Infrastructure & Kingly Gifts

It's not sexy to talk about building or maintaining an infrastructure, but just try to change the world without one. - Seth Godin

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/10/infrastructure.html

In the A29 Network we talk about leaders as prophets, priests, and kings, based on the three offices of Jesus. (I'm not actually sure where this paradigm for leadership originated, but it's the only place I hear the language.) Every leader will be have a primary strength area, a secondary strength area, and then an area that they are weak.

Prophets are leaders who speak the truth. They cut through the confusion and clarify what it happening. They are visionaries.

Priests are leaders who love. They love the people around them, are compassionate, and make people feel cared for.

Kings are leaders who organize. They plan. They are strategic. They understand how seemingly disconnected parts work together and the implications of decisions.

Kings are the ones responsible for infrastructure, and as per the quote above, are typically the ones who get ignored (at least in church ministry). Their work happens in the background, and if they are really good at what they do, their work disappears. You never see it. You just experience it.

Take Apple: Steve Jobs was the prophetic leader. He had a vision. He was (apparently) often brash. He knew what he wanted. He got things done by the sheer force of his personality. He's the one who saw the iPhone in your hand before you even knew you wanted an iPhone.

Tim Cook, on the other hand, is a kingly leader. He organizes. He's the reason the thousands of little parts in your iPhone come together at just the right time, in just the right time frame, in just the right quantity, at just the right profit point, so that the iPhone that someone else envisioned actually ends up in your hand.

Steve Jobs (rightfully) got credit for his vision. Tim Cook (rarely, at least in the general public) gets the credit for almost certainly being the most effective kingly leader on the planet. His work disappears. We look at the phone in our hand and think, "amazing!" Rarely do we stop and think about what was required to make 13 million of them, ship them to multiple countries, and sell them all in three days, with enough stock remaining to do that again in a few weeks in nine more countries, then within three months to well over 100 countries. In fact, the only time you'd think about it is when there is a glitch in the system: when you show up to the Apple Store and they don't have exactly the model that you wanted in that exact moment.

The main problem is assuming you don't need the kingly gifts in your organization. That's what most churches do, in my experience. They love the priests (how could you not? They are so caring!). They love the prophets (they give good sermons!). Kings aren't even on the radar, even though organizations are simply not effective unless there is someone without the kingly gifts in a high level of leadership. That's why many church organizations remain small. You can't get anywhere unless you have an infrastructure that actually allows for the ideas you have to come to fruition, and the people you have to be organized into a meaningful movement.

The Fallacy of a Dying Church

Here is some language that we should stop using: "dying church".

Let's get this straight: the church of Jesus Christ is always alive. Let's not lose focus on what the church is. It is the gathered body of people made alive through faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is a work that is compelled by and empowered by God through his Holy Spirit. The very definition of the church cannot be extricated from life itself; if it is, you no longer have the church.

So why do we call churches that are in decline "dying churches"? It stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the church. Our problem is that we too closely associate the church of Jesus Christ with our local church, assuming that the two are one-and-the-same. While the church-local is built on and a part of the universal church of Jesus Christ, it nevertheless contains a wide variety of human elements, both cultural and systemic. Life, for those portions, is no guarantee. In fact, if there is a guarantee, it is that at some point in the future, both our systems and our cultural expression will become irrelevant, and thus, highly susceptible to collapse.

The first step is to make the distinction between those elements of the church that are "man-made" in their origin, and those that are "divine" in their origin. Only when we do that will we become comfortable with the changes that are necessary in the human realm, while holding fast to the life-giving elements of the church, which is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

What I've seen is that many churches, in an effort to simply survive, will sacrifice the Gospel or the advance of the Gospel for the sake of the local church. While they may desire to grow and be "healthy", it is only trumped by their desire to make sure things can continue to be done the way they've always been done. Change is scary; risk is scarier. If we change, we risk making a mistake that will ultimately destroy "everything we've created" (see the problem?); if we don't change, not only do we remain comfortable but we mitigate the risk. If there is any risk, it's far enough down the road that we're not worried about it.

Incidentally, this is why most organizations that ultimately close their doors are on the path to closure long before they think they are. Organizations grow, stabilize, and then plateau. It's in that plateau period where the choice is often made to remain in a state of comfort and not "rock the boat"; unfortunately, that's usually the first step towards a long, slow, steady decline that won't be evident until the gentle slope has turned into a cliff and there is almost no turning back.

The good news for the church is that we aren't, or shouldn't be, afraid of organizational collapse. We're not selling a product that needs to be revamped, lest we lose our lifeline. We're preaching an unchanging Gospel that is our lifeline. When we wrap our heads around that, and realize that the lifeblood of the church goes on and on and on and grows and grows and grows no matter what happens to our little expression of the church, we become much more open to letting go of the human elements of the local church and living in the comfort and grace of the Gospel.

The church is not dead, she is alive! That's the confidence we have in the Gospel. And that's the message we need to proclaim.

Becoming Galilean

“It took Jesus about two seconds to become a human. It took him around 30 years to become a Galilean.”

— Robert Guerrero

I was at a fundraising banquet for a non-profit where I serve on the board (New Hope Community Ministries. Check it out: http://www.newhopecmnj.org) when the guest speaker dropped the bomb quoted above. I've been processing it for the past week.

When I arrived in North Jersey and at Restore, I had a lot of thoughts about church planting that turned out to be mostly wrong. It's not that they were incorrect, per se, it's just that they didn't fit the context that I was planting in.

North Jersey isn't like the other contexts that I've been in. It's faster-paced than Miami, but much more community-centric than upstate New York and the capital region. It's a delightful blend of fast-paced-cut-your-throat-to-get-ahead New York City and old-timey New England, where if we don't know you and you didn't grow up in this here town, we don't trust you. It's not exactly either of those things, but it has elements of both. It's regional, but it's not. We commute to work, then come home, park our cars, and walk to the park. My town is better than yours. Welcome to North Jersey.

I remember hearing about a dude who was planting a church in New York City and for the first year, when people asked him what he was doing, he said something to the effect of, "learning the people." He may as well have said, "becoming a New Yorker". That's what he was doing, and he was right for doing it.

At the time the comment struck me as somewhat silly–again, not because he was wrong–but because it seemed like a waste of time. It seemed to me like a better approach would have been to take a person who was already a New Yorker and have them plant a church in New York. At least it would have been more efficient. Of course, raising up indigenous leaders is (or should be) the long term goal of every church planter in New York and elsewhere. But unless that is happening already, or until it does, a church planter is going to need to take some time to learn the context if we are going to preach the Gospel well.

The good news about the good news is that it doesn't stop being good, no matter what context you are in. But, if you want to make sure that the people you are preaching to hear it as good news, you better learn to express it in a language that they can understand, addressing the real needs that they already know that they have, or setting them free from the real bondage they already experience. And that requires becoming one of them. Like Jesus became a Galilean.