ON READING THE BIBLE:
Leonard Sweet video on reading the Bible, the problem with verse-itis, and also on orahnge (left-brain) and apple (right brain)
-------------- Some thoughts on your final paper:
Since there are the instructions:
Summary assignment due one week later: · Write a 5-7-page leadership plan that outlines specific ways in which you will work at developing biblical leadership character and skills. Discuss your leadership history, including experiences indicating strengths and weaknesses. Then, by integrating material from the course texts, class content and writing assignments, devise a plan for strengthening your leadership profile. Deal with character issues, dark side issues, skill issues, etc. As part of this assignment, articulate a one-sentence vision or mission statement that will help guide your efforts in leadership. The vision statement should be a one-sentence statement that articulates your purpose and direction in leadership (Please put the statement in bold type). This paper is meant to be a practical, specific tool that will be an asset for you in your present or future leadership context.
...
...remember to draw from some of the class material (Leonrad Sweet Aqua Church Leadershp Arts Videos, the Leighton Ford book, Nehemiah paper, class discussion on culture etc), definitely discuss your Myers Briggs and how thatshapes you and your leadership style, pro and con (see the brief articles on the Week 3 post since we didn't talk much about this in class). You'll probably want to reflect on how you came out on the "Dark Side" test (Part 2 of the book).
AGAIN: video or power point would be acceptable instead of a paper, but if so, be sure you included the sources and references you would in a paper.
A video of you does have the benefit of seeing the person talk about themselves. NOTE: on the right side of the website (under "helpful resources"), and also on the tabs on the top of the page, I have added some articles and videos that we didn't talk about in class...these would also count as class materials.
As you know, there is no final exam....but the final paper is the equivalent, meant for you to draw from, and integrate course material...with a real practical focus.
I really believe this final project is one you'll want to keep and re-visit at strategic points in your future.
The paper is due a week after our last class session, so that means midnight Oct 25th via email. I have copied in the instructions and guidelines for the paper that Rod Reed wrote for your student guide below..but first some clarifications:
No special formatting rules (other than the sentence that is to be in bold, and be sure to cite your sources.)
In fact, I will accept a video or power point as I have with other projects, as long as they show the same level of interacting with course texts and materials, and spell out the action plan etc.. It may be easier to do this kind of assignment as a traditional paper, though a video format where we see you talking through your findings and leadership plan might help the project reflect on the personal reflection that is asked for.
Be sure to include reflection on your Myers Briggs, and "dark side" profile.
FROM STUDENT GUIDE: Summary assignment due one week later:
Write a 5-7-page leadership plan that outlines specific ways in which you will work at developing biblical leadership character and skills. Discuss your leadership history, including experiences indicating strengths and weaknesses. Then, by integrating material from the course texts, class content and writing assignments, devise a plan for strengthening your leadership profile. Deal with character issues, dark side issues, skill issues, etc. As part of this assignment, articulate a one-sentence vision or mission statement that will help guide your efforts in leadership. The vision statement should be a one-sentence statement that articulates your purpose and direction in leadership (Please put the statement in bold type). This paper is meant to be a practical, specific tool that will be an asset for you in your present or future leadership context.
-------------------- We'll talk about this painting in class.. what does it have to do with:
"biblical perspectives on leadership"?
Getting in touch with oureslves, and the dark side of leadership?
Click here, and read pages 9-15 here, if you want get started..
1)the temptation to be relevant("Turn these stones to bread."),
2)to be spectacular ("Throw yourself from the temple."),
3)to be powerful ("I will give you the kingdoms of the world.")
This is from one of the classic, and shortest, books on Christian leadership, "In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership". Grab it for three bucks! -------------------------- We'll pick up left brain/right brain discussion. The following video "test" of which side of your brain is dominant is not a professional test, and it is debated how accurate it is, but try it.
We should note that some see the whole left brain/right brain theory "pop neuroscience oversimplifications"
One more cheap and cheesy "test":
Try this…
Lift your right foot a few inches from the floor and then begin to move it in a clockwise direction. While you're doing this, use a finger your right index finger to draw a number 6 in the air. Your foot will turn in an anticlockwise direction and there's nothing you can do about it!
