intersections

Jean Vanier: The lonely task of leadership

I'm quickly reading through Becoming Human, by Jean Vanier's founder of the L'Arche communities around the world. In the first chapter entitled "Loneliness." I ran across this amazing statement. He is talking about the movement of our lives from order to chaos and back to order again as a necessary and inevitably movement of human evolution or maturity. He is describing the unhealthy tendency to resist this movement and preserve order because we don't want to go to that uncertain place. This change always engenders loneliness but we try to stop this process at our peril.
This statement contains vital lessons for anyone who leads or aspires to be a leader.

To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder. In this way, we discover the new.

Those who have the eyes to see this new order, as it arises, will often be considered too revolutionary, too modern, too liberal. Dictators everywhere have clamped down on movements for liberation; those who lead are always so certain that anarchy will arise if they do not govern with a firm hand. In reality, leaders are frightened of sharing or losing power. They too are frightened of change. They want to control everything. Those who see the coming of a new order will frequently be alone, persecuted (13-14).

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For more about Jean Vanier and the L'Arche communities check out these resources:

L'Arche: A Community of Brokenness and Beauty (Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett, August 2, 2007)
The Wisdom of Tenderness (Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett, December 20, 2007)
Adam, by Henri Nouwen

Stained Glass: Hollywood Blvd. (Episode 1)

I just realized that the first episode of the four-part documentary that the North America Division is doing about the Hollywood Adventist Church is now online at the Vervent website.

I'd love for you to have a look at it and tell me what you think. This was written and directed by one of our members, Melody George. (As an aside, you will be hearing a LOT more about Melody in the coming months...just sayin').

There are three churches that are a part of this project and each church will have four episodes. Stay tuned for the rest of these in the very near future.

Now, have a look at Episode one...click here and look under Featured Resources for "Stained Glass: Hollywood Blvd - Episode 1."

Hollywood Church like Google?

Our senior lay leader at the Hollywood Church, Neville Salvador, sent our staff a link to this video today, along with the following comment.

"I believe we kind of have a Google-like environment going on at Hollywood--just not the budget!"

I found this to be an incredible compliment. Those of you who know the Hollywood Church from the inside, check out the video and let me know what you think of Neville's assessment. I'll share some of my thoughts, too, but you go first!

A different kind of leadership

A pastor friend of mine in Moscow reminded me a great quote today and I think it's the perfect way to begin a new year of blogging. This quote comes from Alan Roxburgh's excellent book, The Missional Leader. I read this book when it first came out in 2006, so this quote is a great reminder.

It also comes at a good time because I was having coffee and catching up with a friend who remains fairly active in the Hollywood Church in spite of moving out of the area recently. We were discussing the relative merits of the numerical growth (or lack thereof) of the church. The pressure to "grow" the church is almost irresistible sometimes. We both agreed that if we wanted to pack out the Hollywood Church (it seats approx 300, I think) we could do that. Our group is smart enough and talented enough, and our leadership capacity has grown to the place that we could probably pack the place in a matter of a year or so. We weren't being arrogant. We were just being realistic. But we agreed that this was not the point. And, in fact, the whole character of the Hollywood Church would change such that many who have found the life-giving experience with a life with God would be devastated. Those who are unfamiliar with the missional church and still drinking from the fountain of "church growth" and attractional methods of church development will probably misunderstand what I'm saying here.

Anyway, enough commentary...now the quote.

Today, we give up on congregations that we declare are out of touch with the culture. We run to big, successful places with marquee-name leaders to find out how to be successful. In so doing we are going in exactly the opposite direction from everything we see in the Biblical narratives. We have forgotten that God’s future often emerges in the most inauspicious places. If we let our imagination be informed by this realization, it will be obvious that we need to lead in ways that are different from those of a CEO, an entrepreneur, a super leader with a wonderful plan for the congregation’s life. Instead, we need leaders with the capacity to cultivate an environment that releases the missional imagination of the people of God (21).

