Church Leadership and Administration

Transcription

1 Church Leadership and Administration ML501 LESSON 10 of 24 Kenneth O. Gangel, PhD Experience: Scholar in Residence, Toccoa Falls College Lecture number 10,. We must be very careful in the use of the word with which we deal in this lecture, the key word, the word control, because it can often be used in general discussion of leadership to describe a certain kind of leadership style. He s really in control. He s a strong leader. He runs a tight ship. He has a situation in which he s always in control of the people that work for him. Those kinds of phrases frighten me, because they describe an autocratic leadership style, and I have attempted already on several of the lectures in this series to suggest that that kind of leadership style is neither biblical nor practical, nor in line with the best research of administrative science. We re not using the word at all in that sense in this lecture. We are using the word in a technical sense to describe how a person has control or has, if you will, a handle on the tasks that he has. It doesn t matter what that role is. This kind of control applies to the chief executive officer. It applies to anybody in any situation up and down the org chart, anywhere in the staff line relationship. Control is always important. When a pastor comes to a new position, it is important that he get control of his tasks, not control of his people, not control of his board, but control of his tasks or of his ministry, and that s what we re dealing with here. It s important right at the onset for us to develop a spiritual view of control. We can talk, for example, about three types of discipline. There is the enforced discipline or external discipline, which is necessary in the life of any child. Parents must, or at least should I could say must if a child is going to end up as an adult the way the Lord wants him to be exercise a legitimate form of external discipline. That may take the form of spankings or slapping of hands or harsh words. In other words, the child is forced by virtue of the authority of the parent to do certain things at certain times and this is for his own good. 1 of 11

2 The Lord does that with us. Hebrews 12 is very, very clear about the discipline of the Father; and at the moment it s not pleasant, it s grievous, but the end result is always joyous. The second kind of discipline we might call self-discipline. We use this quite frequently to talk about other people, usually people whom we admire. We say that he s a very self-disciplined person or he really lives a disciplined life. This is a good kind of compliment for people to give us, because it recognizes a growing level of maturity. The child is now moving on to the position where he makes legitimate decisions, and he makes those decisions within a disciplined climate. He chooses some things which are not always pleasant because he is disciplined and knows to choose those things. He uses his time wisely. He does not procrastinate at preparation of sermons or study for a test or taking care of certain chores around the house, because he recognizes in a disciplined fashion these things must be done. I am now an adult. I will do them first. A third level, and a higher level yet, is what I refer to as Christ discipline. This is simply self-discipline thrown back into the Lordship of Jesus Christ, in which we recognize that self-discipline is not the iron will of the highly mature person, but rather it is now a submission to the Spirit of God who makes it possible for us to do things that are not only difficult, but it might very well be totally impossible in our own human strength. I m not talking about the miraculous. I m talking about living such a controlled life that the control of that life is constant evidence of the Spirit of God guarding our lips, guarding our minds, guarding our behavior toward other people, and really demonstrating that the discipline is a step above self-discipline, far removed from external discipline when we have to be forced to read the Scriptures and forced to pray and forced to show up for class and forced to study this and forced to eat the right things; but now because of the Lordship of Christ in our lives, this is operable in that way. Now the three types of control might very well be related in that same pattern. You have a control that is forced upon you. You have a control that you exercise yourself, or, I m out of control, now simmer down. Just a moment ago, I was upset. I was at the point of tears, but now I m under control. A moment ago I was very angry. I might have said anything, but now I m under control. Self-discipline, self-control. But now a third level: Christ control. 2 of 11

