Lifescapes

Improving our leadership vision via better hearing

For years we’ve heard how important it is to become a strong visionary leader – to become a seer of a preferred future, and then to creatively bring that into the minds and hearts of our ‘followers’ via good language imagery, metaphor and story. Leonard Sweet, my DMIN professor, a man who speaks so wisely on many fronts and who has greatly expanded my own understanding of leadership in the body of Christ, has this gem to offer regarding the place of hearing in mature leadership for the 21st century:

“The key to leadership is making the inaudible become audible and the invisible become visible. The initial mode of leadership is receptivity: hearing, not speaking. A hearing heart picks up signals rather in the way radio receivers pick up waves from the ether. In fact, sometimes you ‘hear’ it from its absence as much as from its presence.

Note the choice of the word hearing, not listening. There is a difference. You can listen and not hear. Many people are ‘listened to’; few people are truly ‘heard.’ Hearing connects us to that which is unseen and unsaid.

Managers see into sound. Leaders hear into speech and sight. When Saul of Tarsus was called from managing a problem to leading a people, he heard and heeded the voice that others could not interpret.

One of the greatest achievements of life is not a seeing mind but a hearing heart. The ears, not the eyes, are the gateway to leadership. Sight transforms the world into an object. Sound treats the world as a subject. Sight is distancing. Sound is enveloping. When visions are seen, paradoxically, reality is blinked. When visions are heard, leaders open themselves to what the world needs and to new possibilities of truth. Jesus identified himself by what he heard: ‘what I have heard…I tell the world.

Voice-activated leadership moves from vision to vibration, from eye to ear, from structure to rhythm. Instead of squinting at the future, perhaps we should keep our ears cocked and become ‘all ears.” You are what you hear more than you are what you see.

We naturally prefer the eyes to the ears because when we look with our eyes we are in control of reality…When we hear with our ears, we are vulnerable to reality…With the eyes we can construct our own reality; with the ears we have to deal with situations as they really are.

Voice-activated leaders combine a designing eye with a discerning ear. In fact, discern comes from the Hebrew word that means “to hear.” Hence the beginning of the capstone summation of Hebrew faith known as the Schema: ‘Hear, O Israel’ – which is equally translated ‘Discern, O Israel’ – “The Lord our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD Your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength...

Peter Drucker once remarked that 60 percent of the problems in the workplace result from faulty communications. The percentages could only increase in regard to leadership, the very essence of which is communications. Why are communications sometimes so faulty? Too much designing eye; not enough discerning ear. The leader’s lot is constant hearing, constant communication, and continuous feedback loops.

A leader’s first task is hearing. Leaders don’t ‘see’ a vision. Leaders ‘hear’ a vision. Sound becomes sight. Vibrations become visions. The voice arrests; the vision directs. In fact, some people who have perfect pitch actually hear in colors. That’s why perfect pitch is also known as ‘color hearing.’…Leaders hear life. They hear other people. Yet so much of our time in the church context is spent talking, as if we can talk our way into leadership…I am convinced we spend way too much time making noise rather than listening to the vibrations of the very people we are called to lead."

Source: Leonard Sweet, Summoned to Lead (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 57-60.

Is Overpopulation the Real Issue?

In the "Letters" section of our local newspaper, the Oregonian, I came across a cross-section of responses to an article by Jack Hart in the June 15th edition. In that article Hart points out that continued growth in world population impacts global warming, availability of food and clean water, international security and a host of other concerns. As I read the reactions to Hart's "Treading on a Taboo" article, I was struck by one particular respondent. Somehow in this conversation about the need to curb the human population, one key presupposition remains unchallenged - the best way to deal with the planet's stretched resources and the strain of the collective human footprint is to set limits on population growth. This may be true in some secondary sense, but this letter to the Oregonian reminds me that people are not the problem, but the solution - if we are willing to live more responsibly and less selfishly as eager stewards of this precious earth under our care.

"Jack Hart wants us to believe, like the zero population alarmists of the 1960's, that people are our planet's problem. He argues that 'the quality of American life will be forever damaged by the arrival of 100 million immigrants, an argument historians have recorded for decades. He also argues that development and economic progress are parts of the problem.

Immigrants from all corners of the Earth have made this nation great and continue to solve many of its problems and make our communities wonderful places to live. Those of us who often work in the developing nations know that the incredible economic growth there in recent years is making daily life not only tolerable but enjoyable  for millions of people.

