LEADERSHIP LETTER ARCHIVES

 

A MONTHLY READING

FOR ALL ARC LEADERS
January 2007

 

Extra-Local Leadership

 

During the past few years I have been increasingly serving the church by meeting with leaders and leadership teams in various configurations and circumstances.  Many of you know that I’ve put the tag “Whitewater” on this work.  I’ve done so responsively, I think, to a vision I had (as a very young believer) of many rafts rolling down a Colorado River-like whitewater rapids.  I was trying to warn them to turn around and head the other way because of a precipitous falls not far down the river.  Few paid any attention but those who heeded my pleas, turned and we worked together to make headway against the current.  One of the specific intents of Whitewater Ministries is to help unattached churches find a link with the Alliance for Renewal Churches (ARC).  But a few weekends ago this ministry vision was vitally punctuated by my being on the receiving end of a kind of service I’ve been delivering to others.  Let me explain.

 

At Christ Community Church we are working our way through a transition of pastoral responsibilities.  My increasing “outness” has left some gaps on the inside of our life together.  About two years ago we invited Ray Nethery (the found of the ARC) and Scott Pursley (Pastor of Lamb of God Fellowship in New Jersey) to help us think and pray through some of this initial transition.  They helped us very specifically and graciously.  After that event I wondered why we couldn’t have reached the same conclusion on our own.  We’re pretty smart guys and have many years of experience.  But two weekends ago we invited Ray and Scott out again for help with a more advanced development of this transition.  This time the very sound wisdom we received was accompanied by clear prophetic insight that we all recognized as from Christ.  And on the Sunday following our weekend retreat Scott was able to impart the same sense to our whole congregation.  I told my wife that the whole event was a kind of high point in my experience of extra-local giftings intersecting with local leadership.  It was deeply spiritual and wonderfully relationally based.  And it helped to move us along in our corporate mission.

 

Here are a few perspectives that I’ve drawn from this time together:

  • It is wonderful to have gifted and relationally-based leaders plugged into a local leadership team and congregation.

  • Local leaders periodically get “stuck” in their mission and lack the more detached objectivity of extra-local leaders.

  • It may be part of God’s larger design to keep us humble and move us to a larger unity that reflects His nature as a Triune God.

  • The High Priestly prayer of Jesus in John 17 passionately displays His heart for a profound unity.  If we don’t faithfully and deliberately choose it, He may lovingly draw back from us a bit until we feel our need for it.

  • Extra-local leadership and input is deeply biblical.  However, we’ve all no doubt encountered and endured self-proclaimed apostles and prophets who have selfish agendas and weird spirituality.

  • We can certainly have faith for God to direct a local leadership team in the vast majority of directional and pastoral issues that are continually before us.  But we should all work at developing extra-local relationships with gifted leaders who can help us through the “stuck” places.

 

One more perspective, if you will, from another angle.  For twelve years I’ve prayed weekly with a group of local pastors and leaders.  During this past year, this group has ignited and increased.  We have leaders from Episcopalian, Lutheran, Baptist, Pentecostal, Charismatic, Orthodox, African-American, African, Covenant, InterVarsity and other circles that have begun to know each other and love each other beyond the superficial.  It has been deeply enlarging.  We are seeing the heart of God with greater clarity as we learn to care for one another, share our needs and weaknesses and look through an increasingly common lens to see the Kingdom of Heaven.  We are being gently but relentlessly moved into a kind of corporate humility that must recognize the other and even come to delight in the other.

 

God is certainly seeking to set all of us free from our myopic pride and spiritual introversion.  It is exactly what He prayed for in John 17 and it is increasingly what my heart cries out for.  Pray with me for this work of grace in your heart, your congregation, your city and for the connections that God has given you in His world.

 

May the Prince of Peace bind us closer together in this Christmas season and into 2007.

 

Ned