“..Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God. I have applied all these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brothers, that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up in favour of one against another..” 1Co4v5-6
[1] Letters about letters, leading about leading.
“..I have applied all these things to myself.. ..for your benefit.. ..that you may learn by us..”
✍️❓ What is Paul doing here? The letter to the Corinthians has a theory of church & leadership baked in to its premise. And in this verse here, he’s talking about the connection between his conduct and their conduct and his writing about his conduct to them-as-church. Have I ever written or received a letter like it? What sort of relationship does it reveal? What sort of author? What sort of audience? What sort of mission? What would this look like now?
⛪❓ What is church? It was a church who received this letter. They were a group-as-formalised-group for whom the receipt of and application of this letter’s instruction was a coherent constitutive practice. Could we say that church is an organism, with its thinghood contingent on its practice of leadership reflected in its exchange of such letters? What is church? Am I a part of such a church? What letters guide us?
🤴❓ What is leadership? It was a church leader who wrote this letter. He wrote it to exercise leadership. He wrote it to make plain a pattern of church leadership for his readers to imitate. Could we say, preeminently that leadership is designing my life explicitly and explicatorily for imitation by a followership? And, to that explicit and explicating end, leaders write letters. And that the substance of that leadership can be assessed from the text, from the strength of text’s stated-purpose, from the clarity of its vision, the depth of its vulnerability, and from its making very plain and completely accountable the relationship between author and audience ~ the leader and the led?
[2] We need to talk about church leadership: COVID-19
🦠➡️⛪ Because now is the time that a what-is-church? discussion can be foregrounded: Covid broke the church. With the virus mitigation and legitimate personal anxieties and cautious government/church regulation preventing meetings, disrupting communication and altering the giving/receiving of funds.. the scattered church is asking in an unprecedented way, what is the purpose and value of this gathering and these connections? What good is a church that doesn’t classify itself as an emergency service in a crisis? Covid is not such a black swan that it should be exceptional to the church’s remit. Suffering happens, chaos is ever present, pandemics are not unprecedented - Covid is the natural reality that the church presumes to serve, if the church is properly calibrated to the real. Is it?
🦠➡️🧙 Because now is the time that a what-is-leadership? discussion can be foregrounded: Covid broke church leadership - certainly it has variously alienated them from the led and has shaken the platform for the leaders’ practice of leadership. Covid’s social and personal upheaval is providing the circumstances for reflection in the area of what leaders have prioritised and what role they have designed the church to play in our personal and national life. If Covid is a trial stress-testing the church, then it is keenly a test of the leaders: is their headship fit-for-purpose? When long-standing normalities are altered, when the train approaches a junction, when decisions have to be made - the need to respond appropriately and creatively reveals which leaders are sleeping at the wheel, which leaders take leadership seriously, which leaders’ theology of leadership is foul-weather-ready, which leaders’ practice of leadership has popular consent, active support, and a well-delegated subsidiary leadership suited to empowering the church-as-led to respond as one.)
⛪➡️🦠 Because now is the time that a what-is-church? discussion should be foregrounded: Solving Covid needs church. Covid as a health crisis needs the church to be an holistic healing presence at the human scale. Covid as a financial crisis needs the church to be the abundant agent of redistribution. Covid as a crisis of transparency/corruption in national government needs the church to be an audible coherent prophetic voice to speak truth to power. Covid as a mental health crisis needs the church to be a calming antidote to fear and loneliness. Covid as a crisis of national unity and ungovernability needs the church to be a hopeful, stabilising and community-organising force. Covid as a panic of short-termist expedient fixes needs the church as the longest-term stakeholder to be wisdom for the public debate. For example, the role of church mediating civic governance at the local level (1:21:00 and elsewhere: youtu.be/BySABTCoNZo?t=4831). Solving for Covid needs the church to know what church is, what church is for, what power the church has, what mandate the church has, and, what singular unity & granular diversity would make the church uniquely positioned to comfort a nation in crisis and to counsel a nation as it builds towards a new normal.
