Signs of the Times

Pastoral Translations of Ministry & Culture in Honor of Leonard I. Sweet

Ross

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498220613
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

All ministry leaders concern themselves with the intersection of Jesus-centered ministry and contemporary culture. They ask themselves questions such as,"What do we need to change in order to keep up with a wired world?""What should never change?""What are the nonnegotiables of faith in Jesus?"Many have attempted to answer these questions. However, most of these leaders offer solutions that the everyday ministry leader simply cannot replicate.Signs of the Times is a unique offering to those who wrestle with the mash-up of ministry and culture. All of the contributors have found success within their ministries, and yet most do not minister to thousands on a weekly basis. Additionally, all of them have had the privilege of studying directly with Dr. Leonard I. Sweet.Despite having authored more than fifty books, Sweet can still be a bit of an enigma. Many of his readers have been deeply influenced by him, and yet they may still struggle to understand what his insights might mean for their ministry.Each of the contributors to this work thoughtfully engages with a key idea that they personally learned from Sweet and they translate it for ministry in the early twenty-first century.

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Summoned to Follow

Leonard Sweet’s Antidote for the Leadership Cult

Anthony L. Blair, PhD, DMin

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.”

—Matthew 20:25–26 NIV

Maxwell’s House

“Everything rises and falls on leadership.” So says John Maxwell, the Wesleyan pastor turned leadership guru who has now become the world’s top seller of leadership literature. His organization claims to have trained over three million leaders in forty-seven languages in one hundred countries.1 But he’s not the only one saying that leadership is the sole or most critical factor affecting ministry. I have heard this mantra since my own days as a young pastor—from bishops and peers who were convinced that there was a crisis in the church (and in the world) that only strong, personality driven leadership could solve.

Over the past generation or so, Western Christians have embraced and attempted to sanctify the dominant models of leadership in our society without much reflection and very little critique. The illustrations are ubiquitous:

• Leadership Journal, a Christianity Today, Inc., organ, advertises itself as “the premier publication for today’s church” and has a readership of approximately eighty thousand.2 It is accompanied by a popular blog and an electronic newsletter, and provides quarterly advice for leading churches and other ministries.

• The Global Leadership Summit, sponsored by the Willow Creek Association, attracts more than one hundred and seventy thousand leaders from around the world. It’s billed as a “world-class leadership event,” and includes a fascinating mixture of evangelical leaders and others whose faith commitments are either unknown or “secular” in some respect.3

• Perhaps no academic discipline has received more attention from Christian institutions of higher learning over the past decade than Leadership Studies. New programs have been multiplying at nearly every degree level. I am familiar with this pattern from personal experience; as a higher education administrator I have personally created or instigated the development of at least four of these programs myself (in part to offer a distinctly countercultural understanding of leadership). And I have seen nearly every other institution with which I am personally familiar do the same because of the market for these studies.

• The title “senior pastor” is in the process of becoming blasé. First, larger churches created the title of “executive pastor” for what is, essentially, the chief operating officer of the multimillion-dollar corporations that many congregations have become. And now “lead pastor” has come into vogue as a descriptor of the chief executive officers of those organizations, particularly those that are emphasizing the leadership aspect of the pastoral role.

• Undoubtedly the most popular model of leading change among American Christians is that of John Kotter of Harvard University, popularized in his book Leading Change. This model of leading change is top-down, linear, and dependent on motivating key followers to embrace a leader-delivered vision. Other models that place less emphasis on the leader and more emphasis on the people in the organization or community, such as the appreciative inquiry model developed by David Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve University, have been largely ignored by the church.4

• As a seminary president, the drumbeat I hear from both denominational leaders and from local churches is that seminaries should do better at training future pastors in leadership skills. I hear only occasional concern about the kind of character our graduates will have, very little concern about their theological commitments or assumptions, and almost no concern about the hermeneutical or homiletical skills. The most common question is, “Do they know how to grow a church”?

