[This is part of a series on “How Do I Develop an Apostolic Leader?” You can read the other posts here.]
“Passionate involvement can make you happy, sometimes, and miserable other times. You want people to be involved and engaged. Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.” – Brad Bird, Director at Pixar
OK, so as a leader you’ve committed to developing and hiring apostolic evangelists and they are now operating at full steam in your organization. It creates an almost overwhelming level of energy and creativity is erupting everywhere. It’s exciting but at the same time it begins to feel chaotic to the point that you wonder if it is sustainable.
How do you prevent the whole thing from careening off the road and crashing?
Here are some guidelines to help you focus the energy in the same direction and keep the movement pressing forward.
1. Keep the Mission at the center.
Not only must you have language that everyone agrees expresses the heart of the work you are trying to achieve but it must guide everything you do. The mission should direct your plans. Every program evaluated by it. You should repeat it over and over and when given the opportunity, exegete its meaning. When a new idea emerges, someone has to ask, “How does this project/idea/activity help advance our mission?” Keeping the mission at the center keeps everyone focused in the same direction.
2. Hire managers along with apostolic leaders.
John Kotter (Harvard Business School) says,
“When organizations have high competencies in management and leadership, they’re able to meet challenges today as well as tomorrow. However, most organizations are usually lacking one or the other. When management exists without leadership, the company is often unable to change. And when leadership exists without management, the company is only as strong as its charismatic leader.”
According to Kotter, Managers are able to make complex systems run efficiently and effectively, “hour by hour, day after day”. Leaders create vision and strategy, motivating others to take action and create systems that manages can manage, then when necessary, transforming them, “to allow for growth, evolution, opportunities,” and avoid hazards.
In an apostolic movement, you have to have both.
Don’t pit them against each other but create spaces where both can come together to solve problems, overcome obstacles, and meet challenges that are blocking you from moving forward in mission.
3. Fight the tendency to handle complexity with bureaucracy.
Growing ministries always become more complex. When you are engaging larger numbers of increasingly diverse populations and hiring more staff to do the work, your organization will naturally mature into a complicated system. In order to handle increasing complexity, organizations tend to create more leadership levels and complicated matrix systems to try and hold the organization together. But if your not careful, you will find that instead of the mission you intend to have, your organization’s mission will be reduced to keeping the system running. You know you’ve settled into
bureaucracy when new ideas are never put into action because too many layers of permissions are required before any practical step can be taken.
Fight to keep your organizational structure as simple as you can tolerate. Create places for those who don’t have direct authority to have influence into decisions. Avoid adding meetings but repurpose existing ones to meet the needs of your leaders. Don’t be afraid to ask whether the structures you are using are working. If not, be willing to change them.
5. Be a community of prayer.
On a regular basis, require that everyone stop to be in God’s presence and prayerfully pursue His guidance. We believe that God is active among us. We believe He will lead us. Too often our organizational system doesn’t allow us to hear from God corporately. We can avoid serious error if we will let God have to access to us. Space in his presence helps us stop, listen, and learn from Him through each other.
6. Keep innovating.
Find a way to allow space for the Apostolic staff you have hired to try new things as they seek to advance the mission. Help them develop new ideas, try them, then evaluate their effectiveness. Allow room for failures and successes. And when a new idea is proving effective, give them a place to teach and share with others what they are learning.
Finally, as the leader, keep learning. No one knows everything. There will always be new challenges and we have to be open to learning from others. In the end, we will know that it is only through God, and his amazing ability to “do far more than we can ask or imagine” that our mission can move forward. We can trust Him to lead and teach us every step of the way.
Which one of these tips helps you most in leading apostolic leaders? Are there any others that you would add?
[This is part of a series on “How Do I Develop an Apostolic Leader?” You can read the other posts here.]
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