Leadership and Ethics […] 5 – What Does This Mean in Practice?

In a comment on the last post on leadership ‘Emerger’ asked: “What does this mean in real life? The most I can draw out so far is that we facilitate conversation. I don’t think that in itself is enough.” He/she then goes on to propose some thoughts on work by Carver and Bell (“John Carver talks about this with a seemingly modernist view of clarifying Policy Ends and Executive Limitations. Bell refers to the binding and loosing in the church as an important to help clarify people’s freedom.”)

I wanted to respond to the thoughts in a separate post, as as I’ve mulled on things some wider things have come up… which I guess I could summarize as: we are part of Corpus Christi, not ChristCorp™.

Firstly, I would entirely agree that facilitating conversation is not enough as a leader. But it is a big aspect as it carries with it an important sense of leadership style that carries people beyond the fruits of the actual conversations facilitated. The very act of giving space to such action sends a clear message of intent: that as a leader, one is not going to dictate, but resource. But, more importantly, what I have been trying to get across is that there is not going to be just one such leader. The key to this model is that leadership is distributed, and different people will be taking a lead in different situations. This has two big implications:

1. People who are currently ‘do-it-all’ leaders are going to have to initiate some sort of process by which they step down from fronting the majority of things.

2. People who are currently members of congregations or groups are going to have to consider what roles they ought to be taking a lead in, and doing so.

With reference to this second point, I think (and thanks to Jon for flagging this again yesterday, over some excellent tea and cake) that resources such as Belbin ought to be used far more widely than they currently seem to be by churches. For those who don’t know, Belbin’s Team Roles is a tool for working out the role that you most naturally play within a particular group. The emphasis is clear: for a team to run effectively all the roles need to be present and functioning. I know of a case recently where the management of a large Christian organization did Belbin and found that there were loads of ‘plants’ (creative thinkers) but no ‘completer-finishers’ in the group… Which explained fairly well why they were having loads of good ideas, but were getting nowhere fast.

Beyond Belbin I think that as churches in a context of ‘self discovery’ we ought to be helping people to discover ‘who they are’ beyond the often shallow tags of ‘child of God’ etc. By using tools such as Belbin, Myers-Briggs, The Enneagram and such-like, people ought to be being helped to realize their potential as members of a living community… not left to fester in pews doing very little. The great thing about these tools is that they bring with them affirmations of belonging, and help people to realize that even though they are not the charismatic, do-it-all leaders they have seen up-front, they do have a vital part to play in the maturing of the community.

Returning to ‘Emerger’s’ question about ‘what it all means in real life’, I would say, as I have in the book, that we need to be careful not to define models too closely. To do so, I believe, returns us to the problem of ‘hey, let’s do it like Willow Creek/HTB/Vineyard/Solomon’s Porch’ etc, and what we end up with is a beast not suited to its environment. The beauty of an emergent solution is that it is exactly designed for its local situation. So beyond the ‘governing dynamics’ which I’ve tried to outline above, I wouldn’t want to give an ‘out of the box’ example of what things would look like in any given situation. You want to find out? Then risk it and do it. Praxis.

Secondly, while what I’ve read of Carver’s work (and I’m very happy to hear some better expertise than mine on this) seems very good, it does seem overtly focused on the business environment, with its emphasis on purpose, ends, expectations etc. We need to remember that we are part of Corpus Christi, not ChristCorp™. I’m not sure churches should have ‘goals’… As living systems they should ‘be’ and mature and grow (and die)… but they are not in a market economy situation, and not trying to maximize profits for shareholders. They are more like a family which, if anything like mine, does not have board meetings and strategic planning groups… but low-level communication and regular feedback between members, not mediated by anyone else. This is perhaps a difficult idea to swallow, as we seem so caught up in success: are enough people coming, is the presentation slick?

As Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost have written, we should not be about ‘attracting’ people to church. Rather, church ought to be a resourcing place for us to ‘get out there’. And this, finally, is something all leaders ought to keep as a touchstone: that it’s about ‘out there’, not ‘in here’. Too often the lion’s share of church resources, prayer-time etc. are spent on the leaders  on the ‘inside’. They need instead to be constantly pushing away the focus and serving people to help them ‘be’ Christ immersed in the culture/local situation they are in.