Mike Frost wrote a book with Alan Hirsch called ‘The Shaping of Things to Come’. This book put into words and pages what my heart felt. Here’s an encouraging/valuable/challenging/long/insightful clip of Mike talking about the missional Church. Make a cup of coffee or tea and spend some time watching this and let it sink in. Thanks to Alan for posting this on his blog for me to steal:)
Archive for the 'Leadership' Category
Today I was talking with a friend about church stuff…I’ve been thinking of this analogy for a while, but hadn’t really processed it much.
I’ve been thinking a lot (a lot) about what sustainable movements look like and what it takes to be sustainable. In the process I’ve been thinking about what sustainable isn’t. The image that came to mind was of seedless grapes. A seedless grape is convenient, tastes the same, and looks the same…but there is one major difference: it can’t reproduce. If a seedless grape is the last grape on the planet…it has no chance of reproducing. If a seedless grape falls to the ground and dies…that’s all there is to it.
A grape with a seed has all the DNA tucked inside of it to create more grapes. If a grape with seeds dies there is a chance that many more grapes will be able to grow.
The critical difference is that a seedless grape is missing the part that can actually make a difference to the sustainability of the fruit…it’s missing the DNA. A movement cannot be sustainable if the DNA is lost. This is the biggest threat to Christianity not being sustainable for generations to come…becoming seedless grapes.
My prayer is that we as a movement will rediscover the DNA of following Christ that makes faith in Jesus so potent and culture changing.
If you are curious as to thinking more about this subject I would check out the book The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch. He does a great study of the first century Church and the underground Church in China; two movements that have possessed this radical DNA.
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…
I realized today that I haven’t posted on here in a while…It’s certainly not because there’s not much going on in our lives or because I don’t have anything to say…I’ve probably had too much on my mind and too much to say to put anything worth reading on here.
Here’s what fresh on the top of my mind…
A book was recommended to me called “Leadership and Self-Deception” and at first was like, “I’m not self-decieved…I know my weakness.” This should be proof in-and-of-itself that I needed to read a book with this title.
I have to be honest about this. Within pages I was already learning A LOT about how I am self-decieved…not to mention how I treat others as objects and not people, betray myself, justify my own perceptions, and how all of this leads me to be emotionally distorted in my view of my world.
Over the last few weeks, and even months, I’ve been doing a lot of processing about my life. After reading this book I realized that most of my processing has been based upon the hidden assumptions that the way I see the world is the way that it really is. How I view people is how they really are. How I see ideas as they really are…but all along I was certainly seeing thing more out of focus than I thought was. This is what self-deception does.
I can’t even begin to describe the freedom that learning this has brought. Sadness over how ‘grey’ the created world in my head was and how I began to view people that I love. But now I am free to see things more for how they really are…and grateful for the grace that is given so that I can start over every day.
This realization is helping me answer some of the larger questions that I’ve wondering about for a while. Questions about leadership, influence, personal loneliness, being misunderstood, not being able to communicate the way I used to, and some others. This has been helping see ways where I have even began to see Jesus’ teachings in ways that fit with my views…Which has lead me to being further from the real Jesus, even though I thought that I wasn’t, and His good intentions in my life. This is the type of thing that self-deception can do over time.
There is a radical reorientation going on in my head…it makes me feel dizzy sometimes, but I know that in the end I’ll be planted more firmly on the ground.
If this post has made you think at any time “I should read this book.” Do yourself a favor and listen to yourself!
I got this book in the mail from Amazon.fr two weeks ago and I’ve not been able to stop reading it. Two pages into it I decided to not write in the margins or do the underlining thing because I know that I’ll be reading it again…I wanted to save the graffiti for round two. I am already somewhat anal about books, so I was taking especially good care of this one…Then last week a group of us guys went down to Invalides and played some American football in the rain and mud…this resulted in ruining my quest to keep this book in pristine condition. The rain penetrated my bag and found it’s way to my book. Now the crisp pages of The Forgotten Ways are extra crisp and have a nice wave to them….this book now looks very loved and it’s just the beginning. There are many marks, underlines, drawings of my own (i’ve not seen a book with this many graphs and illustrations in it since my high-school trigonometry book!), and notes to come.
So about the book: I didn’t think that Alan could have much more to say after The Shaping of Things to Come
I can’t recommend this book enough as it has already greatly inspired, encouraged, and challenged me. Thanks Al for your work…a gift to the Kingdom.
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