L E A D E R S H I P W E E K L Y Your Practical, Digital Guide to Christian Leadership From Leadership journal and ChristianityToday.com —————————————————————– Web site: http://LeadershipJournal.net/

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Thursday, January 16, 2003

WHAT WE HAVE UNCOMMON

It’s our differences that make our churches useful in the Kingdom. by Kevin A. Miller, editor-at-large

Four years ago, my pastor left our church and moved 45 minutes away to plant a congregation. Thankfully, he had a family of six, so that more than doubled the waiting group of five people. My wife and I decided to join the group because we’re church-planting junkies; if we’re not sitting on folding chairs, we don’t know how to worship God. Still, it had been some time since our church fit in a living room and served Holy Communion from a card table.

I figured the new church would soon be like the former one, for it had the same senior pastor, the same worship style, a similar location, and, including our family, 10 of the same people.

I was wrong, hilariously wrong.

The church has become radically different from its ancestor. Their demographics, passions, and projects diverge widely, even wildly. One example: They have a ministry for home- schooling families; we have one for Gen-Y professionals. The churches stand as a case study for Lyle Schaller’s point that churches are progressively becoming more unlike each other.

That fact challenges every church leader today to discern and affirm the congregation’s unique spiritual calling. This sounds easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult. To understand and accept these people, to see what God wants to do in and through them, requires us to lay down much of what we know and what seminars teach. It requires listening and letting go of our plans.

It’s much faster, when entering a church, to franchise, to use an approach proven in a larger congregation. It worked there, it should here. (Besides, we like that approach.)

When our new church chose music different from what I’d enjoyed in the former church, I grumbled within. I justified my complaint by my superior knowledge that the music I liked would be more effective in outreach. Only slowly, as a spiritual discipline, could I accept the fact that the new music better fit this new group of people.

As leaders, it’s tempting to bring in the vision God has given us, assuming it should also be this congregation’s. Not necessarily. Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned (in Life Together) that “God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly…. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.”

I’m learning to ask, “What is unique about this church? How is God at work in her leaders, her location, and her loves?” We must be teachers, but also learners. We must stop saying, “These people don’t get it” and start saying, “They might be right.”

We grow, and the church flourishes, when we let this crazy- quilt people be who God made them to be, when we accept and bless the group we have. Leaders shape a church, but we must work with the grain of the wood.

Wisely did Eugene Peterson write in Leadership, “When we work well, our tastes, experiences, and values are held in check so that the nature of the material, or the person, or the process, or our God is as little adulterated or compromised by our ego as possible.”

–Kevin Miller is Leadership editor-at-large.

WHAT’S NEW AT LEADERSHIPJOURNAL.NET

THE CONSUMER TRAP http://ChristianityToday.com/le/2002/004/2.32.html What postmodern people need is a different relationship with money.

It can be heard in coffee shops, clubs, classrooms, and certainly at every Ralph Nader and anti-WTO rally: “Consumerism is crushing America” and “There must be more than birth, consumption, and death.”

At times it’s even more blatant. I was driving through downtown Minneapolis with a 31-year-old advertising executive. We approached a new shopping, hotel, and entertainment complex. “Look at that enormous blight on the landscape,” she said. Or in the words of a pastor’s son, when I asked if he had been to the Mall of America, “I hate shopping malls and all the consumerism crap that goes with them.”

This sentiment is not so much about the stuff sold in these places as it is in the unending call to be consumers of it all. Young people are not against stuff. We have more stuff than any generation before, and we have the bills to prove it.

Many of the church’s younger people are begging for a different relationship with money. That’s the real issue. An entire generation, maybe two, are consumed by money and debt and consumerism. They need to see money in a new way, a biblical way; but, because the church is also bogged in consumerism, younger people believe the church is of little value in helping them out of the quagmire.

Read the rest of this article: http://ChristianityToday.com/le/2002/004/2.32.html

—— PUTTING PEOPLE OFF THE BUS http://ChristianityToday.com/le/2002/004/19.13.html Leadership Weekly readers debate firing church workers.

RESOURCES YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

CHRISTIAN HISTORY MAGAZINE http://ChristianityToday.com/go/lemag-history This exciting magazine surveys Christian history in a format that is attractive to the scholar and novice alike. Colorful charts and illustrations make each issue a valuable resource that you will return to again and again.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY NEWS

CLERGY RATINGS AT LOWEST POINT EVER http://ChristianityToday.com/ct/2003/002/12.21.html Survey finds low trust in the church.

WEBLOG: STONE TABLET CONFIRMS SOLOMON’S TEMPLE, BIBLICAL NARRATIVE http://ChristianityToday.com/ct/2003/102/21.0.html Plus: Ashcroft goes to bat for faith-based initiative, and other stories from online sources around the world.

To receive daily news and more, visit: http://ChristianityToday.com/go/ctdirect

WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING

Sorry last week’s poll question was not available online. Please take the time this week to vote.

THIS WEEK’S POLL QUESTION Should Christian leaders drive luxury SUVs?

Yes. Everybody else does. Yes. If they can afford it. No. It’s a waste of money. No. It sends the wrong message to non-believers. Christian witness isn’t affected by vehicle cost.

Go to http://ChristianityToday.com/leaders/index.html#poll to cast your vote. See how your answer compares to others’.

ILLUSTRATION OF THE WEEK

AMERICANS BUSY STORING THEIR STUFF In an Atlanta Journal Constitution article by Jim Auchmutey, the writer quotes comedian George Carlin as saying, “The essence of life is trying to find a place to put all your stuff.”

Auchmutey writes that there are 32,000 self storage businesses nationwide (or the equivalent of 1.3 billion feet of rentable space), 620 in Atlanta alone (twice as many as 10 years ago), and 100 million storage containers are sold by Rubbermaid every year.

This “stuff” explosion peculiar to Americans has led to a new profession: the professional organizer. Some P.O.’s charge as much as 75 dollars an hour to help people get organized in this culture of clutter.”

Citation: Jim Auchmutey, “Our Overflowing Lives,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, (1-20-02); submitted by David Slagle, Lawrenceville, Georgia

For more illustrations, visit: http://PreachingToday.com/

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