As I sat in church yesterday listening to our Pastor speak I began to realize that my spiritual life had taken another one of those turns in life. One of those turns that become a defining moment in your life. It seems God has led me back to a place spiritually that I have not been in the last 20 years of my life. Over the last several years I have mostly been at a place where I felt responsible for others spiritually. Going to church had become a chore in some ways for me and in other ways it had become a place of failure. Not just a place of failure that I felt personally but a place that I failed others and a place where often entire groups of people were failing in living out God's call on our lives. Not all of the past several years have been full of just failure. There have been great times of spiritual growth in my life personally and those around me. Times of true actual growth in the body I was a part of that could have led to a better place where people could flourish in their relationship with God and with others. These times of growth would always end up short lived. A lack of leadership often was a factor in watching the growth slowly die back to the place where it was before the growth began. Often I have felt responsible to at least a small group of those people for letting that death come and steal our growth. Leadership is not only a function of the highest seats of authority in our churches but leadership belongs to those of us sitting in regular pews as well. We all can be responsible at times for assisting the growth of a church just as we can be responsible for assisting the death of that growth.
So I sat in my pew and I thought something is different here, something is not as it has been in my life lately. The person in the pulpit was actually speaking a blessing over the congregation. He was telling the church that they "were doing it right". I hadn't heard that in a long time. I was used to being told how "wrong we were doing it." I realized his positive words that he was speaking over the congregation were not just the something different that I was trying to identify but rather it was just a small part of that difference. The biggest difference was leadership. When we begin to build something we start with the foundation and often the state of the foundation will also be the state of the rest of the building. Leadership and foundation are very similar for me. If the leadership is strong and balanced then the other layers will follow. I read a quote the other day about leadership that said
"Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen."
Something extraordinary is happening in our church. Leadership is making a way for others to give and use their gifts and people flourish when they are living out who God made them to be. We are at our best when we begin to realize that God gave us a purpose and gifts to pursue that purpose. We are at our best when leadership can affirm those gifts and can affirm who we are in God and then make a way and a place for the people to live that out. Leadership is making the way for this congregation to not only contribute to making something extraordinary happen but to live extraordinary lives in God.
So I had found what I lost…………someone to follow. Someone to say "you're doing it right". I can live out the calling on my life because others are living out the calling in theirs.
