Leadership and the Emerging Church

I got an e-mail from someone today who wondered if I had ever used my professional skills within the church, especially in the filed of leadership development. I haven't actually but leadership and new expressions of church seems a crucial issue to me. The church's leadership models are firmly rooted in the feudal world picture, modified with a strong dose of modernism. This simply will not do today for a number of reasons:

* It is not Biblical and models a false gospel;

* It does not relate to postmodernist people, who will only follow those they trust and relate to;

*It is unable to provide the depth or breadth of leadership currently needed by the church.

It seems to me that leadership in the church must be visionary, servant-focused, relational and facilitative. The tasks of the leader are to hold the vision, both of the gospel and of its local proclamation in word, deed, and presence; to model the kingdom values which Jesus came to initiate (Luke 22:24-26; Phil 2:5ff; etc.); to offer authentic relationship; and to facilitate the development of new leaders.

How to achieve this? Partly through teaching, but mainly through experiment and support. Church leaders seem to me to be ill-informed, ill-equipped and low on self-esteem (though that often manifests itself in a kind of authoritarian arrogance).

The most powerful approaches in leadership development seems to me to focus around coach-mentoring and action learning. The action learning set is like a learning laboratory where leaders can experiment with ideas and concepts without getting their fingers burned. Coach-mentoring offers the opportunity for stimulated reflection, supportive challenge and attentive encouragement. All leaders should have access to coach-mentoring; this is not generally true for many leaders, especially in the church.

I have just completed a three-year course of study in Norwich diocese and am due to be ordained deacon on 2nd October. There was nothing on my course about leadership, yet it is crucial especially as we begin to grasp the fact that we have to be a missionary church in the West. There is already a certain amount of experimentation with leadership forms in the emerging church.

Cell Church, for instance, has a huge requirement for leaders, though these are of a rather traditional nature. Base Ecclesial Communities have a different leadership model; which could be described as distributed and participative. Alt.worship groups tend to operate with a consensual opt-in style of leadership. Each has something to offer the church yet I suspect that most ministers have been completely untouched by these developments.

Changing the syllabus in theological training courses will help but there is an urgent need to do something now. The challenge is great because so many ministers have a vested interest in the present structures and feel threatened if asked to move outside their comfort zones. Yet the risk is even greater since the lack of effective and appropriate leadership is the single greatest factor in holding back the development of the church in the West.

Endings

Tonight was the end of my course. Formally it was session four of the Gospel & Mission course and indeed that's what we did. There were no special rituals to mark the end of three years' study. We made a small presentation to John, our course director, at half time and we ended by saying the grace together. That was it.

We will all meet again at the start of our ordination retreat in three months' time. It all seems a bit unreal; there's relief certainly and thoughts will turn to practicalities such as preaching scarves, stoles and the rest of the impedimenta of sacrality.

We talked again about our role. Will our incumbents let us be mission-focused? Can we be instrumental in Rowan Williams' 'mixed economy'? There are moves to dilute the differences between Ordained Local Ministers and other clergy. The net result of these may well be that we, too, are sucked into maintenance of the existing structures and provisions. This cannot be what God wants, surely.

Yet how can we avoid it? The inertia of the C of E is so great that it sometimes seems that despair is the only authentic response. Sybil said that someone had done a presentation on 'Mission Shaped Church' at their deanery. When it came to exploring the notion of mixed economy there was huge resistance from the clergy. "If you can't get them to come to the main service then you're doing something wrong" seemed to be the message. It would be better, it seems, for no-one to come to worship than for a group of people to worship together in a way that is not directly connected with the traditional Sunday service.

Cell vs Base

I'm not very good at keeping this blog up to date but life has been very hectic recently. Now that the Pursuing Excellence project has finished I may have some more time.

I've been thinking about cell groups and base ecclesial communities. Both offer a fresh expression of church but each has a different orientation. I guess that this is partly because of their background. Cell seems focused on growth while base majors on service. This dichotomy doesn't seem very biblical. When I hear, as I did recently, an evangelical minister say that we must remember that we are not here to offer a social services programme I get worried. Church growth is required by the great commission but not at the expense of living a kingdom life. There is a temptation to simply combine base & cell to provide a more holistic form of small group. The fact that this hasn't been done suggests that it's not quite that simple so I will resist the temptation to offer simplistic suggestions - for the time being at least.

There is another key difference between cell & base: the way that leadership is exercised. Cell replicates a hierarchical leader/led status model while base has a collaborative role-based model. The collaborative model seems more postmodern and more congenial to me at the moment. But I do not want to assert that it is superior or more biblical because I believe that we see both forms of leadership offered there.

An advantage of the status model is that a leader may be better equipped to hold the vision and manage the boundaries than collaborative leadership. On the other hand, cells often fail because they cannot grow leaders fast enough; perhaps a collaborative model could cope better with multiplication by division. Yet base groups do not seem to have a desire to grow.

I do get a sense that a dialogue between the two approaches should be fruitful. Has this happened? Can it happen in my head? I will continue to explore and try to get a sense of what might emerge from such a dialogue.