3 Now all we need to do is to turn these three levels of discipline and control into a recognition of the three styles of leadership. And we say that the whole pattern of the participatory leader, forgetting the autocratic and the free-reign leader for the moment, the leader who engages with other people in a team relationship in participatory leadership is a person who is able to subject his own desires and wills and demands and commands to the will of the larger group. He is a team player, and he s able to be a part of that team, even though he s the team leader; and he is a person who is able to be not just controlled by others, he really couldn t be a leader if that were the case, nor just a person who brings himself under control, but a person who is constantly under the control of the Holy Spirit in all the things that he does. Paul talks in one of his letters to the Corinthians about not being under the control of anything but the Holy Spirit. Are all things lawful? Yes. Are all things expedient or profitable for him? No. And he chooses only those things which are profitable because he will not be brought under the power or control of anything else. Now I could leave this lecture and wander off into bypaths of Christian lifestyle and talk about the control of drugs and the control of alcohol and the control of various kinds of matters such as caffeine, the control by soap operas on television or the control of television itself, or the control of one person over another person and on and on and on. These are not things that are totally alien to the Christian community at all. Now let s make a switch and talk about how all this works out practically. Here comes the controlled leader, the Christcontrolled leader, into a new job situation. It is now important for him to get job control. Again, I emphasize, not control over the people with whom he works, but control over the task, which is now his to fulfill. How does he know when he has job control, that is, what kinds of things have to be done by the Sunday school superintendent in his first year or by the pastor in his first year at a new church, even though he may have been in the ministry for ten or fifteen years? What kinds of things must fall in line before he really has a handle on that job and can really go home in the evening and say, I know what I m doing, and God is blessing it and I m glad to be here? By the way, some of this will take as long as six months to a year or more to achieve. Job control is not something we come by quickly. 3 of 11

4 One of the items I ve identified is an adequate grasp of goals. Goal orientation is tremendously important. The whole idea of management by objectives is crucial to our understanding where the organization is going and what we are trying to do in the organization and what the organization expects of us within that pattern. It becomes crucial for us to work on the purposes and goals of the organization. Sometimes we discover in going to a new church (talking about the pastor now for a moment) that the church does not seem to have any goals. Its goal is to survive. Its goal for the last six months was to find a pastor. They haven t taken any five-year, long-range views. They don t have any scenario for the next decade. They re just going from week to week, sometimes it seems from day to day. So it becomes important in that framework to recognize as much as possible that you as the leader become the catalyst for goal setting and for an objective orientation. Gather opinions from as many people as you can (people who are influential in the church), and begin to identify some measurable kinds of events and measurable kinds of achievements that we re trying to move toward and that whole pattern. Then there must be a general agreement on the goals. You can t just have the goals as the leader and charge on ahead with the goals in your back pocket and expect people to run after you. I would think that the setting of objectives and the reviewing of objectives on a yearly basis is absolutely mandatory, and until you really have a grasp of the goals of the organization, you ll never have job control. Obviously, the goals have to be related to individual objectives within the framework, and there must be agreement. One of the basic patterns or philosophies of MBO is the recognition of individual accountability, that is, people being responsible all of the people or as many as possible in the church/in the organization being responsible for goal achievement. Not just patting you on the back and saying, Yes, those are good goals. Go get them. See the major objective of managing, or a major advantage maybe I should say, of management by objective is that it seems to have the individual participating not only in the planning of the program, but the implementation so that everybody who s there knows what is going on. This is particularly true of the leaders the elders, the deacons, the official board. MBO is simply a philosophy of management which indicates that we begin to think about the organization in terms of what it s supposed to accomplish; and from that general purpose statement, we begin to break down some objectives and then some very, 4 of 11