If you are a church leader, how do you hear this statement? In what ways do you sense God's Spirit calling you to a different kind of leadership - different than a CEO or "super leader with a wonderful plan for the congregation's life?"

Introduction to Missional Leadership

Many of you who read my blog have asked me, either by email, phone or in person, about missional church. What is it? How can we sort through the fluff and get down to the issues that really matter? Like any new word or concept, it quickly gets co-opted to mean, "the new name for whatever we're doing that we're really excited about."

So, if you're wondering about missional theology and leadership, you have an amazing opportunity to learn from one of the best teachers I know in this field. Allelon is hosting a new webinar with Alan Roxburgh called "Introduction to Missional Leadership." The first of this 5-part series will happen on Monday, January 5 at 9:00 AM PT or January 6 at 12:00 PM PT (you chose one). Best of all, this webinar is free. You can learn more and register for this Allelon Webinar here.

If you are a pastor or lay church leader and you've been reading my blog off and on for a while and wondering how you can better understand what it would mean for you to be a misisonal leader, you really shouldn't miss this. I will be attending this webinar myself. I am finishing my final project for my D.Min. in Missional Leadership (Fuller Theological Seminary) and Alan Roxburgh has been one of two primary mentors (along with Mark Lau Branson) so I know Alan well and I know this material. But, I also know that I can learn from the interaction with others as we grapple with what it means to lead local communities of faith into authentic missionary encounters with our neighbors where God has placed us.

So, please join me on January 5 at 9 AM or on Jan 6 at NOON for this first of five webinars on Missional Leadership.

"From the Margins: Engaging Missional Life in the Seventh-day Adventist Church

Over a year ago Ryan Bolger (Fuller Seminary) asked me if I wanted to contribute an article to a series of articles being published in Fuller Seminary's theological journal call, Theology News & Notes. Each contributor was asked to reflect on how the emerging church conversation was taking shape in their respective denomination. My article, one of nine, is entitled "From the Margins: Engaging Missional Life in the Seventh-day Adventist Church," and begins like this:

“It sounds to me like this church wants to have a conversation without an agenda with its community. Am I hearing you right or . . .”

He never finished that sentence, but several of us knew exactly what he was thinking. This comment was spoken on a recent January afternoon at a gathering of our congregation to discuss progress and next steps for creating a public art mural on the wall of our church property that faces the Hollywood Freeway—one of the busiest freeways in Los Angeles. The comment came from a first-time visitor, a gifted musician, and a Seventh-day Adventist deeply disillusioned with church as he has experienced it for his 30 or so years of life.

What several of us felt, and later confirmed, was that this man (who I’ll call Jason) was sensing something hopeful, but he could barely believe his ears.

You can read the rest here, along with the other eight articles.

There has already been a considerable conversation started over on my Facebook page, but I'd love to hear your comments and reflections after you read it. Please leave a comment below.

The contributors are...

My Forum Presentation

UPDATE: The audio of my talk, as well as the Q & A session that followed, is now online, thanks to my friend and fellow Hollywood member, Melody George. Click here to read Melody's reflections and listen.

On Sabbath afternoon I gave a presentation at the L.A. Adventist Forum entitled, "Missional Church: Recovering Evangelism as Authentic, Credible Witness." It went pretty well, I think. I so appreciated having the eight or so members of the Hollywood Church who went with me, ranging in age from 23 to 97.

If you're interested in reading my comments you can download the PDF. Rumor has it that a MP3 of my talk will be available soon. Stay tuned here for an update.

Contributing to a new blog

I was recently invited to be one of fourteen bloggers for a new Allelon blog called, The Missional Journey: Thoughts Along the Way.

This blog focuses on:

» mission-shaped leadership;
» re-connecting and engaging the “worlds” in which we live;
» stories of engaging and listening to our context(s);
» the gospel and our modern Western culture; and
» Allelon initiatives.

