“People lack trust in leaders because of the poor character demonstrated by so many leaders. My interviews with 6,000 Christian leaders show that one of the greatest struggles they have is demonstrating godly wisdom. The issue is how worldly wisdom aligns with godly wisdom and how to discern the difference.”

I quickly wrote the quote down because it is exactly the reason why I write this blog.  My purpose is to help Christians who are leaders become more authentically Christian in their leadership practices.  I don’t think it is that hard to figure out a Christian approach to leadership, but it does take time to reflect on your faith and your work and how they intersect.  That’s why I call this blog Leadership Reflections.  By sharing my own reflections, I hope to help you with yours.

Worldly Wisdom

Worldly wisdom is developed from a human perspective without any reference to God or his ways.  It is often positioned as the opposite of godly wisdom, as if the two were diametrically opposed to each other.  In this paradigm, worldly is bad and godly is good.  But it is not as simple as that:

• If we believe that God created our universe with certain rules for how it works, then we can study it and learn about it.
• And if God gave us the ability to think, to discover and to create new knowledge, then we should do so.

It is inevitable then, that quite apart from God’s revelation humans will work out some knowledge and wisdom about how things work, or the way things are, that is right and aligns with God’s design or his ways.  Don’t be surprised when this happens because it is simply the result of the orderly ways of God.

But sometimes we get it wrong and develop ideas that are not in alignment with God’s ways.  This happens because our values are not in alignment with God’s or we have forgotten to leave room for God.  Most often it is just a case of someone who doesn’t know God and doesn’t know any better, but sometimes a person develops something with evil intent such as when a con artist develops a con game based on understanding our (fallen) human nature.

Worldly wisdom, therefore, is not like godly wisdom.  Godly wisdom is always 100% right.  Worldly wisdom has a range, from downright ungodly to wisdom that unintentionally aligns with God’s ways.  For example, people with no awareness of God can still do good deeds because they believe it is the right thing to do.

The issue isn’t that worldly wisdom is the opposite of godly wisdom, but that even at its very best it is incomplete without godly wisdom.  On a continuum from foolishness/ignorance to godly wisdom, worldly wisdom can be anywhere from 100% wrong to being 100% right (about the topic at hand), except for its source.  If worldly wisdom meets godly standards, then feel free to use it.

Godly or worldly? Discerning the difference

So when it comes to Christian leadership, there is much worldly wisdom we can draw upon to understand group dynamics, organizational theory, governance, motivation, planning and so forth.  There are many very good secular writers whose models and advice are just fine for Christian ministries.  But we must be careful to discern where worldly leadership wisdom is deficient and falls too far short of godly wisdom to be able to use with integrity.  And that is why a Christian leader needs to take time to reflect on his or her leadership practices.

How to distinguish the difference?  How to tell if a secular leadership technique is appropriate for a Christian to use?  Here’s some advice from a great little book:

“From a Christian point of view, it is only when the direction and the method are in line with God’s purposes, character, and ways of operating that godly leadership takes place.”
(Reviewing Leadership by Robert Banks and Bernice Ledbetter)

That is how you tell.  Ask the question, Does this align with God’s purposes, character and ways of operating?  This is why I say it is helpful if at least one of your ministry’s senior leaders has formal theological education.  It is not good enough to just find a verse here or there to justify something.  In this context, verses are little thoughts, and you need BIG thoughts.  You need to know not just the verses, but taken as a whole, what does Scripture say about God and his ways?  What’s the big theological picture?  You also need a vibrant personal relationship with God in which you submit to and then experience his leadership.  You will get to know pretty quickly how to assess opportunities or methods for suitability.

Here are some illustrations that may help:

• In a commissioned sales environment, sales managers are trained to motivate their staff by appealing to their self-interest and greed.  They have them develop vision boards – pictures of all the good things in life they want to have or experience.  Looking at these every day motivates them to sell more.  Since when would God have us motivate people by appealing to their greed or self-interest?  What relationship does this build between the salesperson and the customer?  Instead of truly helping customers, the salesperson has objectified them into a means to an end, an end in the best interest of the salesperson, not the client!  Does the technique work?  I guess so.   Is it godly?  No.  This style of management cannot be introduced into a Christian workplace.
• Traditional strategic planning is based on analyzing the past to predict the future.  To ensure the plan is achieved, staff are evaluated based on achieving goals that support the plan.  Where does this leave room for God to do something new?  When God told Paul to go to Europe, Paul went.  He didn’t say, “I’ll fit do it on to my next mission trip” or even worse, “I’ll have to work it into my next 5 year plan.”  The Holy Spirit blows where he will, and we have to stay nimble and flexible to respond quickly to his leading.  Traditional strategic plan also relies heavily on setting your strategy based on distinguishing yourself from a competitor, but God wants you focused on what he has called you to do.  In traditional strategic planning, your strategic options are limited by your SWOT analysis.  Since when has God been restrained by your weakness?  I’ve written more about this in Strategic Planning for Christian ministries.  Strategic planning can be done, but be careful to design the process to include God!

So when I am confronted with a new leadership technique, I look for the aspects of it that need to be tested against God’s purposes, character or ways of being by asking:

1. What is this advice or method based upon?  What assumptions does it make?  Why does it ‘work’?
2. How would this affect the way I relate to another person or group?
3. Why does this appeal to me?  What emotion or motivation makes this solution desirable?  Does the appeal call upon something in me that runs counter to the fruit of the Spirit?
4. How does it maintain or contribute to my status as “a holy vessel, consecrated to God” and to our ministry’s representation of what life in the kingdom of God looks like?