5 very specific management goals. I recommend your reading of Peter Drucker s book The Practice of Management and other volumes which relate to this. We should spend a great deal more time on it, but time is precious on each of these tapes. A second aspect of job control is adequate equipment. It s important for you to have the equipment to do your job. A pastor might need a copying machine or a typewriter or maybe a dictating machine, whatever it might happen to be; invariably we talk about money on this, but sometimes it s not so much money. Let s say here s a pastor who needs to use or wants to use to enhance the communication of his sermons and of his teaching some kind of an overhead projector. The overhead projector is there, but there s no way to make transparencies other than just by drawing on the acetate with a video pen. And so it becomes essential for him to make known the need of a machine that will make transparencies. I m thinking what comes to mind is a 3M Secretary Copier, which for $150 $200 can be purchased a used and overhauled set. This is not big money. We re not talking about a massive expenditure for even a small church to provide a pastor with something that will enhance his ministry and give him better job control, in this case, over the preparation for sermons and teaching situations. The third level or area of control is personnel resources, the whole aspect of working with people and understanding the accountability of people and knowing that there are enough people there to do the job. Perhaps we re limiting our discussion here primarily to staff, because the whole idea of the pastor bringing the entire congregation or a majority of the congregation into the ministry of the church and I believe that that s a very important task you must be accomplishing can only be done after the immediate leaders are a part of the process of goal orientation. So personnel here, probably has to do with staff. Let s be very, very specific. A secretary. Here s a pastor struggling along and he spends five hours a week, six hours a week running a mimeograph machine, typing out the bulletin on a stencil, doing this, to fooling with the audio equipment for the Sunday service for the recording or fixing the amplifying machine and so on, and he says, Oh this is no problem, I like to tinker with machinery. This is a lot of fun. But the point is those five or six hours that he spends with tinkering with machinery are five or six hours he is not giving to the pastoral task of study, of ministry; and you go right back to Acts 6 and you see the apostles saying, Look, we have other things we have to do. It s not that we don t like the widows. 5 of 11

6 It s not that we re too good to handle food distribution. We like to do that. That would be very interesting to make sure that things are evened out here and the Hellenistic widows get their share, but we have other things we must do. We have prioritized our time. You find seven men with the right qualifications. Let them do this. And the pastor needs to have adequate personnel in order to do the necessary delegation and get the job done properly. The fourth level is adequate time. Sometimes we feel as though we never have adequate time. And as long as we view the ministry in the broadest sense, you know, Peter Drucker s idea of taking the recognition of excellence all the time in everything that we do and achieving excellence is very, very desirable, very nice to talk about, but sometimes it s difficult to achieve. Or to go back a few years and talk about John Wesley who mentioned the world as his parish. Well, that s simply not right. John Wesley did not have the world as his parish. His parish was quite limited in terms of the whole world. And we ll never have adequate time and job control regarding time until we recognize the limitations that the Lord has put on the ministry He has given us, and then only accept the expansion of ministry as the Lord puts it before us: the recognition that we have certain tasks to do here and now. There s a strong home base to build. There are parameters to the people to whom we minister. A church in Chicago does not minister to Chicago. A church of 250 does not minister to 50,000 people in a broad metropolitan area. There is a certain boundary of responsibility. Then the time begins to get into focus. It quite may well be that the time factor can only come into focus when the personnel issue and the equipment issue and some of these other things fall into place as well. And certainly we can say that the fifth one will never come until the first four are cared for, namely, adequate confidence. You know when you have job control when you have adequate confidence that you can do the job. When you enter a major leadership post, whatever that post might be, you find yourself sort of riding a euphoric high for the first few weeks or months and everybody is very gracious and everybody s very nice, applauding the things that you are doing. Yes, you re doing... great to have you here. Wonderful. You re doing great. What d we ever do without you? And then the problems begin to cluster, and you begin to see the real warts of the operation, and also people don t remember quite as frequently to say thank you and to applaud your efforts. And now you re at the point where you begin to wonder, can I really do this job? 6 of 11

