Two Difficult Ministry Realities

There are two realities about church leadership that are difficult for me to understand and therefore practice and that difficulty makes them difficult to communicate.  But, I’ll try.          

Reality 1—Church leadership requires consensus building.  Pastors are not CEO’s.   Churches employ relatively few employees and rely heavily on volunteers.  Jim Collins, author of Good to Great—a book about successful businesses—said that this is true of all nonprofit leaders.  Business leaders exercise executive leadership.  Nonprofit leaders exercise what Collins calls “legislative” leadership.  Here’s what he said in an interview for Leadership Journal, “A church leader often has a very complicated governance structure. There can be multiple sources of power, constituencies in the community, and constituencies in the congregation. With all of that, you're going to run into trouble if you try to lead a church as a czar. Church leaders have to be adept in a more communal process, what we came to call ‘legislative’ rather than an ‘executive’ process.”  We came into the retreat saying that in general we wanted consensus on direction and that consensus on direction first and where we could come to consensus on direction we would move to how we make that direction real and then finally we would examine possible implications for staff, building, and program. 

            Reality 2—Sometimes the most needed change for a congregation is a change in attitude not structure.  “Attitude” is the word that one of the retreat attendees used so, I’ll adopt it.  Church Attitude:  Every congregation has ways of thinking and acting that are so embedded people don’t really think about them.   Take the importance of the Lord’s Table.  There’s nothing in any official document that requires the Lord’s Supper every week.  No official document says it is meal to remember Christ’s death.  Nonetheless, it is what we do every week and most of us would say we do it to remember Christ’s death. I would not suggest that we stop taking communion every week.  But what would happen if I tried to get people to call it the “Risen Lord’s Supper” rather than just the “Lord’s Supper?”  What if I tried to get us to think differently about it as a celebration of the presence of the Risen Christ and de-emphasize it as a remembrance of his death?  Difficult?  You bet it would be.  Now, this suggestion did not come up at the retreat.  Nor am I proposing it now. It is an example.  The problem with examples is that they quickly become proposals.  THIS WAS JUST AN EXAMPLE.  As we become specific about the changes many of us saw coming out of the retreat, most of them were more attitude change than structural change.