Macrorepentance: Schizophrenic Leadership
Because my training is in history I sometimes do a mental exercise intended to give me big-picture view of what’s going on in my life. I imagine myself as a historian living 100 years in the future and analyze today’s events using the disciplines of history.
Lately, I’ve been trying to make sense of the accomplishments of the CGGC Ad Council from 2007 to 2010. I have strong feelings about what the Ad Council did. Objectivity hasn’t come easily. I am, however, an intellectual by temperament. And, I’ve been trained to wear the scholar’s hat. I can wear that hat in a pretty strong wind.
Here’s what I came up with:
There is a noteworthy degree of schizophrenia in the four documents the recent Ad Council produced. Those four documents are: The Mission Statement, the Vision Statement, the Standards for Credentials and the revision of We Believe.
The Mission Statement says,
As witnesses of the Lord Jesus Christ, we commit ourselves to make more and better disciples by establishing churches on the New Testament plan and proclaiming the gospel around the world. (Matthew 28:16-20, Ephesians 3:8-11, Acts 1:8)
The Vision Statement says,
We seek to establish and network vital reproducing churches.
These two statements are Apostolic in their understanding of the church, they are kingdom-oriented and they are externally focused.
On the other hand, the Standards for Credentials and the revision of We Believe take a medieval Christendom view of the church; We Believe is profoundly sectarian and both are internally focused.
To a future historian, this will appear schizophrenic. It’s impossible for me to understand how the same body could come up with two sets of documents so diametrically opposed to each other. I’ve been asking myself:
If I were a historian in the year 2110, what would I make of this set of four documents? What conclusions would I draw about the Ad Council?
I hope that you will enter into this conversation with me. Here are some questions I’ve been asking myself:
1. Were these people so lacking in theological insight that they are unaware of what they’ve done?
2. Do the documents reflect the shepherd culture’s concern for relationship which would be happy with any document that people would agree on without consideration of truth?
3. Do the Mission and Vision Statements manifest the fad culture that has imprisoned the CGGC for decades? That is: Did the Ad Council simply jump on the Mission/Vision Statement band wagon but never really believe its own high-sounding rhetoric?
4. Does the tension among these documents reflect strong differences within the Council and suggest that there was no consensus?
5. Is leadership to blame?
5a. (Here’s one that I can’t get myself ignore.) Is leadership to be thanked? Did Ed shepherd these four contradictory documents into existence on purpose to sow seeds of debate and contention at General Conference?
Whatever the truth is, we all need to pray for the current Ad Council. It is faced with the task of trying to find God's will in the tension over Credentials and in continuing the revision of We Believe.
The CGGC has a Shepherd dominated leadership thesis entrenched for decades which nurtures our culture of decline and death. I believe the CGGC also now possesses several distinct emerging antitheses. My hundred-year-in the future-historian-self gets it that this Ad Council’s got a bigger task ahead of it than any GC Ad Council in my memory—perhaps than any that has gone before it.
I believe that if the CGGC is going to glorify God 100 years from now, a spirit-guided answer to these questions will be our gift to the future.
posted by bill Sloat at 6:51 AM
22 Comments:
bill,
i'm still a bit on the outside of some of this, and i think i've said all i can about most of this elsewhere. just one question:
i understand that a statement of faith may be outward-focused (e.g. winebrenner's "pro bono publico") as you have pointed out before. but isn't a document that sets standards for the ordaining of ministers in a specific denomination by definition inward-focused? its purpose is to define part of our organizational structure, the stuff on the inside, so doesn't it necessarily have to be inward in design? or do you mean more by "the credentialing document is inward focused" than that?
Walt,
You are, of course, correct that a document that credentials leaders deals, by definition, with issues within the body.
What the Standards for Credential document does which brought it into question at General Conference is embrace the Medieval paradigm of church leadership. The Medieval paradigm created a priesthood in a movement that defines itself as a priesthood of all (believers).
My concern is that the document doesn't empowers apostles--sent ones--who are wired to make disciples out of people who don't know Jesus but a priestly class who serve as mediators between the clergy class and the lay flock.
The problem is that they don't see what you see. You mentioning medieval Christendom simply doesn't get any traction. They don't see the dissonance, the schizophrenia. It simply doesn't register I think.
Until someone can convince the bulk of leadership (or even a strategic few) that many of these things are not just extra biblical but unbiblical, little will change.
It could hypothetically be that something that happened during medieval Christendom is helpful (I'm not claiming this).
At the end of the day, it matters less where any of our current practices, documents and beliefs came from.
