Part 1
If you are to step into the unknown, the place to begin is
with the exploration of the inner territory.
--James Kouzes and Barry Posner
There is no doubt in my mind that enrolling in the Rutland Cohort Master’s Program in the fall of 2003 was something that was directed by the Holy Spirit. “We make our own plans, but the LORD decides where we will go” (Proverbs 16:9 CEV). He knew that I needed help. What I didn’t realize was the extent of my need. It didn’t take long, however, until I began to comprehend the depth of my leadership dilemma. As I began to work my way through the very first classes, I began to understand my predicament. As I viewed the intense passion of my instructors and saw their enthusiasm for the work of God, I realized that my passion and enthusiasm for district ministry and leadership had slowly burned down to little more than a pile of embers. Somehow, while superintending the South Carolina District, I had gradually, almost indiscernibly evolved into the role of an institutional manager.
Like so many of the ministers I was trying to lead, I had become disheartened with not much more than a lukewarm enthusiasm for my work. I had reluctantly resigned myself to loyally going through all the motions while tenaciously tending to the bureaucratic minutia that had become the essence of my work. How could this happen to me?
It is my understanding that no major denomination has ever reached its centennial mark, still vitally connected to its original purposes and passions. The longer a movement exists, the more institutional it becomes. By institutional, I mean the more structure it develops to maintain itself and its resources. The more structure it develops, the more rigid it becomes, and the harder it is to change and adapt to new paradigms. The result is that administration becomes the priority while flexibility, enthusiasm, and risk taking become a threat to status quo and are no longer seen in a positive light.
After almost eleven years of district leadership, I finally began to see this development clearly. The position I had accepted with enthusiasm, passion, and high hopes, had turned to little more than a tedious job as I gradually became more and more enmeshed in the quagmire of district work. I began district work knowing that change was to be anticipated. What I did not foresee was that the district would change me and not the other way around.
It seemed that the longer I served as superintendent, the further removed I became from the very pastors I was called to serve. Instead of becoming more involved in “district activities,” I watched with dismay as pastors and lay leaders become less and less involved. The vast governance system the district had built over the years had become more and more restrictive and less and less empowering.
I remember faithfully telling pastors, “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always have what you’ve always had.” I can’t recall the number of times I repeated that common definition of insanity: “To believe that you can keep doing what you’ve been doing and get different results.” Sometime during the first few weeks of involvement in the Master’s Cohort, those words came streaming back to me. It seemed that God had grabbed me by the sides of my face and began shouting them at me. I vividly remember sitting in Dr. Wayne Lee’s office going over the results of my personal gifts assessment. With tears streaming down my cheeks, it began to dawn on me what had happened. I had lost my way.
In his book Aqua Church, Leonard Sweet tells this story:
From the Gulf War of 1990-91 comes the story of three British soldiers stumbling in the desert. Separated from their troops in the fighting, they were lost, hungry, and searching for help when they literally bumped into a four-star USAmerican general.
Excitedly they blurted out, “Do you know where we are?”
The general stiffened. Upset at their lack of protocol and rituals of respect, he looked down at them and demanded, “Do you know who I am?”
One of the English soldiers elbowed his buddy and mumbled, “Now we’re in deep trouble. We don’t know where we are, and he doesn’t know who he is.”
In the process of losing my way, I had almost forgotten who I was…a leader. Now, suddenly, this truth came bursting in upon my mind and spirit. I realized that I had nearly misplaced my personal mission in life. I was, in fact, running the store but no longer building the Kingdom. When Jesus told Peter, “I will build my church…” (Matthew 16:18a KJV), he wasn’t talking about building a mausoleum—a place devoid of life. He wasn’t talking about building an institution with a big, bulky rulebook. He was talking about building a vital, living organism that had enough of God’s power to be able to successfully storm the very gates of hell. The Holy Spirit gave that kind of life to the church in its beginning, and the Holy Spirit can give life to the church today.
Erwin Raphael McManus, in his book An Unstoppable Force, makes this powerful observation: “…the real tragedy is not that churches are dying but that churches have lost their reason to live.” What he said about churches is also true about those who lead them. In Christian Coaching, Gary Collins makes this revealing statement: “We can never win in the race of life when we have no idea where we’re going. If you forget your goals or if you have no life goals, you’ll loose your motivation and ultimately lose your direction.”
Losing sight of your reason to live, misplacement of your personal mission is a spiritually and emotionally debilitating experience. This is not something that happens intentionally. No one deliberately sets aside his or her personal mission. Never the less it can happen. It almost happened to me. I had lost hope—hope for healthy, thriving pastors, hope for healthy, thriving churches, hope for a healthy, growing district.
What made my situation more baffling was the vivid memory of the churches I had pastored. Each had experienced health and growth. Why not the district? It certainly wasn’t because of slothfulness. My work ethic hadn’t changed. During the past eleven years I had been able to improve a lot of things, but nothing close to turning my district around. I guess it could be described as equivalent to riding a bicycle…a stationary bicycle. I was doing a lot of peddling and perspiring but clearly not going anywhere.
My conclusion? I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. The first horn was my loss of personal direction, and the second horn was what I now can see as an ineffective district operational model. The district structure did not readily lend itself to sustained and measurable progress. The district control/command model was designed more along the lines of preserving and protecting what we had rather than being creative and transformational.