🧙➡️🦠 Because now is the time that a what-is-leadership? discussion should be foregrounded: Solving Covid needs church leadership. If and where mistakes have been made, and the eye has been off the ball, and churches and their leadership have been negligent to prepare for such a rainy day - then, especially now is the time to repent, to reform, to rejoin, and to recalibrate the mandate of leadership so that the body of the church is fit for purpose. Leading in the storm must be explicit, prophetic, responsive etc, but perhaps even more than that, as the acute circumstances of the pandemic subside, the question of what-is-leadership must be discussed, so that the church emerging can serve society as it ought.
[3] We need to talk about church leadership: letter-writing
❓ Interrogating media when the medium is the message and the message can only be mediated. What is the letteriness of a letter?
📨 Letter form Just now, during distancing, when the former forms for the dissemination of content are broken (eg. no in-person preaching, no in-person counselling, no in-person small groups etc) and when all improvised forms are so conspicuous in their unfamiliarity, so egregious in their compromise, and so self-consciously present-at-hand in their in-progress innovation (eg. asynchronous youtubes recorded without feedback, eye-contactless zoom meetings, awkward masked alfresco 2metre meetups..) if I am not talking about the form and structure and medium of leadership and so not critically reviewing the technological and human channels that leadership is (dys)functionally operating through then I am flying blind. We need to talk about letter writing.
✍️ Paul is a leader. Paul writes letters. We’re looking at 1Co4v5-6 and it’s context is in-letter. Paul writes letters. He writes letters as-leader to achieve leadership, to achieve a specific quality of leadership, to engender and empower a specific churchly quality of followership in his readership. Paul writes letters. The form itself is instructive. Do I write letters? Do I take that time to write? Do I invite response? Do I set a culture of exchanging thoughtful thoughts? Do I write letters? Do I write letters with my church-leader hat on ~ that is, as-leader, do I write pastoral letters, instructive and corrective, chastening and clarifying, leaderly missives? Do I write letters for posterity, letters to put-it-on-record, letters to be read aloud, letters to be read together, letters in black-and-white? How do I caption myself? How do I footnote my references? How do I serve the church with the particular affordances of the written form? The power of letters is massive. The opportunity in this distanced moment is unique.
📜 Paul writes letters. Costly, careful, at-distance, formal verbal expressions of concern, vulnerable descriptions of his own struggle, directive instructions for life and life-together, permanent personal public commendations of others.. It would be possible for a church leader to write such today, hand-written parchment to the dispersed church in Oval. Other mediums exist, with their different affordances, but there is no excuse for silence.
📜 In a media saturated age, with no shortage of books and commentaries, sermons and study guides, opinions and testimonies, I am, nevertheless struck by the form of Paul’s letter, in it’s decisive pastoral authority and implied relationship and clarity of purpose. I consider that, just as there is a cessationism as it applies to the Spirit and works of power, there’s also widespread cessationism as it applies to a mode of letter writing and works of authoritative writing. What church leaders write letters like this? What is their theology?
📜 In an unfinished thought exercise (below scrabbling for examples of formats), I’m wondering what sort of grid/axes would map the qualities of apostlic epistle-writing and what contemporary form offers similar affordances and a similar sort of engagement. Re: Permanence/Fixity/Framing? Cost/Distance/Distribution? Authority/Mandate/Personality? Public/Private? Poetry/Polish/Performance? Condensed-ness? Moral-teaching?
MEDIUM:
🧑🚀 Personal video/audio. This has become a feature in lockdown - a sort of captain’s log - Podcasts prepared the way for this intimate and immediate format. There are a range of ways it can be done effectively, and in tune with the niche of its audience. I admire particularly those who Declare the form. Declare as-leader what you’re doing, declare what we’re doing and not doing and declare why, frankly. And. Bespoke the form. Tailor a format to the circumstance, exploit the opportunity, grapple with distancing as distancing, forge a novel form to fit fitting content.
Grace has a sense of purpose, a call to commit, a conscious humble consideration of the limits of the form and the ambitions for alternative connecting. Bridgetown begins a season that has considered the value of short-form little-and-often which they have done relentlessly. St Marks energetic montage offers access to the home of a patriarch modelled on a radio-show format, and positively achieves to hospitably and literally give platform to voices from the congregation. A charming lofi shambles, warm, human, theologically light, tailored to unite a certain audience, produced on a shoestring, reflecting certain priorities and presuppositions in the pastor-flock relationship. Trent Vineyard illustrating video as an apostolic medium, the form of the ‘Vision Talk’ phenomenon combines teaching content with specific direction for the body of believers. FIEC - if just for the headshots illustrating the survey of sermoncasts.
