Prioritising the Gift of Leadership

I write out of deep concern for the church that has nurtured me over the past four decades; the Methodist Church of New Zealand. While this may not be true of ‘lay’ training, it has been clear to me over those four decades that presbyteral leadership is a value within the church that, at best, has been largely ignored or taken for granted, and at worst, scorned.

I’m reminded of a line near the end of the Pixar movie The Incredibles where Dash, with a gift for moving at phenomenal speed, a gift he is not allowed to exercise, is assured that he is ‘special’. He is subsequently told, “So is everyone else”. He comments somewhat sadly “When everyone is ‘special’, no one is.”  In its commitment to an egalitarian ‘every member a minister’, the church has implicitly said ‘no members are leaders’. Rather than seeing presbyteral leadership as a gift the church needs at flaxroots level for its very survival, we have regarded it as the sacred preserve of a few at the very top of our hierarchcial structure.

While we are properly concerned that we select ministry candidates for their capacities for critical thinking, inclusiveness, communication and compassion, etc, we don’t seem to intentionally select ministry candidates for leadership. I wonder if it’s a value that is even considered. To this day we offer presbyters minimal training in leadership, and we don’t expect or offer ongoing professional development in leadership.

I enjoyed and treasured my three years at Trinity College in the late 1980s. I came into the college with a high level of Biblical literacy and discovered I knew all the answers to questions no one was asking, nor interested in. My three years taught me to understand what the questions might need to be, yet it in no way prepared me for parish leadership. For three years I had been infantilized, and then was thrust in front of a congregation and expected to know what to do. I remember at our first Parish Executive meeting being confronted with the planner for the year ahead. Even though I was in a team ministry, alongside a senior presbyter, I felt overwhelmed. All I wanted to do was survive the first week.

Disgraced former mega-church pastor Bill Hybels used to say, “The local church is the hope of the world, and its future rests in the hands of its leaders.” He was a strong advocate for the recognition of the spiritual gift of leadership. There is no doubt that churches that thrive tend to be well led. I can’t help noticing that for those with a strong leadership gift it almost invariably brings a whole raft of other gifts along with it. I’m wanting to suggest that the signal gift we need to be looking for is leadership. We need to train ourselves in how to recognise the kind of leadership gifts the church needs, and to be able to discern them - both when they present themselves, and when they are absent.

If we are to have future, we need to prioritise the gift of leadership in our selection, training and professional development processes. My fear is, that it may already be too late.