What's on your heart to do?

In my new role (former role, as of 23 March 2005) as Director of Youth Discipleship & Mission, I get to meet with, converse with, and minister with a variety of churches with many different emphases. Even among the youth staff at the office, there are widely divergent approaches and ecclesiologies, which has been invaluable for helping me to sharpen and challenge my own thinking.

Recently, as part of that process, I found myself in a day-long series of seminars hosted by the Willow Creek Association of Canada, listening several times to none other than Bill Hybels himself (the guru of the seeker-sensitive movement) -- some pomergent friends of mine are having convulsions just reading this sentence!

I found Bill to be an engaging speaker, a very intelligent communicator with a strong passion to see churches be relevant to a world that does not (yet) know or follow Jesus. Bill's passion is to train leaders to multiply the Kingdom -- you'd have to be beyond cynical to question his heart or his motives, whatever you might think of the seeker model.

Two things occurred to me as I listened to Bill talk about "strategic leadership":

1. I had noticed about ten years ago that many churches had adopted an approach to leadership that basically said "Hey, look at Robbymac (I'll use myself as a generic example) -- he's such an evangelist. Let's put him in charge of evangelism." And Robbymac, wanting to serve his church, would allow himself to be taken out of the works of evangelism he had been doing that had caught the attention of the leaders, and be placed in an administrative position of creating and overseeing the evangelistic programs of the church.
   
   Until, a few months or years later, when Robbymac gave up in frustration because nobody supported all the evangelistic programs, and while everybody took the training in evangelism classes that he started, nobody would actually DO anything evangelistic -- except signing up for more and more training.
   
   Hopefully, Robbymac would simply give up on the position and go back to being an evangelist, but the landscape is littered with little Robbymac's that gave up on leadering and on evangelizing due to being burnt out and feeling inadequate.
   
   And I wondered, then and now, when we take somebody out of what they have passion for, and put them in the administrative position of overseeing what they used to pour themselves into, why are we surprised that they lose heart? And then we have the audacity to put them on the shelf and repeat the process with somebody else?
   
   
2. Bill Hybels made a very thought-provoking comment in his last address, something to the effect of struggling when "the demands of strategic leadership clash with the values of spiritual formation". Bill's example was what to do when someone as strategic and busy as he was happened to bump into a grieving mother in the church lobby.
   
   The demands of strategic leadership would say "you've trained other to do this -- your time is scarce and you need to learn to say no", while the values of spiritual formation would say "gee, wasn't the Parable of the Good Samaritan about this very thing? How could I NOT slow down and care for a smoldering wick or a bruised reed?" (Matthew 12:20)
   
   I suspect that one of the major departure points between the "stragetic leadership" (cynics would label it the CEO management model) movement and the emerging church movement would be their answer to that struggle. Or as one of my co-workers remarked earlier today, "we'd evaluate 'effectiveness' by a different grid'."

P.S. I had a great time teaching at Tyndale Seminary yesterday, although trying to cover "Postmodernism & the Emerging Church" in one three-hour class was extremely crazy! It should really be a course -- or several courses -- all on its own. But it's a start, and I had a lot of fun doing it!