TRINITARIAN-INSPIRED

SHARED LEADERSHIP

 

When we began Highlands Church in 2009, my co-pastor Mark and I led with this motto: how we do what we do is as important as what we do. We had both experienced very poor leadership in churches where decisions were driven by outcomes with little regard to the impact on staff or the church culture. We felt certain that the true fruit of ministry was found and developed in the how. How we prioritize relationships. How we make decisions. How we empower leaders. 

 

Without really meaning to, we were leading through a shared leadership model. When our third co-pastor Jenny joined the team in 2010, she named for us what she was seeing: that though Mark was the founding pastor, he was deferring and sharing power in all kinds of ways. It looked to Jenny like what she imagined the Trinity to be - in a perichoresis or a circle-dance of mutuality among the Three. (This, by the way, had absolutely no correlation to the fact that there were three co-pastors.) 

 

In our Trinitarian-inspired shared leadership model, women lead. LGBTQ people lead. Black, Indigenous, People of Color lead. Differently-abled and neurodiverse people lead. Employing shared leadership means the community hears from a diversity of perspectives all the time, instead of one dominant perspective. Power is shared. And it means that relationships are the priority - the primary how of being the church.

 

Relationships are really hard work, as I imagine you are well aware. Leading with others is incredibly powerful and complicated. So a shared leadership model can either be breathtakingly beautiful - a vision of heaven…  or it can go disastrously wrong. 

 

Over the last fifteen+ years of living and leading in this model, we have learned many lessons the hard way. We have learned how powerful the Enneagram tool can be in helping us identify our specific ways of wielding power, of attempting to manipulate the situation for our desired outcome. And we have learned how incredibly fruitful it is to work. through. that. shit. What we’ve seen is that when transformation is happening in the leadership team, the fruit only multiplies throughout the entire community. 

 

If you’re curious about this model of leadership, or maybe you’re neck-deep in the struggle, I would love to be a resource and a sounding board. 

GOOD, THEOLOGICALLY-ALIGNED

WORSHIP MATTERS

 

In May of 2018, a pastor friend of mine asked me, “As a pastor, don’t you sometimes feel like you’re just rearranging the furniture on the Titanic?” It was such a heartbreaking and honest question from someone who had been pastoring for more than 25 years. Yet I was surprised by how vehemently the word “no” immediately bubbled up inside of me. I did not feel like I was wasting my time amidst all that was happening in the world. In fact, I felt quite the opposite. 

 

I spent a lot time reflection on his question, and on why I felt that my time as a pastor was well-invested. I realized that part of the answer came from my own journey of reconstructing Christianity which had transformed a really important part of my Christian evangelical upbringing: the purpose and expression of worship. 

 

One of the sins of white evangelicalism is an over-correction to the personal: the teaching that the only important thing is one’s personal relationship with Jesus. Justice-making has been a nice-to-have, but not a spiritual imperative. The resulting impotency and willful ignorance has harmed (and continues to harm) people of all kinds of marginalized backgrounds, but mostly pointedly BIPOC and LGBTQ individuals and communities. 

 

 

But our spiritual roots look nothing like this. Worship and justice are inextricably tied together. And so for progressive churches and communities, we must critically examen our worship practices and traditions to ensure they reflect the robust justice-minded theology we are (and have always been) called to. 

 

Good worship matters. Good worship transforms us. And justice-making is the true measure of whether our worship is good or not. Worship should remind us who we are and to whom we belong; worship should draw our attention to the community as well as to our own experience; worship should inspires us to do the next loving thing.  This is what can change the world. 

 

If you are a leader of a worshiping community, I’d love to help you analyze your worship practices and gatherings. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach to worship (thank God) so my role is not to give you a formula to follow. Instead, I will help you align your worship practices theologically and culturally to be a truer expression of who you are as a community, and who God is.