Here I share leadership lessons I’ve learned along the way. All in hopes that you won’t have to make the same mistakes I have.
Tradition can be a powerful tool. If tradition is used right, it can connect us to past generations, teach us important lessons, and serve as a rite of passage into the next stages of our life. Liturgical Christians, like Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox have a fantastic grasp on great ways to use tradition well.
I love tradition, when it’s done right.
But tradition can also be overly romanticized and kind of stupid.
Gold fish are often a child’s first pet. They’re low maintenance, inexpensive, and easy to handle. I mean, you need a bowl and some cheap food, just add water and BOOM! You have a pet.
But there’s a fun fact about gold fish that I remember hearing years ago – if you place a small gold fish in a large fish bowl, it will grow to proportionally fit the fish bowl. This means that you can take a fish you win at the fair and watch it grow if you place it in the right environment. (To be fair, I don’t think you can get a bagged gold fish to turn into koi).
This same principle applies to churches. And no, I don’t mean physical buildings (this time). Churches have little ‘fish bowls’ all over the place – little things that stop them from growing any bigger than they already are.
Like many of you, I was shocked and dismayed about the news yesterday out of Paris. It is a heart breaking narrative of anger, hatred, and violence against everyday people going about their everyday lives. And this narrative is becoming all too common.
The story is unfolding as I am writing this, so my intention is not to give you an up to date report and response, but rather, a pastoral response to the heartbreak, pain, and suffering.
Our natural response is grief – I get angry when I experience loss and pain. It’s my primary stage of grief whether it’s death, job loss, or tragedy. We, as a nation, seem to express our grief similarly, through our anger. We want to know who is to blame, why they did it, and what justice demands. As a nation, we can safely answer the first two questions fairly easily (ISIS and because they’re terrorists).
The third question is more difficult. Some of us want to bomb every inch of ground that smells like ISIS has been there. Others want to help other countries get involved and take a secondary role. Still others want to be entirely hands off.
I don’t know what the best option is, but I do know that you can’t bomb, shoot, or kill an idea, which is what fuels ISIS.
There are no simple answers – We want the solution to this situation, and presumable future occurrences, to come with a simple answer. Life rarely provides us truly black and white options. There are political and humanitarian issues at play in this conflict with ISIS, which is admittedly a much more clear cut conflict than most. Those issues are complex because of a wide range of cultural and social issues that no single person is prepared to really address in a blog post.
Above all else, fear must not drive us – Our call, as Christians, is to lead with love. We must not use a rhetoric of anger, vengeance, or fear. This includes towards those who would wish us harm. This tragedy will inevitably be a point in the conversation about the refugee crisis, our response to ISIS, and general foreign policy.
Christians are called to love first and always. Our inclination will be to wall ourselves off. We must love the unlovable. We must reach out to those who are hurting, and not look for excuses, reasons, or justification for violence or anger.
We cannot let the normal narrative be of hate, violence, and tragedy. We must, rather, change the narrative to one of love and mercy.
A lot of churches are struggling to connect with Millennials, for a large number of reasons. The biggest reason I’ve noticed, while wearing both the “church leader” hat and the “millennial” hat, is that the church isn’t sharing information in to social ‘watering holes’.
A ‘watering hole’ is a hub that the community gathers regularly. In ancient times, it was often a well or a marketplace. More recently, it was the downtown area of a city or village. Now, the ‘watering hole’ has moved online to social media. Before, you’d look for ‘Help Wanted’ signs in windows to find a job, now we go to different websites. If you wanted to get to know even a little bit about someone, you’d have to go to their house. Now, we have virtual living rooms on Facebook.
Many churches continue to make community announcements, celebrate birthdays, and organize events using the techniques they did twenty years ago: passing clipboards and having the pastor tell the congregation what was going on. The problem is that the churches kids (Millennials) can’t hear them, because we’re not there.
Church leaders face a big struggle when it comes to revitalization of their congregations. 90% of churches are either in decline or stagnant, which means only 10% of churches are growing. Many churches (and, if we’re being honest, church leaders too) want simple solutions to make the process of turning around a decline quick and painless. But the reality is that revitalizing a church will take time. It may be helpful to think about the process of revitalization as the process of “eating an elephant”.
When I was in ROTC, I remember an instructor asking our class of cadets (who had noticeably become frustrated by our perceived lack of progress) a seemingly absurd question: How do you eat an elephant?
His answer?
The Dead Drop 