What’s happening?
The left side of your brain, which controls the right side of your body, is responsible for rhythm and timing. The left side of your brain cannot deal with operating two opposite movements at the same time and so it combines them into a single motion.
Try this with your right foot and left hand and you should have no problem!
Leonard Shlain (a surgeon), whom we introduced last week, is a more respected left/right brain expert; Read some short excerpts about or by him here and here. Tonight we'll take his suggested mini-test for brain dominance...don't worry, no wires and electrodes!
and dichotomies are potentially dualistic and dangerous,
there is value in comparing
(on the one hand),
the "left hand" of Myers Briggs preferences (ESTJ=Extrrovert, Sensing, Judging, Perceiving),
the "modern" world (RRWI=Rational, Representative. Word-Based, Individual)as Sweet summarizes it)
the left brain functions as summarized by Shlain (DWAN=Doing, Word, Abstraction, Number)
To the other hand:
the "right hand" of Myers Briggs preferences (Introvert, iNtuitive, Feeling, Perception)
-the "postmodern world (EPIC=Experiential, Participatory, Imgae-Driven, Connectivity) as Sweet summarirzes it
-the right grain functions as summaried by Shlain (BIMM=Being, Image, Music, Metaphor)
ESTJ INFP
RRWIEPIC
DWAN BIMM
No, I am not making a political statement by putting the left in blue, and right in red (:
...or the supposed "right" answers (the ones that match me!) on the right (:
etc..
Helpful links:
Myers Briggs and Left/Right Brain here
EPIC acrostic on PDF, p 36-37 here) ----
Here are the last 3 "Leadership Arts" videos by Leonard Sweet, with text condensed from "Aqua Church": Episode 10 is here
Leadership Art #10-Using the Gyroscope: Creativity
Creativity is the gyroscope for postmodern mariners, and it is understandable why some would make this the leadership art of the twenty-first century. The overlap of the emotions and the intellect is called the imagination, a gyroscope that spins toward transcendent realities in our lives.
The postmodern religious vision is less intellectual than imaginal. “Both the affective and the imaginative, strongly stimulated by audiovisual images, are becoming the central part of human and religious functioning.” Postmodern Christians have clipped the wings of reason and are riding the winds of a prodigal imagination and supernaturalism. Imagination has become one of the church’s most valuable commodities. ---------------------
Episode 11 is here Leadership Art #11-Learning from the Ship’s Log and Library: Intellectual Capital
Postmodern leaders are intellectual capitalists. In fact, knowledge is the capital commodity of twenty-first century culture. The source of wealth today is not material, it is informational. The pursuit of wealth and influence today is the pursuit of information, and the application of information to the world in which we live. Information is power. Leadership is either well-informed or ill-equipped and nonexistent.
Leadership is soul work, but it is also wisdom work. Of all the knowledge occupations out there, leadership is the most knowledge-intensive vocation. Aside from what you carry in your heart, what you carry between your ears is your most valuable tool of the trade.
Postmodern culture is information rich but wisdom poor. Spiritual leaders must know how to wisdomize their ministries and missions.
Cultivating a Learning Culture
All-Time/Just-in-Time Learning
The human brain is only 38 percent developed at birth. All other mammal brains are 98 percent developed at birth. To be a human being is to be a continuous learner.
A leader is always preparing for the next expedition and is always learning more about the sea.
Total Learning Experience
Postmoderns have different cognitive styles and learning capacities from moderns. Some scholars contend postmoderns learn on of three ways: visually (what they see), audibly (what they hear), or kinesthetically (what they feel and touch). David Kolb counters with four discrete modes of learning: concrete experiences (CE), reflective observation (RO), abstract conceptualization (AC), and active experimentation (AE). Whether your learning modalities are based on visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners, or (with Kolb) Divergers, Assimilators, Convergers and Accommodators, total learning experiences incorporate multiple information streams in the learning enterprise.
