Lecture

In the late twentieth century, churches rarely split or even fought over substantive issues. Seventy-five years ago entire denominations splintered as they hotly debated such matters as the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, the promise of the second coming, and foundational biblical truths. Many evangelical congregations and denominations existing today came out of those conflicts. But today we fight over interpersonal issues; more accurately, the petty matters which cause our problems draw us into emotional struggles with other Christians. And then the relationship between and among people becomes the focal issue. We forget that the reason we no longer speak to certain people is that they vigorously campaign for contemporary worship styles, a decision in which in our opinion, ruined our church forever. Leaders face a different level of the problem of relationships, and of course that is the focus of this chapter.

For us, relationship always stands at the foreground of what we’re trying to do. Efficiency and competence may operate at a very high level, but if our people skills break down or if they never develop, we will very quickly face major problems in carrying out the leadership task. One business magazine carried an interesting article entitled “Ten Fatal Flaws of Business Executives.” What were they? Insensitivity to others, coldness, betrayal of trust, overt ambition, performance problems, over-managing, inability to staff effectively, inability to think strategically, inflexibility especially in adapting to superiors, and weak or insufficient communication. Now with the possible exception of Numbers five, six and eight, every item on the list has to do with interpersonal relations.

Mark Senter some years ago wrote a wonderful article in The Leadership Journal which makes up our outline here. It’s a diagrammatic thing, but you don’t have to see the diagram. That’s not really crucial. The flow of Senter’s article is well-captured in the terminology that he uses.

He says there are five stages in a ministry life, if you will, and the first is getting acquainted. During this time the team leader talks to as many people as he can and asks the key questions about the church, about its philosophy of ministry, it’s vision and, through all of this, tries to get a handle on his unique fit in this particular group of people. Senter also suggests arranging public visibility during this time, some evidence that you’re there such as the planning of a retreat, the development of a training program, the rewriting of job descriptions. Hey, there’s a new kid on the block, and he’s got something to contribute. Obviously throughout all of this, the leader works on job control which we have discussed already.

The second stage is getting established. During this time, leaders build people’s trust. Goal achievement is important, but relationship building rises to the fore here. This is the time you want to begin to establish solid ongoing ministry programs, all of which build trust over the long haul. And if that trust doesn’t develop, as Senter notices, termination may very well result. The third stage is getting rolling. How does one measure growth in leadership? Well, when the leader receives wider responsibilities both within the congregation and outside it, now you can anticipate support and failure as well as support and success. And that’s no small step in the credibility process.

By now you should also have job control, and you’re well aware of what is happening and what’s going on. But what if you stagnate here? You know, what if you get caught in this block? How do we recognize stagnation? One of the first signs is just sheer physical exhaustion. Now make no mistake about it, you can get totally exhausted about other things than ministry stagnation. But when things do not go well, we often work harder trying to turn them around. And our bodies remind us that not all is well in this particular leadership role. But the absence of some of the items can also serve as red flags. If we have no opportunities for ministry, no opportunities beyond the congregation, no support from the congregation or the group in failure, no confidence in job control; hey, those are problems. And often a leader struggling with stagnation resorts to hiding mechanisms to excuse the real problem. And perhaps we’ll begin to find interest and satisfaction in something beyond the primarily leadership role. And of course all that does is to worsen the problem.

