Leading from the back

In a recent church news the following quote was printed:

Asked what would be his priority if he returned to leadership in a local church, New Testament scholar Gordon Fee replied: "No matter how long it might take, I would set about with a single passion to help a local body of believers recapture the New Testament church's understanding of itself as an eschatological community (The Ordinary Hero by Tim Chester, p. 165).

Now, there it is...'leadership' in a local church? I'm glad that Fee had the sense to realise that if he returned to serve a local church his job would be to HELP in some way. So often we take the notion of 'leader' from the world, maybe from the military, and think it has some application in the church.

An example of how this skews things came from a friend recently. She related how an acquaintance was over-awed by being asked to take on the leadership of a particular group. I'd be surprised if she was told what she would be expected to do, but being told it was 'leading' would be enough to give anyone the jitters if it was not stripped of worldly connotations; she would possibly have known that it is the Spirit that leads and we all follow together contributing as our gifts can provide.

It would have been more useful if she had been asked to help with the __ group. And the dimensions of that helping given to her: maybe organising the roster, helping people prepare their own contributions, finding fill-ins when someone can't do their roster, be the contact point, etc. More like convening, facilitating, organising, or just plain helping (Gordon Fee's word). My earlier post on Mintzberg on 'leading' is apposite here.

When we start to think 'ministry' and not 'leader' we'll all be better off, and as Christians we might all be encouraged that we have a part to play in the life of the church and not just sit and watch, which is what 'leaders' so often engender and the concept in its worldly configuration suggests.

BTW, I was very encouraged to hear a person who was going to serve at a remote area church talk about the 'contribution' he hoped to make: a much more Christian conceptualisation of joining the life of a church than any worldly hubristic notions of 'leading' (and, please don't start me on the oxymoronic idea of 'servant-leader')

Bible refs on gun sights

In response to the news of Bible references being inscribed on pieces of military weaponry, a minister at my church penned the following (in part) in our weekly bulletin:

The message is so wrong on so many levels. When will we learn that this sort of misguided tokenism only increases our fascination with the notion that God is somehow on our side. And this is wrong. It is never a matter of whose side God is on; what a bizarre thought if we really stop and think about it. Oh that we would remember that God is sovereign over the whole earth and that he is working out his plans and purposes. The real question for us is whose side are we on; God’s or our own?...

Because Jesus came to turn our world upside down and inside out; he knew that what is displayed on the outside of our lives has its genesis in what is going on inside. Is Jesus glorified by what is etched on a gun or by a changed life? Think on these verses:

Our thoughts. Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. Phil 4:8

Our attitudes. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.   Phil 2:5-8

Our lives: A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.  John 13:34-35

Our speech: et no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear… but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence; Eph 4:29, 1 Petr 3:15.

The external will always reflect what is going on inside. If our thoughts and attitudes are not being shaped by God then why would we ever think that our lives and speech will be? There is an order here. Let’s not be fascinated with guns and etched verses—the real question is how is God shaping our thoughts and attitudes so that we love one another and are always ready to tell others of the wonderful hope we have in Jesus. For in this way only will our world see that Jesus is indeed the light of the world (John 8:12).

The mainstream view

"The empirical observation that nature has, over three billion years, developed survival strategies..." (Pich, et al, "On Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Complexity in Project Management" Management Science v. 48, n. 8 Aug 2002 pp 1008-1023).

This is, of course, the mainstream view. But there is no 'empirical observation' about nature developing survival strategies, let alone over 'three billion years'. This is merely a statement that assumes the truth of the rhetoric of evolution. But, to be fair, this is the sort of thing that one reads in even biological literature, where what is imagined, hoped, supposed, surmised or simply fabricated is considered to be empirically established because all alternative explanations are ruled out axiomatically. Rationally, how could anyone 'observe' something that supposedly took three billion years, when even R. Dawkins stated that one couldn't see evolution happening, becuase it is too slow. Stephen Gould on the other hand considered that we couldn't see it happening because it was too fast!

Just recently, this blog on a critical view of evolution came to my notice.

And, speaking of empirical, just what do we see?

Genes are produced by adult organisms;

Offspring are very similar to parents;

Genes don't change very much, and what variability we do know about seems to be strictly confined to the level of genus or family (see the finches that got Darwin so worked up: still finches).