Then compare your answers to what you know of God. Be wise.  Be discerning.  Take time to reflect.

As you and I both know, there is no one single way to lead.  There is no single formulaic five step process to successful leadership.  There are all sorts of ways one can lead, and which way you choose may be highly dependent on circumstances, your nature, and a whole bunch of other factors.

My caveat

This blog is a series of reflections on how to provide Christian leadership.  I’ve made some strong statements and I know I say ‘should’ quite a lot.  That sounds pretty directive!  Since I write based on my experience, my circumstances, my personality and so on, I think my suggestions will work well for me, but will they for you?  You must decide that for yourself.  My goal is to get you thinking and provide you with some help along the way by sharing the very best information I can find or think of about Christian leadership.  I am sure my thoughts have widespread application (or I wouldn’t bother writing), but in the end they are just observations.  They are my contribution to Christian ministry written in response to the question I assume readers are asking: ”I wonder what a Christian leader who has time to think and write about leadership issues thinks about leading in a Christian way?”

Your caveat

You as a leader are in a similar position.  You have your opinions about issues facing your ministry’s leadership and as a leader you should be sharing them.  We lead from our convictions knowing that people want to have confidence in their leaders, but that means that we tend to lead with a high degree of certainty.  Let’s not be more certain about things than we have a right to be.  In many cases, there is more than one way to “skin the cat.”  (What an awful expression, but it expresses the thought perfectly.)  This is why it is best to lead with consensus decisions, or decisions that you make but which have been shaped by group discussion.

In closing

• Knowing that I could be wrong, or that there is more than one way to lead, is why I allow comments on this blog.  I want you to participate with me and my readers in a group discussion so we can all learn together.
• Knowing that you could be wrong or that there is more than one way to address whatever issues face you, is why you have a team to consult with and to help you lead.  Two heads are better than one and all that!

Leaders are not required to have all the answers, but to know how to develop a good answer and to make a decision.

Plans fail for lack of counsel,
   but with many advisers they succeed.
Proverbs 15:22

Conditions in which you might use a veto

There are two basic scenarios where the possibility of a veto arises.  One is where the decision is within your area of responsibility, but you prefer to have a group decision.  This is often the way a senior leader operates with the executive team.  The other is where you have delegated the decision authority to one of your direct reports and expect them to make a decision.  It is possible in either situation for a decision to be made that you simply cannot accept.  Although guidelines for decision making can be set, every decision boils down to a matter of judgment, and no two people will always judge everything exactly the same way.  As the more senior leader, if in your judgment:

• the risk level is too high,
• there are competing higher priorities for limited resources from other areas of the organization,
• it sets a bad precedent, or
• some aspects of the decision affect something over which someone else has the decision authority,

then you may find it necessary to overrule the decision.  But doing so may cause other problems because you originally said the decision was for others to make!  You have to take particular care that no leader’s credibility with the staff is damaged because of the veto.

A necessary tool

If you are in a leadership position, it is because someone believes your judgment is good enough that they can entrust you with your position.  You were chosen over all other candidates to do your job.  So team leaders at every level have a duty to hold in reserve the right to say “No” to anything that in their judgment has significant repurcussions that they cannot live with.

Senior Leaders

The board trusts the senior leader to guide the organization.  In most cases, the senior leader is the board’s only employee and is accountable to the board for everything that happens within the organization, whether good or bad, whether done by the senior leader or by others.  Senior leaders cannot excuse poor organizational performance on the basis that they were outvoted by their leadership team.  The board would have every right to fire the leader for not exercising good judgment and good leadership.

Other Leaders

Other leaders within the organization are likewise placed in their leadership positions because the senior leader trusts them to use their own judgment to get results from their teams.  They can’t excuse poor team performance on the basis that they were outvoted by their teams either!

No leader can in good conscience allow a decision to stand if they believe it will be detrimental to the organization’s ability to fulfill its mission.  That would be a gross dereliction of duty.  The basic principle of delegation is that you can delegate responsibility but not accountability.  Leaders will always be held accountable for the decisions of their staff.  It is as if they made the decision themselves.  They therefore have the right, and the obligation, to veto a decision when necessary.

Use it sparingly

I assume every leader wants to lead well, and most will understand the value of shared decision making, so in real life veto power should rarely be used.  When it is, it causes problems such as these:

• People don’t like uncertainty, and if a leader exercises a veto frequently, decisions will be seen as arbitrary and thus unpredictable.  The result will be anxiety among the team members.
• Shared decision making results in greater buy-in from team members because the decision is seen as fair.  Even if a team member is outvoted, they still recognize that votes are a fair and democratic practice.  So when such a vote is overturned, the team members (who are the ones who will be asked to implement the new decision) may not give it their wholehearted effort.
• When a veto is used to overturn what was to be a shared decision, team members will wonder why they were asked to make a decision when it appears the leader had already made the decision.  (In reality, the team probably came up with a decision the leader did not anticipate.)  No one likes trying to guess what outcome “the boss” wants.  Vetoing a decision made by a group is highly demotivating.
• When a decision that was delegated to a staff member is overturned, that staff member will be very disappointed to say the least, will see it as a vote of non-confidence, and if others know the decision was overturned, will suffer loss of credibility.

