Why The CEO-Leader Model Doesn't Serve The Purpose Of Going Missional

In an interview with Pastor/Professor David Fitch with the editors of The Leadership Journal here are a few of his perspectives on leadership in the Life on the Vine, in Long Grove Illinois, a chruch seeking a more missional posture.

"At Life on the Vine, we recently added a fourth pastor. Some people
told me a model with multiple visible leaders would never work—there
would be no single face to attach to the vision of the church and the
church would never grow. Balderdash (is that a word?). The church
continues to grow. There are signs of healing, new mission, and new
souls finding God."

1. It doesn't make sense to build a church around a personality
People start coming to hear that one guy (most often it's a guy), and
as the crowds get bigger this pastor becomes distanced from the
congregation at which point he loses the ability to speak into the
people's lives that he knows.

2. There are no supermen or superwomen
With mutliple pastors the whole ministry of the chruch is fed from their may gifts, and all are invited to participate in the empowerment of the gifts as modeled by the many faceted leadership. No single pastor has the gifts required to bring this about.

3. Isolated pastors can get tunnel vision
Multiple pastors in submission to one to another can work against this.

4. Pastors benefit from being bi-vocational/bi-ministrerial (since bing the secular workplace is ministry)
Pastors who have jobs outside the chruch can get to know non-Christains and spend time in non-Christain settings.

5. It models the diversity and interrelatedness of the Body
The notion of a senior pastor puts up a false impression that one
person is especially qualified and elevated to ministry. But with
multiple pastors, he/she does not stand alone. The whole body is called
to minister the gospel inside and outside the church as a way of life.

6. It protects pastors from the temptations which lead to moral failure and/or disappointment.
Multiple leaders in mutual submission to each other in Christ, there
can be no temptation to put any of the pastors on a false pedestal as
an image of the perfect Christian.

7. It is hard for pastors to be servants when they are put on a pedestal.
All pastors should have to clean toilets, serve the poor, and vacuum floors after potlucks. We should see ourselves in submission to the Body of Christ, not over it. (Mark 10:42-45). This "amongness" is not always possible as a senior pastor.

8. Because the senior pastor position is an impossible position to live up to.
Therefore, by accepting this role we are setting ourselves up (and the church) for inevitable failure.


While Pastor David Finch agrees that in some contexts and ways of bing the Body of Christ, the senior pastor position may still have validity - it doesn't work at 'Life on the Vine' whilst they seek to be missional.

How To Connect With Your Audience

Connecting with people is critical for selling, persuading or getting the point across. And one of the ways we connect with people is to tell them stories about ourselves.

I was at a business workshop recently, and the stories that were most effective (by acclamation of the attendees) were ones where the person let down his/her guard, and revealed something personal. This is one of the reasons storytelling is more effective than reciting a list of benefits to a prospect. In addition to being interesting and easy to understand, it also helps create a personal bond with the audience. It means that you may want, in your ministry storytelling, to reveal anxieties, fears and feelings. In other words, to give the audience your confidence.

Why Thinking About Vice Increases Your Chance of Giving In

In a recent Science Daily article - a study by researchers from Duke, USC, and UPenn explored for the first time how questioning can affect our behavior when we have mixed feelings about an issue. The study, forthcoming in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, found that asking people questions, like how many times they expect to give in to a temptation they know they should resist, increases how many times they will actually give in to it.

A number of experiments were run including college students illustrating how questions that seemed innocent enough, actually encouraged people to lower their guard to the extent that they were actually giving in to the vice.
Despite very real negative repercussions, respondents to a question about their future class attendance engaged in the negative behavior (missing class) at a significantly greater rate than those not asked to predict their behaviour.

While the results were especially pronounced for those with low self control. Its implications only serve to strengthen why those of us in leadership and management have all the more reason to lean on the Lord and be rooted firmly in the Word so as to avoid the numerous vices that pervade our lives and societies.

However on a positive note - two moderators were discovered which can prevent intention questions from exacerbating indulgences in vices -

1. Having people explicitly consider strategies for how they might avoid the behavior.
2. Having people create a self-reward for sticking with their stated usage patterns.

How To Make A Point Effectively

We often grapple with the question of why and how leaders should go about making a point through their messages. In otherwords get people to understand the message when they hear it, they remember it, and they change their behavior because of it.

Messages that make a point or “sticky” messages have certain distinctives - unexpected, concrete, credible, and emotional.



Read More on my other blog.

Why Put Your Spirtual Vision In Touch With Reality by John King

Greetings from Ephesus, the city in Turkiye where the apostle’s Paul and John built up a Body of believers.

It is rather intriguing for me to be staying in the shadow of the ruins of this ancient city. The conference centre that we are holding this LMC at, is located amidst the farms and villages that now occupy the silted in harbour to the city. There is no evidence of there ever being a harbour here now. Even the huge city was buried and lost for generations. I spent some time in the ruins of the 40,000 seat amphitheatre where Paul confronted the mob who spent two hours shouting about how great their gods were. I wandered along the now unearthed street where the silversmiths had their shops and looked off toward the nearby Isle of Patmos. As I turn the pages of the New Testament to read the enduring words of both John and Paul, I'm awed by what our Father preserves and what He allows to crumble. That gives a unique perspective on what 'reality' is.

In a study that I'm currently working through called 'The Vision of the Leader', Bruce Wilkinson (Walk Thru the Bible) makes a statement comparing long and short visions. He says, "We can have a vision for 500 years from now with ability to look back with God’s perspective." He enlarged my perspective on the Seven Year Letter that we wrote ... and even on expanding my Life Management Plan to consider my 'after life' portion of existence. That is a big spiritual vision and is probably more in touch with reality.

When John wrote the prophetic words of Jesus “turn back to me …. If you don’t, I will come and remove your lampstand …” (Rev 2:5) it’s likely that he could hardly believe that not just a church but a whole city would disappear when the light went out. But the very things that I would class as being fairly permanent, did disappear.

Jeremiah was so frustrated with the spiritual state of his people that he was called the weeping prophet. His vision was so far beyond his times that he never saw it realized. Yet 500 years later, people were still so aware of his mourning that they wondered if Jesus was actually Jeremiah. Jeremiah’s ‘after life’ existence was still making an impact.

I’m taking a longer look at my Seven Year Letter !

On behalf of the ITA team

John King