I wrote a post just today called, "We Don't Really Have Bible Study." Let me know what you think.

And if you haven't heard of Allelon or visited their website recently you should definitely check it out. It is the premier place for all things missional!

Cruciform Leadership

A wonderful friend and fellow laborer in God's field sent me this great quote today from H.M.S. Richards, Sr., under the title, "Keep At Your Work." (I'm not going to end it this for gender inclusiveness - you can translate on the fly!)

The Lord has given to every man his work. It is his business to do it and the devil's business to hinder him if he can. So surely as God has given you a work to do, Satan will try to hinder you. He may present other things more promising, He may allure you by worldly prospects, He may assault you with slander, torment you with false accusations, set you to work defending your character, employ pious persons to lie about you, editors to assail you, and excellent men to slander you. You may have Pilate and Herod, Annas and Caiaphas all combined against you, and Judas standing by ready to sell you for thirty pieces of silver; and you may wonder why all those things come upon you. Can you not see that the whole thing is brought about through the craft of the devil to draw you off from your work and hinder your obedience to God?

Keep about your work. Do not flinch because the lion roars; do not stop to stone the devil's dogs; do not fool away your time chasing the devil's rabbits. Do your work. Let liars lie, let sectarians quarrel, let corporations resolve, let editors publish, let the devil do his worst; but see to it that nothing hinders you from fulfilling the work that God has given you.

He has not sent you to make money. He has not commanded you to get rich. He has never bidden you to defend your character. He has not set you at work to contradict falsehood which Satan and his servants may start to peddle. If you do these things, you will do nothing else; you will be at work for yourself and not for the Lord.

Keep about your work. Let your AIM be as steady as a star. Let the world brawl and bubble. You may be assaulted, wronged, insulted, slandered, wounded and rejected; you may be abused by foes, forsaken by friends, and despised and rejected of men, but see to it with steadfast determination, with unfaltering zeal, that you pursue the great purpose of your life and object of your being, until at last you can say, 'I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.'

I can't express how timely this quote is for me. This is the heart of cruciform leadership. Are we greater than our Master? Should we expect to be treated differently than he was?

Also, I think this is what it means to say that "we believe in the communion of the saints." Though Elder Richards has long since gone to his rest, awaiting the great resurrection, his ministry continues to speak to me, sitting under the weight of leadership in the urban jungle of Los Angeles. I'm sure Elder Richards could barely imagine the circumstances under which we do minstry today, but he at deeper level, he understood exactly. And today he has encouraged me to "keep at my work!"

Henri Nouwen - The temptations of leadership

I don't know if today is just a day for good quotes, but I can't resist sharing this one. If you get Sojourners' Verse & Voice, you've probably seen this already. After the quote, a few thoughts.

Too often I looked at being relevant, popular, and powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry. The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but temptations. Jesus asks, "Do you love me?" Jesus sends us out to be shepherds, and Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led to places where we would rather not go. He asks us to move from a concern for relevance to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from a leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people.

- Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus

A few members of our leadership team had a conversation last evening in my office. It's a conversation that happens fairly often, in various ways. Someone had said something about "how different" the Hollywood Church is from anything they've experienced before. Some use words like "raw", "authentic", "messy", and "unpredictible." Of course, those words aren't good news for everyone.

I think one of the intangible differences about Hollywood is that we give quite a bit of time and energy to learning how to lead in the ways that Henri Nouwen describes above. I spent the better part of 10 years doing exactly what he describes - worrying about being relevant and effective...maybe even popular.

Today we are wrestling with the invitation found in this quote - an invitation to vocation. The last line is so revealing. We are learning, as a leadership community, what it means to embrace a vocation of leadership "in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people." This is no easy task. It is messy and raw, though we certainly don't set out toward messiness and rawness as objectives.

How do you understand the distinction Nouwen is making in your own live and vocation?