“Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.” – Acts 1:26

Right now at theStory we are in Acts, we’ll probably be there for another two years.  I must not be reading it very carefully because I totally skipped over Acts 1:26.  Are you kidding me?  They picked a disciple by casting lots?

If that doesn’t make you want to just throw away everything you’ve ever known or read about leadership then I don’t know what does.  Think about how subversive that is.  It’s almost like they are saying, we don’t care who our leaders are because this community doesn’t live or die by it’s leaders.  We just need someone to fulfill the role.  Sure we can chalk it up to thinking they just really trusted God to pick the right person.  I think though it’s deeper than that.  This tells us a lot about who leaders are and how we determine who they are.

For theStory, we’ve always chosen leaders by their gifts, and how they will contribute to the overarching conversation as we lead our community.  If someone doesn’t do that well, we get frustrated and we can’t wait for them to step down or we ask them to leave.  It’s all backwards.  It’s not about having the right people in the right place to find success.  Obviously, this is the case if our entire church movement was founded on the back of someone drawing the short straw.  Hauerwas in the video below asks “what kind of community do you need to be that you can choose your leadership by lot?”

That question completely leaves me blank.  I’ve never thought of it that way.  I always thought it was what kind of community do you need to be so your produce good leaders?  Or what kind of community to we need to be so we can raise leaders up from the inside and not have to hire from the outside?  Those questions those presume that leaders are picked by someone (other leaders?  democracy?) and that we actually know what a good leader is. So I think we do need to ask this question. Because it takes the pressure off the one leader to be a perfect leader so his community succeeds. This question though forces us to put the pressure on the community so that it doesn’t even matter who the leader is. Hauerwas asks this questions and others in the video below.

Related posts:

1. Good and Bad Leaders
2. When Leaders Fail At Leading, What Next?
3. Pastors, Salaries, Leaders and Budgets

On the flip side of this, is the fact that a good leader I am learning listens to his people.  A good leader does not go to far ahead of his people that they think he is the enemy.  A good leader can take correction.  A good leader is patient.  A good leader listens, and acts in the best interests of everyone.  A good leader is not judgmental.  A good leader is a good discerner.  A good leader can see time in perspective and doesn’t rush anything.  In a lot of ways a good community holds their leaders accountable.  They discipline.  They pull in the reigns when necessary.  They help bring the leader down to earth so that they can better understand his people and they can better understand them.

The balance between those two worlds I find at most times to be beyond frustrating.  Yet I am continually convinced that it is the leader that needs to give and submit, not the other way around.

God give me patience and strength to submit.

No related posts.

In being a leader of sorts, part of my role is to help set a vision, or a goal and help bring the people that are choosing to follow me to that place.  At least that’s what I think it is.  This is my confession: most times I end up getting way to ahead of myself and end up setting goals and ideas for people and then get upset that they aren’t meeting my expectations and moving at my pace.  There are two examples that come to mind that have made me realize that this is the case.  The first one is a bit juvenile, but you would be surprised at how much it has affected me.  I hate macs, apple computers, and I don’t want anyone using them.  Anyone who was working with me or for me I would get very frustrated that they wouldn’t do things my way.  It was easier for me to fix.  It was better, more efficient, cheaper, more customizable and I had a long running list.  The more I yelled and got frustrated at the people who were supposedly following me (in my business or tech worlds) the more I saw people switching over to these machines with glowing apples.  Everyone came to me for help, but no one would listen to me.

The second example is with moving into community.  I’ve got a running list longer than my hate list against Apple machines as to why I think living in community with each other in simplicity is a good and beautiful way to live as a Christian.  I was lead to believe that in being a leader, you just have good ideas and if it’s a good idea then people do it.  This proved a little bit troublesome for me.  Half the people thought it was a good idea, patted me on the back, admired my passion but wanted nothing to do with it.  The other half just think it’s a horrible idea and want nothing to do with it.  I was basically stuck with two groups of people who want nothing to do with what I think is a brilliant idea.  Frustrating.