The fourth level is getting insights. Here you enroll in a D. Min. or a D. Miss. program or take on some major continuing education, or on a less formal basis, you make some observation visits to other effective ministries around the country. Now as you’re enjoying the acceptance of peers, you begin to see recognition in your role as a professional. There’s a new growth or a second wind maybe that you’re gathering, and it serves as a buffer against the horror of inertia, which is just another way of talking about stagnation. And then finally, says Senter, you reach the stage of getting credit. And according to Senter, this probably won’t come until about five years into the leadership role. And I suspect there are some times when it doesn’t come that soon. It comes because of efficiency in ministry, shepherding relationships, and the development of new ministries that work. Team leaders now are involved in professional organizations. You’ve joined the appropriate professional organization. Maybe you hold office. Maybe you’re preparing to read a paper at a national meeting. You recognize a shepherding rather than a hireling role within your particular ministry. And maybe you’ve begun to write an article here, an article there. Maybe you’re consulting with another church that wanted you to come in and evaluate their program. These happen because of firm relationships with people who accept us, people who make it possible for us to move all the way to stage five. Senter observes that we can’t get stuck in stages one and two because termination will probably shake us loose, but three and four represent a real danger. And many who might otherwise be leaders of significant influence have found themselves instead in the ruts of stagnation or inertia.

Well, let’s talk about developing an interpersonal relationship or maybe developing interpersonal relationships is a better way to put it, because you’ll certainly want more than one. You may very well be a long-established leader in your congregation, or you may be a neophyte waiting yet for your first leadership position. To either group, the veterans or the rookies, establishing and maintaining relationships is a crucial aspect of leadership. Let me, however, back away from the veterans for a moment and talk to the rookies and ask the question, how can you behave like an experienced leader even if you are not? Well, one step is to know and be known by the key players in the organization. At first glance, that sounds like raw politics; but that’s hardly my intent. The fact is, most leaders can’t escape visibility. Chief executive officers and senior pastors stand up in front of meetings, chair important gatherings, meet with boards and executive committees.

But middle management—or read “associate staff”—tend to be much less visible. In a large church or a Christian organization, an associate could be on board for almost a year before many folks know he’s arrived. So without being pushy or appearing self-serving, the new leader stays in contact with the senior pastor, the rest of the staff, key elders, deacons, and key leaders in all phases of the church’s ministry. This is sort of like moving from Senter’s stage one to stage two.

Secondly, never consider yourself indispensable. One of the great sins of Christian leadership is to think that you’re irreplaceable in an organization. Leaders who delegate reluctantly or who always seem to have much more work than any of their peers or who never take a vacation of any length or who constantly complain about stress and overwork may very well fall into the category of thinking that they are irreplaceable. You know you can measure an attitude of indispensability by staff behavior as well as by your own. Have your subordinates’ skills been static over the past year? Do people tend to come and go in your organization without any significant longevity or tenure? Do staff members rarely come to you with ideas? Is it possible to keep the organization functioning when you’re out of the office for a time? If you have to answer no to all of those or yes as the case may be, you can tell which is the negative and positive response, then you need to look again about your own attitude with respect to replaceability.

Remember the wonderful passage in Luke 17,

Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep? Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now, sit down to eat?’ Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper. Get yourself ready. Wait on me while I eat and drink, and after that you may eat and drink.’ Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also when you have done everything you were told to do should say ‘We are unworthy servants. We have only done our duty.’

What does Jesus mean? What exactly is an unworthy servant? The King James uses the word “unprofitable.” Well apart from humility that Christ’s servants must always show, we all have just done our duty, there is a hidden idea here worth exploring. The word translated unworthy in the NIV is a form of the word achreios which literally means “without need.” Establishing that, one could conclude that it is the servant who has no need, but that doesn’t seem to be the point of the parable. Rather we might substitute the word dispensable and capture the spirit of the idea. What is the idea? The master has no indispensable servants. We do our duty. We follow our orders, and the sovereign God determines when our time in a given leadership post is complete. By the way, that’s one reason why it seems so foolish to argue to maintain a leadership position in a Christian organization when others, especially if they are in authority, seem intent on dismissing you. Don’t fight it. Get out of there. Go someplace else.