[note to self about a process of podcast prepping] Sam Arnold offers an intelligent, clear primer in quite-high-production-value presentation. Albeit quite technical/technological, this presentation has the sort leading-about-leading quality I am finding in Paul - of trying to explicitly and missionally talk pragmatically about the practice of teaching teaching by example as a resource for the church churching. Dan Allender and team give thoughtful reflections about the process making a pastoral podcast re counselling. Sonal Chokshi at a16z talking about the content/edit/prioritisation process and tech stack. 11FS talking with Robinhood Snacks about the process of curating content, growing an audience, etc
📧 Newsletter. Intriguing more widely as a route to monetisation by other content producers. The contemporary Newsletter format is underexplored as a christian vehicle - as news, as teaching-content, as a condensed episodic portioned form of communication. There’d be a 2Ti4v3 danger in cultivating a paid-christian guru format. As with all these potentially infinitely leveraged platforms there's danger in the power. There’s a danger in accelerating the concentration of influence in a shrinking minority of mechanically amplified voices, a danger of the polarisation of opinions gaming the algorithm, a danger of further multiplying the wealth of platform capitalists and the gutting of the intermediate scale of humane community and wreaking needless havoc by the disenfranchisement of the long-tail of non-influencers. Nevertheless. I’d love to see great examples of apostolic newslettering. See substack on substack. See letter.wiki ~ a diablog, if you will. Interesting to ref ‘letters’ and to see the appeal of a debate/discourse format. See L’Abri using mailchimp. See threethings newsletter (not newsy per se).
💌 Prayer Letter. This has been digitised - ref PDFs in emails!! But I await a natively digitalised mode. PrayerMate app is poking this possibility. But it’s tricky. More could be done to critically engage the tradition of the Prayer Letter, and the way that it crystalises sent-ness and intimately forges co-labouring and makes weighty the exchange of words as being before God. PrayerMate’s efficiency risks abstracting the relationship of prayerer-and-prayeree, into an aggregated mechanical items for a rosary - this is not a criticism of PrayerMate. Part of this is UI design and the opportunity for it to be more dialogical, more dynamic, and less reducible to mere listing. And, part of this is getting authors to produce content that apprehends the medium’s possibility. Various thoughts from 2010 with this format from Singapore 1, 2, 3
🖥️ Blog. How would Paul write his epistles today? Maybe on a blog? Not sure. Blogs as a medium have developed a lazy web culture that deserves much of its pejorative association. Positively, a leader’s blog would and should provide a medium-to-long form of essay carrying transparency in a church’s public thinking that is different to the sermon form, and closer to the captain’s log or public service announcement. Blogs that have escaped the under-edited rantosphere of myopic literary form and terrible graphic design, have achieved to put accessible excellence into influential forums. I consider: Challies, PraxisLabs, AlastairAdversaria
🔖 Short-form Social media. Probably not, but it is still possible to structure missionality via quippy aphorisms and soundbites. Not sure who does this in a way that I could describe as Pauline. @EllisHPotter1 - haikus, paradoxes and makes-you-think. @JohnPiper - sets himself the challenge of verse+exegete inside 280chars. Relentless and an appropriate interrogation of the short-form, in the brain-teaser, little-and-often mode of scriptural saturation. @craiggroeschel - not infrequently profound, but the content is overwhelmed by the form of poppy and visual fridgemagnetery. The way this content is combined also with the life-of-the-pastor shows the risk of playing a personality within the influencer format as an attractive wealthy individual, and the challenge of not communicating a prosperity gospel by default. @Conaw pushing the envelope on what the twitter-thread format can carry, and what that hypertext and interactive form enables. See also in this convictingly rich category of thread compilers.. @vgr @fortelabs
↔️ Q&A, AMA and Curious Cat ~ curiouscat.me/zugzwanged - asynchronous q&a is an accessible format - preserves a high level of quality, a thoughtful and referenced approach to answering and leaving a record of FAQs as archive. The UI of curious cat is pretty opaque, but the ambition of a very simple structure offers affordances not replicated elsewhere exactly. Jordan Peterson prior to leaving patreon, the privilege of this access to the guru. Paul VanderKlay for the use of Discord’s audio equivalent of this interactivity
📮 Offline - thinking especially in a time of Covid, widely templated and imitated, the flyering of streets to create access to and coordination of Mutual Aid, has been a form of letter-writing unprecedented in my lifetime and offers a radically pragmatic indictment of christian tracts by comparison. Template
[4] We need to talk about church leadership: Content
So, write letters.