I still wonder how the hell things get done?  I feel like sometimes that when I hear a good idea I’m the first person to jump on board and help that person get that thing done, or attempt to change my life to better align with Christ.  I’m probably not, but I feel like I am at times.   I struggle with this a lot.  If one of my roles is to be an idea person, then what am I doing wrong if no one listens to the ideas?  If one of my roles is to help lead people to look more like Christ, what do I do when people at least look like they are listening but don’t go anywhere?  Maybe that’s not my role?  Maybe I need a better understanding of what my role is?   If it wasn’t for me pushing and whining and being “that guy” that everyone knows how he’s going to answer or respond, then I wonder where the fight for good would actually come in?  Am I really expected to sit around and wait and keep my mouth shut and let people come to grips with truth on their own?  What kind of role do I play in helping people move along?

A few years back I read a book that I should have listened to.  Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  I underlined half the book, but I think I failed to apply any of it to my own life.  It just became academic jargon about how to handle people groups that I may never come into contact with.  I’ve been going back and reading it, and things are sticking out to me that directly apply to my situation.

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”
— Paulo Freire

Oops.  Looks like I’m starting over, again.

Related posts:

1. Authority: Leading and Following
2. Good and Bad Leaders
3. Pastors, Salaries, Leaders and Budgets

In 2006, I wrote a post entitled Authority: Trusting More than Yourself and even though I was in university and am embarrassed of almost everything I said and wrote then, I found myself resonating with what I said then.

Authority to me is not power. It is not something that can be hung over someone’s head or something that can be misused. Authority, in my understanding is not something that the person with authority chooses to have or not. Authority is something that can only be given to someone by the person who is going to be under that authority. Authority is a decision by the person under it, not by the person administering it. This is why I think authority is one of the most fundamental concepts that a Christian can hold. Christ has given us freedom, and we need to use that freedom to give him authority.

After writing my sermon this past week on wives and husbands and submission I have come to realize this statement in a little more depth.  Jesus and Paul’s statements about power, humility and weakness seem to resonate a little bit deeper with me now.  True power comes from the bottom.  Power is given, not taken.  Relationships are built when both people are giving and not taking.  The relationships that Jesus always emphasized were the ones where power was constantly given and never taken (and never received).  As soon as our conversation strays into using labels, or demanding control, or demanding someone listens, I fear that we will have missed the boat.

When power comes from the bottom, it doesn’t look like power anymore, it looks like weakness.  It looks like a waste of time.  It looks like we’re being walked on.  It’s basically not power, and good thing, because power isn’t what we are after at all in any case.  We are after relationships with our community and with God, and the only way to accomplish this is through the giving up of our own rights and power and submitting them.

Good luck.

Related posts:

1. Authority: Bottom Leads
2. Bottom of the CN Tower
3. Mirrored Relationships

The argument Paul has been formulating thus far has been very broad thus far. He’s been tackling major issues and hasn’t really narrowed anything down. This week, in the second half of chapter 3, Paul gets extremely specific. There is some weird stuff going on though. Most people will read the next verses completely out of context of the rest of the letter and just go on and make a bunch of moral assumptions about what Paul is doing here. Instead though, what I want to do, is try to follow Paul’s train of thought and why he would jump what he did. First though, let’s read our section for today.

Colossians 3:18-4:1
Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.
Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism.
Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

I’ve seen this verse used (along with a similar verse in Ephesians 5) multiple times to try and argue why women need to submit to their husbands and do what they say. More recently there has been a resurgence of well-known speakers who continue to belabour the point of gendered roles in marriage to the point where one speaker said that a stay at home dad was “worse than an unbeliever.” It really gets ridiculous after a while if we start to look at the Bible as a moral code book where we can just take any individual verse that we find and tack on all of our assumptions about what it must mean. Then verses start to be used as proof texts for arguments that have no consistency with what God’s story is even remotely about and become more about proving what we think it says, and we only think it says that because we’ve been told that’s what it means or we’ve bailed on the responsibility to actually understand what we are reading.

However, let’s give ourselves some background before we can understand why Paul would say something like this. The Christian story is a remarkable story of God using the most unlikely characters to bring about salvation to the entire world. Through thousands of years of culture where women we’re barely seen as human, slaves were treated as animals and depending on your class would determine your rites the story we find in the Bible was written. The difference being, the Bible is drastically different. In all other material in the time that is covered through the scriptures from my understanding we have nothing that even comes close to the story of Israel and Jesus. The Hebrew Scriptures, which were written during these times, are the most tolerant, life-giving and radical words to be written, putting time in perspective. Remember, slaves were like animals in this culture, they literally served no other purpose in life than to work for the demands of their masters. So killing them was no bigger of a deal than killing a chicken for dinner. They were pawns of whatever their master could come up with.