But if they stand in the way of biblical, spirit-led Christianity, they must be changed.
Either documents give shape to the future of our mission/vision or they hinder it.
Bill,
Sorry, I had to pipe in on this one. The discrepancy you point out is, indeed, plain to see.
May I offer another hypothesis as to how this came about?
Sometimes when you are in a committee environment (be it shepards, corporate management, people in a local drama club, cub scouts) you can get so immersed in a project that you see the singular project as opposed to the bigger picture. It is a common error and it is less intentional and more of a focus on the micro as opposed to the macro.
I certainly do not have a grasp on history that you do and I certainly do not have all the answers. I have been in enough committees and management positions to see this happen a few times, though.
Though our Sunday gatherings are 15-24...we do have a safeguard in place. We spend the last several months deconstructing everything and now we are building. In that building we put a safeguard in place. We went with Jesus' revised Shema in Mark 12:29-31 and the Great Commission. Everything we talk about and hold to is held up against the critical lense of these two passages...if they complete or complement them, we mover forward. If it does not..we don't do it.
Perhaps consistency could be better achieved if the Ad council had some core that everything has to go back to...something short..something powerful.
I think sometimes we try to grow grapes when we planted an apple orchard.
Bill, I think many of the suspicions oozing through your questions are legit. I do not know specific answers to all of them.
I don't think Ed shepherded deliberately dissonant docs into existence just to create needed tension, but I do know that he is okay with tension that emerges and creates fresh discussions about divergent paradigms.
I think we have an interesting mess on our hands in the CGGC, where the assumed Christendom perspectives are increasingly rubbing up against what you called "emerging antitheses". The question that intrigues me is how long it will take for the emerging antitheses to end up having dinner with a group like the Ad Council. It will likely take years.
At the moment I am encouraged that the apostolics among are
getting permissions heretofore not given. That allows new ministry to develop and at least in some circles, important conversations about matters of substance to take place. The tragedy would be if what is emerging never finds its way into places of authoritative leadership (and even there I would hope the new authority is more spiritual/organic than institutional).
On a separate note, to the point of doctrinal statements, I do think it's okay to have a doc that defines what one has to believe to lead in our group. I would, however, like to see these kinds of statements be more than sterile doctrinal docs. Even the creeds were defensively written bare bones doctrine docs- they say nothing about the message, the Kingdom, the life.
Dan M.,
Re: Until someone can convince the bulk of leadership (or even a strategic few) that many of these things are not just extra biblical but unbiblical, little will change.
Amen, bro!
(I'm going to say this repeatedly:) It seems to me that it is the job of the prophet to do the pointing out. It is the jobs of, I believe, the apostle and probably also the teacher to do the convincing.
Perhaps the one thing we lack in the CGGC and in all of Western Christendom-based Christianity is an integrated APEST community in which apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers are all empowered to live within their callings to balance each other and to collaborate with each other.
We are beginning to acknowledge that the five callings exists but we have made no progress in being a body in the living out of our callings.
Pat/tux,
Re: Though our Sunday gatherings are 15-24...we do have a safeguard in place. We spend the last several months deconstructing everything and now we are building. In that building we put a safeguard in place. We went with Jesus' revised Shema in Mark 12:29-31 and the Great Commission. Everything we talk about and hold to is held up against the critical lense of these two passages...if they complete or complement them, we mover forward. If it does not..we don't do it.
I thought the Ad Council put its own safeguard in place by creating the Mission and Vision Statements. With those Statements as a foundation, there is no way that the Ad Council should have been able to produce the credentialing document that it did and there is absolutely no way it should have been able to send out to the church the two revisions of WE BELIEVE that it has.
That's why one of the questions I'm asking myself is if the Mission and Vision Statements were merely manifestations of our deeply entrenched Fad Culture.
Point taken, Bill.
An amalgamation of fads placed in language without careful thought is possible based on the picture you painted.
This is common in our western church culture.
Sometimes we adopt a phrase or a term without adopting the spirit of the term. Other times we adopt a singular concept in a very large Bible and an infinite God and say THIS is THE thing. We need this thing. This widget IS the New Testament.
Yeah, if we are not being schizo, we are being ocd.
Pat,
Sometimes we adopt a phrase or a term without adopting the spirit of the term. Other times we adopt a singular concept in a very large Bible and an infinite God and say THIS is THE thing. We need this thing. This widget IS the New Testament.
In my opinion, what you describe is the inevitable result of a leadership culture in which shepherds, gifted in nurturing relationship, are given the task of being stewards of truth.
