Friday, January 16, 2009

best, better, good

Anyone who’s been to a management/leadership seminar (and this includes pastoral leadership seminars) has heard this aphorism: “The good is the enemy of the best.” But is that how God wants us to live our lives, i.e., never content, always striving and pushing and driven? Do we know how to live in the goodness of each moment? Today (at a prayer retreat) a friend shared with me this counter-aphorism: “The better is the enemy of the good.”

“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” James 1:17

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

spiritual optometrics

A lot of leadership gurus make a big deal about having a “vision statement”. As a lead pastor, I do recognize that it’s important to have a vision for our church community. That’s why the leadership team spent a lot of time in conversation with God, the people of Grace, and each other about our vision for the next 10 years. And God gave us Dave Evans and the Veritas workshop to help us see that we are “becoming like Jesus together.”

But there’s another definition of vision. In his book “Connecting” Larry Crabb says that we need to develop vision for each person that we connect with. We need to see each other with God’s eyes and sense the possibilities that God has created for each other so that we can help each other reach for those possibilities.

As a church leader I find myself working to keep these two kinds of vision in balance. If I’m too driven by the vision for the church, I’ll lose the compassionate touch that marked Jesus’ ministry. But if I’m too wrapped up in the concerns of individuals I can lose sight of where God is taking us as a community. The tension of leadership is balancing these two kinds of vision. Too much of one or the other makes you either too driven or direction-less.

This came home to me in my men’s group last night as we discussed the issue of human trafficking. The issue is so big, but the work of liberation and healing happens one person at a time. In the presentations at Grace on Sunday about mission work done in Thailand and China it was the stories of how the Gospel touched the lives of individuals that grabbed our hearts. Yet the fact that we had two people able to engage in such work was possible because someone had a vision that resulted in a mission organization.

I guess I need spiritual bifocals. I need God’s help to see both the big picture and the close-up needs of individuals. And I need the discernment to know which needs my immediate attention.