yourself?

That’s not easy to answer. I think it’s a given that the pastor will not be the most skilled person in the church at everything. Otherwise he’d be leading the choir, singing the solos, and running the air conditioning. In my company, I can find someone who is better than I am at performing almost every function. Marketing, advertising, writing product specifications—you name it, someone can do it better.

But a symphony conductor is not usually the best French horn player, and he doesn’t feel threatened. His role is to make the whole orchestra function to its potential. You should not feel threatened by an individual with great administrative skills, for example. Use him; help him realize his potential within the church.

But what happens when the French horn player only wants to play solos? Doesn’t participatory leadership encourage that kind of thing?

I suppose in some cases it does. But then you have the other side: When a number of people participate in leadership and administration, they help deal with the would-be soloist. The responsibility doesn’t rest entirely on your shoulders. Furthermore, in my church experience, most problems of this nature sprang from spiritual problems within the individual. They weren’t the result of management styles at all.

So you’re democratic as opposed to autocratic?

I am careful not to be autocratic. True, many organizations prosper under an autocratic leader. But in those places, you’ll also find a lot of unhappy people. When they find they just can’t work in that kind of environment, they leave.

And in a church with an autocratic pastor, a large part of the congregation becomes so dependent on this type of leader that when he steps down, he’s almost impossible to replace. One of the principal responsibilities of a CEO is to assure the company that an appropriate successor is ready to step in if something happens. There can be no interruption of the company’s growth. This is hard to pull off in companies led by an autocratic leader. In a sense, it is much better if my organization doesn’t depend on me as an individual but rather on my part in the long-range goal-setting process. And when I leave, this process must go on.

If I don’t have strong management skills, can I still lead effectively?

Yes, if you recognize that management does need to happen in your church. And just because you’ve never worked with management principles and tools doesn’t mean you can’t learn. Pastors are formally educated people; they have the basic intellect to understand these things. I believe many pastors would surprise themselves by discovering what good administrators and managers they really are. We all know people who became good golfers past the age of 50. They never knew they had the talent.

My own formal education was not in business administration. I know highly successful business people who have degrees in music, English, and philosophy. Administrative skills were picked up along the way.

Can you summarize your leadership principles for pastors and other church leaders?

I believe organizations improve when you do the following:

• Understand your own objectives, your own sense of mission and goals.
• Clearly articulate those objectives to your lay leaders, and try to get some feedback as to how well they understand them.
• Exercise patience. It will take time before you have enough of your parishioners behind you to turn objectives into working programs.
• Take inventory of your personal resources and those available within your congregation.

From the book Leaders Copyright © 1987 by Christianity Today

Leadership in the emerging church is a paradox. I am someone who fully sees the value of mission statements, organizational charts, and a strategic approach to leading. I read everything John Maxwell and Bill Hybels write, and they fuel my heart and passion for leadership. The irony is that most growing up in our emerging culture are critical of anything that looks like "organized religion." My church doesn't want anything too business oriented or too structured.

Where previous generations related to a more structured culture, many in the emerging church are drawn to a non-hierarchical approach. Much like what is emphasized in the writings of Henri Nouwen.

I've read Nouwen's In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership a dozen times. It convicts me to the core about motives and the heart of leadership. But Henri was shepherding and loving a relatively few people. Leading a church that is growing, launching new ministries, and building multi-level leadership teams needs Nouwen, but also Maxwell.

So I wrestle. In our church we live in the tension and try to do both. I dive into my Maxwell books and focus on building leadership and setting up structures needed for a healthy Ephesians 4:11-12 type of church. After a season, I need to run back to Nouwen for a season.

To some degree, these two paradigms seem polarized. But I think it is possible to still be "organized" without becoming "organized religion." In the end, it is the Spirit of God who does things through us anyway. But it is definitely a paradox we live in today, with new thoughts and values colliding in the emerging church.