Then the Torah comes into play with all sorts of rules and regulations helping curb some of the ridiculous laws that were in place, they are at least worth mentioning. Now, I do know that anywhere and everywhere, even in religious writings, slaves were regarded as absolutely worthless, except by the Hebrews. But I’m not going to lie to you, I really don’t know what to do with some of these laws. There are laws in there for slaves that state that you can rape a women, but not if she’s engaged. Or if you beat your slave, you will only be punished if the slave dies. These are not exactly highlights. So I admit, there is way more going on here that need to be dealt with on a theological level that we can’t really jump into today. However, the more amazing part is how the scriptures include these nobodies into their stories. The Bible though does something that stories don’t usually do. It takes a slave, someone who is not considered anything worthwhile, someone who even the Hebrew Scriptures don’t give a lot of hope for, and then all of sudden puts her in the lineage of Jesus. Remember Ruth? She was just a lonely slave girl, someone who was at risk of being treated poorly who was vulnerable to whatever her master wanted. Then her Master died so she’s at risk of getting tossed around from master to master. She’s a puppet to other people. She has no humanity. Then, by a miracle, someone takes pity on her, marries her, cares of her and gives her a child and her child has a child and that child has a child and their name is David. King David. Ruth, an animal, a nobody, becomes a direct descendant to Jesus.

I don’t know about you, but if I was writing this story, I’d probably skip that part. Besides you don’t put the woman’s name in the genealogy at all anyway. She should have been cut out from the get go, not had an entire story written about her. Speaking of women, don’t even get me started about how women were treated in these times. They were impure, men had to clean themselves when they were with them. They were subject to the wishes of their husbands or their fathers. Again, the Hebrew Scriptures are better, but compared to the standards we would expect today, they are still appalling. But the story of Jesus incorporates women too. Remember Rahab? She’s a prostitute. Yup, she’s in the lineage as well. It also incorporates children in a way that even his own disciples couldn’t understand. At no point are we able to come up with any argument that makes slaves, or women, or children inferior to anyone else. In God’s story, everyone, of any class or gender, any sinful background. They are all included.

God’s story incorporates those that are rejected by society and culture. It’s slow, and its extremely indirect. But God’s story is for them and has not forgot about them in any kind of way. The culture that Paul is writing in though, the Roman empire, has forgotten. They had their own way of doing things. There was a hierarchical order of how relationships worked.

Man -> Wife
Master -> Slave
Parent -> Children

This is just how it is. These hierarchies denoted rites, and submission. The husbands will rules. The master’s will prevails. This is how society interacted, this is how the world worked. You didn’t ask questions, you kept quiet and let them men do the talking.

This however poses a problem to these new found Christian communities. As Paul has been saying all along in Colossians, the church is to be caught up in modelling alternative ways of being in the empire, and this most certainly includes relationships. The church models new creation and new creation is completely different then the way of the empire. Paul since the beginning of this letter has been rooted in an argument that puts Christ central. Just a few verses before Paul says

Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.

In his letter to Galatians he take this a bit further

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Paul is unapologetic. He claims over and over again, the kingdom of God works different. It wrecks havoc on the regular way of doing relationships. Enough of this hierarchy based strictly on human categories. How about this, we are human and we are in Christ and that is it. The rest of these hierarchical structures, leave it to the empire, they are empty and will only lead to more destruction as they are not in Christ.

“This is not a narrative that imposes a series of absolutes to oppress us; it is a story of liberation from an empire that would take captive our imagination while it rapes and plunders the earth….this is a story of restored relationships, a love story that calls forth an alternative community characterized by compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness, love, peace, gratitude and wisdom.”
- Walsh and Keesmaat

Up until this point in the letter, according to the Kingdom, according to Jesus there is no difference between man and wife, Jew or Greek, Slave or Master…all are free and all are one in Christ. All. So when we get to the second half of Colossians, Paul isn’t just throwing out everything he said before. He isn’t re-instituting a hierarchy of unhealthy relationships and contradicting all this one in Christ talk. So let’s throw out that idea right off the get go. There is still no male or female, no slave or master. Paul is an egalitarian. All are equal. There is no law that states that because of some class or gender that you were born into it somehow changes your inherent value as a human. So with all this in mind, let’s revisit our passage for today.