Our problems will be solved by people and by families, both large and small, living as responsible stewards of the Earth. People are the solution, not the problem."

Post Muddy Rudder Ruminations

I just returned from the Muddy Rudder pub, one of my favorite hangouts for connecting with locals and with those interested in missional leadership stuff. This afternoon I made the trek by bike, which was an enjoyable respite from all the books and websites I’ve been perusing for my doctoral research on missional Orders. I grabbed some pints and dinner with Craig Williams, who is PCUSA’s new Director of New Church Development for this region. Craig and I share a similar passion for developing a series of linked missional communities across the city and region, so it was fun to blab and dream and exchange ideas. Last week I introduced Craig to Linus Morris and Rob Fairbanks, my buddy and the new “N. Am. Movement Leader” for Christian Associates (both Rob and I actually don’t like that title).  The future of missional leadership development and church multiplication, I believe, lies in the forging of alliances with people like Craig. So I’m continually attempting to cultivate in my own small ways a synergy among existing leaders and churches who want: a) to see new disciples enter the Kingdom; and b) to see missional DNA seeded into new and existing churches so that new reproducing churches are planted. 

As far as working out my role on both the local Portland scene and on a regional/west-coast level, I’m really encouraged lately. Now that Rob is stepping into CA in a big way, I finally have a committed flesh-and-blood teammate to work alongside. We’re in the early stages of articulating the mandate for a N. Am. Team, but already we’re gaining notable traction among some leaders and planters in Spokane and Portland. These guys are interested in participating in a CA-sponsored missional-relational-incarnational church planting network, some as CAers, others as partners. I'm gravitating toward developing a training ethos here locally that could be scaled up for other urban centers. So my orientation is more and more directed toward training and coaching, and finding those who will join me in offering those. On a local SE Portland level, I’m jazzed about the new friendships I’m developing with several missional leaders interested in training leaders for church planting and social enterprising. Four of us just finished facilitating an eight-week course on missional leadership development at Imago Dei.  I’m hoping this could become a prototype for use in other churches, and I’m happy to see that the content my friend, Casey Cerretani, and I chose to cover actually got great reviews from those participating in the class.  

All in all, I’m pleased with these developments. But I’m still taking it a week at a time and often wondering how the Lord is going to make it all cohere and become sustainable (also financially viable for me). 

A backyard green project

This past week I've been immersed in my doctoral research on missional Orders, along with researching church planter training processes for Christian Associates and dreaming/scheming with my Imago buddies about a collective missional endeavor locally. In between these "sitting" activities (some might add an "h" there), I managed to get out into the back garden and start designing a raised bed planter for Ann. I'm proud to show off the result of my efforts with this 6' x 4' bed made of 100% recycled cedar I knicked from two local dumpsters (the wealthy-wasters in an adjacent neighborhood had the wood designated for the landfill). My green team ought to be proud of me - can't wait to show them! The project has already won some long sympathy back rubs from Ann.

Green team makes the Sellwood Bee

Ann just pointed me to this little piece about our green team, which appeared in the May edition of the Sellwood Bee. I'm glad to have neighbors who care about such issues and who can have fun at the same time...

SUSTAINABLE LIVING
“Green Team” potlucks focus on sustainable food practices

By PATRICIA (PATSY) STEIMER
Special to THE BEE

After its first project – cleaning bus stops on Woodstock Boulevard -- the Woodstock-centered “Green Team” met to plan its next activity. The team was then composed of Dan Steigerwald, Lonnie Port, Carey Collins, and Bill Steimer.

Someone suggested that the team and the spouses get together for a sustainable potluck supper, providing an opportunity to think about sustainable eating and to consider other topics related to reduce/reuse/recycle – and to get spouses to join the Green Team!

The first dinner took place at the height of the harvest in early September. Instructions were simple: Bring a dish prepared with locally-grown ingredients, and be ready to talk about the choices made at every stage from preparation to disposal of waste.

The goal was to reduce the carbon footprint of our food consumption, bearing in mind that the transport of food, especially prepared and refrigerated food, uses a tremendous amount of energy.

Four couples arrived bearing a veritable feast, including lamb casserole with eggplant and applesauce, tomato and cucumber salad with basil, roasted carrots and potatoes, wheat berry salad with apples and mint, and peach cobbler. All the dishes were homemade, and all of them were delicious. Ingredients came from Farmers’ Markets, backyard gardens, farm shares (Community Supported Agriculture), and even the grocery store!

