The need for leaders and leadership--There
is no substitute for quality leaders
Two factors are crucial in a positive
leader-Character and Competency.
Character has two parts: Knowing and managing
the inner life.
a.
Knowing my inner thoughts, feelings,
values, ethics, boundaries, spiritual desires, and motivations
b.
Managing my inner life through
the Holy Spirit who leads us to self-motivation, self-nurturing` and self-control.
Competency has two critical aspects: The
knowledge about what to do in leading and the skill to carry it out at the
right time.
a.
Competency of knowledge about a group,
an organization or an individual. For example, a therapist needs to have a
basic knowledge about psychopathology as well as a model for interventions for
that pathology.
b.
Competency in the skills to implement
the intervention is quite different from the theoretical information noted
above. A teacher may have great knowledge about a topic but fail in
communicating that knowledge in a way that students can understand.
Exponential
changes: In the world of the New Testament, the leadership challenges were
quite different from those in the Old Testament. Moses led a developed
community of people toward a goal. In the New Testament the goal was much more
diffused. It was to take the Good News to the whole world. A small group of
fanatical monotheists in a tiny place called Palestine could hardly turn the whole world
upside down! But, they did. The long awaited emphasis on world evangelization
had come.
The only way to
accomplish that was through exponential or geometric rather than arithmetic growth.
Take a piece of paper and fold it 40 times. How tall would it be? Two inches,
two feet two miles two million miles? How about half way to the moon? This is the power of multiplication of
doubling. This was the strategy of Jesus
and it worked.
Many of us think
about ways to evangelize the world or at least our city. Imagine if you won
10,000 people per week to Christ or some 500,000 people to the Lord
annually. We all agree that such a thing
would be wonderful. Billy Graham would stand up and take notice. You would be
famous. However, that method is not as effective as the one outlined by Jesus.
If you could win
two people to Christ and spend time to disciple them so they could win others
and repeat the process every two years you would be far more successful than if
you tried the other way. Jesus and the
New Testament leaders chose the exponential process rather than the mass
marketing approach to evangelism. They started small, trained well and always
reproduced and the world was dramatically touched in a few hundred years.
Unfortunately, in our lust for fame we nearly always choose the big event
approach rather than exponential discipleship. We like the “rock star” approach of the
Rolling Stones rather than the Solid Rock approach of the Messiah who rolled away the stone.
We need more people
to adopt the discipleship and multiplication process and forget about the big
events. Do you have any nominations for exponential leaders? Who would you say
was the most influential Christian leader in history? I have asked this
question many times in a variety of places. Seminars and seminaries; churches
and church elder boards; sermons and solo pastors. I get some rather
interesting answers. Here are a few of the nominations.
- Mark (He wrote the first Gospel)
- Mary (The mother of Jesus)
- Luke (He wrote more of the Bible than any other person)
- James (Brother of Jesus and wrote a book)
- Luther (He started a revolution)
- Mohammed (Without him, Christianity would be much bigger)
- Billy Graham (A modern evangelist of repute)
- Bill Bright (Founded Campus Crusade
- And you nominate?__________________________________
- My nomination is coming!
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