Colossians 3:18-4:1
Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.
Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism.
Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

What has happened, as I mentioned before is with verses like this and the verse about the male being the priest of the home we very quickly can come up with an argument for male kingship. So what ends up happening is we end up getting into arguments about authority and control, and then eventually we start making broad statements like “well I’m the man, and this is the way it is.” As soon as a label is presented…we have a problem. There is nothing to form a belief like that rather than imparting that into the scriptures and not understanding the context of what Paul is doing whatsoever. This verse was never meant to give anyone power over anyone else. In fact, it’s meant to do the opposite, its meant to encourage each person to give power to the other. The way a relationships should work.

There is a few things we need to realize about what Paul is doing here. The first line that should pop out to us is “as is fitting to the Lord.” We know now what is fitting to the Lord. That line should debunk all ideas of control and forceful power by itself. We know that giving up power and not taking it is always fitting to the Lord. What is fitting is that men and women are created equal and their relationships are a reflection of Christ’s love for the church. We know that power, oppression and control in relationships is not the God given direction. We know that God has redeemed relationships through Christ and that the church is to model this new way of living in these relationships. So with this in mind, wives submit to your husbands, and husbands love your wives. This is what we call a parallel passage. They are saying the same things. Paul is not giving men power and telling the women to do whatever he says. This isn’t saying that the husbands will is the prevailing will. This is just reinstating how relationships work. Love and submit, that’s how it goes. We are to be a community of people whose relationships are marked by love and submission.

As soon as you try and separate the two verses and use them to empower one side over the other side we’ve completely missed what Paul is doing and what God has been doing and leading up to all throughout the scriptures. This new way of doing relationships though doesn’t stop with the husband and wives, it flows down into how children and parents interact. There is another parallel verse happening here. Since the beginning, parents were the bosses, they tell their kids to do something and they do it. Children we’re seen as lesser beings, just waiting to grow up and be meaningful contributors to society and actually become fully human. But then it looks like Paul is saying that even these relationships are being subverted. No longer is one the boss over another, but it looks like there is a mutual submission going on here. There is actually a relationship that is happening that both sides need to be mindful of as opposed to one person just telling the other what to do.

Paul’s on a role now and he just keeps going. Masters and slaves, two more parallel verses. Masters be fair, servants kick so much butt. Paul is not just advocating for people to get along, he’s advocating for people who were once in oppressive, authoritative relationships to actually think about the other when they make a decision. Can you imagine?

We recognize why this divisive system is in place in the empire. Why does it not work in the Kingdom of God?  In this train of thought, what other questions come to your mind?

We are not a community who simply has stricter rules about how certain people should act with certain people. Rather, we should be a community that puts all people on the same page in all cases. There is no hierarchy, there is no control, there is no power. The bottom gives power through submission rather than the top taking it through control. We find all of those things in Christ, so we refuse to let them seep through into our relationships. So in a world where the homeless and disabled are not listened to and our patted on the back, we subvert that by having relationships with them and listening to them. In a world where the guy at the pulpit tells you how you should behave and what you should do with your money, we have a community where the guy at the front has a relationship with you and struggles alongside of you to make sense of the scriptures.

This passage is not creating rules for how marriages and parents should setup their power structures. This passage is saying that those patterns of hierarchy don’t work in the kingdom, so no matter what “title” you have in the world (male, female, slave, master, parent, child) that doesn’t automatically make you powerful, respected or worth being submitted to. Rather, the kingdom, this church, works completely different, we refuse to see labels and rather see people. We aren’t going to play power games, and we certainly are not going to acknowledge the labels of power that already exist.

Just because you have more money, and can tithe more, does not mean that you will have any extra say or pull. Just because you are a parent of thirteen kids doesn’t mean that the single who walks in the door doesn’t get a say. Just because you’ve grown up middle class and you follow certain social standards about how to conduct yourself, doesn’t mean that someone from an impoverished class will be looked down upon. Just because you’re an adult, will not make your will play out before our kids. Just because I’m a pastor, doesn’t mean I have the corner on the Bible or God.

Instead, we are in a relationship with humans, no matter what status symbol they have. All this talk about empire and how its all around us and trying to figure out how to interact with it and subvert it. Paul gives us a heads up. He says it starts in the home. It starts in your marriages. It starts with your employer. It starts in your relationships.

However, we can’t just stop there anymore. Because we live in a global economy. We are connected to people we have never met. And Paul talks about slaves. So yes, none of us have a slave that lives in our house, well most of us don’t. So we would think a lot of what Paul is saying here doesn’t apply to us at all. However, let us not forget that there is over 32 million slaves in the world today. Listen to the working conditions in factories around the world.

