Equipping and Leadership #1.

There is a lot of interest in the post about Wimber and The Vineyard Movement. I think John Wimber was a good leader and the Vineyard has had a good impact. However, no leader is perfect and no movement or denomination is perfect.

We humans are tempted by big, shiny things. Healing, prophesy, crowds, styles of preaching, theological fads, nice buildings, a great library, seminary degrees, advanced education, erudite speech, etc. are like candy to a baby.

 I have always been tempted by education, knowledge and being smart. I wish God was as impressed as I. Jerry Kirk assigned me the sermon topic of humility one time. I was often asked to preach when others were on vacation or a difficult topic came up. I asked Jerry  if I got to wear my Doctoral robe with the special stripes when I spoke on humility. I did! I was very impressive!!

So, while admitting my culpability and lack of perfection, let me discuss leadership.
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 and motivations

b.     Managing my inner life through 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? How about half way to the moon?  

 This is the power of exponential growth.  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! That is 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. That approach worked and the world was dramatically touched in a few hundred years. 

Jesus was a genius in multiplication. He had a great "strategearry". Unfortunately, we are not like Jesus. We know so much more than he. We  like to choose the big event approach rather than discipleship. We like the “rock star” approach of the Rolling Stones rather than the Solid Rock approach of the Messiah. 

 I wonder what would happen if we did it Jesus way? Probably not much. He was pretty old fashioned.  We have some books on it in the bookstore. Willing to be challenged?