Re "Leadership" - again!

Sent to me from the great blog of Alan Hirsch. Very serious pondering required!

I have long believed that leadership, or the lack of it, is a significant key to either the renewal, or the decline, of the church. If this is true, that leadership critical to our success or failure, then we must ask the question as to why we are in our current state of demise, and then seek to remedy the situation. This is of strategic importance. And if we pursue this a little further, we must in the end center our attention on the agencies and people that have been responsible for the training and endorsing of a leadership that has overseen the massive decline of Christianity in the last two centuries. Some hard questions must be asked about the way we train and develop leadership.

Perhaps the single most significant source of the malaise of leadership in our day comes from the way, and the context, in which we form leaders. For the most part, the would-be leader is withdrawn from the context of ordinary life and ministry in order to study in a somewhat cloistered environment for up to seven years in some cases. During that period they are subjected to an immense amount of complex information relating to the Biblical disciplines, theology, ethics, church history, pastoral theology, etc. And while the vast majority of this information is useful and correct; what is far more dangerous to discipleship in that setting is the actual socialization processes that the student undergoes along the way. In effect, they are socialized out of ordinary life, and develop a kind of language and thinking that is seldom understood and expressed outside of the seminary. Its as if in order to learn about ministry and theology we leave our places of habitation and take a flight into the wonderfully abstracted world of abstraction, we fly around there for a long period of time and then wonder why we have trouble landing again.

Please don’t get me wrong, we need serious intellectual engagement with the key ideas of our time, what is truly concerning is that such engagement largely takes place in the largely passive environments of the classroom. To love God fully with our whole being, leadership development must inculcate in the disciple the lifelong love of learning but this must be done in a way far more consistent with the ethos of discipleship than the ethos produced in and through the academy.