“Regardless of where these factories are located, the workers’ stories have a certain mesmerizing samness: the workday is long–fourteen hours in Sri Lanka, twelve hours in Indonesia, sixteen in Southern China, twelve in the Philippines. The vast majority of the workers are women, always young, always working for subcontractors from Korea, Taiwan, or Hong Kong. The contractors are usually filling orders for companies based in the U.S., Britain, Japan, Germany or Canada. The management is military style, the supervisors often abusive, the wages below subsistence, the work low skill and tedious. “
Naomi Klein

All of us are part of this slavery. Just think about any product you’ve bought in the last little while, especially coffee, tea, t-shirts, electronics, chocolate, vegetables, fruit and meat. If you purchased it from a larger store, odds are that it came from a slave trader. The corporations themselves that offer us these products admit that the moves to these countries where there are no labour or environmental laws is to increase their profit and stay competitive. We are involved. We are responsible. And unfortunately there is nothing innocent at all about this kind of slavery even though we try to justify our way out of it. Every time we step into a store and buy their products that come from these slave houses, and we are excited about the price or how great it looks, we’ve then joined the cycle and have made these sweatshop workers our slaves. Every time we buy coffee, or tea or chocolate that isn’t fairly traded, we’ve made those workers are slaves.

For the kids first, then adults:  With Christmas on its way, why will we still buy (and want) products that we know are made by slaves?

Brian Walsh, in his book about Colossians helps us understand how the position we find ourselves in is exactly where the empire wants us. It’s this language of helplessness, and inevitability that should make us aware that our imaginations have been captivated by the empire. Remember we talked about this a few weeks ago, and how the empire looks to crush and imagine for us, and then the only things and life we can imagine, the only problems we can solve are through spending more money. Our imaginations have been captivated by the empire. Because the truth is, we have many, many choices. We just don’t want to do the work, or spend the money to use them. There is fair trade, and there is products made in co-ops all over the world. The very least you could do is buy your clothes from a used clothing store so that your locally poor will benefit from your purchase. We could make different decisions, that are less oppressive, but we are lazy, and our imaginations and energies are drained by money and the dreams of the empire….you know like looking good, and having more things.

It is overwhelming. It is overwhelming to treat our slaves right and fair, because we don’t know them. But this is why we’ve spent the last two months talking about how this place needs to be different. The church needs to act as an alternative community who can imagine and dream together about what living differently means. Imagine if we had our kids in the other room imagining ways that we can learn to function that doesn’t oppress people?

We talked about this a few weeks ago, but when children start getting targeted as consumers, to buy more of these products that are made in slaveshops, then no wonder Paul is concerned with the relationships between parents and children. When parents spend on average 4 minutes a week talking to their children and children 1350 minutes a week in front of a television, well obviously there is something wrong going on, and this community needs to face into that and start offering alternatives. Handing over our children to the captivity of media, food, television, the education system of the empire provokes them to become dutiful citizens, obedient consumers of the empire who have no imaginations left and certainly do not learn how to resist. Have we handed our kids over to the empire’s wishes for them? We have slaves. We’ve handed our kids over to the wishes of the empire. Our marriages are falling apart as each spouse tries to get what they deserve.

It is all connected. This all works together, and we as the church must work together to create a community that is actively creating alternatives so that our kids thrive and have imaginations and have real relationships with people. Our kids will learn, like Paul, to treat the distinction between slave and the free person as irrelevant in this new community, in the new creation. They know they wouldn’t have a slave now that they treated poorly and they will question and they will dream up new alternatives so that we don’t have slaves over seas either. We can’t just hand them over to dream the same dreams of the empire, to have more and nicer things. Slaves won’t make sense because they are no different than ourselves.

So this is heavy passage by Paul, because it demands that we no longer see separation by labels for anyone. The person in the sweatshop making your latest fashionable sweatshirt is no different than your brother or sister. The husband is no different than the wife. The kid is no different than the parent. We are all in this together, all one in Christ, all have value in Christ. When we actually believe that and start living that practically, everything has to change. Everything you do will go through that filter. Everything you buy you will have to be mindful that you aren’t oppressing someone. Everything you say will be in love toward people and not hate or bitterness or ignorance.

So may be this kind of community. I wrote this prayer, that I hope we can read together.