I could offer other examples or illustrations, of course, but these should suffice to demonstrate what the reader already knows or suspects about the importance of leadership in Western Christianity. It is about the careful acquisition and strategic use of power. It is about the person or persons at the top of the pyramid. It’s about changing things for the better. It is about everything rising or falling on leadership.

This is the house that Maxwell built. And Leonard Sweet is having none of it:

Leadership literature has been a cannibal galaxy in the church for the past forty years, gobbling up everything in its path. The leadership cannibal galaxy is so strong it will be hard for many of you to hear these words. Thinking of your faith in leadership terms has simply come to sound normal. And that’s no accident. A mountain range—or more accurately, a Himalayan heap—of secondary literature on leadership has been written convinced you to think that way. The only Christian books to sell more than leadership in the past thirty years were “left behind” theologies of escape and “up your behind” theologies of wealth.5

Shackleton’s Ship

To understand the strong emotion in that quotation, we need to appreciate Sweet’s early and prophetic evaluation of the patterns noted above. He addressed the topic at some length in two books published eight years apart. The first was 2004’s Summoned to Lead, which introduced Ernest Shackleton, the intrepid Antarctic explorer, as a model of the kind of leadership Sweet believes God is summoning in our own time. In that volume, Sweet began a critique of the dominant leadership models of Western culture, a critique he deepened and expanded in I Am a Follower in 2012. Together, they represent not only a surprisingly strong and helpful assessment of the leadership cult of Western society but also a thesis in motion, as the arguments of the latter book are more fully developed than those of the former. I have therefore used a combination of their titles as the heading for this chapter.

In these two volumes, I see Sweet articulating and providing support for four primary theses:

1. leadership is about hearing (a summons), not seeing (a vision);

2. leadership is about following, not controlling;

3. leadership is about the kingdom of God, not success; and

4. leadership is about character, not charisma or competence.

Each of these represents, I hasten to suggest, an artificial dichotomy against which some readers will push back, and such nuancing is offered at the end of this chapter by way of critique and application. However, Sweet’s purpose in setting them in such stark contrast is understandable: he wants to wake the American church from our sleepy compliance with values we dare not hold and patterns we should never have emulated.

Leadership is about hearing (a summons), not seeing (a vision)

“Leadership is an acoustical art.”6

The distinction here between hearing and seeing is not intended to distract from Sweet’s repeated insistence on a multisensory approach to life, worship, and even evangelism. (See, for instance, his book Nudge for the latter.) Rather, the difference is between hearkening to a call to action and claiming a special knowledge of the divine will for a particular community of faith. “Failure to probe the currency of hearing as well as the currency of seeing is one reason why leadership remains one of the most studied and least understood phenomenon of the last century.”7

He illustrates this at some length by recounting the story of Shackleton, whose ship, ironically named Endurance, was crushed by sea ice during his attempted trans-Antarctic expedition in 1915, leaving Shackleton and his men trapped on the ice for nearly two years. Shackleton distinguished himself by the survival of every single man of his party in that most inhospitable of environments, even as he failed to accomplish his stated objective.

For Sir Earnest Shackleton, it was the ears. Called by colleagues “the greatest leader who ever came on God’s earth, bar none,” the Antarctic explorer Shackleton understood that leadership was more than meets the eye. To adapt Paschal [sic]: the ear has its reasons that the eye knows nothing of. The ability to find one’s voice and to hear and call other voices into harmo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Sweet & the Spirit
• Chapter 1: Summoned to Follow
• Chapter 2: Wake Up and Smell the Future
• Chapter 3: Preaching as Bricolage
• Chapter 4: Heretics and the Way Forward
• Chapter 5: What’s Going on Here?
• Chapter 6: The EPIC World of Anglican Worship
• Chapter 7: Every Bush is Burning
• Chapter 8: Indefinable
• Chapter 9: Identity, Vocation and Calling
• Chapter 10: Rearranging the Furniture of Faith
• Chapter 11: EPIC Parenting in the Post-Church Church
• Chapter 12: Discovering the Future, Hidden Deep within the Past
• Chapter 13: Reading the Signs
• Chapter 14: An Epistemology of Empathy