How to reduce the need to veto

• Delegating decision authority to a team (as in consensus decisions) or to an individual (when decision authority is delegated) is best done when the leader who has the authority is confident the team or person thinks the way they do about making decisions for the organization.  Since no one can read minds, leaders should always tell their teams how and why they make their decisions.  Let people understand your thought process.  Share the values and priorities you use when weighing the options.  When a team understands the ministry’s strategies and values, how the leader interprets those, and the amount of risk the leader is comfortable with, their decisions will be less likely to be overruled.
• As the team leader, be involved in the decision process and let your concerns be known as soon as they arise.  Define the characteristics of a good decision at the outset, and if it is a lengthy process, get periodic updates on how the process is going.  If the line of thought is heading in a direction you can’t support or are worried about, this is the time to ask for more research or to amend the parameters of what a good decision looks like.  You don’t want anyone wasting time unnecessarily on options that ultimately won’t be approved by you.
• If you know there is a category of decisions that you are particularly concerned about, keep these decisions as yours to make.  Instead of a group decision, involve the group in a consultation process so you still get a broad range of input and good thinking.  This way everyone knows up front which decisions are yours and which are shared.  A good practice described in Executive Teams is for the team leader to inform the team when a topic is first raised whether they are making the decision, consulting with you so you can make the decision, or if you are informing them of a decision you have already made.

How to reduce the negative consequences of a veto

• The worst thing is to veto a decision when staff members have no idea that you are prepared to veto decisions.  Although you hope never to have to use it, it is only fair to tell the team that the possibility exists.  Assure them that you will always explain your rationale each time.
• If you do have to veto a decision, use it as a learning experience for the team.  What factors did they miss or which priorities did they order differently?

An alternative to a veto

Rather than vetoing a decision, if the downside is fairly limited you could agree to accept it as an exception or a one-off and not as a precedent.  Set a time limit for how long it will stay in place or implement the decision on a pilot basis so you can test it out.  Both of these strategies reduce the long term effects of a bad decision.  Use this situation as a teaching opportunity to explain why you are concerned about the decision and perhaps set a policy to address whatever was missed in the decision making process so it won’t come up again.

Conclusion

The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 met to consider whether or not to veto Paul’s decision to convert Gentiles without making them abide by Jewish rituals.  There was a real chance they could have overturned Paul’s practice, but they discerned a fresh way that God was at work and ended up supporting his decision, although they did make it conditional (thus demonstrating that they had the authority to overrule Paul if they had chosen to do so).  This example shows that a veto should not be used without careful consideration of why the other decision isn’t a good one.  Never veto anything without deep consideration of the issues.

On the other hand, Paul’s letters are filled with examples where he is overturning decisions that local churches have made and telling them what to do differently (often related to Judaizers and internal church discipline) because he has a deeper understanding of the principles and issues involved than the church leaders apparently had.  He protected the church and its mission by using his apostolic authority to correct bad decisions.

In the end, you owe it to your ministry to never allow it to do anything that will impair its ability to fulfill its mission.

Read the book for a fascinating explanation of what happened on Easter Island and Pitcairn Island, why there are no more Mayans and why the Vikings died out in Greenland, why the Dominican Republic and Haiti share the same island but are in such different circumstances, the real story behind the genocide in Rwanda, the disastrous conditions that exist today in China and Australia, and what all this means for our civilization.  We can avoid disastrous decisions if we learn from history.

Diamond says the factors that contribute to poor decision making are:

• Failure to anticipate a problem before it arrives
  • The primary problem is not thinking ahead of a decision’s consequences.  Australian settlers introduced rabbits and foxes to Australia with disastrous results that are still with us today.
    • Leadership Check: Decisions are usually made to fix an immediate problem (the Australians wanted some animals they were familiar with from home) or to exploit an immediate opportunity (“There’s gold in them thar’ hills!”).  Your analysis should go much deeper and:
      • Follow the decision through for its intended and unintended consequences.  What do foxes and rabbits eat?  How many rabbits will there be in a hundred years?  Are there any predators to control the fox population?  Ooops!  If you do “X”, what affect might that have on “Y” (public opinion, other programs, co-dependency relationships, etc.).
      • Speculate as to what might happen.  What if a bad economy results in fewer donations?  Do scenario planning and define the leading indicators for each scenario.
  • Some societies simply forget the past and have the ‘joy’ of discovering the consequences of the same bad decisions again and again.  It didn’t take too long after the oil crisis of 1973 before gas-guzzling SUVs were being sold.
    • Leadership Check: Know your history!  Why learn from your own mistakes when you can learn from others??!!  Find out about strategic leadership initiatives that others have tried and failed.  There are books about strategic failures, magazines such as the Harvard Business Review regularly analyze stories of success and failure, and an Internet search turns up lots of resource material.  Now, don’t take this too far and say just because it was tried unsuccessfully before you won’t try it again.  Make sure you understand why it failed, and then see if circumstances are different today or if a different strategy might fare better.
  • Sometimes we fail to recognize a potential problem because we use a false analogy to analyze the consequences.  When the Vikings landed in Iceland and saw the same kind of trees they knew from home, they thought they could harvest them the same way.  What they didn’t realize was that soil conditions were different, and once the trees were cut down, the topsoil blew away and nothing could grow again.
    • Leadership Check: Don’t be too quick to say “This is like that.”  Leaders make this mistake all the time, taking what worked elsewhere thinking it will work for them.  It might work, but are the situations similar enough that the strategy is transferable?  If you dig deep enough into a success story, you will often find there were a few key factors without which the strategy would not have worked.  Be sure those factors apply to you too before applying the strategy.
• Failure to perceive a problem when it arrives
  • Some problems are imperceptible, such as the amount of nutrients in soil.  The first few crops planted in Australia grew, but they sucked the last remaining nutrients out of the soil.
    • Leadership Check: Check your assumptions!!!!  Have someone who isn’t immersed in your ministry’s culture review the plan and tell you what they think your assumptions are.  We often mistake assumptions for givens.
  • Some problems are not seen because the managers are too far away.  They don’t know what is happening “on the ground.”
    • Leadership Check: This is why field visits are so important.  I make it a point when travelling to stop in and see as many of our members as I can.  It is why I want to hear first-hand from staff about their interactions with our members.  It is why I want to see selected raw data as well as the executive summary and report.  I’m not going to analyze the data again, but looking at it gives me a better grasp on what was said.  Leadership cannot afford to be isolated from the frontline.
  • It is difficult to spot a problem when it takes the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations.  Global warming is a prime example.  When this happens, it results in “creeping normalcy.”  The change is so gradual people don’t notice it.  The change is only noticed when people remember long enough ago to say, “Didn’t that mountain used to have snow all year on it?”
    • Leadership Check: While year-over-year comparisons are helpful, don’t neglect decade-over-decade comparisons (or some other suitably long time frame).  For example, our membership retention rate at CCCC fluctuates up and down by about 0.75% each year, so the year-to-year comparison really doesn’t mean all that much.  What matters is that the records show that it has never varied outside the range of 94 to 97%.  So if it started falling by 0.3% each year, that wouldn’t be the end of the world because annually that is within the normal fluctuation.  But if the rate declined below 94%, that would be news.  But we’d only know that by paying attention to the longer term trends.  So keep a rolling average of say five years, or maybe ten years, to screen out short term fluctuations and uncover the longer term trends.  Then use a comparison of this year to five years ago to check for creeping normalcy.  Apply the same evaluation methods to your environmental scans.
• Failure to even attempt to fix a problem once it has been noticed
  • Some people figure they can personally profit at the expense of others, so they continue with bad behaviour (eg. polluting) that has immediate profits for them and leaves the problem for others to clean up.
    • Leadership Check: This is where politics enters the equation.  We normally think of “office politics” as a bad thing, but really it is neutral. In Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership, Bolman and Deal define politics as “the realistic process of making decisions and allocating resources in a context of scarcity and divergent interests.”  It becomes bad when people start campaigning for the welfare of their department rather than the welfare of the organization.  As the organizational leader it is your job to set the terms on which the decisions will be made:
      • first and foremost, the good of the whole ministry takes priority over any particular component of it
      • just as important, all decisions must align with the organization’s values, and
      • the best choice is the one that best advances the mission.
  • People might continue doing something harmful (overfishing for example) because if they don’t do it, they  believe someone else will.  Since the resources will be depleted anyway, they might as well get what they can while they can.
    • Leadership Check: This should not be a problem for a Christian ministry, but you never know.  As a leader, you must always be sure that your decisions are to do what is right, not just for your ministry, but  for the benefit of the kingdom of God and the world that God is wooing.  Take the high road and be a model, a paragon of virtue.
  • We cling to values that no longer make sense.  Montana’s state government hasn’t been willing to deal with the problems caused by mining, logging and ranching because they are the pillars of Montana’s pioneer spirit and identity.
    • Leadership Check: Challenge everything about your ministry.  You don’t change for the sake of changing, but neither should you fossilize for the sake of fossilizing!  Previous leaders did what had to be done in their generation and you must do the same for yours.  So challenge the sacred cows.  Challenge conventional thinking.  The question is, “Does this still work for us today?”  It could be a cultural value, a program or a methodology.  Challenge them all and prove they are still working better for you today than any other alternative available to you.
  • We don’t like the people who have identified the problem, so we don’t take it seriously.  This is why it has taken so long to accept the reality of global warming.
    • Leadership Check: You don’t have to like someone to agree with them.  Forget who said it and focus on the value of what they are saying.  Is it a good argument?
  • A clash between short and long term motives can prevent people from taking action.  Politicians are unlikely to think beyond the next election.
    • Leadership Check: This is where the Christian concept of stewardship should be a vital part of your leadership.  It is not your ministry (even if it is named after you!).  You are a steward caring for Christ’s ministry, and as such you should be thinking very long term, certainly much longer than your presence on the leadership team.  When you “check out,”  what report will you give the Owner?  Will you be turning over an orchard with no trees in it because you used them all up or will you give back a rich, productive and valuable orchard brimming with trees for the next steward to use?
  • Crowd psychology can easily get otherwise rational people caught up in the excitement of the moment and lead to dangerous things being done.
    • Leadership Check: The best protection is to forget what the crowd is doing and check out the fundamental issue yourself.  Does it make sense?  A lot of ministries got suckered into the New Era Philanthropy ponzi scheme because they did what everyone else did and didn’t do their own due diligence.  The few major ministries that did not take part checked the so-called investment out for themselves and decided the underlying premise didn’t make sense.
  • Groupthink occurs when stress and the need for mutual approval lead people to suppress their doubts and critical-thinking skills.
    • Leadership Check: Groupthink is why you need a “devil’s advocate,” someone to do their best to promote a different decision.  You need to have real alternatives, not just an assumed single option.  You need to test your thinking with outsiders, or the board.  Every organization likely has cherished beliefs about itself that are no longer true or relevant.  If a decision seems too easy or too obvious, perhaps it’s because you haven’t thought deeply enough about it or tried hard enough to find real alternatives.  Do the work!
  • Psychological denial occurs when something is so painful to think about that you deny its possibility.  People living right below a dam often say they do not believe the dam could burst.
    • Leadership Check: Consult with people who are more removed from your situation.  They will be more objective.  If you are honest with yourself, what are you most afraid of regarding the continuing viability of your ministry?  What have you said will never happen?  Get it out in the open, because only then can you deal with it.
• Finally, the problem may not be solvable, it may be prohibitively expensive to solve, or our efforts may be too little or too late.
  • Leadership Check: I’m not sure what to suggest here.  Do you bail?  Do you keep plugging away regardless?  We never know what the true unsolvable barriers are until we try to break through them.  Some of the best inventions discovered or the best things people have done have been accomplished after tremendous effort and repeated failures.  Are you Don Quixote wasting your life tilting at windmills or are you Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb after 1,000 failed experiments?  (Edison said they weren’t failures; he was just finding many ways not to make a light bulb – there’s positive thinking!) Answering the Quixote/Edison question is what leaders get paid for.  As Kenny Rogers sang in The Gambler:

“You got to know when to hold ‘em,  know when to fold ‘em,
know when to walk away and when to run.”

A Christian leader isn’t really a leader but a person who follows Christ (the real leader) closely and organizes others to do the same.  Developing intimacy with God and knowing his heart is the essence of Christian leadership.  The Bible is very explicit about how important intimacy with God is for his leaders.

With his army fleeing, King Saul felt as leader that he needed to do something.  He needed to make a sacrifice to God.  The prophet Samuel scheduled a sacrifice, but when it appeared Samuel wasn’t coming, Saul offered the sacrifice himself.  Just as he was finishing, Samuel arrived.  “You have done a foolish thing,” Samuel said. “You have not kept the command the LORD your God gave you; if you had, he would have established your kingdom over Israel for all time. But now your kingdom will not endure; the LORD has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him ruler of his people, because you have not kept the LORD’s command” (1 Samuel 13:13-14).

This is the danger of letting your personal spiritual life with God coast along, of not giving it top priority over everything else.  Saul wanted to do a good thing (seek the LORD’s favour), but he was doing it the wrong way - the king was no priest and had no right to offer the sacrifice.  Had he been intimate with the LORD he would have known what to do and what not do.  The fact is, I have no right to lead anything that is done in the name of Christ if I am not being directed by Christ!

I serve CCCC in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the name of Christ to accomplish the portion of God’s mission that our ministry works on.  I’m sure you do the same for your ministry.  And while I expect all the staff at CCCC to do exactly the same too, I am quite aware of the higher standard of accountability that leaders have for their obedience to God.  The prophets have a lot to say about this!

I do my best to practice what I preach, and I have left a ministry leadership role when it became clear I would be doing it in my own strength and power.  During my first two years at CCCC, I was also pastor of a small church that had suffered a lot of discouragement and the District wanted me to do four things there as its (part-time) pastor.  I loved providing pastoral care for people and I had no lack of vision for what I as their pastor was to do for them.  But near the end of my second year, I was praying about which of several priorities should be the focus of my preaching for the next year when the Lord told me my time there was up.  I was shocked to say the least!  I wanted to stay and I told the Lord so.  His response was sobering.  “John, you have done everything I wanted you to do there.  Well done!  I am pleased.  You can stay if you want, but from now on you will be on your own.”  Oh my goodness!  Pastor a church without the Holy Spirit?  I couldn’t even begin to imagine that.  God obviously had someone else in mind for whatever would come next for this church, and I dared not get in the way.  I resigned and helped them link up with a nearby church that provided a pastor.

The positive consequences of being intimate with the Triune God include:

• Leaders will be working on things the Lord obviously wants to bless, so they will see more fruit from their ministries
• By putting God’s agenda ahead of their own, there will be much less temptation to run the ministry for their own benefit (reminder – it’s all about God, not the leader)
• Leaders will have a healthier self-image as they acknowledge their reliance on God and don’t take all the credit themselves
• There will be less of a burden for the ministry because it is Christ’s ministry, not theirs, and Christ will look after his own ministries.  Only own what is yours to own!  Here I must share from my own experience the crushing burden of bearing too much concern for a ministry.
  • Back in the 90s I was a deacon and there were things that were causing significant problems in the church.  I felt as a deacon it was my responsibility to fix them.  Finally, during a prayer meeting I was overwhelmed with the situation and in despair when I suddenly found myself crying out over and over again a prophetic word from Jesus.  He said through me, “This is MY church, and I will look after MY church.  This is not your church, and it is not your problem.”  I realized that Jesus is quite competent to do what he wants to do.  While I needed to fulfill the responsibility of being a deacon, I had to let Jesus fulfill his responsibility as the owner.  Jesus will take care of his own and he only asks me to play the part he has assigned to me.

The first act of leadership is to be intimate with God all the time.  I’ve written a few suggestions in another post about how to maintain intimacy with God, and in yet another post I wrote about how to hold a personal spiritual retreat.