7 Do I really have an understanding of where this organization is going; and am I the man to take it there? Do I really have the equipment? Do my colleagues have the equipment necessary to do the job? Do we have the funds to get the equipment? Do we really have the people here? Are we staffed to handle the task that people think we re accomplishing here? Is there enough time in the day? If I work 24 hours straight through, seven days a week, would I have enough time to do the job? And these haunting questions begin to cause a lack of confidence, and a lack of confidence gives us a queasy feeling that we really don t have job control. The opposite of job control, of course, is crisis management: moving from one place to another as rapidly as possible putting out fires. Dashing here, dashing there. Take care of this problem. Take care of that problem; and while you re over here, another one develops over on the other side. You rush over and you take care of that. Back and forth. Crisis management. Obviously, longrange planning is one of the antidotes, but another one of the antidotes is a good grasp of the job, job control. Goals, equipment, resources, time, and confidence. I warn you again, these things do not come easily. They do not come quickly. This is a major argument for long tenure in Christian leadership. Do not walk up to a job and if things don t work out in the first six months or a year, forget it and move on. God s going to bless me, should ve blessed me by now. Since He hasn t, He obviously doesn t want me here. He wants me somewhere else. Very immature thinking. Let s go back to the great leaders of the Bible. Look at Moses and the years of struggle and effort that he put into his work for the Lord. Joshua, battle after battle, skirmish after skirmish, difficulty after difficulty. David, bringing the kingdom together. Watching it fragment. Defeating the Philistines. Watching them regather their forces and come back again. Job control. Adequacy in the necessary components. Now I ve built into this lecture a treatment of the systems approach because it clearly relates to job control. Systems approach very simply described and I do not offer this as a definition simply described simply means that the organization that you serve, church, whatever it is, school, the organization is a system. All of the parts relate to all of the other parts. This is simply a practical implementation of the old law: the sum is greater or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But the sum of the parts is more than a sum in the systems approach in that all of the parts are integrally connected with all of the other parts or each of the 7 of 11

8 parts with all of the other parts. And in that pattern you recognize that when you touch one aspect of the organization, in one way or another you touch every aspect of the organization. When you communicate something to one person in the organization, in one way or another, it affects everybody in the organization. It either affects them because in the old leak system it will get out to them; or it affects them because now one person knows something and nobody else knows it. The systems approach is very, very crucial, and it leads us to consider such things as zero-based budgeting and zero-based programming. Zero-based budgeting, of course, is very common now in some businesses, particularly in economic difficulty, in which a business no longer assumes that the budget of this year will simply be an extension of the budget of last year adjusted for the appropriate inflation and growth patterns. So if department X spent $35,000 of the total three-million-dollar budget last year, then obviously we start with $35,000. We build in a double digit inflation factor, we allow for X percent of growth, and now this year they re going to be operating with $39,500. That s the old system. Zero-based budgeting says, No, we do not allow you anything for the next fiscal year. We do not assume anything. We do not presuppose a budget. You justify every expenditure your department wants to make. Friends, this would do wonders for some of our churches. This does not mean that you get rid of department X. It could very well be that he ends up with $39,500, or maybe he ends up with $45,000 when it s reconsidered; and we discover how important and strategic the work is. Zero-based programming is a little more radical yet, and it suggests that like the budgeting aspect, we assume nothing regarding the programming. Let s stay with the church. We don t assume a Sunday school just because we ve always had one. We don t assume a Wednesday evening prayer and Bible service. We don t even assume that the church will regather on Sunday evening. Now maybe all of these things are absolutes in our understanding, and we reaffirm that, but we reaffirm them at least on an annual basis. We consider them. We reevaluate them. We review them. We do not assume anything because the systems approach wants to provide for us a constant continuing and updated control of the jobs that we have within this organization. 8 of 11