Fran,
Bill, I think many of the suspicions oozing through your questions are legit. I do not know specific answers to all of them.
You raise a point that I’ve wanted to make for some time.
I have no suspicion. I have a ton of confusion. I think that you, an apostle, are reading me as an apostle, not as a prophet.
There are two stories in Acts in which the prophet Agabus appears. They are instructive about what it means to function as a prophet and how the church should deal with people who are prophetic.
In Acts 11 a group of prophets travel from Jerusalem to Antioch. One of them, Agabus, predicted a famine through the whole Roman world. In Acts 21, Agabus travels to Caesarea from Judea to meet Paul as Paul travels to Jerusalem. Agabus took Paul’s belt and bound his hands and feet with it and said that this is what the Jews would do to Paul in Jerusalem.
Notice what happened in both stories. After Agabus spoke he disappeared from the story.
The disciples in Antioch decided to help the Christians in Judea. Agabus didn’t have anything to do with that. After Agabus used Paul’s belt to bind his hands and feet a lively argument broke out among the people with Paul but Agabus disappears from the story. He traveled all that way to give the object lesson but, according to the text, had no word about what Paul was to do with the truth.
My experience is that the Lord gives me great passion for and insight into the ‘what’ of things going on around me. I can see the dissonance in the way we are led. I can feel with intense anguish the impact of the macro-schizophrenia. But, understand it? No. Be able to interpret it? Not really. Be suspicious? No. Confused? You bet!
I think it is a word from the Lord for me to point out the facts of the inconsistency in what our leadership has done. But, I have no gifting in understanding what to do about it.
I do believe, though, that others are now stewards of the word the Lord passed on to the body and continues to pass on to it through me.
When Paul says that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, I think that he’s saying that, humanly speaking, the prophets provide the ‘what.’ It is the task of apostles to come up with the ‘how.’
Very interesting self-reflection and thoughts Bill.
It occurs to me though that although your task may be to point out the problem, you will be deeply frustrated until somebody else provides the how.
This is a great example of how deeply we need each other and how difficult it is, even living faithfully within one's calling, if others do not embrace their own.
Bill... I agree with your take on the roles of apostles and prophets, and I'm working on the how the best I know how:-)
Dan M,
Very interesting self-reflection and thoughts Bill.
It occurs to me though that although your task may be to point out the problem, you will be deeply frustrated until somebody else provides the how.
This is a great example of how deeply we need each other and how difficult it is, even living faithfully within one's calling, if others do not embrace their own.
I am and have been deeply frustrated because we don't have an integrated APEST community in the CGGC to do the Lord's will in all of the who, what, when, where and hows of the Kingdom. And, we are a long way away from having that integrated community.
The shepherds haven't given up their hegemony as of yet.
When the Word says that we are a body it isn't joking.
Fran,
I know that you personally are working on the how as diligently as I am proclaiming the what.
But, until we have a leadership community in which apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers are all empowered to live within their callings we will continue to quench the Spirit and thwart the advance of the Kingdom.
Anybody have any good stories / examples about apest type integration at a local or regional level?
For some reason (personal passion or ignorance) I don't think about the biggest macro level as much as some others. I'm most passionate about seeing these things happen in local communities and city wide.
That seems about as much of a challenge as I can handle trying to think of ways forward :-)
Dan,
Anybody have any good stories / examples about apest type integration at a local or regional level?
The Epistles of Paul?
IMO, we're going to have to stop using the lens of Christendom and its myth of congregational polity and begin to take a New Testament view of things.
There's a reason that the Book of Acts takes a macro view. The Church is built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets--not the shepherds, teachers, elders and deacons--with Christ Jesus as the chief cornerstone.
Jesus didn't actually say, "The time has come. The church of God is near. Repent and believe the good news."
Leadership as the New Testament describes it is the integrated and collaborated work of macro church leaders--APEs--and micro church leaders--shepherds and teachers.
What you ask for in your question seeks a New Testament norm where itinerant, what Viola calls Apostolic Workers, come and go among congregations and bring insight and giftedness that settled shepherds and teachers don't possess.
In the Book of Acts, Paul's return trips to churches he'd already begun are examples. 1 Corinthians is an example. Titus 1:5, in which Paul instructs Titus to--as an Apostolic Worker--to appoint elders in every town is an example.
I believe that if you are looking for an example of the integration of a settled apostle (an oxymoron: a settled 'sent one?') and settled shepherds and teachers you'll never find that because you're still imposing the Christendom myth on the apostolic church.