May you truly be able to say with Paul, “But we have the mind of Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:16)  Blessings!

Yes, it’s true.  My predecessor Frank Luellau lived in Elmira and had the CCCC office in Kitchener.  Back in the days when everything was done by mail, we produced lots of it.  Frank would drop it off at the Kitchener post office on the way home and got what he considered to be pretty bad service (I don’t know the details).  So he started dropping it off in Waterloo which, for those who don’t know, is between Kitchener and Elmira.  But he got less than adequate service there too.  So he started driving all the way home and stopping in at the Elmira post office.  Overnight, CCCC became their largest customer.  Voilà!  He got superb service.  It didn’t take long before he began to wonder why he was driving all the way to Kitchener every day, and he moved the office to Elmira, to be closer to the fabulous Elmira post office (and, I suppose, his home).

Why do we stay here?  We don’t produce nearly the volume of mail that we used to, and a lot of what we do produce has been farmed out to mailing companies.  But when we do have a mailing to send out from our office, we still get terrific service from our local post office. 

There are other reasons to stay too.  Elmira is, quite simply, a nice place to be.  It is in Woolwich Township, about ten minutes north of Waterloo, so it is in the country a bit.  And since I live in Waterloo, that gives me a nice drive in the country every day, and against traffic both ways.  (The country drive is a positive most of the year except when the farmers are spreading manure!)

The CCCC office in Elmira, ON

The rent is very reasonable.  We pay full freight, but it is still half the cost of being located in Waterloo.

Elmira is a great place for families.  About half our employees live in Elmira and the immediate environs and really enjoy raising their children here.

Finally, Elmira is about as crime free as a place can be.  Elmira’s weekly paper, The Observer, has a column called Law & Order that I find a lot of fun to read.  I don’t think a spin-off show called Law & Order: Elmira would hold its audience for very long.  The level of crime around Elmira is hardly serious by anybody’s standards.  Here is a sample of police reports from this week’s column:

December 10, 2010

8:15 AM        A 27-year-old Milverton woman was making a left turn from Schumer Line into a private driveway in a buggy when her horse turned abruptly and collided with a 2007 Honda driven by a Linwood woman in the oncoming lane.  The horse required euthanasia, and a member of the Linwood fire station was on hand to tend to the horse.  There was minor damage to both vehicles.  No charges were laid.

10:25 AM        A stray horse caused a traffic tie-up when it got spooked and broke free from the hitching post where it was tied on Industrial Drive in Elmira.  The horse darted across Arthur Street, directly into the path of an oncoming pickup truck, driven by a 46-year-old Elmira man.  Jay Rice, youth pastor and Elmira resident, saw the horse and set off on foot to catch up with it.  When police arrived, Rice was holding onto the horse by its bridle to stop it from running farther.  The truck suffered significant damage, while the horse suffered minor injuries.

December 11, 2010

2:03 PM        A box containing a teddy bear, four eyeglass cases, a stack of Valentines Day cards, a baseball glove and golf balls was found, left under a tree on James Court in St. Clements.  A St. Clements man reported that while he was packing up to move, another man grabbed a box of his belongings, jumped into a vehicle and fled the scene.  The box was later found under the spruce tree on a nearby lawn.  The belongings have been returned to their owner.

Folks, that second story occured very close to our office, but I can honestly testify that I never ever felt I was in any danger at all!!  And if you don’t believe the horse and buggy stories, well here’s the view from my office window (for real).

Since this picture was taken, we’ve moved just down the street, and the hitching post for our new building is on the opposite side from my office window.  Alas!

Someone once applied to work at CCCC and when I asked why they wanted to work for us, the job applicant answered, “Well, you are in Elmira, and I would like to enjoy the slow pace of country life.”  That person was not hired!  It may be a slow news day in Elmira, but it is never a slow day in our office. 

Anyhow, that’s why we are in Elmira – the excellent service of Canada Post!  Sometimes we don’t need to do big strategy sessions or market research.  Sometimes decisions are made for very simple, ordinary reasons that may even seem arbitrary, but they work out well and that’s all there is to it.  Not every decision needs to be a big deal.

Now what about you?  Is there a reason why you are located where you are that is for a somewhat off-beat reason?  Is there some other decision your ministry has made for surprising reasons?  Let’s hear the stories.

This will be a long post.  It has taken a lot of time to write it and I don’t want to break it up into two posts because it is one big thought.  So please be patient as I think you’ll find it helpful.  There are learning points below, but the story of my call precedes them in order to demonstrate that your call doesn’t have to be just like someone else’s and so that I can refer to my story in the learning points.

My call to ministry was not like John’s.  I knew from my preteen years, I think almost to the time I was saved, that somehow God was going to use me some day to serve his church.  I don’t know why I thought that, I just did.  I continued to have that thought many times over the years, but I had no idea how one serves the whole church.  A church or a denomination, I understood, but the broader church?  I thought it quite presumptuous to even think about it!  Who am I?  So I just went on with my life.  But on May 25th 2001, I asked God a question, ”Why have you given me so much vision for my church, for my clients, for everyone around me and nothing for me?”  The answer was so clear that I pulled over to the side of the road in shock.  I knew instantly that God had given me a call and the call was still valid this many years later!  I went home and told my wife I was going to go to seminary to prepare for whatever God had in mind for me.  She instantly agreed without reservation (now that’s confirmation!).  I met with trusted people from my church who supported my sense of call to ministry.  (Thank you Marshall, Jim, Ray, Laurie and Walt.)  Two weeks later I was enrolled at Tyndale Seminary and two weeks after that I started my first two courses during the summer term.