In fact, a lot of young people with attention deficit disorder are really multiple learners (especially kinesthetics) in need of total learning experiences, not drugs.
Postmodern electronic kids learn not through lock-step, lecture-drill-test marches of Industrial Age classrooms and corridors but through multisensory webs of stimulation and inspiration.
SDL Learning
SDL (Self-Directed Learning) skills set students free to assess their own needs, with direct access to resources to meet those needs, and with critical evaluative skills to assess how well they are doing.
SDL learning is basic to postmodern leaders, whose more active and independent learning styles make them naturally self-directed learners. No one can tech postmoderns how to lead. Postmoderns teach themselves. This is not to say that SDL skills aren’t teachable.
Web-Based Learning to Learn
The Net changes everything, including how one learns. The creation of a learning info-structure is more crucial to ministry than the building of organizational infra-structures.
Postmoderns learn more from electronic resources than from print. These is no option but to fully computerize the educational wing of your church, to install at least on screen in every sanctuary or worship center, to make Internet access easy and abundant. Don’t be and Internot Church (those afraid or reluctant to use the Internet).
Learned Ignorance
Leaders must settle for nothing but the latest intelligence, the best information. But leaders must also realize that information is perishable. If learning is at base “making sense of things,” then we may need to unlearn some things so that we can make sense of things like never before.
Book Learning
Even though print is now a digital enterprise, the notion that people read fewer books in a digital culture is fiction. An old maxim my mother taught me-“Leaders are Reader”-is more true now than ever. Consumers purchased 32 percent more books for adults in 1995 than they did in 1991. In 1998 ten thousand more books were published than five years ago; nine hundred new magazines were launched in 1998 alone.
We can never fully “catch up,” but we can stay close. How? By reading a lot more than we do. Set aside fifteen minutes a day to read a book. That becomes almost two dozen books a year. That increases your lifetime reading by one thousand books, or five times what you read in college.
---------------- Episode 11 1/3 is here. Leadership Art #11 1/3- Feeling the West Finger: Intuition
Leadership Art #11 1/3 is intuition, putting one’s finger to the winds to help in dead-reckoning (estimating one’s position), to hasten dead-aft sailing (sailing with the wind straight behind you), or to locate the eye of the wind-the exact direction from which the wind blows. Leadership Art # 11 1/3 is the aptitude for distinguishing puffs and tempests, and the artistry of maneuvering and reversing through gusts and gales.
Why is this Leadership Art #11 1/3 and not #12? Because 12 would be too neat a package-the postmodern world is not that simple. Because this one follows and builds from al the others. Because intuition is dangerous without the other eleven leadership arts.
There are some who point the wet finger heavenward after learning the first two leadership arts. They think that once they have found the North Star and can use the compass, all they need to sail is the wet finger. But leaders aren’t ready for the wet finger rite of passage until they have mastered the previous eleven skills. For without the other nine leadership arts, your boat may be seaworthy, but you aren’t.
The wet finger carries the secret of the leadership arts: It’s in the air.
The leadership art of intuition is not simply the ability to jump in over one’s head in places where very few can swim. The leadership art of intuition is an everyday thrival skill in which over-one’s-head decision-making, out –of-left-field observations, and winds-of-change opportunities become wild-card judgments that actually chart the journey itself. Postmodern leadership is a combination of the rational and the intuitive, the visible and the invisible.
For postmoderns, a well-honed intuitive sense is as important as intelligence and as critical as a continually fresh flow of information. Ironically as our lifestyles and life requirements have become more dependent on technology, the worth of a well-read, well-fed intuitive sense has become more precious. The more technologically progressive, the more interconnected humans and machines, the more intuitively adept leaders must become.
