I was fully engaged with Lance's last eNews blog which hit highlights of this year's Global Leadership Summit which he experienced at Winebrenner Theological Seminary.
Lance noted that Bill Hybels offered this as a definition of leadership: "...getting people from here to there."
Lance was impressed when Hybels said,
A leader knows it's not okay to stay here and that we need to be going somewhere.
To me, this statement defines the essence of what has driven the CGGC decline for at least the last generation.
CGGC leaders have been absolutely obsessed with "there."
Spiritual gift driven ministry
35,000 by 2000
Natural Church Development
Missional Leadership Initiative
ONe Mission
Hear the Call
Leadership Development
Making disciples...
...to hit only the highlights. All fervent attempts to, as Hybels says, be going somewhere.
All of which failed, or are failing,...
...miserably.
All of which intensify our spiritual and numerical decline.
Trying to be going somewhere has not been our problem for a long time.
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Our problem is not with the yearning to be going somewhere. We have been doing that obsessively. The problem has been with leaving our "here."
Our leaders have always needed to hold on to what they have, hoping to graft on to the old something new that will give geniune spiritual life to our here. And, that has never worked in all of the history of the people of God. And, it will never work for us.
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Two truths strike me in this Hybels stuff:
1. This leaving here/going there thing is nothing more than what Jesus and the apostles and the prophets called repentance. And, to this point CGGC leaders have resisted calling for repentance or practicing it. We are going to have to repent to do what Hybels is talking about.
2. My Characteristics of the CGGC Brand is my attempt to describe the CGGC "here." And, the more I think about it, the more I think it is very accurate.
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The best place for the CGGC to start is for the Findlay crowd to call a gathering to define what the CGGC "here" is and to pledge to the Lord and to the whole Body that we will leave it, that is, we will repent of it and turn from it.
We must repent!
As I've said here in the past, I chafe at the idea that human beings think of themselves as being leaders in the Kingdom of God. But, understanding that, in the CGGC, some do, it seems to me that if the men who fashion themselves as our leaders are going to lead us from our here that they are going to have to be the first people in the CGGC to leave here so that the rest of us have someone to follow.
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ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that one profoundly unchristlike quality of what passes for leadership in the CGGC is leaders want the body to follow what they say. Leaders in the CGGC seem to think that their role is to come up with the right ideas and that the body should, then, execute those concepts.
ReplyDeleteJesus, on the other hand, led by doing. He never taught nor commanded any action that He didn't put into practice before He asked it of us.
If men and women in the CGGC are going to think of themselves as leaders, they are going to have to begin to lead by doing.