This Is Really Important for Leadership Development

Skye Jethani:

Many in ministry have come to believe that if something lasts, if it continues even after we have stepped away, then it can be considered a success. A church plant that grows, finds a property, builds a facility, hires a staff, and still exists 20 years later is deemed a success. The same might be said of a network of “organic” churches. If it’s still going years later then we’ve built something successful. In each case the ministry is not assessed by how faithful God’s people were or even by the fruit exhibited, but by its ability to continue.

But linking success to perpetuity bring two problems. First, it can make us deaf to God’s calling. We tend to assume that just because God has used a ministry or method in the past that he must desire for it to continue indefinitely. But this assumption means we may miss a new work that he has in store. Was this not exactly why the Pharisees could not embrace Jesus or his ministry as divine? He did not fit with their expectation. Their minds were so mired in the past that they could not imagine God doing something new.

Dallas Willard speaks about this temptation in his must-read article “Living in the Vision of God.” Willard documents a pattern all too evident in our ministries. A godly, Spirit-filled leader is used by God to accomplish great things for his Kingdom, and invariably a community forms around the leader. But when the leader is gone, those remaining assume his or her ministry can and should be perpetuated. The wind of the Spirit may have shifted, but they want it to keep blowing in the same direction. So, an institution is established around the departed leader’s values, methods, and strategies. If these are rigorously maintained, it is believed, then the same Spirit-empowered ministry evident in the leader’s life will continue through the institution that bears his or her name.

But what we fail to see is that the Spirit was not unleashed in the leader’s life because he or she used the right tools or strategies. This “fire of God,” as Willard calls it, was in their soul because of their intense love of Jesus Christ. Rather than imitating the leader’s methods, we should be emulating his or her devotion to Christ–a devotion through which we may hear God’s unique call for us that may, and probably will, differ from the departed leader’s. But a fixation on perpetuity makes this unlikely as we opt for cookie-cutter replication of models and methodologies instead.

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