May we be the kind of community where
Wives love their husbands and
Husbands love their wives
and where
Husbands and Wives mutually sacrifice and submit to one another

May we be the kind of community where
Parents listen to their children
Children obey their parents
and where
Children and Parents seek understanding and not manipulation or control

May we be the kind of community where
Others become important to us
Our Lives don’t oppress any other
and where
We seek justice and peace rather than excess and luxury

May we be the kind of community where
Children are given opportunity to dream
Children are given freedom to be different
and where
We create environments for selflessness instead of selfishness

May we be the kind of community where
Those we don’t understand are welcomed
Those we don’t see are sought
and where
We consciously create an alternatives where there seems to be none

Amen.

Related posts:

1. The Contrasted Imagination – Sermon on Colossians 1:15-23
2. The One About the Two Debtors (A Sermon on Luke 7:36-50)
3. Waiting Well – A Sermon on Advent

I’m going to go out on a limb here. This whole leadership freak out in the church, and all the conferences we run to help people be better leaders, all the books that we write and read to successful leadership, and all the seminars and school classes we take to build up our character so we can lead better; I think its all a major deviance from the kingdom. There is way too much pure propaganda encouraging our youth, and our type-A’s to take hold of their skills and direct them to being a good Christians leader. The whole movement has very little theological basis. It’s a cultural phenomenon, not a biblical one. I grew up in churches that put a lot of emphasis on leaders, and growing leaders and discovering your potential as leaders. We end up building up really strong, confident people who can sway masses of people to do whatever God has called them to do. We end up building a lot of people that aren’t any better leaders, but are just really confident in their leadership abilities.

Even in youth, we allowed some kids to be on the worship team, and we didn’t allow others. So here I was, as a seventeen year old know it all who lusted daily, telling a sixteen year old girl that she couldn’t be on the worship team because she had a non-Christian boyfriend. Yes, I actually had this conversation. This kind of action was encouraged by all the leaders above me. I was a confident kid who had no problem removing people from places of leadership because for some reason I found myself as the gatekeeper for these types of things. This of course only served to empower me to build even more clear lines that would keep people in and out of roles that I thought needed to have only specific kinds of people in them. Inevitably this causes only people that I like and appreciate to be in any kind of leadership role at all, so I have an entire group of people that I like who are in any kind of position to remove me or change anything at all. It’s a slippery slope. It’s building an army of people that will protect you. So, in my previous experiences, the closer I got to leadership roles at my church, the quieter I am forced to become if I want to keep my position because the people above me could take you out because you are outside their lines. I could keep towing the line and exercise the power I was given, by guarding the gate of who else is allowed in. Fortunately for me, I didn’t shut up. I kept challenging the leaders above me. This caused me to be pushed out a lot quicker than I expected. I only really picked up on the challenging of the leaders above me, it took me a lot longer to realize how I should be treating the people that I was supposedly leading.

Here is my issue. We spend way too much time on something that Jesus barely talks about or refers to. In fact, many would argue that in every case that leadership or power comes into conversation with Jesus he flips it on his head. If you want to be a leader, don’t be one, be a servant. If you want to be at the top, then be at the bottom. If you want to be first, then be last. I never, ever heard these phrases in any leadership talk in church, and I certainly never practiced it or saw it practiced. If you want to be a leader, which you should, the general idea is that you have to be leadership material. You have to be strong, visionary, gets to-do lists done, strong communicator and you need to do whatever it takes to build those gifts into your character so you are a better leader. Right.

So there was a time when you would hear the term “servant leadership” thrown around. For a while, this started to seem like a good thing. This is more in line with what Jesus was saying and at least now is using the language that Jesus used. However, I’m unsure why we have to add the word “leadership” onto the phrase at all? Jesus didn’t do that. He didn’t say be a servant leader, he just said be a servant. It’s like we don’t want to let go of the control, the power, and the respect that comes with a term like “leader.” Perhaps we just can’t bare the humbling that comes along with that. If you do that you might end up just cleaning dishes a lot, or making too many hospital visits and not enough time for “real ministry.” We just can’t let go of the delegating, preaching, meetings, and the cool vision stuff, we think it’s way too crucial for everyone else. We think that eventually we outgrow this whole servant thing and move into the leadership thing. Then, to appease the biblical people, we just call ourselves servant leaders.