Write letters because we can and must do so in the circumstances of Covid.
Write letters because the medium of letter-writing is effective because the form is powerful and accessible.
Write letters because we-as-leaders have something that needs to be said. We have content that is looking for a form. We have a message that is looking for a medium. What is it?
🔠 Letter content. Yes, the content is Jesus. But the purpose of the letter is much narrower than that. It is specifically tasked to grow the church and catalyse is growth through equipping its leaders for the task. We should demand such explicit missionality in the missives of our leaders.
🔠 There must be content. If leaders can’t write letters like Paul’s in a time of Covid they never will. There is so much that needs to be said, such a grave future that needs to be interrogated, such uncertainty that needs to be clarified. And this is at a time when all connection is via words, because all communion is remote, all communication is online, conscious, conceptual, mediated and verbal. If helpful to use this lens, one could consider that all loving is via words-of-affirmation (as it were, so to speak..) (we have no means for touch, limited scope for gifts or acts-of-service at a distance, no permission to be colocated for quality-time) all connection is verbal via the media of Zoom, email and youtube - and so. much. content is being exported? So much content that if nothing apostolic is being articulated, it is not for lack of parcels being posted, it is because there is no leaderly content to fill the form. In other seasons one could legitimately claim a tacit, pre-verbal, eloquently embodied, balletically displayed discipleship modality, leading by using words only when I have to, but now, I have to, words are all I have.
💬 Beyond mere vocab? Defining “church” and defining “leadership” is important, but it risks being merely semantic. Defining leadership and exploring leadership-as-imitation is a project akin to distinguishing between teaching and preaching - there is a need to disambiguate the vocabulary, and so to crystallise high-goods and in a hierarchy of prioritisation. But it is not a project unaddled by pre-existing emotional baggage.
🤬 Beyond vexation? Defining “church” and defining “leadership” is important, but it risks subtly deriving the emotional force of its argument from a strength of historic grievance rather than from the strength of its attractive future. In writing this from a place of pain, I risk overstating the dichotomy. The below could be not more than is consignable to the junk drawer of there-must-be-more-to-church-than-this. But. I hope to develop, if only for myself, a more precise code/framework/toolkit of leadership. If “leading” 41, if “leading” the PJs, if persevering with St Marks and its “leadership”, then a non-trivial precision in the deliverables and felicity conditions of leadership is of supreme importance and huge value.
👨👦 Towards father-heart? Interpreting this chapter in the next few days up to 4v15 is about to become a stark father-heart cri de coeur. Everywhere every church exists it is statistically constituted of the unfatherly fatherless presuming to father the unfatherable. Post the pejorativisation of patriarchy - we are left with thin archetypal gruel for our concepts of leadership. My seeking to lead and to be led must entail an emotionally difficult unpacking of fathering-as-fathering. One cannot talk of theories-of-church and models-of-leadership, without healing that hurt. So surgery at St Marks. So intensive care at 41. I can do better. I can be as Paul. But, danger is everywhere.
[5] Leading about Leading - a paradigm?
“..I have applied all these things to myself.. ..for your benefit.. ..that you may learn by us..”
🆕 There is something in Paul’s teaching-about-Paul-teaching that has gripped my attention just now with a novel force. It suggests a paradigm of leadership which self-understands reproductively and self-replicates winsomely and, in all, it churches reciprocally to mutually and iteratively sanctify self-and-other recursively. If I can properly disambiguate and distinguish this as a leadership paradigm I may have some equipment to orient my own leadering, and have some precision to qualify the otherwise vague critique I make of subleaderly leaders.