I was not then aware of a call to CCCC, I was just being obedient in taking the next step in preparation to serve God.  When my wife and senior pastor saw the job ad for the executive director of CCCC, they both recommended that I apply.  God orchestrated events in a marvelous way during the next six months.  The key for me was a one-week spiritual retreat that was part of my MDiv program.  The issue I brought to the retreat was whether I should pastor a church or lead CCCC, which had been offered to me subject to one more interview.  I thought one was a test for the other!  The spiritual director said something life-changing and liberating.  “Why do you think God has only one perfect plan for you?  Don’t you think in his graciousness God may give you two opportunities, equally pleasing to him, and then take delight in watching you make your choice?”  He suggested a prayerful walk in the woods during which I realized that neither ministry option was more spiritual than the other, they just fulfilled different purposes in God’s plan.  I came home and conferred with Marshall Eizenga, then associate pastor at my church, who had watched my spiritual formation for fifteen years by that time.  He confirmed the appropriateness of CCCC for me.  So my call was discerned based on a clear call to prepare for something (I didn’t know what) coupled with opportunity and guidance from several people that all aligned with a long-standing feeling I had as to God’s plan for my future.  The other half of the equation is that the CCCC board independently discerned that I was called to lead this great ministry.  My denominational advisor also agreed it was a good use of my gifts.  We were in agreement and God’s call was confirmed in community.

As I travel for CCCC and visit our members, I always ask people how they got into the ministry that they are now in.  And every time, I get treated to a unique story of how God worked in someone’s life.  I’ve never heard the same story twice, and since God works in different ways with different people, I don’t believe there is a formula for discerning your call.  What we learn from those who have gone before us is: 1) to be open to God working through us in unexpected ways; and 2) that we discern his leadership by engaging in Christian spiritual practices and spiritual reflection.  So here are some observations you may find helpful.