So began my journey back to my Pentecostal roots, back to God’s presence and plan. Rediscovering my mission in life (being a leader, not a manager) and realizing that I could, in fact, initiate a better way to affect Kingdom building in this district, began to pump new energy and new passion into my spirit and soul. In the Cohort I was being introduced to new ideas, new tools, and a new hope. I would stop trying to make the old system work and begin developing something new. No more trying to force new wine into old wineskins. I would be the leader God called me to be and escort my district into something new and far-reaching. In his book The Power of Team Leadership: Finding Strength In Shared Responsibility, George Barna makes this revealing observation:
Leadership is more than calling the shots, and it is more than merely having influence on people’s thoughts and behavior. Similarly holding a position or title that implies a person is a leader bears little relationship to whether, in reality, the person is a leader. Neither does possessing a charismatic personality or massive intellect make a person a leader. A leader succeeds only if his or her followers succeed.
As my story unfolds, I will try to explain what I mean by having rediscovered my personal mission and try to share some of the goals God has given me for the future. I am intentionally staying away from terms such as, re-mapping, reengineering, or restructuring. I prefer to use the term, transformation, basically because of what has happened to me. It all begins with leadership. I know God has begun building something new in me. Before a leader can transform a district that leader has to, first of all, be transformed. I believe God wants to build something so new and unique that when it is complete, no one will have to ask, who is the author?
You can’t create a map of terra incognita. You can’t consult maps in a world where the terra is no longer firma. In a new world with no familiar landmarks, you can only explore the new world for yourself. Postmodern culture is unmappable on flat surfaces. It cannot be reduced to two dimensions. Mapping is now non-linear. It’s more like “a spider spinning a web,” says Brian Shannon of the Corps of Engineers. “You’re moving back and forth, building something one line at a time until you have a complex network that captures a place” (Sweet, 18).
In the introduction to his book Leading the Team-Based Church: How Pastors and Church Staffs Can Grow Together into a Powerful Fellowship of Leaders, George Cladis makes this opening observation:
The most effective churches today are the ones that are developing team-based leadership. This pattern will likely continue into the twenty-first century, both because Scripture emphasizes Spirit-led, Spirit-gifted, collaborative team fellowship and because today’s culture is receptive to such leadership (xvi).
“If effective leadership is going to take place in our churches,” Barna writes, “it will be because laypeople are being encouraged to use their leadership abilities” (Cover page).
I will try to clarify how I am going to, with God’s help and direction, replace the district’s hierarchical, top-down institutional model with a team-based prototype. Leonard Sweet argues, “At this dawn of a new millennium, either you are making history or you are becoming history. If there were ever a time for on-the-edge, over-the-top, out-of-the-box leadership, it is now” (Carpe Manana, 19).
HISTORY
I will begin by sharing some history about the South Carolina District. This notice was sent to the Pentecostal Evangel and published on July 4, 1942, and read as follows:
The 9th annual District Council of the Georgia-South Carolina District will convene at Fenwick and Bohler Streets, Augusta, Ga., July 21-23, opening on the night of the 20th with a fellowship meeting.
At the recent meeting of the Georgia-South Carolina District Council, the ministers and delegates of South Carolina met in a separate session and after prayer and considerable discussion, it was unanimously decided that those from this state should meet and form a new South Carolina District. So, July 23rd, 1942…this group met…and declared themselves and the churches represented a separate district from Georgia.
A beautiful spirit of unity prevailed during all the discussions and elections. Many honorable and commendable things were said relative to the benefits South Carolina has received under the supervision of our beloved Brother Noles. The growth God has given could not have come had it not been for his untiring efforts and undaunted zeal for home missions (Pentecostal Evangel, July 4, 1942).
In 1992, at our district’s 50th anniversary celebration, the special brochure included the following observations:
This fellowship grew out of the struggles and triumphs of humble believers seeking to know God in His fullness. South Carolinians from the mountains of our western counties to the Atlantic coast grew dissatisfied with the status quo of their spiritually dead churches. A spiritual hunger and thirst emerged in the hearts of folks across the land. In the deafening noise of cotton mills, the employees found time to read their New Testaments. Midland farmers plowing cotton rows would tie their mules to the fence and kneel in the shade to pray. Fishermen and oyster gatherers, weathering the elements along the coastline to make a living, felt a strong yearning to fellowship with the God of the heavens.
Reports were heard of fiery preachers criss-crossing the state with a new message. Folks crowded under tents and brush arbors to witness the new phenomena of praying in tongues and miracles of healing.
Today, fifty years later, we gather to celebrate God’s faithfulness and to honor those stalwart soldiers of the cross who founded our district. Their venture of faith paved the way for growth in the Pentecostal movement. Hundreds of ministers have pursued their directives and thousands of souls have been saved and brought into the fold.
We now stand at 117 churches, strong, serving the same God, preaching the same message. We have more people in more places to lift up Jesus. The harvest is ripe. With greater resources and more helping hands, we re-commit ourselves to build His church at home and abroad. We believe that when every creature on earth has had an adequate witness of the gospel, Jesus will return for His church. We promise to press on with the same faith and boldness that birthed this district fighting the good fight of faith (50th Anniversary Brochure).
The South Carolina District has currently entered its sixty-third year of existence. Over these years, eleven superintendents have been given an opportunity to provide leadership. This district plateaued several years ago and is currently in a progressive decline having experienced a net loss of nearly twenty churches over the past 12 years. Attrition continues as many of our older congregations continue to try to hold on to the past expecting that tomorrow will somehow become yesterday. Many of our pastors simply don’t know what to do to reclaim the health and spiritual vitality of their churches.
Peter Drucker has been called the father of modern American management. He is possibly best known for the two questions he most often uses. The first is “What business are we in?” And the second is “How’s business?” Over the past twenty years, according to our Annual Church Ministry Reports, Assemblies of God churches across South Carolina have led over seventy-five thousand people to salvation. However, our average Sunday morning attendance has increased by less than three thousand. However you slice it that is “poor business.” We may have excelled to some degree at evangelism, but have basically failed at making disciples of those we have reached with the gospel. This must change! I’ll share more in September. (To comment on any part of this article, please scroll down.)