Jesus was the ultimate Rule breaker and Rule Maker. As the rules changed for the early Christians, the apostles steered the church with the ”wet finger” of intuition. In their “outside-the-box” leadership, they played hunches, minted some new myths, and proved that it is possible-through the power of the Holy Spirit-to see what we can’t comprehend. Recorded in the fifteenth chapter of Acts, a historic meeting was held in Jerusalem among Peter, Paul, James, and other apostles. The decision reached was not an easy or popular one: to set to the side Jewish law and preach to the Gentiles.
A letter went out announcing this new direction and justifying the decision. It read: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…” (Acts 15:28).
Incredible! The apostles picked up the wind of the Spirit and piloted the church in a whole new direction. How? Among those present at this meeting was the Holy Spirit, whose presence and purposes were intuitively received by the apostles. They resisted the winds of public opinion-even majority rule-and surfed the fresh waves of the Spirit.
Rare Necessities
Whatever it is, leaders can develop their intuitive capabilities. One book alone lists dozen of techniques. The following are my favorite ten “rare necessities” for maximizing intuition in life:
Listen to music, especially unfamiliar pieces.
Get physical exercise, an essential part of the creative process.
Mix metaphors and match up opposites.
Use a variety of materials to build models and mock-ups.
Acquire dream skills and sleep learning
Cultivate a “listening logic,” a logic which hears both words and the feelings which lie behind the words.
Develop “anticipatory consonance with nature.”
Read poetry aloud, and linger over every word until it sinks into the soul.
Practice extended seasons of prayer and fasting.
Stay away from people who are wave jammers.
Ralph W. Neighbour Jr., the reigning expert on cell-group church, says that “I have asked every cell-group pastor I have met on my journeys, ‘When you stared, did you make a trip to see a model of what you have here? Did you attend someone’s seminar before you started?’ In each and every case, the answer has been, ’No, I went to my knees…I had no choice. [God] taught me as I went along.’” The first intuitive step a postmodern leader must take is downward, onto the knees. From that kneeling position every perspective will necessarily be unique and unrepeatable.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Several of the class chose to do their leadership interviews on video or power point..
Great job, check these out..
Elvia's interviews: 1)Steven Shin, CA State Mktg Manager
2)Steve Marshall, Vice President of Explorer Insurance Company:
Leighton Ford, who wrote our main textbook, also wrote a great book, The Power of Story,:" where he suggests the following progression: Story>Vision>Character>Evangelism
Read all about it here.
-------------------------------------
Unfortunately, the "He Led You Like a Bride" video we'll watch is not online, but it is available on the Vol 9 DVD here,
A section of the "Run" video we'll send you off with:
---
Gordon Fee (author of your "How to Read the Bible" textbook:
-Another clip of his on reading the Book of Revelation, and Scripture in general (cmplements the last chapter of the book).Transcript here, and video here)
----------------------
Finally, on the Kingdom of God:
The "age to come" (the Kingdom) has in large part already come (from the future/heaven) into "this age" (in the present/on the earth.
>>>Tonight we do "holy collages!"
What does that have to do with leadership, and getting in touch with oneself?
You'll find out tonight!
---
When we talk about getting in touch with ourselves as a person and as a leader,
we realize the Scripture is pretty insistent and consistent that anyone claiming to be a leaders is called to be prayerful and careful...That may be partly because, like an iceberg, most of "us" is below the surface, beneath the mask and title..(usually, only about 1/7 of an iceberg is visible (above water, visible to the naked eye):
This is a good point to quote Russell Willingham's message.
Fill in these blanks; then you can read on to compare your answers with his.
"The pastor/shepherd's job is to keep watch over __________"
"Your most anointed ministry as a pastor/leader will flow from your being ___________."
CLICK HERE to check Russell's answers.
Then say "WOW"!
And he's just quoting the Bible...
John O'Hara asks what if we expected church leaders to be
honest instead of perfect
servants instead of rulers
friends instead of managers
coaches instead of performers?
Here is Henri Nouwen on Jesus' "temptation to be relevant." Remember thatNouwen equates the three temptations of Jesus in the wilderness as:the temptation to be relevant ("Turn these stones to bread."), to be spectacular ("Throw yourself from the temple."), and to be powerful ("I will give you the kingdoms of the world."