A relational atmosphere for leadership development, seems like we’ve talked a lot about developing the atmosphere and the environment and the climate. Wherever I go to lecture or consult with churches, people ask about training programs. What should we be teaching? When can training programs take place? How can we motivate people to come? And we’ve talked about that some in this series as well. But the ultimate answer lies in the interpersonal atmosphere that a church or organization currently maintains. Or to put it another way, the issue of recruitment and training ultimately comes down to the kind of ministry team you ask others to join. Do they want to be a part of your organization? Can you develop people with the intent of their taking over leadership positions when they become available? We dealt with this earlier, but I want to return for one more spin. The team leadership approach is central to creating a positive climate for leadership. We’ve been talking about and talking about and talking about one lone wolf leading another might look a great deal like Elijah and Elisha, but it bears little resemblance to the New Testament pattern. Paul’s disciples were groomed to plan a leadership team. Indeed, that was the problem with John Mark in his early days. He simply wasn’t a team player. Timothy, Titus, Epaphras, Silas and all the rest had to understand their roles and their goals on the leadership team. And Paul’s relational style led toward group involvement not individual ministry.

Participatory leadership, once again we come back to something which has occupied our attention throughout our study. Genuine participation pushes decision-making authority down to the trenches. It invites leaders at all levels to make decisions in areas which pertain to their direct work responsibilities. It avoids the upward surge of power in a bureaucratic organization. When a board of deacons or elders gives off an aura of cultic authority rather like hooded Klansmen gathered deep in the woods for a secret meeting, they place the entire congregation in danger.

Such procedure destroys the universal priesthood which is so essential to a properly-functioning church. I can’t over-emphasize the significance of the doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers. And I may have already over-emphasized it. But I don’t think it can be over-emphasized.

Biblical leadership, one could argue, states that although based on biblical principles, the first two items above are actually functional or principial. But as we seek other leaders, it becomes absolutely essential to know and follow the Bible. In one pastor’s conference after another and one D.Min. class after another, I have heard congregational leaders discuss deacons and elders and sometimes even pastors who don’t meet the biblical qualities and yet hold office. Like cities and states and entire countries, people often deserve the leadership they get. God has clearly identified biblical qualities of leadership. And if we ignore them or if we deny them, we should expect to pay the consequences.

And finally, there is tolerant leadership. Ken Callahan talks about making excellent mistakes. He points out that the level of creativity in developing leaders is directly commensurate with the positive recognition for excellent mistakes. To state it more directly, the more positive the recognition for excellent mistakes, the higher the level of creativity. Greg was a beginning youth pastor in a suburban Midwestern church. He knew all about hayrides and lock-ins, but he wanted to try something different. So with the full authority of the pastor and elders, he designed a teen ministry Sunday in which every Sunday school class and every other ministry carried on in that church would be done by a teenager. Does that sound creative to you? Well, I think it does. Does it sound productive? Well, it wasn’t in this case. Maybe with a few more months of preparation, it would have worked. But hitting it cold as they did, the kids blew the assignment.

Now what? The board turns down all future ideas from Greg? The teenagers get no more cracks at public ministry in the congregation? Only summer trips in Mexico? Well, not if we follow the principle of flexible leadership, not if we follow the principle of creative failure. It may have been a mistake to let the teens take over the church that Sunday, but it was an excellent mistake. Greg gets high points for creativity, and his supervisors will help him work out the kinks so that three or four months from now, he can try the idea again perhaps this time with outstanding results.

Well, we need to talk about workaholism. Remember we talked about being exhausted here a little bit ago? It’s probably what you will be when you finish this course. Relationships and the workaholic syndrome, one of the reasons we train other leaders is to share the burden. Autocratic leaders take the yoke, but they don’t share the burden. As people develop under our guidance they, like John Mark, become profitable for the ministry. And they help us avoid the stress and overwork problems common to ministry leadership. What are the marks of the workaholic? How can you spot a person who really looks like this common household word we use all the time? Well, there’s no absolutely authoritative list. But people who specialize in this area suggest several behavior patterns which mark someone obsessed with his or her work to the point of performance dependency; this is what they call it. Inability to accept failure is one. Others are incessant work patterns, guilt over low productivity, anxiety and depression, subjective standards of success, and leisure time guilt. Don’t tell anybody I’m going to play golf. I want everyone to think I’m in the office twelve hours a day. Another is time consciousness. And a fascinating thing is workaholics always know what time it is; also self-denial in a negative sense, denying physical exercise or recreation. Also, future orientation which is good until it becomes an obsession. Another is impatience; oh this list is getting too convicting. Let’s move on.

