Leadership and action

William Willimon, reflecting on the work of Gil Rendle, shares thoughts on "non-synoptic leadership":

In the complex and conflicted human organization called today's church, Rendle says that leaders can no longer function well with either problem-solving or strategic planning. It is unproductive in a conflicted organization where people feel very differently about many different subjects to spend so much time negotiating, bargaining, and planning for a distant future. Now leaders must act, even if they aren't sure if they have a consensus backing them up, even if they are unsure of the results of their actions. This is "non-synoptic leadership."

When I was a young pastor, put upon the church with virtually no training in pastoral leadership, an older, more experienced pastor gave me a couple of bits of advice that I have not forgotten.

"I am sure someone has told you that you shouldn't change anything when you go to a new church for at least a year," he said to me. Indeed, someone had told me just that. "Well, forget it! Don't change anything in a new church unless you become convinced that it needs changing! Change anything you think that needs changing and anything you think you can change without the laity killing you. Lots of churches are filled with laity who are languishing there, desperate for a pastor to go ahead and change something for the better. Lots of times we pastors blame our cowardice, or our lack of vision, on the laity, saying that we want to change something, but we can't because of the laity. We ought to just go ahead and change something and then see what the consequences are."

Sounds good to me. It helps to remember that transformation takes place not only in the heart of the individual believer, but in the community of the church.