Despite the fact that Jesus said, very clearly and dramatically, that to be great in the Kingdom of God one must be a servant and that to be first among those in the Kingdom one must be slave of all, the mountaintoppers of today's CGGC and ERC insist on thinking of themselves as leaders and they make "Leadership Development" a central goal.
(I'll ask, at this point, as our decline continues: How's that working out? Or: Is the Lord of all authority and power and grace and mercy and blessing, blessing their yearning to lead and to develop leaders?)
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As I understand reports from ERC sessions, Conference mountaintoppers are touting a new Strategic Plan through which they hope to lead the ERC out of, according to what Jim Moss, Sr. has said, is a numerical decline that began in the late 1950s and a spiritual decline my study of Churches of God history suggests began in the 1930s.
I have not seen the actual Strategic Plan so I can't comment on its content. I can, however, comment on the paradigm: Kingdom-change-through-strategic-planning.
To this point, Strategic Plans have always failed the ERC. What reason is there to think this one will succeed?
The same mountaintoppers and the same leadership values that guided failure in the past are still in place.
The Lord always calls His people to renew themselves through repentance. ERC mountaintoppers have not repented. They insist on practicing old, failed ways.
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On a very practical level, disregarding all the spiritual and theological stuff about how the Lord creates and blesses change: The bottom line issue facing ERC mountaintoppers is that there is very little "followership" in the Conference.
The truth is that the first reality about the East Pennsylvania Conference that surprised me when I entered it in 1976 as an idealistic and submissive 22 year old pastor, is how many "anti-Conference people" there were and how committed those people were to their opposition to all things Harrisburg.
Forty one years later, the spiritual distance between Harrisburg and Conference cynics is, if anything, greater than it was and is increasing with the passage of time. The outright disdain that many cynics feel toward the Conference is, perhaps, the reality that defines who and what the ERC is in the 2010s.
The cynics, very simply, do not, and have not, practiced followership as far as ERC mountaintoppers are concerned. This has been true for all of my years in the Conference, but much more so today than when I entered the Conference.
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No matter what the content of the new Strategic Plan may be, the first challenge facing ERC mountaintoppers is to recreate followership among deep-seated Conference cynics. Winebrenner had followership in his day but trust in the mountaintop disappeared long before Kevin Richardson even drew his first breath.
Is the recreation of followership among the cynics even possible for mountaintoppers? I've said this before: With God all things are possible.
For that sort of near-miracle to take place, however, ERC mountaintoppers will need to lead in obedience.
And, the mountaintoppers will have to take into account the fact that the cynics have either been skipping Conference for years, or, far worse, have been sitting in Conference sessions for years, rolling their eyes and harrumphing, as Conference mountaintoppers tell them what a great job they are doing in leading the Conference in those despicable Yay God sessions.
To recreate followership, the mountaintoppers will have to face up to the considerable sins of their past.
To recreate followership, mountaintoppers will have to repent of their desire to lead and allow the Holy Spirit to take control.
To recreate followership, they will have to seek Kingdom greatness and humble themselves. They will have to begin to serve. They will have to enslave themselves to the Lord and His people in the Conference.
The mountaintoppers will have to be the first in the Conference to repent. I'm not certain they know that. More to the point, I'm far from certain that they are willing to repent.
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