Leadership in the Church spans a number of different things and can be considered in various ways - some different to what 'the world' calls 'leadership’, some similar but which should be exercised in a 'Christian' way, whatever that is. And then there's the business of full-time paid Christian ministry, which though we speak of 'service' can be horrible and isolated in a church structure which doesn't support its staff properly.
Christian leadership and character start with the idea of Jesus as a servant and us as his followers. This poses as 'the opposite' of leadership meaning ‘power’ - though you might wonder sometimes. And actually when 'the world' understands leadership as 'service' for the staff and the organisation it's following exactly the right model. Many, both Christians and non-Christians, do indeed exercise that kind of leadership in their professional lives, and of course the Church and the Christian community needs leadership of the right sort to take us into the future.
Growing Leaders is a Christian course from the Church Pastoral Aid Society (CPAS) which tries to span all these aspects and blend them into a coherent whole - think 7 Habits of Effective Managers meets Bible Study and Prayer. That said - this isn't necessarily a comfortable marriage, the course is poorly structured, and I wouldn't dream of running it again - but scroll down the page if you want my analysis of Why it didn't work. Or just hope for the best and see my re-worked, understandable and usable set of documents:
Contents and Overall Structure
1 Leadership Matters
2 Establishing Identity
3 Clarifying Call
4 Developing Character
5 Discerning Direction
6 Developing Others
7 Leading together
8 Embracing Cost
9 Staying Fresh
10 Continuing Well
Additional Material
11 Spiritual Dynamics
12 Strategic Planning
13 Finding Rhythms
14 Growing Well
15 Shaping Culture
Frankly the experience was horrible all the way through. Here are some thoughts, though I could write more ... much more ...
No-one was on the course because they actually were a Christian leader - our course members were a random group of mildly-interested people who barely knew each other and weren't talkative types, most of whom didn't/don't particularly aspire to being leaders in the church or on church councils in the future. And none was a leader in 'industry' or 'society'. We'd have done better - and this is obvious when you think about it - to put our existing church leadership group through it - but that wasn't the way it was framed.
As I've said, the course is basically 7 Habits of Effective Managers meets Bible Study and Prayer, and aimed presumably at people who already combine these in their busy lives. Frankly, if they're already balancing those two aspects they're probably resolving the ethical issues much better already under their own steam that this course will ever do.
One of the sessions is based on Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team - which were evident enough in our organisation, though it was insisted that we didn't have them. Those of us who knew the Dysfunctions could see them well enough, even though they were denied; while those who didn't know them were left thinking 'why's this been pitchforked in all of a sudden?' Either way, Lencioni got no traction.
The course is poorly structured, its 'ideas' aren't strong and it doesn't 'cohere' in clear ways: instead it comes across as an organisational behaviours course mixed with a Bible Study and worship evening, and a vague idea that this all adds up to Christian ministry. The written material is of very poor quality and basically amounts to giving out endless unrelated handouts ... which experience shows just sit in people's ringbinders and then get thrown away. Being me, I wasn't prepared to teach from chaos, so I largely reformatted it all into the tidy, understandable, usable documents above - but they're still not great, because the course itself is pretty awful.
Behind all this was a worrying feeling that the course was being used as a pretence of supporting people for the rigours of real Christian ministry - e.g. after ordination. The language of call and cost felt contrived when it suggested 'every Christian is called, aren't you', and it actually became worrying when 'therefore you can expect a heavy personal cost as part of it' was sprung on us in part 8. Those things may or may not be true, but this course certainly isn't an adequate approach for a diocese or a church pretending to 'support' its staff - which is rather how it was sold to us.
And a word about the boss - who announced 'this must be done' and then left me to do it, with no sense of supporting me but a clear dump of blame when it wasn't working. It later turned out the boss had actually been on the course some years ago and had hated it then - so it's not clear why we were doing it now other than to 'show off' to the wider church - but that's a discussion for another day. The lesson here is: don't embark on this sort of thing unless you have absolutely 100% support, including financial and resourcing, from all the structures around you - and a very clear idea of how you're going to do it.