My challenge is to let Henri show me how to reflect Jesus to my organizationally resistant sheep, even when I'm making plans like John.

—Dan Kimball, Vintage Faith Church, Santa Cruz, California

Leith Anderson: Leading by Influence

I recently got an e-mail from a pastor in Europe. Six years ago he had asked my advice regarding a crisis in the European church. He e-mailed me to thank me, but also to tell me that he's been mentoring another church through a crisis using the advice I gave him.

His e-mail was an example of the chain of influence—leaders who can look to those who came before them and influence those who come after them.

I'm at a different place on that chain than I used to be. I'm in my 30th year of ministry at Wooddale.

With experience and relationships come wisdom and the ability to understand issues with greater insight and speed. Now I'm thinking about how I can leverage my experience and relationships for the church and for the kingdom.

When you're younger and inexperienced, there are more mentors available to you, more people ahead of you in the chain. But when you're older, there are fewer. Lately I've been looking to Vernon Grounds, chancellor of Denver Seminary. He turns 92 this year, and he's been "retired" for 30 years. But he has blessed a whole new generation of leaders since then. From Vernon I've learned that good listening is often the best advice.

I've also turned to Richard Mouw at Fuller Seminary. I took his book The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage with me on my sabbatical. Mouw has learned to celebrate rather than criticize the heritages that have gone before us. While he may disagree with issues of the past, he focuses on how the benefits given by previous generations can in turn bless the next generation.

These are lessons I'm drawing from as I weigh my place in the chain. I've been given the experience, and given the relationships; now I'm looking at how I can use that experience to bless those relationships and the relationships that come after them.

—Leith Anderson, Wooddale Church, Eden Prairie, Minnesota

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information.

Richard Lamb is the author of The Pursuit of God in the Company of Friends. He is a long-time InterVarsity Christian Fellowship staff member and has served at Stanford, U. C. Santa Cruz, Harvard, Boston University, Boston College and Brandeis. Lamb now supervises their ministry in the western United States

One of the things that you establish in this book is that you were not a natural people person. Doing something in the company of friends was really more of a learned behavior than a natural behavior for you.

In fact, I was trained as a scientist in college. I would have to say somebody else might have called me a nerd back then. I became involved in a Christian fellowship in college and that became a very vital shaping experience.

I would come to the InterVarsity Fellowship meetings on my own and leave on my own, and I was both committed but also detached.

I want to get to the very thesis that you’re establishing. How would you describe the basic point of this book?

Well, these two things are attractive to us: the pursuit of God and the company of friends. They’re not alone. These things have an interplay with one another. The one reinforces the other and vice versa. I think if you were to query people about what the pursuit of God involves, you might come up with fairly individualistic answers like deepening in prayer, growing in my relationship with God, spending more time reading the Scriptures.

On the one hand, community is a very attractive notion. Friendship is a very attractive notion. But I think even in churches we can often find that we don’t have language to talk about things that are closest to our hearts in our relationship with God. And so I’m trying to connect those two very attractive concepts together in a single process that I think is the process Jesus used with his disciples.

Community is a buzz word. Everybody is talking about community. What essentially are people missing when they talk about community in the Christian community today?

I’m not sure if there’s one thing. But part of the answer involves understanding what I think are three essential and kind of irreducible components of community. Community involves a move outward, a move inward, and a relational glue that keeps us together. I call the move outward partnership in mission; the move inward is accountability, depth of relationship; and the glue, the relational glue is friendship.

This book is a series of stories about the painful experiences you’ve had in learning these lessons. And one of them has to do with starting a church in Cambridge. Tell us a little bit about the Cambridge church, how it represents so many of the principles you’re talking about here, and how it became a place where you could be shaped.

I’m in touch with a lot of people who are InterVarsity alumni. And we had a sense that there would be a place for a new church to emerge that would have a kind of a charismatic focus, but not a kind of high Pentecostalism, if that makes sense, a kind of an academic Vineyard.