These are not character flaws nor are they necessarily negative behavior patterns. Self-denial, for example, is a strong New Testament characteristic. Future orientation is essential for long-range planning. But when we take this thing as a package or even a cluster of six or seven, we begin to see what is medically referred to as a syndrome. Without delving into the oft-described type A personality, we can certainly see that person in this list: driven, task-oriented, goal-focused, she moves through life leaving others in her wake. There’s no time to develop other leaders. So the syndrome only worsens. And ultimately perhaps, medical help of some kind becomes necessary. But wait. Isn’t there something to do before they lock you up or strap you in the chair with a little white suit on? Yes, there are suggestions for defeating workaholism. Psychologists, counselors, and therapists can treat it over months and years if you like; but as Christian leaders we can go a long way toward alleviating our own problems once we recognize them.

The following list is not as long as the first, but it offers practical suggestions to shed the workaholic patterns that mark and plague too many of us; I include myself in this unfortunate group. Number one, see people and respond to them as people not just as staff or customers or saved or unsaved or brothers or sisters or some title, but people. Secondly, give of yourself instead of things. I’m told by sociologists that that’s tough for people in the baby boomer generation. It’s easier since you’re making more money than your parents ever did, certainly than they did when they were your age, to pay somebody to do it. Now we need new help in our church. We need more help with the children’s ministry; hey let’s hire somebody part-time, okay? I’ll give a few bucks more a week to do that. Three, enhance your sensory awareness. This is the old “stop and smell the roses”. Look at the sunset. Feel the raindrops. You know what? That takes time. It takes the very time that you’d like to be rushing back to the computer and dashing out the next aspect of this course. Four, develop a capacity for spontaneity. Do the unusual. Don’t be so predictable. Don’t drive the same road home from work every night. Don’t come in at the same exact time. Don’t eat the same thing for dinner. Get in the plane and fly to Paris for dinner tonight.

Five, make yourself slow down. I can testify as one of the aged generation that this will happen automatically if you wait long enough. But maybe you don’t want to wait long enough. Maybe you want to kill off workaholism a little bit earlier, so you need to make yourself slow down. Say “no” once in a while. Try taking on fewer things. Six, find a pleasant avocation or hobby: golf, stamp collecting, goldfish. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s whatever you like, whatever will make you slow down, whatever will take you into that other mode. For me right now it’s playing tennis. I try to play three times a week. I’m talking about matches that last two or two and a half hours. Am I guilty about that? Not in the least. The only thing I feel guilty about is not playing five times a week. Why? Cause I’m growing up, and I’ve learned that part of maturity is to work without playing and to play without thinking you ought to be working.

Now all this is valuable for leaders immediately coping with the problem. But it’s essential as well in relationships. We not only develop leaders, but we have a tendency to develop leaders who are like us. God help the congregation in which a driven senior pastor cultivates driven associates until the whole staff looks like a herd of stampeding buffalo. Watch out for those nervous habits, missed appointments, slipping work quality.

They are symptoms of workaholic distress. I call your attention to Luke 5:16. “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” What about relating to new leaders? Developing new leaders implies that somewhere along the line we have made choices regarding those with whom we will work and into whose lives we will pour our own. The following principles relate, for example, to a pastor hiring his first assistant, a Sunday school superintendent looking for teachers, a parachurch ministry director combing college campuses for staff, and a dozen or a score of other leadership development situations. There are pitfalls in the road and pitfalls in leadership selection.