---------------------
MYERS BRIGGS RESOURCES:
Links and resources on the Myers Briggs Personality Profile..
We'll also introduce left brain/right brain theory, and compare
these carts with RRWI/EPIC (see Week One) and Mysers Briggs ESTJ/INFP...wreseling with implications for leadership.
----------------------------------
Tonight's Ray VanDer Laan
video on Moses striking the rock is not online, but you can find it on this DVD
-----
On the "practical relevance of the doctrine of the Trinity," especially for leadership, and being in touch with oneself, there will be plenty of good discussion tonight...but here are some quotes and links:
"our trust in the Trinity's embrace frees us to love more fully with triune types of love--fostering deep relationships that involve solid friendships without sexual innuendo" (Marva Dawn)
"It is precisely the one triune God in whose image all human beings are created who holds the promise of peace between men and women with irreducible but changing identities."(Miraslov Volf)
"Like the Trinity, we are called to understand who we are not as isolated individuals who have to make contracts to protect ourselves, but as persons with faces turned towards God and each other." (Edith Humphrey).....above three quotes, source
"The more a church is characterized by a symmetrical and decentralized distribution of power, and by a freely affirmed interaction, the more it will correspond to the Trinitarian communion."-Miroslav Volf, from his "After Our Likeness:The Church as the Image of the Trinity," p. 236 (free read here)
Outline/Summary of DARK SIDE textbook (by Jürgen Friedrich, click HERE)
--------------
Remember, each week we watch three of the (12) "Aqua Church Essential Leadership Arts" with Leonard Sweet":
Summary of Aqua Church and the Leadership Arts here
Here are tonight's episodes 7-9:
Leadership Art #7-Taking Shore Leave: Sabbath Rest:
Leadership Art #8-Signaling with Flags and Semaphores: Communication:
Leadership Art #9-Valuing the Crew: Collaboration and Team-Work:
-------------------------------
Here is a summary of Sweet's discussion of these three leadership arts (From source linked above):
Leadership Art #7-Taking Shore Leave: Sabbath Rest
The pace and pressure of a twenty-first century lifestyle has brought us head-on to another all-too-solid wall. Many of us have already slammed into it. The “speed-of-light pace” of postmodern living is exhilarating but exhausting. Just as a plane moving through air builds up pressure in front of it as its speed increases, so our bodies and souls, the faster our lives speed up and zip by, feel the crush of growing pressure and risk the approach of a deadly, life-shattering, wall-slamming event.
The leadership art of shore leave is not one we have to invent. Only turbocharge. This relief valve has been part of our tradition all along. It’s called Sabbath-keeping. High modernity preferred therapy over Sabbath. Only by relearning the art of Sabbath-keeping can spiritual athletes and spiritual navigators hope to keep safe, sane, and spiritually fresh while cruising postmodernity’s sea-lanes at breathtaking speed.
For those of us raised in Sabbath-observant homes, Sabbath-keeping was marked mostly by a litany of no-nos. For younger children, no fidgeting, talking, or sleeping during services. No getting good clothes dirty by playing after church. For older kids, no movies, no parties, no dates on the Sabbath day. Although special meals and gathered families are good memories of these enforced days of togetherness, more than a few Sabbath-reared children triumphantly latched on to Jesus’ observation that ‘the Sabbath was made for people, people were not made for the Sabbath.” We recited that verse as we hit the door and bolted for what we believed would be “freedom.” And what “freedoms” we enjoy. “Freedom” to work twenty-hour days. “Freedom” to work seven-day weeks. “Freedom” to be dog-collared to electronic ball-and-chains so that one can never get away from work.
Our freedom from the “Sabbath” exacted a high toll. When we lost Sabbaths, we lost spiritual well-being. It is not so much that we “keep the Sabbath” as that the Sabbath keeps us-keeps us whole, keeps us sane, keeps us spiritually alive.
It is hard for postmoderns to see rest as holiness, not laziness. Can you think of any activity more universally banned and panned than napping? Postmodern lifestyles equate sleeping in with sloughing off.
