Standing Up Compassion Leaders
What is the leadership plan for compassion and community ministry in your church? There is an important tension around this issue that both new and existing church leaders need to wrestle with. With community ministry, everyone needs to own it, but someone(s) needs to lead.
There are three common mistakes made that keep serving others from becoming a real core value of the church. Mistake 1: Senior pastor owns the community service leadership alone. This is the fastest route to a bottleneck and lack of consensus. When the senior guy owns this alone, it will be relegated it to another task on the already long list. For the senior person to own this directly, is to ensure that it never grows to real capacity. Mistake 2: Senior leader doesn’t own community ministry. The lack of involvement and modeling will ensure that serving others doesn’t gain the kind of imperative within the church that is requires to become lifestyle. In this error, serving others never finds its way into the language and stories of the leadership because it is not a real part of the senior leadership experience. Mistake 3: Someone other than the senior leadership owns community ministry, but they are not really connected to the core leadership of the church. We keep close what is important to us. Senior leaders tend to work closely with their worship and creative team, small group leadership and others. The proximity of the community service leader creates a two-way imprint: Leadership values working their way into the heart of the community service leader, and community service values working their way into the heart of the leadership team. Distance between community and core leadership also ensures that community service and compassion ministry will at best find its way into the list of official but not so important “programs.”
Serving others can never be only program if it is to become lifestyle. Incarnational living is not a program, and the formation of Jesus in the life of the church can only happen if servanthood is experienced and shared throughout the body.