• God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not our ways (Isa 55:8).  You cannot plan your way into a call from God.  If you are asking God to bless your plans, you are probably not going to live out your highest and best purpose that God has in mind for you.  At one point while at seminary, I thought God had forgotten me, so I helped him by getting some job interviews with Christian ministries.  At one interview, the Holy Spirit clearly indicated to me “This is not what this is all about.  Withdraw all your applications!”  My plans were frustrating God’s plans.  His direction was to stop planning, sit back, and watch what he would do.  I would do nothing but respond to what others initiated.  It reminded me of the truism “Let go and let God.”  Experiencing God is a great book that says God never asks people to dream up what they should do for him.  You can’t call yourself.  You are called.  Are you asking God to bless your plans, or are you seeking God’s plans?
• What if God seems to be silent about your call?  Whenever there is silence, the standard advice is to check for sin first and deal with that.  And if sin is not the issue, then keep doing the last thing God told you to do before the silence and wait for him to initiate change.  And lastly, if you’ve never felt you had a personal call, perhaps the general call that all believers have is your only call (in which case, see the next bullet point).  While at seminary I had no understanding of what kind of ministry God was leading me into.  God seemed quite quiet.  All I knew was that I was done with secular work.   I also didn’t know how I could finish the degree as a full-time student with no income.  Yet in spite of all the things I did not know, I did know with certainty that God wanted me in that MDiv program and that is what I hung on to.  I said to myself many times, “But this one thing I know…”  It was the last call that I had from God that gave me the fortitude to persevere and push through some tough circumstances.
• There are different kinds of call.  A corporate call is shared by all believers while an individual call is for one person alone.  Os Guiness says the ordinary (or corporate) call is to a life response to “Follow me!”  A special (or individual) call is a clear communication from God to a task.  Some people have no sense of individual call, in which case they live their lives following the call they share with all other Christians, believing that God will use them ad hoc as they live their lives.  They are fully living a called life by doing so.  I don’t know that we can say everyone needs an individual call.  I do question Guiness’s definition of the individual call as a call to a task.  I prefer to think that God calls us to a particular part of his mission.  I feel called to the mission of equipping God’s church, more particularly the leadership of churches and Christian agencies.  I am currently fulfilling that call through my role at CCCC because the board and I both feel that this role, with me in it, serves both my personal mission and CCCC’s organizational mission.  If my time at CCCC ends, I am sure I would still feel called to serve the church but God would be leading me to another means of doing so.  In my opinion, discerning your call usually means discerning two things: 1) what mission you are called to; and 2) with whom you are called to do it. 
• Sometimes we are in circumstances that we don’t understand.  At one point I was really, really mad at God because I was doing everything for him and he was doing nothing for me.  I came home late one night on a real spiritual high from a three day retreat of silence and solitude to discover I had received a fax from someone whom I had forgiven in my heart for some really bad behaviour a few years before.  The person came to mind during the retreat and I wrote out a script about how I would tell the person of my forgiveness.  So when I read the fax and saw the same bad behaviour all over again, I lost it with God.  I composed my own imprecatory psalms that night!!!  But God was big enough to bear my complaint and revealed to me that these circumstances were building character, to help me become the person he needed.  Had I truly forgiven the person in my heart?  This was something of a test.  Far from doing nothing for me, God was actively working to make me more useful to him.  When you don’t understand your circumstances, ask God to show you his perspective on your circumstances and follow through on what you learn.  If circumstances do not support what you feel called to do, then it might not be the right time, so continue doing what you are already doing.
• Os Guiness, in his book The Call: Finding And Fulfilling The Central Purpose Of Your Life, says that you should do what you are.  He believes that God’s call is normally in line with the gifts that you already have.  “Normally” is an important concession, because God might call you to something outside of your abilities and interests, and give you the passion, grace and gifts needed once you start work.  I’ve heard many stories where this has happened and people are doing things they never thought they would have the slightest interest or skill to do.  Much of my life has been fighting against who God made me to be, in particular a voracious reader and researcher.  We tend to devalue the things that come easiest to us and admire in others what we find difficult to do ourselves.  There are many reasons why I feel my role at CCCC suits God’s call on my life, but one of the unexpected benefits is that it also allows me to use the talents and interests that come easiest to me and that I had devalued: my love for reading, researching, thinking, reflecting and writing.  Does God give gifts to support a call or does he call according to the gifts he has already given?  I suspect the answer is both, but normally you already have what you need.  Perhaps it just needs developing.
• Sometimes when people feel called to a mission they mistakenly think they are also called to create or lead an organization that pursues that mission.  For example, someone might feel a call to full-time evangelism, but it is a very different thing to be called to be an evangelist than to be called to lead an evangelism ministry.  And it is quite a different thing to be called to lead an existing organization and to be called to create a new one from scratch.  An evangelist and an executive director have two very different sets of skills and gifts.  It also takes vastly different skills and gifts to build on what someone else has founded than to be a ministry entrepreneur.  Paul recognized these distinctions (1 Cor 3:6).  So, are you called to do the work itself or to lead an organization that enables others to do the work?
• In The Soul of Ministry: Forming Leaders For God’s People, Ray Anderson says, that in deciding what ministry to do or how to make decisions, don’t be guided by the past but by God’s eschatological preference.  In the midst of the now and the not yet, the Holy Spirit is guiding us to be the church Christ wants when he returns, not a copy of the one he left.  Therefore, you should expect that your call will contribute to the church moving forward in some way (or at least the particular segment of it that you will lead).  Being oriented to the future will help stimulate creativity while discerning your call.  Gary Harbaugh echoes Anderson’s future-orientation.  He wrote in Pastor as Person that pastors are called by God to lead God’s people into the future. This involves choices about change that must include risk. Don’t follow your instincts, he says, follow your faith.  You aren’t called to maintain a church but to lead it forward within the context of our culture and society.  What attracted me to CCCC was the realization that it already had a great ministry, but there was a lot of room to expand its work.  At one interview, the board said my mandate is to explore to the edges the full mandate of CCCC.  This is a ministry that is not resting on its laurels but seeking God’s direction as it strives to fulfill its mission.  Perfect!  I can, with God’s help, lead CCCC into that future.
• It is crucial that other Christians who are close to you are part of the discernment process.  You might get away with missing out on one of the above points, but this one is critical.  The corroboration of your call by other mature believers is central to correctly discerning God’s call to ministry.  We serve, even if in different ministries, as fellow-workers.  We bless each other through the laying on of hands, prayers of dedication and so on.  We work in community, not as lone rangers.  Some people think they are called to ministry leadership, but if no one else supports that understanding, you must seriously question whether you have properly heard from God.  I tested my call with my wife, my pastor, my prayer partners, some mature Christian friends and a few others.  Along the way I had guidance from my professors at Tyndale that was invaluable.  There is wisdom in receiving advice from counselors (Prov 13:10).

So, assuming God is calling you to some particular part of his mission, he will do it in some way that is likely to be unique to you.  You’ll have the delight of seeing God give you your own story of how you were called.  But these tips should help you be ready for the call when it comes.  May God bless you richly with a satisfying life of service, whatever your call.

Would you like to share the circumstances of your call?  I’d like to hear it.

You can’t of course, but you can protect yourself by being more curious than you think you need to be.  Ask questions.  Here’s a funny example of what happens when you assume you know the answer and don’t ask any questions.

In the example, the captain thinks he is confronting another ship.  He never asked the other person to identify himself, so there was nothing to challenge the way he saw the problem (which was the problem that his staff had called him to the bridge to solve).  It was only when the true identity of the other person came out that the captain had “disconfirming” information.  In other words, the new information did not affirm what he “knew” but disconfirmed or challenged it. 

Good questions to ask all the time, and especially when you think the answer is a no-brainer, include:

• Let’s suppose something else is going on here.  What might that be?
• Does anyone think differently?
• Any question that checks your own assumptions

What these questions share is that they are all open-ended questions that invite unpredictable responses.  In one of the case studies the CEO thought he had heard from his staff by giving them a survey to complete.  However, the survey only had closed-ended questions with no opportunity to write anything in, and the questions dealt only with the issues that the CEO thought were important. 

I did a survey for my dissertation and almost every question had closed-ended choices (that makes statistical analysis easier) and an open-ended box where they could explain their answer and add whatever else they wanted to say related to the question.  Numerous times the closed-ended questions sounded very much supportive of one side of a debate, but in the open-ended responses many people qualified their answer and it became obvious that opinion was much more divided than the statistics would show.

So, the next time you think you know something, ask questions to confirm that you really know that what you know is right.