Making space & Leadership is vital

Today I purchased two 4 drawer filing cabinets on sale at Auchan, our grocery store. One of them is replacing a two drawer one that has broken for several years. I placed both new cabinets next to my desk in my office/guestroom and am in the process of organizing them. It's nice to get some things off of piles on the floor and into a more organized system where I don't have to look at or step over them each time I enter the office.

While reorganizing today, I've felt good about throwing out some paper and files that were important to me in recent years as I was focused on Mission Radicale and the work team at Belleville. However, both of these ministry priorities are less important to me now, so I don't feel the need to keep all these papers about them.

It's nice to be making space today. One benefit is having more order in the office. Another is having more room for newer priorities, like la Fonderie, as well as the interns/helpers that we have staying in the office.

Fruitfulness in life requires that we prune our lives from time to time. We can't do everything well, or even do everything. Ministry and relational priorities change. To do new things well, we need to sometimes leave certain old things behind, even if we enjoy and are comfortable with them. We need God's wisdom to make good decisions about what to activities to stop participating in, which objects, notes, and papers to hold onto, or even which relationships to place less focus upon.

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Yesterday I had some time to continue reading The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. So much in it continues to resonate in my heart at this time.

Here are some of their insights about the shape of the missional church in a section title

Leadership Is Vital (pp. 67-68)

If we could do church all over again, we wuld build clear leadership philosophy and vision, recognizing that imaginative, godly, biblical leadership is absolutely vital. It is the strategic area of leverage for change. We would focus on this first and keep focusing on it. It will be important in planting incarnational churches tht the leaders select a team only on the basis of a clear, demonstrated commitment to stated philosophy and vision. We have found that some people who can cognitively agree with the philosophy of the incarnational-church mode, still have great difficulty with it in practice. The attractional mode is so pervasive and so entrenched in the Western church that those who have grown up in it sometimes have a kind of default program in their imaginations. They can agree with the need for significant change, but they readily default back to standard practices in reality. It will be essential to take leadership teams through a process of recognizing the difference between what Brian McLaren calls church traditions and the Christian Tradition. Leaders need to understand that church practices or traditions are culturally inherited. They are fully adaptable and flexible for the culture and must not be confused with biblical teaching that is not negotiable and not flexible.

...We will put on the table our belief that the New Testament teaches a fivefold leadership matrix that implies a community of leadership made up of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers (Eph 4:11-13). We think it is the legacy of the Christendom mode that sees Christian community in terms of a triangular hierarchy, with pastor-teachers at the pinnacle. In a post-Christendom world, the yearning for an egalitarian, gracious community of faith requires that leadership be egalitarian and cooperative as well. We cannot find the term senior pastor in the New Testament, but we can find Paul's desire for the church to be led by all five leadership giftings, acting in concert for a balanced biblical equipping of the saints. The church's current emphasis on pastors and teachers means that the cross-cultural missionary heart of the apostles and prophets is always quenched by the concerns for good teaching and pastoral care. So-called "good teaching" is not occurring in a church that has no heart for its community, since the purpose of teaching is to equip Christians for service. (Bold mine)

This is not to say that the church should not be effectively shepherded by godly leaders ("elders" to be precise), but we see Christian leadership operating best as a community within a community. Any suggestion that there should be a distinct class of "priest" in the Christian church is clearly a contradiction of Pauline teaching. And this is not just a critical to be leveled at the Episcopal churches. The evangelical and Pentecostal churches, with their hierarchies of pastors, are functioning with a priesthood in all but name. The New Testament radically reshapes the language of priesthood, presuming all believers to be priests, able to make their lives sacrifices, and able to gain personal access to the grace of God. There is no distinction in the New Testament between priest and laity, the sacred and the secular, the religious and the everyday. Only when all five functions of leadership are equally balanced do we have a leadership team worthy of Paul's vision in Ephesians. A new congregation should establish a full-fledged leadership matrix from the beginning.