Leadership Continued

If you’ve been following our journey with leadership then you’ll be interested in what came out of our meeting last Tuesday night.

We finished our biblical reflection and distillation with the following conclusions and over the last week we were going to take time to pray, listen to God and see what he had to say as ‘where to from here?’

I had thought we would unearth some kind of a small team to oversee the wider team/mission and discuss any critical issues of direction and focus.

Funnily enough over the week, although I spent time in prayer I couldn’t sense God saying anything at all – not a whisper!

When we came together on Tuesday we went around the group and I asked people to share what they felt God had been saying to them before I shared my own nothingness. Almost without exception the group raised questions of ‘do we need this team yet? Can we just function as one big ‘leadership team’ and all decide on direction?’

It wasn’t what I expected and not what I was hoping for either. But it certainly seemed like God was saying ‘go this way for now’. The conclusions sat well with me, not because it was what I wanted but because there was a sense of having heard God. This is the value of a team process and the protection against one person’s way of seeing things.

It means we will function as one larger decision making group at this stage – a situation has both pros and cons. It seems everything we do is a series of trade offs, so we need to keep coming back to who we are and what we are about.

In taking this route it necessarily means that some of our time as a group will be spent dealing with directional/strategic questions and that will take away from worship/prayer/scripture/hanging out. But to have a team within a team would also remove people a step from the thinking process of the decisions.

Everything we do has a cost and benefit. If we meet weekly we lose some level of relational closeness that is possible in a small group. If we meet fortnightly then we stop building a sense of connectedness in the larger group.

One of our essential foci is that of being a team of missionaries connecting with the community rather than focusing on us as a gathered community. Its all too easy to default to getting out gatherings right (because they are the visible structural entities) and all too easy to neglect the day to day hanging out and making connections that actually validate what we are seeking to do.

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