9 The elimination of blockades, of course, is crucial. Those things that get in the way of control. You can go right back to section 2 there and talk about equipment breakdown.no longer able to function because a simple thing like the copying machine is broken. You can t get the copies that you need or, if you re doing radio work, your morning service is broadcast live and now a microphone breaks down, or you get some kind of a repair problem in a cord and, therefore, control of the situation/of the ministry/ of the task is lost. So you eliminate the blockades, always looking for them in the broad sense. Of course, alertness to wrong drift has to do again with objectives. We re talking about people who sort of wander off on their own one way or another and without the clear kind of accountability that is built into a systems approach of objectives. You can t maintain control of the organization when different people in the organization are engaged in wrong drift. There s a person, for example, who started out with us, had the idea, was moving along well, but now he s doing his own thing. He s been around five or six years and seems to pretty well take matters into his own hand and goes his own way. Again, a simple application or illustration: A Sunday school teacher who was an effective teacher, quite popular as a matter of fact, knows the Word of God, but now he s got a hobby horse idea and every Sunday school class deals with this; and we re experiencing in that class a wrong drift of objectives in the broad edificational patterns of the church because we re not watching that situation. Perception of trends and issues is another part of control. Alvin Toffler wrote (1969, 1970?) a book entitled Future Shock in which he pointed out that it is not change that gets us, it is the rapidity and extent of change, and we re wiped out by so much change so fast. Now that hasn t changed in Toffler s newer book The Third Wave, [where he] updates that whole idea in which he says that if a person is going to be a leader in any kind of an organization that wants to keep pace with the times, there is going to be a necessity of watching the unfolding scenarios of the future and developing some grasp of where the future is going and the kinds of things that are going to happen. Therefore, identifying a proper posture for the church in the future. Ethnic trends in a given city, the change demographically of population shifts, the economic factor, here everybody s driving in miles to the church, which used to be a neighborhood church, 25, 30, 50 years ago, but no longer is a neighborhood church. Now everybody s driving in. Well it s fine. Well gas is 60 cents a gallon, 70 cents a gallon. 9 of 11

10 What if it goes to $1.75, $2.00, $2.50 a gallon? Will people still drive two, three, four times a week, 25 miles one way to church? We need to develop different scenarios and think in advance in an awareness and a perception. The perception in this sense is almost the opposite of reaction. We don t discover all of a sudden, Hey, look what happened. What are we going to do about that? See, that loses control. Job control is based upon a grasp of what is going to happen and a posturing of readiness. And then, finally, I would indicate here a willingness to introduce change. A willingness to respond in a way that enables us to bring about change without upsetting the organization. There s no need really to spend a great deal of time on this particular item here simply because we will be dealing with the process of change in a future lecture at great length. Suffice it here to say that when you have job control, and only when you have job control, do you have the confidence (key word there in 2. E.), the confidence to introduce change. The leader who lacks confidence will not be a change agent. He s just the guy that s trying to keep things... he s trying to stay alive. He s on the treadmill. He s worried about not losing his job, never mind shaking the organization. His motto is Don t make waves. It is only the confident leader, the assured leader, the leader who is secure in knowing what he s doing and directing the organization toward its appropriate goals who can say, All right, friends, I think that we ought to do this now. Think with me on this, pray with me, and let s move in that particular setting. Please remember that the effective leader really functions as himself. He doesn t hide under some kind of a mask; doesn t try to be somebody he is not. If he can t handle a particular task, he either resigns the task or he breaks the task up into different functions and does appropriate delegation to make it possible for the organization to go on. But none of this Peter Principle or Paul Principle operating the Christian organization, well, obviously it does operate, but if you re going to be an honest leader before the Lord, a leader who is really concerned about job control, you ll recognize the very, very significant factor of relationships and functioning as one s self in the whole pattern. 10 of 11

11 Please remember that the organizational chart, as important as it is, is merely a skeleton. It holds the body, but it s not a channel for nourishment. It becomes essential for us to recognize how we are seen by others, to ascertain the needs that people have in the organization, to give them a chance to explain those needs, and then to respond in a pattern that is need-meeting, while at the same time oriented to the goals of the organization. So work toward job control. Make sure you have an adequate grasp of goals; adequate equipment to do the job, which has been given you which you have accepted; adequate personnel to assist you in the task; adequate time to get it done; and then, ultimately as a result of all of these, adequate confidence to lead toward job control. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 11 of 11