In Part Three of this series, Neil Darragh discusses how we can learn new leadership for the church from contemporary leadership models.

In Part Two of this series on the synodal way, I considered what I called “traditional” resources for transforming the church. Traditional resources are those resources which have originated in the experience of past generations of Christians. “Contemporary resources", on the other hand, are resources available from within the experience of living generations. Important among these are contemporary church denominations other than our own, recent experience of collaborative ministry, and secular patterns of organisation.

Other Church Denominations: The Wealth of Experiments

Schisms and heresies, however undesirable in themselves, have resulted in many examples of different kinds of church ministry and leadership. We already know a good deal about the good and the bad of them. If we are on the lookout for better kinds of church organisation, we can often find them already being lived out, usually with mixed success, by someone else somewhere. These are not, then, just theories or hopes, but “experiments” in real life that we can learn from and in that sense are resources for reform.

Today we have examples of hierarchically organised churches alongside 16th-century Reformation churches who have made deliberate decisions against hierarchical structures and for congregational, constitutional, or collaborative structures of some sort. Charismatic churches have minimized any kind of formal structures. Now that we have more amicable relationships with many church denominations, we also know that each kind of structural arrangement has its own kind of positives as well its own kind of negatives from a mission point of view.

We are also more aware today of the intricate relationships between church structure and ethnic or national cultures. Contemporary church structures often have culturally specific origins. And church structures that work well in one nation or culture may not work for churches in other nations with their own different cultural assumptions and practices.

In recent times, there has also been a search among many churches for a more radical reshaping of leadership and ministry, “fresh expressions” of church, such as alternative worship communities, base ecclesial communities, cell churches, multiple and midweek congregations, network-focused churches, school-linked congregations, seeker churches, traditional church plantings, revised traditional forms of church and youth congregations.

A key point for our focus here is that we have often treated other church denominations as competitors. We would do better to treat their successes and failures as resources for us in our own attempts at reform. They also make us aware today of the value of diversity and the dangers of uniformity in human society.

Recent Examples of Collaborative Ministry: You Can’t Do This on Your Own

The idea of “collaborative” or “shared” ministry has been around for long enough now, with enough trial and error, success and failure, for it to be a contemporary resource, rather than just a theoretical possibility. Hierarchical or line-management forms of social organisation are vulnerable to authoritarian personalities, to control rather than empowerment, and to incompetence in the person in charge. They are also wasteful of the diverse kinds of creative talent and commitment that is generated in more collaborative ways of decision-making. Collaborative ministry, rather than line-management on the one hand or congregational decision-making on the other, can coordinate this variety of rights and gifts. There already exist models of collaborative structures in a variety of church groups and communities.

The idea of collaborative ministry stands in contrast with “clericalism” — the sense among bishops, priests and deacons, that “I'm special. I'm set apart. I serve my people and look out for their needs and well-being. I have other ministers to help me but I am in charge.” This system of pastoring is characterised by a “benign patronising” on the part of the clergy and passivity on the part of the laity.

By contrast, a transformed theology of leadership would be founded on the principle that all ministry in the church is relational. In a relational theology of ministry both the ordained and those called to exercise the gifts given to them at Baptism play vital and complementary roles in the life of the church. Moreover, ministerial accountability should be not just vertical accountability, but be subject to the scrutiny of the community.

The key points for our focus here on seeking resources for church reform are: (a) a collaborative model of ministry may be able to rescue us from a history of an overly hierarchical pattern of leadership and move us towards one that is adequate to the requirements of contemporary mission; (b) a collaborative model is about collaborative decision-making and is not the same as a consultative model which shares information but not decision-making; and (c) in a contemporary mission-focused church, such collaboration among ministers, especially among community leaders, has become necessary because of the complexity of the church’s multiple engagements in a pluralist society.

Secular Patterns of Organisation: Objectives, Evaluation and Reform

A third kind of contemporary resource is secular organisations. The term “secular”, as I use it here, does not imply that such organisations are atheistic or anti-religious. It is simply a term to refer to those organisations that, as distinct from the resources considered above, exist outside of and independently of the church. They state their goals and organisational culture without explicit reference to religious affiliation or religious legitimation.

Using this kind of resource from the secular world does not imply, as some have objected, an intention to “adapt” the church to the modern world or bring the church “up to date”. It is looking for information and experience about organisation in the contemporary world outside the church which could help in the process of reforming the church so that it is better equipped for its mission.

What kind of secular organisation? Not just any kind will do. One of the advantages that we have today over the churches of past ages is that we now have an abundance of social science research on how social organisation can help or hinder the stated goals of an organisation. As an example, the International Association for Public Participation (www.iap2.org ) is a secular organisation which sets out its “core values” for public participation in an organisation or project as: 1) believing that those who are affected by a decision have a right to be involved in the decision-making process; 2) promising that the public's contribution will influence the decision; 3) promoting sustainable decisions by recognising and communicating the needs and interests of all participants, including decision makers; 3) seeking out and facilitating the involvement of those potentially affected by or interested in a decision; 4) seeking input from participants in designing how they participate; 5) providing participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way; 6) communicating to participants how their input affected the decision.

Many local churches would empathise with such principles, but it is very rare that a local church actually practises them as core values. The bottom-line question in considering a secular organisation as a resource for a local church is: Would this model of organisation, if adopted for internal church organisation (ecclesiology) help the church’s engagement (missiology) in seeking the well-being of our society and planet (the evolving realm of God in the world)?

In this article, I have named some of the available resources, traditional and contemporary, for transforming us into a church fit for its mission in the realm of God. The process is not particularly radical but it will depend on us seeing ourselves not as a church tied firmly to existing structures, but a church in process and willing to learn.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 293 June 2024: 12-13