Leadership Art #8-Signaling with Flags and Semaphores: Communication
In the modern world, we mastered the “Three R’s”: Reading, ‘Riting, ‘Rithmetic. In the postmodern world, leaders need mastery of the Three C’s: Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity- Leadership Arts #8,9, and 10.
Apple Computer tried speaking these words to the world of its day. Its Macintosh had the best interface. It had the best graphics. It led the desktop publishing revolution. It was more “uses-friendly” out of the box. But because it refused to “dumb down” the operating system ( a decision made in 1987) by licensing it to other companies, the Mac lost out big-time to Big Blue, which standardized its features and made them available to the competition which itself touted its status as “IBM-compatible.”
What if God had refused to dumb down? “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14a). This is the essence of the Incarnation-God came to us.
Web Civilization
It’s time to decide. It’s time to break ranks and name names. Are you a Postmodern Reformer, or are you a defender of the existing power structures and delivery systems? Are you or ar you not a part of this Postmodern Reformation?
Our ancestors at great personal cost claimed the book as the heart of modern learning and communications. Will we claim the Web as central to postmodern learning and communications? The Protestant Reformers made the book the new delivery system for learning and faith development. Will Postmodern Reformers do the same with the Web?
For leaders, not having a Web site is more than being without a calling card, allegedly the equivalent for a modern leader. For leaders, not using a Web site as a communication and community-building tool is to have bumbled the future. The Net boasts the potential for the biggest communications boost in the history of the church.
The Net commences a whole communications system and a whole new delivery system for ministry.
The Net makes it possible for the church to engage in one-on-one dialogue with each of its members, to learn about their dreams and daily minimum requirements of spiritual needs.
The Net enables leaders to customize communication and to personalize teaching, healing, and preaching like never before in history.
The Net helps remove barriers to communication and celebration-including time and distance. Already a wedding has taken place simultaneously at four different U.S. cities through Web-based electronic videoconferencing.
The Net helps leaders choose the best time and place to communicate.
Every communications system does some things well and some things badly. The promise of a Web Civilization is paralleled by the perils of a Web Civilization.
If the church doesn’t help identify what’s life-giving and what’s disease-producing in the emergence of this new self-generated, self-adapting, self-modifying, self-diagnosing, self-repairing Web Civilization, a lot of other people will gladly oblige. The church has done this before. It was the Sunday school that gave rise to and modeled the public school system, which ushered children from all socioeconomic levels into print culture.
Wing Culture
The most powerful communicators in the post modern era wing it through sea and sky with images. Metaphors are how leaders chart the course for others to follow. Postmodern leaders are master iconographers whose storytelling skills and metaphor powers graph the routes and guide the ship. The art of telling stories is one of the paramount leadership tools of postmodern culture.
What is icon-parable storytelling? A postmodern icon-parable is an image or metaphor that coveys a lifetime of experiences and stories. Icon-parables story people’s lives. Icon-parable storytelling helps us make decisions or reverse decisions we’ve already made. Without icons, postmoderns are spiritually ill-fed.
There are various kinds of iconic stories. “Stories of identity” help convey values, build morale, develop role models, reveal inner mechanisms of community. These icons serve as carriers of identity, values, and memory. They are the primary carriers of religious culture.
Communication’s Four Tacks
1. Make the Net Work.
Use the Web. To communicate with this new Net culture, leaders must experience and employ the Net. This is more than simply being Web-friendly. It is also more than a Web site.
It is a Web ministry.
How do you help people become attached to your Web site? Enable them to play, have fun. Eddie Bauer has “virtual dressing rooms” where you can mix and match clothes or scan in your home’s floor plan and see how its furniture fits in. 2. “Give Away the Farm.”
In a Web Civilization, you give away content.
MCI, which offered for the first time free domestic calls to many of its customers on the busiest day of the year for telephones: Mother’s Day.