Dinner conversation covered such topics as solar energy, IKEA packaging, recycling in Holland (where Dan and Ann Steigerwald had lived for many years), the possibility of recycling styrofoam with orange extract, ways to store food without using harmful plastics, and – the ultimate recycling – organ donation.

At the next dinner, the group did add another couple: Todd Sargent and Lara Utman – who brought additional knowledge and expertise. “Green Team” members come from varied backgrounds, and rang in age from thirty-something to sixty-something, but their common interest in environmental issues pulled the group together. The second dinner was a success, and the group has eaten together monthly ever since.

Winter presented some challenges, but a January brunch included a quiche with many winter vegetables, a salad of carrots and walnuts harvested from a backyard tree, and a selection of baked goods made with Bob’s Red Mill Organic flour (from Montana).

The March gathering was a pizza party, featuring fresh mozzarella cheese made by Green Team members, along with frozen tomato sauce and pesto from the group’s 2007 gardens.

The next Green Team Project is the Woodstock Community Cleanup on April 26th, which the group will undertake along with the 41st Avenue Speed Bump Committee.

Let's get back to living the Story

“Throughout Western societies, and most especially in North America, there has occurred a fundamental shift in the understanding and practice of the Christian story. It is no longer about God and what is about in the world; it is about how God serves and meets human needs and desires. It is about how the individual self can find its own purposes and fulfillment. More specifically, our churches have become spiritual food courts for the personal, private, inner needs of expressive individuals. The result is a debased, compromised, derivative form of Christianity that is not the gospel of the Bible at all. The biblical narrative is about God’s mission in, through, and for the sake of the world and how God has called human beings to be part of God’s reaching out to the world for God’s purpose of saving it in love. The focus of attention should be what God wants to accomplish and how we can be part of God’s mission, not how God helps us accomplish our own agenda.
    This is why the way we conduct church is such an essential part of the missional conversation. God intended the local church to be a sign, witness and foretaste of where God is inviting all creation to Himself through Jesus Christ. The ways of the church are to be a contrast to the ways of the world – it is intended to be strikingly different from the immediate society around it. The church is to formed around beliefs and practices discovered through interaction with Scripture and not primarily derived from the particular culture in which it is found, although it must also be embodied in translatable forms within a culture. We are to be in the world, but not of it – we are to give it meaning and purpose, not pull our meaning and purposes from it.” (from The Sky is Falling, by Alan Roxburgh)

A Missional Leadership Development Primer

When pastoring in The Hague I developed a leadership development process called "Leading Edge", which I think had a pretty good yield in the years my staff and I employed it. As I reflect back, I now see that this process did not delve deeply into the critical area of the leader's missional formation. I've considered resurrecting Leading Edge with a new missional impetus, but for now I'm experimenting with an eight-week class format that specifically addresses missional leadership development. For the next eight Saturday mornings, I'll team up with three other facilitators and together we'll be exploring this subject with about 20 participants as part of Imago Dei's School of Theology (all of this under pastor Clark Blakeman's covering). Should be an interesting road-test.

Missional Leadership Development
(Imago Dei’s School of Theology, Spring 2008)

Synopsis: This class will seek to enhance movement toward sustainable, Christ-centered leadership and missional praxis through helping leaders and potential leaders re-imagine ministry and church, so that following Jesus on mission is central to their lives and effectively expressed within the orbit of their relationships and context.

Summary:  God desires to develop and activate servant leaders as vanguards of missional movements that engage and enrich the cultures into which they are seeded. This requires strategic and prayerful attention to missional leadership development. As a learning community we will be exploring how to help one another grow in God and in our zeal and capacities to inspire, equip and strategically release the people of God into mission as signs and foretastes of the now-and-not-yet Kingdom of God. 

Objectives:
•    Inspire those called to leadership to contagiously exhibit a natural, intentional, and creative lifestyle infused with God’s missional heart;
•    Stimulate participants to strategically and practically motivate/release others to missionally engage and enrich their local neighborhoods, vocational spheres, and city. 
•    Listen to, learn from and pour into the lives of Imago’s leaders so that they are better suited for missional leadership and ministry over the long haul.