Evil and its problems

A friend recently sent me this:

http://aristophrenium.com/?p=436

The problem is simple: If God is all-powerful, loving and good, that means he can do what he wants and will do what is morally right. But surely this means that he would not allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly (as he could easily prevent it). Yet he does. Much infant suffering is the result of human action, but much is also due to natural causes such as disease, flood or famine. In both cases, God could stop it. Yet he does not.

The author's comment is:

It is sheer irony that TPM would be found committing such a basic question-begging fallacy. In reality there is no tension at all between my answers. Notwithstanding my agreement that there exists a God with the above described attributes, I had agreed that it is morally reprehensible to “allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly when one could easily prevent it.” Notice that emphasized word, for it is critically important. If there exists a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent then there cannot exist gratuitous evil or suffering, for the two are mutually exclusive in the same way that an Irresistible Force and an Immovable Object are. One can posit that my two answers are incompatible only by begging the question (fallacy) that some humans suffer needlessly; to assert that gratuitous evil or suffering exists shoulders an enormous burden of proof in a critical evaluation of the God of Christianity.

My friend made the comment:

It's the omni-point and gratituous evil stuff that is sick. Ryft forgets there is a fall and thus there is gratuitous evil. His convenient enthymematic premiss is that God ordained the fall, an admission which would have atheists rejecting Christianity outright.

I replied:


The problem is in the construction of the assertion. They set up a 'god' to fail (the almost ever-present but non-existent 'god' of the philosophers). The Creator God is not fully described in relationship to his creation as per the first element of the syllogism. As you say, it ignores the fall, the doctrine of creation where we are the stewards of the created order ( and therefore responsible). He has done something about it.

Without adopting a calvinist definition, I prefer to adopt a more biblical description of God as being sovereign: this in relation to the creation, of course, but 'soverign' is a relational term, and starts to open the discussion as to what this entails, whereas technical terms such as the 'omni's' seem to ignore the system of relationships which God has entered by his creation, modified by the fall (where his life giving ness was rejected), and changed again in redemption.

Why do Christians keep accepting their opponent's definitions, instead of rejecting them from the outset as unbiblical and thus just 'made up'?

Pastor-Theologian

My comment on a blog on pastor-as-theologian at Euangelion:

It is almost inevitable that a pastor is a theologian, else with what is he or she pastoring? Applying the word of God to the growth or encouragement of another Christian involves engaging with that Word, does it not? Or have we entered the conceit of the world that some 'do God' better than others, and that because of specific studies? Not to confuse being a theologian with being someone whose job is to research, teach or publish about theology, or who is a paid Christian in a church...anyone can enter into a pastoring role by the circumstances my opening suggests.

I was a little concerned at some posts that seem to lock either pastoring or theologizing into formal jobs, or even a pastor being part of a therapeutic dyad...heaven forbid! It seems to me that there is or should be a relational dynamism in churches that would step beyond job titles to actual encounters of people with each other: in home Bible study/prayer groups, in formal 'classes', in the bus...whereever. It's what happens, not by whom it happens that sets the scene, I think...meaning we could all at times be pastor-theologians!

Leading to where?

Listening to 2CBAFM aka Hope-FM recently, I heard mention of a course at Tabor College on pastoral leadership… and a few days ago I read in Mintzberg’s latest book Managing the following:

…by putting leadership on a pedestal separated from management, we turn a social process into a personal one. No matter how much lip service is paid to the leader empowering the group, leadership still focuses on the individual: whenever we promote leadership, we demote others, as followers. Slighted, too is the sense of community that is important for cooperative effort in all organizations. What we should be promoting instead of leadership alone are communities of actors who get on with things naturally, leadership together with management being an intrinsic part of that. Accordingly this book puts managing ahead, seeing it together with leadership as naturally embedded in what can be called ‘communityship’.

Now I’ve blogged before, critically, on the penchant in contemporary church circles to talk ad nauseum about ‘leadership’ and bemoan the passing of the counterpoint concentration in decades past on ‘ministry’. The latter more biblical in every way than the former: the latter being about serving and building cooperating mutually serving communities abounding in the giving of the gifts of the Spirit; the former being about the promotion of the select few over and above the rest of the church, they reduced to a passivity that itself is unbiblical and in denial of the work of the Spirit in building the church. The former is about a supernaturally derived body, the latter is about a lifeless worldly organization that seeks to substitute mechanism, technique and ‘methodology’ to use that strange word, for the movement of God’s Spirit in people.

