In our last article, Fred Romanuk introduced five types of leadership development:
- Learning About Leadership: Event or ‘guru-lead’ training. Few ever say this event-focused learning about leadership made a difference.
- “Throw them in the Deep End and see who survives”: The most ineffective form of leadership developing leader but the most used. People are put into big jobs, we watch them flounder, morale erode, and people quit - then do it all again.
- Learning the Gaps: Identify the ‘gaps’ between current and needed capacities. This approach often uses a ‘360’ process and is a helpful beginning point.
- Mentoring: Leaders work with a mentor/coach. Organizations too often use this approach with unqualified people but with qualified mentors its effective.
- Leadership Action Teams: Leaders group together to work on leadership situations above their current capacities; a coach assist them engage untravelled leadership challenges.
The question we are continually asked across denominational systems is: “How do we form leaders for the new space in which we find ourselves?” The most effective way brings leaders together in action-directed, just-in-time learning where they’re working on their own leadership challenges with an experienced coach.
Too many leaders are still looking for magic bullets to address leadership formation. We’re beguiled by the idea of gathering with gurus who benevolently pour out their experiences and stories. There are a lot of catchy phrases out there about how to do transformation but, they betray a stubborn conviction that there’s a silver bullet to be found, a ‘bulls eye’ to be hit. Behind these approaches lie assumptions that are never named or addressed:
- A romanticism that believes out there somewhere is the right answer or formula if we can just get the right gurus or method to find it and show us the way.
- A functional pragmatism that stubbornly holds on to the notion that with the right data and information (studies of the community, demographics of the church, some set of missional ‘indicators’, some measure of the ‘right’ factors) we can come up with a plan to successfully execute the right strategy for success.
I am continually surprised to hear leaders, who know that we’re in a new space where our former maps make little sense, turn again to romantic idealism (there is an answer out there) and functional pragmatism (‘we have the technology, we can do it’). There is a better way that avoids both traps. It involves the method of leadership development Fred described as “Leadership Action Teams”.
I recently had lunch with my brother, a wonderful pastor and keen observer of the church. He asked me about the leadership development work I do across multiple church systems. I described the twin assumptions I just critiqued and summarized them by saying that what these approaches betray is the fundamental Gnosticism so prevalent in discussions of missional leadership today. He understood what I meant. I said most the leaders I meet with vision/mission and strategic plans to make great inroads in evangelism or church planting etc. are functional atheists.
I described a different approach, one rooted in a confidence that the boundary-breaking, desert-forming Spirit of God is at work creating something new in this strange, unthinkable world where we now find ourselves. It bemuses me when some guru gives an eloquent speech about our multiple ‘post’ world then offers a formula or plan to make the church work. As I shared with my brother, I’m more interested in forming leaders who know how to engage with the Spirit in this new space than all the tactics, formulas and strategic plans that are out there. This reminds me of the the Celtic missionaries who, from the Isle of Lindisfarne in Northumbria in the 5th - 7th centuries, transformed England and northern Europe.
My brother has spent a lot of time studying the Celts and their missionary journeys. He lit up with recognition as we talked and said: “Do you know were the phrase a wild goose chase comes from?” The phrase symbolized, for me, a useless, futile exercise that produced nothing. I wasn’t prepared for the explanation he shared. The Celts had a name for the Holy Spirit - an Geadh-Glas which means the wild goose. By this they meant that the Spirit of God can’t be put in a neat box, confined to a vision and values statement or tamed within a strategic plan. The wild goose is unpredictable (like the wind). Taking seriously this sense of God, Celtic missionaries went on wild goose chases entering the spaces, towns, hamlets, and villages of 7th century England in the conviction that the wild goose was out there ahead of them. They were open to being surprised by the wild goose, prayerfully asking what God was doing and joining there by naming the name of Jesus, dwelling among people and opening the great story of God’s love and grace. This was precisely what I was trying to describe about the nature of leadership in our strange, unthinkable, new space. My brother has blessed me with language for talking about leadership, linking me to the missionary tradition of the church. What a gift!
We want to form leaders open to following the wild goose not fixated on formulas, vision statements or strategic plans. We form such leaders in our strange, shifting, unthinkable world through action learning communities of leaders. It’s here we rediscover the missional imagination of the Celts who gathered in Lindisfarne, like the incoming tide. They gathered to be shaped in the life of Jesus then went out, like the tide, on wild goose chases.
We’re convinced that in our unthinkable world this kind of leadership formation is the best way of forming mission-shaped leaders.
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