We gathered together, and our belief was there’s a lot of firepower here. We’re serious Christians, we’re eager, ready to rock and roll, planting a new church. Bur our team had the hardest time getting off the ground. There was conflict and judgment and relational tension. And at one point, one of the key people in the group said, we’re hoping that this church will attract hundreds, but our ability to be a small group that lives out what we believe is going to be essential to our ability to have anything to offer to dozens, let alone hundreds.

That was a turning point. It was a personal challenge to me because I was right at the heart of one of the tensions. And I was not performing well. It was really an invitation to expect God to be present, Jesus has to be right here in our midst.

One of the points that you make in your chapter on presence and intimacy is the time factor involved in pursuing God in the company of friends. And you talk about Jesus and how he had a way of using his time that reached a lot of people but maximized that company of friends as a more important use of his time.

The whole notion there is a focus on the few for the sake of the many. This is an ancient notion and well discussed by Robert Coleman in his book of 40 years ago, The Master Plan of Evangelism. The idea of being intentional with people can be a little intimidating because it feels like, if I spend more time with this member of my small group then do I have to be fair about it? Just realize, Jesus focused on a few. He had 12 that he spent a lot of time with, and he had three that he was even more intimate with. And his pattern of relationship can be our pattern as well.

You talk about getting with people different than you are. Well, most churches are based around affinity groups. They’re based around hom*ogenous units.

That may be true church by church, but you can still go into any small group you find and look around and say, oh, these people aren’t like me. And that may be our natural gut reaction. But the second reaction, which we need to train ourselves into, is to say, thank God they’re not like me. I’m in this group, and I have something to learn from them. I have something to learn from them and not just because they’re all my demographic. No, the people here who are pretty different from me are here for a reason, and I have something to learn.

Many times the company of friends doesn’t really have a stated leader, but there is an interplay between serving and leading.

Part of what I’m trying to recover is the notion that friendship and intentionality somehow don’t go together. Friendship should be spontaneous. Intentionality implies work and insincerity. And I’m saying the deepest friendships are going to be highly intentional where we think about people even when they’re not in the room, and we pray for them even beyond what they’re asking prayer for.

That’s a part of the case I’m trying to make that the effort and thoughtfulness applied to our friendships really strengthens those friendships.

What about somebody who hungers for community, but they feel they are alone? They don’t feel like they have any friends, and what you’re describing is even making that feel more painful.

I think everybody has a chance to find a group, like a small group or a new church perhaps, or a new small group. But you show up at that church or at that small group and you look around and you say, these people aren’t like me. Or, I don’t really feel like this is really meeting my needs. And one of the primary pathways or primary steps to community is to decide to make a commitment to a community.

You say this small group didn’t meet my needs tonight. And it may not meet my needs for several months, but if I commit to this group of people over time, by virtue of that commitment I’m going to experience a deeper experience of community. I will no longer be alone. Then I can make other choices like deciding I am going to let them know what’s going on in my life. I’m not just going to wait around and see if they like me. I’m going to be a part of making this group community for me.

We all can make those kinds of choices in our lives. We don’t have to feel like that’s a party to which we have not been invited.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today.

“Where human frailty once served as a reason for me to withdraw from the church, with its unruly and divergent congregants, this is now what compels me back to spiritual community. I had overlooked one essential factor—that I am as finite and flawed as everyone else.”—Carmen Renee Berry

Carmen Renee Berry wants to help those who, like her, once dismissed the church in cynicism, but are now reconsidering it in their search for spiritual community. In The Unauthorized Guide to Choosing a Church (Brazos, 2003), she offers an easy-to-use, sometimes irreverent, hitchhiker’s guide to the mottled landscape of American Christianity. She examines some 30 denominations, describing in simple terms each tradition’s heritage and habits so that the curious can “sort through the liturgy, lingo, and lunacy” of choosing a church.