Availability bias. Sadly many Christian organizations ask three basic questions when a leadership position becomes available. Who’s handy? Who’s visible? Who’s cheap? Certainly a handy, visible, and inexpensive leader may also be competent in the long-term, but that’s not likely. Availability bias betrays laziness in our own processes of leadership recruitment. So does association bias. It might just be a long-term relationship, a pastor recommending to the official board that a youth pastor who has served the church for five years now be appointed associate pastor. That’s fine, but it’s not always the best choice. In its ugliest form, association bias deteriorates into nepotism. We’ve all seen it. Christian organizations passed on from father to son or husband to wife as though they were family businesses. Certainly strong relational leaders draw followers, and people closely-associated with the present leader may be the logical selections for leadership needs. But it’s a pitfall. It’s a danger zone. Keeping power within the family may be a typical Old Testament monarchy behavior, but there’s no evidence whatsoever of such behavior in the New Testament. Also, there is agreement bias. Here the present leader asks, “who’s like me? Who thinks like I think? Who won’t rock the boat?” And this also represents a difficulty. It’s not a mortal sin, but availability bias and agreement bias and association bias are a problem and are pitfalls to look for.

But in the process of leadership selection, let’s take a look at some of the steps that we go through in finding those new leaders. One, of course, is to choose the right follower. No amount of mentoring, training, patience, and longsuffering can undo a bad choice. I’m not talking about bad people like Drucker; just people in the wrong place. You can measure a lot of things here by available tests, Myers-Briggs, so on and so forth. But ultimately, God’s Holy Spirit gives assurance of the person or persons in whom we should invest our leadership lives.

Secondly, create an acceptable climate. Again this is the same pattern I’ve been talking about over and over again; the example of Jesus’ disciples. Our Lord developed His own life to a point of maturity before He attracted to Himself those who would be His followers. They joined Him. They embraced a climate unlike any they had seen before. Selfish aggressiveness now turns to meekness and gentleness. That was an attitude very difficult for them to grasp. Right up to the time of the crucifixion they still debated with one another regarding their relative greatness. And then the Lord turned them loose to lead the New Testament church.

Thirdly, control the pre-arrival factors. Forty years would seem to be enough time to design and control pre-arrival factors for a new leader as we look with confidence at Moses as an example and Joshua. Moses could hardly be accused of association bias. God made the choice, but for forty years, Joshua had been waiting in the wings.

Fourthly, cope with post-arrival factors. What everyone plans before the new leader’s arrival, something will change after he or she gets on the job. According to Peters, leaders especially early in their tenure do not get fully-developed options from which they select a path. Rather, a direction begins to emerge from a sequence of choices about people, issues, resources, and just from serendipity. He calls these traps, patterns of misunderstanding. Now what do we look for if we want to avoid these arrival traps, or post-arrival traps? Patterns of delegation is one insofar as it is possible we should know about the leadership style of the new leader before he or she arrives. That style will, to a significant extent, determine how work is apportioned to others. And we need to know that. Another is internal-external priorities. Take a look at Saul and David.

Saul’s internal priorities were to hold onto the kingdom he saw slipping from his grasp almost right from the first. His external priorities focused on keeping the Philistines away from the door. But when David became king, the priorities of the kingdom changed dramatically. And the people needed to understand that difference. And then resistance to change; again Saul serves as a negative model. At times when his senses were collected, he realized how foolish he was. He behaved childishly. But in jealousy for himself or Jonathan, for his tribe, he resisted change literally to the death. So when appointing new leaders, resistance to change may appear on the part of the outgoing leader.

I’d like you to read a passage of Scripture. I’ll not read it to you on the tape. But in conclusion of this study and of the whole course, look at the wonderful prayer of Moses, the dialogue with God literally in Numbers 27:12-20. And from that derive the following lessons. Christian leaders should pray about their colleagues and their successors. Christian leaders are divinely appointed. Christian leaders serve in offices of authority. Christian leaders bridge the gap between God and His people. Christian leaders serve the people they lead. Christian leaders exercise a shepherding role, and Christian leaders should reproduce themselves. I do hope this course has been helpful. God bless you in your ministry.