My suggestion is to just throw out the term leadership all together. Let’s become better servants. Let’s become better disciples. I can assure you, the problem with the church today isn’t that our leaders aren’t good enough. I don’t care how hard we try to build up better leaders, and invest in our leaders, and make better leaders; that is not the solution to fixing the church, or being more in line with the kingdom. Our problem is that we have way too many people thinking they are leaders and not servants. Servant-leadership doesn’t count. There is no such thing. Just be a servant. Let the leadership lingo slip from your language. If people end up following you, don’t focus on that, just keep serving. Then when you start to think you’ve been getting better at being a servant, and you start getting elevated to more places of leadership, humbly decline and take worse positions even further down the totem pole and serve everyone. Get rid of your books that give you all the techniques and pointers for being a good leader, and pick up some books on building a humble character who looks to be a servant. I can guarantee you, that if you do that, and you are in some type of “leadership” position then you’ll actually empower the people in your midst rather than control them to do what you think is right.

Related posts:

1. The Kingdom: Why First Place Doesn’t Work
2. Four Spiritual Laws Just Doesnt Cut It
3. Bible: Errant/Inerrancy Doesnt Do It

So a command like Paul gives to us to boast in our weakness, makes no sense for us.  How do I boast in my weakness?  Am I honestly supposed to admit that I am wrong or incapable of living out exactly what I believe?  That is dumb.  It’s much easier to justify a lifestyle with ignorance and refusing to think.  I do it all the time.  I do it with the water I purchase and the clothes I wear and the gas I guzzle and the food I eat and the pleasures I have and the electronics I use and the the way I treat my body.  I do all these things without thinking and convincing myself that there is nothing wrong with them.  I can do all these things and live guilt free as long as I push off any situations, people or relationships that are directly affected.  Every time I do one of these things I am telling myself that it is ok to do these things.  I’m not actually feeling bad or bummed out, I’m convinced that it’s fine.

I don’t want to be known as a guy that believes one thing and lives another.  So I change my beliefs.  I don’t want to be a guy who refuses to change his life because he can critically argue his way out of it.  The problem is though that I am extremely stubborn.  I refuse to be wrong.  So if I am living a certain way, I’m going to give you a hundred different reasons as to why it’s OK for me to live this way.  I need you to know that the way I’m living is the right way to live and that I wouldn’t live in a wrong way.

Boasting in my weakness seems stupid and pointless.  I will just boast when I am right and change or give the illusion of change when I am wrong.   What kind of pastor would I be if I was up there telling people that being truly human is one thing, but I’m another.  Where is the example in that?  What kind of pastor would I be if I admitted that I fail everyday in living out what I am encouraging them to live out?  What kind of pastor would I be saying “these are good things to do, but I won’t be joining you in doing them.”  This is a pastor who is weak and a bad example.  My guess is we probably need more of these kinds of pastors.

Related posts:

1. Faith Can’t Be Wrong
2. If You Thought It Was Wrong You Wouldn’t Do It
3. Genesis: God Chose the Wrong Ones

Update: As opposed to offering news clippings, which I had up here before, I will direct you to some blog posts of people commenting on the matter, you can find the news clippings by googling.

Robby Mac’s Thoughts….Good Post(ht)

SynchroBlog: But is it Revival?

Healing Revival

Monday Morning Mentations

Church people #2

Straw Man Arguments

Welcome To Todd World

I am fascinated about how fast and good the designs/websites are that can go up for stuff like this. I wish I would have been on the ball and bought floridaoutpouring.com before they did. That would have been fun. Check out some of the links on here and how fast they get e-mail lists, blogs and tv schedules online.

I think one of the first things “revivals” like this should do is post their budget for all to see. This is how much money came in and this is how we are distributing it to those in need. Jesus talks about money more than any topic in his life because it is crucial to have a firm grasp on it (and not it on you) to live a Kingdom centered life. To hear stories about buckets full of money floating around and no one really knowing where its going breaks my heart. I would be a lot less skeptical about these things if money was an open topic and we knew where the funds were going and were assured it wasn’t just going into the organizers pockets and that they were actually being used like they should. The economic toll that events like these play on convinced souls is massive and it is just another way where the rich get richer and the poor, or middle class who are looking for “blessing” get poorer.

I wonder when the masses will learn that when you put a great entertainer in front of a large crowd who are all expecting something great, that something is going to happen. Wether it is great or not, everyone will think its great and then you’ll start a website, logo, brand and make lots of money all in the name of Jesus. You know the same Jesus who asks us to sell our posessions, take care of the poor, love our neighbour and pray in our closets.

