Today was our second focus meeting – the once a month whole team meeting where we come together to refocus on the mission, tell stories, worship together and learn together. Its the key meeting for helping us stay on track and stay together.
Today we ate lunch, discussed some up and coming stuff like a backyard blitz we are doing, Easter, supporting one family in the team with finance and then had a go at some corporate worship and some thinking thru what leadership is about.
Bec is a great worship leader and took up the challenge to lead us today in a ‘corporate worship’ experience. She did a fantastic job – although I’m not sure she’d necessarily feel that! Doing new things and experimenting with new methods can feel a bit awkward at times – it did today in places. It was also really difficult with 6 or 7 kids clanking around and screaming in the background! But what she led us thru was a genuine worship experience where we had to engage with God and were given the opportunity to participate. Great stuff!
From there we looked at these words:
Institutional
Tradition
Hierarchy
Control
Leadership
In groups of three people were asked to do a bit of word association. Not surprisingly many of the words that emerged were negative – yet all of these words have positive aspects also. It seems that our experience has often caused us to see the negative more than the positive.
Today we were focusing on leadership – something that has copped some pretty bad (I would say ‘reactionary’) press in recent years. After going thru the late 80’s early 90’s where the pastor teachers were marginalised in favour of the gung ho visionaries we have seen the pendulum swing to marginalise the gifted leaders and see them as bully’s/dictators etc rather than team players. from this came the idea that we don’t need leaders or that we can have a completely flat leadership structure.
As usual it is likely the truth is never an either / or.
Rather than simply ‘teach’ what I believe leadership to look like (and I do have some pretty strong views) our plan is to split into three groups to explore the New Testament teaching on the topic – especially leadership structure in Christian communities.
We will do our own research over the next two weeks then meet as a small focus group to share learning and crystallise what we have seen together. Then in 4 weeks time we will come back and share that learning together and work to-wards developing a biblical leadership structure.
The 3 groups are 1. Gospels 2. Acts & Romans 3. Epistles and the rest
I’m looking forward to seeking how it all works out as we do this research together. My hope is that when we arrive at some conclusions we will do so with clarity and consensus recognising that we have delved into the scriptures and grappled with the issues rather than simply reading the latest trendy book and following what it says.accidental husband the divx download