Week 11 Leadership for ministry and mission

11. Leadership roles and structures for ministry and mission

Our task this week is to consider ways in which leadership roles and organisation are part of the story of the church and its message which reflect our beliefs about God and the church and our understanding of mission.

Although I have heard ministers actually say that all that really matters is Christian character since organisation will look after itself, most people have the experience of “square peg in a round hole” difficulties in Christian ministry. It occurs at almost every level. Sorting out organisation is about effectiveness, but it also says something about how we understand the church, and whether we value people in the real business of working and worshipping together. Christian leadership values make a difference to organisation, but organisation can make it possible or impossible for them to be realised. Staff disappointment in churches and Christian organisations is sometimes due to people’s naive and unrealistic assumptions about what being part of a Christian organisation actually means, it is also due to failure in those organisations to learn from those who are not necessarily Christian at all about what it means to manage and treat people properly.

That the church is starting to value the skills of human resource management is not just a faddish interest in management theory and terminology, it is a recognition that as the church seeks to release more of its members into ministry and mission, being able to place people according to their gifts and calling, is increasingly important.

It is sometimes noted that Presbyterianism is named after its system of church government or polity, and that its hierarchy of courts in the church from Session or Parish Council, through Presbytery to General Assembly, sometimes with links to a Synod, is a theological statement not just a pragmatic or political one.

In the readings for this week, Charles Cashdollar draws on research on the congregational life of Reformed congregations in Britain and North America from 1830 to the start of World War I. He describes his purpose as learning how they actually functioned and to try and show what church looked like from the pew. “When people went to church, what did they experience and do? What were their expectations for worship and common life? How did they interact with each other? How did they organize themselves to manage their own affairs and to affect the larger society?” His research is part of a move to congregational studies in North America and Britain which seeks to place the experience of being church alongside theological and historical analyses. We are starting to see similar research develop in New Zealand. Cashdollar’s chapter is a reminder of issues in leadership that may still be with us. His is a book you might consider borrowing from the Library for further reading.

Allan Janssen is from the Reformed Church of America, the same branch of the family as Mark Noll whose description of Presbyterianism was one of the web links in week 1. The RCA take church organisation seriously and Janssen takes a quote from an Orthodox writer to help emphasize that in his view church order is not accidental, and that in Reformed theology it conveys a sense of the priority of the church over the individual. These comments may be relevant to ongoing discussion about the relationship of congregations to the wider church.

My short piece on Local Ordained Ministers, National Ordained Ministers and Chief Executive Officers, seeks to note some of the benefits and pitfalls of using contemporary management theory in the restructuring of the church. It can be a valid contextualisation, but it is not without risk and we need to know what we are doing. Our church has made some significant changes whose implications are still being worked out here.

A longer paper available online on “Persistent Presbyterianism? Lay Leadership and the future of Christianity in the West” was written in 2002 for a University of Otago conference on the Future of Christianity in the West. It is trying to work with the idea that part of the genius of the Reformed church was the way in which it connected positively with emerging political and business forms of organisation in the societies where it took root in the 16th century. It also visits some of the debates about the validity of the distinction made between ordained and lay and its reducing importance in our tradition.

An implication of this may be that making a similar connection today may have a similar effect if we get it right, even if the more fundamental issue is how much whatever system we have is consistent with Christian leadership values. What is going on in local situations with the organisation of volunteer groups, school boards, and the very idea of governance, all has a connection to the language of organisation and process that we have in the church.

Presbyterians may have made this sort of connection brilliantly at some points in our past. As we restructure under all sorts of pressures, the challenge of connecting to the organizational cultures found in society in a Christian way is one we share with Churches generally. We will revisit some of these issues in Week 14. There are other issues which concern many today. Ordination is often a worry, though less so when people think of it as to do with recognition of gifts, rather than their creation.