UPDATE: I turned off and deleted most of the comments of this post, they were just becoming spammy and annoying.

Related posts:

1. Sarnia Revival
2. Sarnia Revival on TV
3. An Open Letter/Review to the Sarnia Revival

Got talking about leaders again last night and it revisited the entire issue all over again. I never stop struggling with this issue and I don’t know why. Sometimes I think it’s because I’m power hungry and want to be in positions that were never meant to exist. Other times I keep revisiting it because I’m always thrown into positions of leadership and I want to make sure that I’m doing things right.

I find that we usually make the distinction between good and bad leaders by how they make decisions and control those that follow them. A good leader makes good decisions and controls the public, church or whoever else in a positive manor and a bad leader the opposite. That is always how we do it. The problem with this is that the basis of good and bad leadership is based on control, which I’m learning is usually a breeding ground for trouble. Why do we assume leaders are those that make decisions for other people? That’s the consensus I see in politics and in the church. We want to ‘vote’ or choose someone to be our leader that will make great decisions for us. Is it so we don’t have to? Is it so we have someone to blame when things go wrong? I’m starting to wonder if leadership in the Kingdom is to look drastically different then what we see elsewhere and usually from what we want.

A leader is one who leads not by making decisions that affects everyone whether they like it or not but one who lives a life that people follow. One position gives power and the other one gives responsibility. One position says that the leader can affect everyone and anyone by their decisions and the other one let’s their decisions speak for themselves. This could be a problem with our concepts of democracy. Really we are choosing someone to make decisions and change the world for us for a four year term. We aren’t looking for someone to model a right and worthy life. We’d rather them tell us what to do.

This is the kind of leader that I’d love to see in the church (and hey why not the country too). Not a leader who is voted into power and then gets to make decisions and steer the ship whatever way he likes. Not a leader who is so concerned with losing power that they have to fight to keep it. Not a leader who insists on his authority because people are starting to doubt him. Instead, a leader that simply lives like Jesus and people follow them because of it. A leader who leads by influence and not authority. A leader who doesn’t try to control all those around them but instead love them, be himself/herself and allow them to decide on their own if they will follow.

Related posts:

1. When Leaders Fail At Leading, What Next?
2. Pastors, Salaries, Leaders and Budgets
3. A Good Read

In this sense, I can see how leadership needs to be redefined away from one individual passing something of value to another creating some sort of hierarchy which puts one in power and the other in powerlessness. However, I still think there is a place for leadership in the kingdom that can work. Miroslav Volf talks about the relationship between givers and receivers in his book Free of Charge and how almost always their relationship becomes skewed. He says that “many maintain that the act of giving puts the giver in a position of wealth and power, whereas the act of receiving puts a person in a position of poverty and weakness.” He goes on to say later than when this exchange is done in love “gifts neither establish the superiority of the giver, nor rigger rivalry between the giver and receiver.” I wonder if the relationship between a leader and a follower can follow this same pattern. Where leadership almost always comes in power, selfish influence and distorts the relationship that humans are to have with one another. Yet when done in love, maybe there is some redeemable factor of the relationship.

I don’t think I can throw out all ideas of leadership. There is something inside of it that still rings true with me. I think there can be a leader/follower relationship that is healthy and not degrading to either side. It needs to be reinvented, of course, but I don’t think it needs to be thrown out or looked past. I think this is where my language of influence starts coming in. I don’t mean influence as something used as a tool to convince people to follow, but I mean influence as a by-product of who you are. Influence can’t be sought after and achieved unselfishly. It should come unbeknownst and then I would consider that grounds for the beginnings of a true leader.

I still think there is room in the kingdom for leaders. I would like to think it fits in with all the other weird tensions. Everyone needs to understand and live in both sides. We have such a bad view of leadership that when we think of it we automatically think of harmful relationships or forceful dictators. I do believe though that there is a place for leaders because it’s their gift. There needs to be an entire new reworking on what this means or look like, and in most ways I have no idea. As I write this post the more I run Volf’s book through my head and I realize how close the relationship is between giving and receiving and leading and following and that it could be redeemable and there is a proper place for it.

Related posts:

1. When Leaders Fail At Leading, What Next?
2. Authority: Trusting More than Yourself
3. Authority: Bottom Leads