I reflect on two things coming out of this:

1. The church’s uncritical aping the world without being able to stand informed intellectually by the scriptures and say ‘no, we do things differently to the world’s organizations, because we are a people called by God to live together in service and love’. We look for different things, we seek to build up one another, not promote the few, we seek to live as a family of love, not as a business where we clock off at 5pm and look to 'leaders' because we don't know where to go'.

Alas, the church has said nothing of the kind, but instead wants to squander its heritage, and its Lord’s teaching in such crude and nonsensical ideas as ‘pastoral leadership’. Why not ‘pastoring’ or ‘pastoral care’ or ‘personal ministry’ as course titles? What does a ‘pastoral leader’ do, anyway?  Where do they lead, and how do they get followers? By dying on a cross? That’s where the church’s leader got his followers!

Of course not, the whole idea is silly. There is no such thing as ‘pastoral leadership’, relying as it does on the counter-biblical passivity of those ministered to as though a psychotherapeutic dyad comes into existence at each pastoral encounter, instead of the mutually committed support given to each other in Christ.

I’m saddened that I’m not aware of any Christian thinker who has made the argument about church life that Mintzberg makes about worldly organizations!

2. Christian organizations seem to bolt head over heels to adopt the titles and structures of worldly organizations. We have ‘CEOs’, Directors, General Managers, State/Area/Regional Managers, and so on. Why don’t we have such humble descriptive titles of functions as ‘coordinator’, ‘organiser’, ‘planner’, ‘secretary’, ‘convenor’, ‘teacher’, ‘facilitator’, ‘helper’, ‘worker’, ‘servant’ 'steward', and ‘minister’? Even ‘elder’ and ‘deacon’ have a good biblical track record for the right circumstances! As I’ve also said before, we even ape the world at the level of Sunday school (now with cute names such as ‘Kid’s Church’, or Sunday Club) and our children have ‘leaders’ not ‘teachers’. Is this not the first step in showing them that the world sets the pace, not the word of God; that we seek to build a structure and not live out the calling of the Kingdom of God?

In a way, I admire the trade union movement that my father was involved in. They eschewed the terminology of big business, and indeed adopted church terms at some levels, being organised into ‘chapels’ with the main worker in each ‘chapel’ being the ‘father’. But they had delegates, organisers and convenors. They had the focus of their convictions to make a new world for workers unlike the one they experienced. It is sad that the church, Christian organizations, seem to lack similar courage or insight and ape the world that it says it rejects! Naturally our witness falls flat because our actions say ‘we want to be just like you, not show a radically different way that is the calling of our Lord’.

Cathedral: the opportunity

In my previous post on an experience at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney, I discussed what had happened.

Further thoughts on possible opportunities:

I've had the occasion to visit a number of cathedrals in Europe and North America (and parts of Asia, come to think of it), and at all, particularly those in the UK, I have pondered on the great ministry centre a cathedral might be.

Most of the cathedrals I've visited have been of a more liberal theological persuasion, and so seemed to exist for the aesthetic of the place, almost. The opportunities for ministry have not been obviously taken.

In Sydney I think we are heading in a different direction, but in stepping towards the cathedral as a ministry centre, we've also lost some richness in seemingly restricting ministry to an almost reflexive evangelical verbalism, missing out on wider opportunities to the poor, the not poor but spiritually needy, to workers and business people, as well as city residents.

I'm all for efforts like the city ministry school (apart from teaching people to 'lead' instead of perhaps, convene or serve Bible study groups: more biblical usages, in my view) and overcomers outreach (although I do wonder if it is really 'overcomers indrag': outreach services I've been involved with professionally, whether in marketing, human services or education have gone to where the client is, both physically and culturally; churches tend to think that tricking people to come to the building is 'outreach'; its not!), Bible study groups themselves, and the corporate meetings and the like. But I think there is far more that will meet people's more immediate felt needs as a path to showing them Christ.

One symbolic step back has been to shift the front door of the cathedral to the more architecturally and liturgically correct western end. Great, but why not put ministry first: the door facing the east, opening onto the city's main street made the cathedral far more inviting and accessible. Now it just looks like the assembly hall of the cathedral school!