When you were distanced from the church, what prompted your return?A good friend committed suicide. Though he attended church, he had grown cynical. I shared his attitude, but his death moved me from feeling cool and clever in my cynicism to admitting I have failings. I didn’t want to be spiritually isolated like my friend.

Over several months I purposely developed relationships with people of faith. A phrase in my mind changed me: “You’ve been living in doubt and visiting your faith; it’s time to live in your faith and visit your doubts.”

You wrote that you felt compelled back to “spiritual community.” What’s the difference between that and “church”?A spiritual community is a place where fallible people find relationships that are accepting and encourage them to grow. Not all churches do that. But many churches, through small groups, ministry teams, recovery groups, and so on, do contain these spiritual communities.

I was active in a church of 2,000, but only because I found spiritual community in a smaller subgroup. I was on a team that ministered during our Sunday night contemporary service. We arrived early, set up, prayed with the band members, and afterwards prayed with attenders. By working on a common goal, we built transparent, accountable, and encouraging bonds.

How can a pastor encourage the growth of these spiritual communities?A church’s response to failure is key. When someone makes a mistake, is there freaking out, a firing, or a flogging? On the other hand, does the church hold those who fail accountable to make amends and grow?

One pastor I knew made an off-hand joke that put down his elder board. It was a mistake. But during the following week, he made amends with the board. The next Sunday, he made a public apology and announced his error and his reconciliation with the elders. He modeled for the church how to deal with mistakes—not by glossing them over, nor through rejection, but by reconciliation and growth.

What’s the main thing community-seekers are looking for?Three things:

Acceptance. I don’t want to be excluded because I’m not at the same place in my life’s journey as you are.

Willingness to get to know me, because I have needs and hurts that have brought me here.

A place where I can work with a circle of friends toward growing and serving.

But the sequence is important. They’re looking for a church that will care about (in this order) “where I am, what I need, and how I can contribute.”

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information.

C-span’s request to film the proceedings of the Supreme Court brings to mind some troubling issues about the integrity of the justice system first exposed at the O.J. Simpson trial. One of these was the question of what happens to justice when we allow cameras in the courtroom. It was not a new question, nor have we yet come to terms with the implications of submitting due process to the framings and cuttings of electronic media.

The problem of media presence extends beyond the courtroom. Churches, too, have gradually submitted to media invasion in ways that range from the blatant (consider the more extreme varieties of televangelism) to the subtle. I tend to think the most dangerous forms of evil are those that are subtle enough to escape general notice until they have taken firm root. Consider technology in the sanctuary. In some churches, the presence of a video camera has become standard, not only at weddings but often in Sunday worship. One argument in favor of this practice, of course, is that it makes the service available to the homebound. But the camera always alters what it records. What a camera “captures” inevitably becomes performance. Some people can manage not to sabotage the spirit and dignity of worship by playing to the camera, but neither are the images the real thing. What is lost needs at least to be acknowledged, and perhaps mourned.

What is lost is, to borrow a phrase, real presence. The electronic media that allow us to capture and postpone the moment, to trade space and time for “virtual” imitations, progressively subordinate and devalue human presence. We’ve probably all felt the irritation of having a conversation disrupted by a phone call. We’ve probably had the disconcerting realization that we’re not really with people who are playing to a camera or an audience. Suddenly they are not completely there for us. Part of their awareness and energy goes toward the camera, and from thence toward the self.

Even apart from the artifice that comes from camera-induced self-consciousness, there is an insidious deception in the idea that a gathering for worship can be packaged as a reproducible commodity. When we gather in the presence of God and each other, we bring and exchange a living energy that cannot be captured. Like manna in the desert, it is for the moment, and cannot be saved and stored. Gathering is a necessary aspect of worship, and to the extent that we relinquish a sense of its importance, we lose something vital.