The only people who don’t have to “give away the farm” are those who are giving big-time experiences. For this people will pay big bucks. The ultimate “big-time” is the experience of God. For this postmoderns will pay “big”-pay with their lives.
3. Tell Big Stories
Stories are the skeletal structure of the soul. Is there energy in your story? Is you body in your story? Is there passion in your story? Is you story more about God that about you? The last step in exploration and discovery is to close the loop. To close the loop is to tell the story, to share what you’ve learned.
Fill Everything With Jest and Zest
Jest and zest are the psychic glues that hold things together in postmodern culture.
Be playful, be funny, and have fun. If you’re having fun, you’re more creative, more energetic, friendlier, and optimistic. We can say something serious too seriously. But remember: For the Christian, the purpose of life is not jest but joy.
Leadership Art #9-Valuing the Crew: Collaboration and Team-Work
Modern leadership highlighted the noun “equipment.” Postmodern leadership stresses the verb “equip.” The first time the word for “equip” is used in the Gospels is when Jesus finds a father and his two sons in a ship, “preparing” their nets 9matthew 4:21; Mark 1:19). The Greek word for “prepare” Is kartatizo, which means to repair the rends, to make whole again. But it also means to make someone what they out to be-to “equip,” to “prepare,” to ‘strengthen” someone for a mission. “Equip” doesn’t mean to fix the nets yourself, but to enlist and empower others to do what God is calling them to do.
Leadership is less about employing people than empowering people. Leadership is less about controlling people than releasing them. This does no mean that other people will not put their lives in your hands. But the whole purpose of an air traffic “controller” is not to keep planes on the land, but to get them off the ground and into the sky. What do “controllers” do? They clear pilots for takeoff.
The future belongs not so much to movers and shakers but to leaders who can work in teams. If fact, the movers and shakes of postmodern culture are teams, which must become the dominant model for ministry and mission.
Postmodern culture is a sink-or-swim society. It creates sink-or-swim scenarios. But the biblical witness is another: We sink or swim together. The actions of one affect all.
In a connectional world, not only does every action have consequence, but every action has consequence on everything else. Collaboration extends outward and inward at the same time.
The Christian tradition is teamwork-obsessed. The doctrine of creation trumpets a God who shares creative power with us, who insists we be co-conspirators in our own story, collaborators in our emergence. The doctrine of redemption is the universe’s story of pulsating and materializing relationships. The very doctrine of the Trinity is based on a relational God living in community both within and without.
Log On and Link Up
The mantra of the future is a collaborative one: “Log On and Link Up.” Leaders Get Linked, Leaders Get Connected.
The Web is about community and connectedness. It is the postmodern watering hole. Moderns use the Internet as an information medium. For postmoderns the Internet is a social medium. They use it as a water cooler and bar stool.
A Good Crew
What is an authentic community? What is an authentic self? What makes an authentic team? The following are critical elements:
1. Mission
Essential to every mission is a focused sense of calling. A team is being deployed “for such a times as this.”
Otherness
Postmodern teams are as marked by “otherness” as the Jesus TeamNet. Jesus brought together political opposites on his team: Simon the zealot and Matthew the tax collector. Jesus brought together a mix of generalists and specialists with the advantage to the generalists, who can keep in mind the big picture. Jesus mixed up age groups and generational gestalts, with advantage to the younger who make us less blind to the possibilities of what we can discover. Jesus nurtured young talent, let them go, and let them rip. Mission teams must begin to read-like Jesus did-the printouts of cultural difference, dissonance, and diversity.
3. Trust
What the language of “virtues” was to moderns, the language of “viruses” is to postmoderns. It is as important to develop positive spiritual viruses as it is positive social viruses. One of those “viruses” that brings together the social and spiritual is “trust.”
4. Succession
A “successful” team is one that knows how to deal with “succession” issues, the most critical of which is loyalty. Leadership is not just the ability to work in teams; it is also the ability to inspire “successors” and mark others for successive sailings-people who will keep the mssion going and raise it to new levels.