Class Dates and Topics: (April 12 – May 31)
➢    April 12- Kenotic Leadership: For Those Dying to Follow Christ on Mission (DAN)

➢    April 19 - Leadership Gardening and the Art of Cultivating Missional Church (CASEY)

➢    April 26 - Living within the tension of both a spoken and a lived gospel (JEREMY)

➢    May 3 - Becoming a courageous “in but not of” the world leader (DAN)

➢    May 10 - Conversation pathways for leadership sustainability (CLARK)

➢    May 17 - The Power of Out-of-context Learning Experiences (CASEY)

➢    May 24 - Leadership formation within deep missional community (DAN)

➢    May 31 - Creative approaches to community development (CLARK)

Required reading: 
The Missionary Congregation: Leadership and Liminality, by Alan J. Roxburgh
In the Name of Jesus, by Henri Nouwen

The grace of night vision

Sometimes it’s pretty dark; but if you avoid the temptation to clamor for a lamp to light the way, you might find that your eyes eventually start adjusting to the darkness. You stumble less, but you still stumble. And while you begin to see that God is mysteriously present in such twilight wanderings, pure grace scores the heart in those fleeting moments when landscapes and constellations appear that you never could find by day.

I'd like to unpack this, but I don't think I will. I'm 50 and I'm grateful and God is God of the day and of the night. And I love Him.

Core questions undergirding MORPH

For the past few months four of us on Imago Dei's Community Development Team (facilitated by pastor Clark Blakeman) have covenanted around five simple practices.  We use the acronym MORPH to capture what we want to see in ourselves as we encourage each other to go deeper in God together while on mission. We describe the actual practices this way:

MORPH means on a weekly basis we covenant to be:

Missional – I will involve myself in some activity that engages and/or enriches my neighborhood or community or city (or world if traveling).

Other-centered – I choose to look beyond myself and bless three people in some conscious act of goodness or generosity (of the three, I will try to bless at least one person inside the Imago Dei Community).

Replenishing – I will read at least five chapters of a NT book, two chapters of an OT book, and at least one chapter of a spiritually-edifying book or article.

Prayerful – I will quiet my soul and spend one uninterrupted hour with God in prayer.

Hospitable – I will extend or receive hospitality on three occasions (at least once with Imago Dei folks, and preferably at least once with non-Christian friends in a home or Third Place).

Our quad has found these practices a bit too general to keep us each consistently moving toward their implementation. So I've proposed we try the following specific questions (each corresponding to one of our five practices) as a way to help us keep in sync with a rhythm that is transformational.

• Missional – God, what single step might I consciously take to meet you on mission this week?
• Other-centered – Who are three people I might consciously serve or bless as an expression of Your self-sacrificial love?
• Replenishing – What NT and OT well will I draw from, and what extra-biblical spring will I tap into?
• Prayerful - When will I carve out one hour to sit with and minister to God?
• Hospitable – With whom will I consciously gather around the table and enjoy the sweetness of unhurried leisure?

We'll see how this "works". I just taped a tiny (font 8) version of these questions next to my laptop keyboard, so that I can remember to be asking God if He has anything to say about how I should be answering them for a given week.

A Republic-an Who has Forgotten His Way (to Portland)

This proves that Alan Hirsch is really a Portlander at heart (ignore his horizontal pose). So every time you see Alan, make sure you tell him he needs to come live in the Republic.

I had the great privilege a couple weeks ago of traveling to Lisbon, Portugal for our annual Christian Associates Leadership Summit. It was even more blessed because my buddy, Rob Fairbanks, joined me (we were asked to bring one younger emerging leader with us to the Summit, so I brought Rob along since he's a few months younger than me). Alan led the Summit by walking our leadership through conversations over the six factors of "apostolic genius" that he covers in his book, The Forgotten Ways. Aside from the feeling I was drinking from a fire hydrant, the conversations were useful to me as I consider how CA might help seed a missional movement in Portland and this region. It would be wonderful to also have FORGE somehow involved here, as there are so many leaders/disciples here in the Republic who carry the missional DNA but lack specific training and development. Both Alan (who presides over FORGE) and his delightful wife, Deb, are missional consultants to CA, and both actually sit on our newly formed Leadership Team. So, hopefully we'll see them back here before too long, and at minimum it would be awesome to see their movement ideas getting traction here.

I was also jazzed to hang out with Rob, as he and I share similar passions for missional church planting and would love to construct a new network of some sort involving CA and other partners in a collaborative alliance.