Interestingly, the Church of God used to approximate the New Testament model of leadership when there were 4 to 5 congregations per credentialed leader and no leader stayed in one place for more than 2, and in rare cases, 3 years.
I was referring to contemporary examples, not 2000 year old.
I think the New Testament is interested in leadership of geographical areas. The churches in one city could be addressed as a whole and yet there were groups that gathered in people's homes as well. Was there shared any shared leadership of the city-wide group of churches? I'm not sure how that worked.
I might not be be a believer in 'primitive Christianity.' I don't know that the 'New Testament plan' needs to be exactly the way it happened in the New Testament.
The New Testament churches met in homes, not in buildings. I assume that if most Jews had responded favorably to the Gospel, many synagogues would have become Christian gathering places and they would have had buildings early on.
The Apostles were most concerned with bringing the Gospel to places where it had never been right? Pushing the boundries. Paul wanting to go to Spain, possibly Thomas going toward India.
What would Paul do today stategically if he were alive? The gospel has gone to most geography in the world, yet we are still largely unevangelized.
I think that with the advance of technology and travel, it's possible to function very apostolically while spending much more time in one geographical area than in the first century. Also, there are exponentially more numbers or Christians today and assumably more gifted with each of the apest gifts.
Does sent really mean mostly geographically (it certainly can be) or is it more purpose in being sent?
I think someone can function prophetically or apostolically within a city or geographic region. Yes, it needs to happen on a larger level as well. I'm not denying that.
I'm concerned that we're taken too much of New Testament description and made it prescription.
I don't think we need to go back to the New Testament exactly. We need to carry on the apostolic impulse, faithfulness to the gospel and our giftings, for our own time.
I may depart from many of you in this conviction.
Dan,
Your post timed (for me anyway) at 9/01/2010 6:12 PM is awesome! You make great points and ask crucial questions.
As I have time, I'll share my thoughts but perhaps we should print it out and meet for lunch and/or breakfast and talk this through.
Not long after the Mission Statement came out I all but begged Ed to call a gathering of CGGC people called something like:
Defining the New Testament Plan.
He didn't poo poo the idea but nothing has happened along those lines. Your questions and comments are some of the issues I think we need to address if we're going to attempt to be people of the mission described in the Mission Statement.
Thanks for bringing up these things.
In reflecting on "defining the New Testament Plan"...
I've been thinking about how easy it is for me to take one aspect of the New Testament plan and make it the centerpiece. For example, we've done a lot of talking about APEST, and I am one of the strongest proponents of returning to the APEST paradigm of leadership locally and translocally. However, I can believe in APEST, choose my leaders based on those giftings, and say "Well, there we have it"... but does that mean I will be leading something which in substance reflects the values of Jesus?
A book I'm reading by a South African Vineyard guy has been reminding me that the purpose of the church is worship of the King resulting in the work of the Kingdom. It's just reminding me that all our talk about church leadership, structure, etc. will come to naught if we are not clear on what the work of the Kingdom consists of.
Fran,
The New Testament plan is certainly much more than APEST. I believe that APEST is so much a part of our discussion because the CGGC's leadership paradigm is so far away from the New Testament's plan for leadership in the body that we are constantly quenching the Spirit by how we have chosen to be led.
As far as what the purpose of the church is, I'm not certain that it is "worship of the King resulting in the work of the Kingdom."
Based on what do you reach the conclusion that it is worship of the King?
What does worship of the King involve?
Bill,
By worship of the King I mean our being captivated by God himself, and then that the Kingdom work we see Jesus doing in the Gospels flows out of this. Jesus continually refers to how he is doing what the Father desires, and that we should be in him as he is in the Father-- all his work flows out of this love for, dependence on, and obedience to the Father.
I see a large part of the church (mainline, evangelical, and emerging) chasing social justice today because they want to do good- but they are not talking about being rooted in the Father like Jesus did, and they are defining disciples as people doing missional things, rather than people in love with, dependent on, and obedient to the Father. As Dan Kimball recently pointed out, if this trend continues, in fifty years there will be no Christians left in the western church do do social justice.
BTW, I am NOT defining "worship" in terms of "worship services" (though I would argue that most of the time the contemporary evangelical church does not corporately worship God as if he were truly present, and hence does not grasp how God's presence in worship can strengthen our abiding).
Fran,
Okay, good. That word worship is so imprecise, especially these days and especially in the American church were 'worship teams' are house musical groups that perform Christian music in front of individual congregations.
It seems to me that the biblical word for that is love.
Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord with all your heart, soul and mind and that, along with the command, "Love your neighbor as yourself" everything else God commands hangs.
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