Pastor as Corporate Spiritual Director

Prodigal Kiwi blog: All too often though, leaders as “managers and/or CEO’s”, rather than enabling and encouraging a congregation to labor to birth something that is both unique and precious (God-gifted) to themselves, expect a congregation to “adopt” the leaders ‘baby’, the leaders vision
This is so right: So much of the management-style ministerial thinking is about vision-casting but without any real sense of ownership from the congregation. Now I know that the books [eg Barna's] will tell you otherwise but we know that in practice, a lot of church leaders have ideas that they want to run with and a lot of congregations just want someone to take responsibility for doing something esciting enough for them to feel like they're part of something bigger and significant and that they can be proud of when they're at work or Spring Harvest or whatever. This is how we collaborate [ie collude] in keeping the congregant as consumer and the Vicar as CEO.

For it to be different several things have to happen. One is that the leaders have to learn to sit lighter to their own agenda's and that will mean learning to understand their own motivations and drivers and how to disinvest emotional energy from their own good ideas. It's not easy but it can be done. There is an ideological side to it too: we need to get out of the idea that leadership is about having the inspiritation and persuading people to follow. This means a real,true, recovery in confidence in the idea that God speaks to the congregation and that God speaks to the leaders but that neither will have the whole picture. In turn this means learning the arts of corproate listening; listeing to the hopes and fears of the people individually and corporately, listening to the history, listening to the 'angel' of the church. It is corporate spiritual direction.

Another thing that has to happen is that congregations will have to learn to grow out of the consumer mindset that is our culture's default setting. For this to happen we perhaps actually need to come up with some metaphoric bases that reframe a person's self-image as a congregation member. The result of this reframing should be that the person sees themselves, along with their fellows, as co-active in the mission of the church. I am not sure what the metaphors should be and suspect that it may need to be part of what would emerge from the listening process mentioned above.

Another thing and related to the last paragraph's item is that we need to redefine the church out of the leisure time paradigm that western culture assigns it. Now this is a key cultural change. Basically it would mean defining a church's mission[s] as much in relation to the everyday work [paid or otherwise] of its members. Parish churches and the like in Britain [and elsewhere?] are really selfish; if it doesn't happen on their premises or with their logo on it, it doesn't exist. This redefinition would mean listening to what memebres know about where they work [or whatever] and listening with them for what God is doing and askingthe question: how should this church be involved in this work or supporting this person or person's. It means turning the church inside-out. It is the tools of spiritual direction which can help that to happen.

Do we have leaders courageous enough to lead by engaging in corporate spiritual direction and supportive and enabling ministry beyond the formal boundaries of the church? It'll be hard because it won't look like what we've come to think of as successful and it won't be rewarded by denominational strokes. ...
Prodigal Kiwi Blog: Pastor as Spiritual Director as Midwife