Postmodern “people skills: raise to prominence the ability to pick a crew and be a crew. All organisms experience growing pains, which means that sometimes teams must be disassembled, reduced, expanded, or reconstituted. The team you start a mission with is not going to be the team you end that mission with. Exercises help discover who doesn’t belong on the team, as well as who needs to “succeed” on that team.
5. Collaborative Competence Framework
The leadership art of collaboration depends on one’s willingness to become a collaborative person and develop collaborative competence frameworks. This does not mean one gives up the identity of the self.” But it does mean that the “self” takes its meaning, shape, and direction from one’s community and tribe.
Collaborative Accountability: Popular culture is a prime resource for postmodern ministry, but popular culture can be hijacked very quickly by reactionary forces: Metaphors, unlike “points,” are easy to pick up, warm and fuzzy, and easily susceptible to private interpretation; postmoderns easily mistake “having an open mind” with letting their brains pop out; in a world of complexity and ambiguity, discernment needs the confirmation of the community. In short, a collaborative style requires a communal check and accountability. The community is a key learning instrument in collaborative leadership.
Collaborative Learning: Collaborative leadership operating out of collaborative competence frameworks is open to stacking new learning habits on top of old ones-like triple-loop learning. In the words of business guru Robert Hargrove, “triple-loop learning involves altering the particular perspective, underlying beliefs, and assumptions (or old rules) that shape who we are as a human being…Double-loop learning (similar to triple-loop) involves altering the rules or underlying patterns of thinking that determine the way we think, interact, and solve problems. Single-loop learning involves trying to do the same thing better or gaining some transactional tips and techniques.”
Collaborative Style: Postmodern leaders circulate an attitude of creative cooperation and solidarity through constantly evolving projects, missions, and deadline. It’s not true that you’re only as good as your next project. But your leadership is only as good as your next mission. The heart of a collaborative style is multiple frames of reference that can juxtapose different types of people and projects. Witness “the Three Tenors.”
Collaborative Space: Leaders need spiritual design as much as “smart design” in their use of space. A “sick building syndorem” can afflict the soul and mind as well as the body. Healthy space is tam space, shared space, not a hierarch of space with royalty inhabiting offices fit for the gods while everyone else lives in convict cubicles. Already in the business world the walls are coming down in office space. More and more senior managers now sit in open offices with no doors. The dimly lit cubicle with one’s own private space is becoming more rare. Pittsburgh’s Alcoa has banished all private offices, even for its CEO. The future is “teaming rooms,” “commons areas,” “playrooms.” People need their own personal spaces, their cliff dwellings, but person space is basically electronic space (laptops and portable phones) conjoined with team space-hangouts like water coolers, living rooms, and snack bars dominated by casual learning, casual dress, and casual connectedness.
-Len Sweet
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Bonus: I can let you in on a secret:
: tomorrow morning at 9 am, you can get in on a conference call with Leonard Sweet.... he will be taking questions mostly about evangelism and his latest book "Nudge,"" but he will certainly mention EPIC and AQUA issues.
Finally, this timely story about the Chilean miners who will hopefully be rescued on Wednesday offers an amazingly leadership lesson about the "First shall be last" leadership principle of Jesus we charted out last week...just look at the title of the news story:
Who goes first
Before anyone can be pulled up, medics from the Chilean navy and rescuers from mine operator Compania Minera San Esteban Primera have to be sent down to assess the miners and organize their ascent. Those rescuers have authority to change a draft list of who gets pulled out first. Chilean navy Cmdr. Renato Navarro said the thinking was to have a physically and psychologically strong miner come up first, in case of a rescue capsule jam and so that he can relate to his waiting colleagues how best to manage the tough ascent.
Next are men with medical or other problems, followed by those deemed to have the mental fortitude for the strain of being the last ones left below while their co-workers disappear up into the light of day. The last miner pulled out may be shift supervisor Luis Urzua, who is reported to have kept his workers in good spirits, particularly during their first 17 days underground, when no contact had yet been made with the world above. -Read more:http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/10/08/f-chile-mine-rescue.html#ixzz124pVebcP
