Over the past six months I’ve been spending a lot of time reading. My two favorite books so far have been The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch and The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. Both of these books really got me thinking about leadership and how it could be structured to be a greater benefit to the mission and to the whole.
I’m a visual thinker so I opened up my graphics program and started playing with some ideas. As a case study, I chose an organization very near and dear to my heart…Christian Associates. I love thinking about how CAI could continue to make a lasting impact in Europe and I believe that if there is any organization who has the courage to make gutsy changes to be more effective, it would be CAI…therefore…it’s fun to dream about this stuff with our organization in mind!
One of the basic principles of the Starfish and the Spider is that effective organizations in the future will discover the ‘unstoppable power’ of decentralization by giving away as much control as possible to the participants. Through personal participant investment, people will move from passive members to active contributers towards the vision and they will carry a real sense of ownership for the accomplishment of vision. What ends up happening is that the organizing group no longer has to be the perpetuator of culture…the participants in-and-of-themselves become ‘value conductors’. The organization will benefit as they now have every participant investing in, and being passionate about, the accomplishment of the goals. Leadership becomes less of a control and command position and more of a facilitator (think Wikipedia, Craigslist, Ebay, Amazon). There is much more, but for brevity’s sake I’ll stop here. Read the book!
In the Forgotten Ways, Alan makes a great case for the need to revitalize and restore the Church with the missional leadership of the 1st century Church expressed through the activation of a true APEPT model of leadership. APEPT is an acrostic for Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor, Teacher…found in Ephesians 4:11. Alan’s idea is the same as the apostle Paul’s in Ephesians…If we want the Church to really grow up and become mature, each of these gifts needs to be actively and equally represented in the guiding of the Church. (Also check out Romans 12:1-8 and 1 Corinthians 13)
I was reading these two books at the same time and I couldn’t help but see how these two ideas go hand in hand. I asked myself this question: How can we adopt an influence structure to become more decentralized so that the voice/influence of the individual can more greatly add value to the whole? Here’s what I came up with when thinking of CAI:
My thinking is that the more we can identify the gifts of people throughout CAI the more we have opportunity to enable people to influence the organization through like-minded (or like-gifted) collaboration, diversity in mentoring, and diversity in teams.
At a fundamental level, networks are created for the sole purpose of facilitating communication. On the network side of things, the goal of this idea is to open up as many lines of communication as possible. Through conferences where like-gifted people can interact, there is a great chance of creating synergy and momentum. This also opens the door for older leaders to mentor younger ones. Imagine if a group of people who are all gifted in prayer and hearing from God (prophecy) got together to pray over a period of days for and about our organization…and then got to have a platform to share that with the rest of the organization? What an encouragement that could be! Or if teachers got together to talk about theology or how to apply the Bible in our contexts? Or if the apostolic people got together to dream about ways to expand Christian Associates and lead it into the future?
On a spiritual level, the main goal of this is to raise awareness of the depth of giftedness across our organization. We could then equip people to use their gifts to serve the other individuals, teams, and in turn live out their own giftedness more. I believe that the more people we have using their giftedness to serve one another, the greater our organization will feel connectivity and the greater overall feeling of unity there will be.
On a practical level, if we increase the number and diversity of people investing in teams then that means that we’ll be able to cover more areas of need and give a greater perspective of how to encourage teams. This would also bring a community aspect to investment as opposed to a one-person oversight idea…this would align with nearly all other levels of leadership within CAI better.
There are so many more thoughts that have been running around in my head about this! This post doesn’t even touch on the details! And I don’t even know how the professional side of an organization is structured. So there are holes…probably big ones. But I’ve partially put this idea out there to see if it peaks any interest, but partly to just get it out of my head! I’d love to hear what you think…
I know that I’m an idealist and that all of this is easier ‘blogged than done’, but I am ever curious as to what we as an organization can do to greater equip each other to influence Europe for the good of the Kingdom…who knows…
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