Some dimension of worship can, of course, be reproduced; a recording of a good sermon can, indeed, allow us to replay and ponder it at leisure. Preachers once provided for this by crafting their sermons as text, choosing words carefully enough to reward a later reading (see John Donne’s Meditations). Still, a printed sermon differs from a recorded service: it doesn’t so closely imitate the event itself that it confuses us about what moment we’re in. It reminds us that this moment of reading is different; possibly just as Spirit-filled, but not an imitation of something it’s not.

It is the business of imitation that’s so problematic. Aristotle coined the maxim that “art imitates life.” Oscar Wilde turned that observation inside out to remind us of something rather less obvious when he claimed that “life imitates art.” It’s hard to remember sometimes that life is not a novel, a series of linked short stories, a tragedy, or a comedy. All these classic literary forms are ways of organizing the material of experience so we can see something about it. So also (to rather less purpose) talk shows, sitcoms, and soaps. Listen to young adolescents in conversation and consider how heavily their social intercourse relies on ironic banter, commercial one-liners, self-parody, and hyperbole. Almost nothing they see in the mass media offers sustained, purposeful, thoughtful, or even witty human discourse.

So we settle for less. We get used to truncated conversations, frequent interruptions, shrunken vocabularies, newspapers written to fourth-grade level (and sinking), and, sometimes, preachers who seem to have studied homiletics under talk-show hosts or standup comics. We use the language of novelty, which entices us to buy new models, new versions, new approaches, rather than seeking a language that differentiates novelty from renewal. Novelty is superficial and transitory. Renewal is deep and lasting.

A congregation is not the same as an audience. Proclamation is not the same as performance. And the good news of the gospel doesn’t need to be conformed to the sound bytes of network news to be relevant.

Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today, January 8, 2001, Vol. 45, No. 1, Page 83Click here for reprint information.

More than two decades ago, Gary Sweeten joined the staff at College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, with a vision for a Christian interpersonal skills program. He enlisted Margaret Rinck to help develop a program that integrated biblical teaching on relationships with listening skills and self-discovery.

The result was the church’s Teleios Ministry, which equips believers to offer help to the hurting, including a sizable number of divorced persons. Today the congregational care ministry (including Teleios Ministry) has over 225 trained lay helpers officially caring for others, as well as hundreds who minister to the congregation informally.

In developing such ministries, Rinck applies “a theology of failure.” She cites the many failures in Scripture used by God, and she calls for understanding human sinfulness and our need for redemption. “We cannot pretend any longer that Christians do not fail.”

Following are Rinck’s fundamentals for developing a climate of healing within the church.

What is helpful to people struggling with divorce and remarriage? What can the church do to bring healing to people whose marriages are broken?

As with most complex problems, there are no quick fixes. To help people recover from sin and failure’s wounds we need to create a “healing community”, a place where it is acceptable to be broken, have problems, admit failure, and where help is expressed in concrete, practical ways.

How does a local church build a healing community? It begins with, as World Vision founder Bob Pierce used to say, “letting your hearts be broken with the things that break the heart of God.” It begins with a willingness to listen before we speak, and a humbleness that realizes, “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”

Developing interpersonal skills training opportunities in the church is one way this can happen. Such training equips people to work together to meet needs for all kinds of hurting people, including those struggling with divorce, remarriage, single parenting, and blended families.

We found several imperatives helpful in developing such training:

• Equip a team and draw on many members’ gifts. Asking pastors to care for all the needs of a congregation limits what can be done.
• Build a solid base of trained listeners. They can provide pastoral care and refer the hurting to professionals when problems warrant.
• Educate members in daily living skills through classes in communication, anger management, and emotions in the family.
• Offer support groups or small group Bible studies led by lay people. Hurting people need support systems and friends.
• Be prepared for problems to pop up. Once people know it is safe, they start telling the truth about their pain.
• Have a list of qualified Christian professionals to whom you can refer difficult cases.

Be patient. It takes years to develop a solid base of empathic lay ministers. But it will be worth the effort when needy people find hope and healing.

This article originally appeared in the December 14, 1992 issue of Christianity Today.