Can we distinguish and so dichotomise:
Teaching good by being good
Commending imitation by crafting imitability, explicitly
I want to explore, if there are two paradigms, and if, in the light of the latter [2] which I find in Paul here, it is possible to (compassionately but absolutely) discredit the former [1] and map how/why we/I fall into the former [1] and how/why we/I might seek to be conformed to the latter [2]
😇 [5.1] vs being good
🙊 [5.2] vs being non-explicit
🤹 [5.3] vs being inimitable
😇 [5.1] Vs being good as leadership. It’s good to be good. But. It is not good enough to be good. It is necessary but it is gallingly and eggregiously not sufficient to be merely good. It is not enough to “lead” by tacit good example. If that example is not explained and not explicit, the ‘good example’ is mere arbitrary exertion of uncalibrated goodness, it may be commendable behaviour by a worker bee but it is not leadership and will be grossly negligent as such if it presumes to think of itself as leadership. This is the emerging implication in my mind. It feels a bit strong. Is there a caveat? How does merely-leading-by-example critically miss the mark? Does it? By how much? At what cost? And, what standard is this measured against? As with the reflections on being all-servant-and-no-steward, there is an obsequious Christianity, defensive in it’s uncourageous ‘goodness’. Paul’s call to Christians goes beyond goodness to specific and more controversial activity - and he issues this call as-leader.
🙊 [5.2] Vs inexplicit leadership. If I am ‘leading’ but not explicitly foregrounding and not explicitly explaining the modelling of a model of life and leadership as leadership - what then is left? Administration and advice, abstraction and management, riskless simulation and inhuman impersonality, the maintenance of the stability of the status quo and then death? Perhaps I hyperbolise. But. Is it reasonable to expect leaders to make plain the leadershipness of their leadership? And without that what is left? I have grown to hugely fear those leaders who occupy roles with only implicit contracts - the role of vague vicar perhaps being preeminent - but perhaps more widely, diluted fathering reflects the danger of listless leadering. Unframed leadership is not riskless and not victimless. With no tethering covenant between leader and led, no SLA, no MOU, no KPIs, one floats disparate and dissolute, an occasionalist family drifting along, drifting apart. Unresponsibility is a thin-veil-over and a recipe-for the tacit tyranny of default unaccountable egotism.
🤹 [5.3] Vs inimitable leadership. It is no small thing to be imitable. The leadership I’m finding in Paul is a [5.1] more-than-being-good, and is [5.2] necessarily-explicit-in-mandate and, crucially, it is imitable. I’ll go on further below to consider the difficulty of shaping your role positively for imitation, but first, consider the paradigm of leadership which is directly opposed to this, which must be overcome.
👑 Mt20v25’s lord-it-over-them is about non-servant leadership, also I get from its “over” an over-above-and-away-ness which conjures the spatiality of the executive-pay-gap, the chasm between the rulers and the ruled - the differential dividing those for whom a different set of rules apply. We operate substantially within a paradigm which esteems cultural leaders for the super-humanity of their prowess, power, privilege. We lionise the slick alterity of the Bezos/Kardashian stratosphere - the very mystique and allure of their inaccessibility capitivates us. We give adulation to geniuses, celebrities, influencers, and power-brokers precisely because they can’t be imitated. The halo effect of their ability to kick a football confers leadership, their wealth gives them authority ~ in this paradigm, leadership not a skill but a right, it is not a responsibility but a side-effect of privilege..
🏘️ This inimitability paradigm trickles down to the smallest levels. Inimitable: where we lazily consume a church whose spectacle rests on the talent of one individual. Inimitable: where we presume to pattern hope by modelling a community house whose function rests predominantly on the privilege of a mortgage-free site
These are not wrong as instances, but they cannot “lead” in a lasting way, because they cannot transfer. If 41 can’t be imitated, in whole, or worse, not even in part - it’s not completely without value, but it is ignorable as a mere artefact in the data, an outlier, an exceptional case, an accident of circumstance. If it is a mere derivative of privilege, it is not a challenge to the status quo, it is no help to the common cause, no pattern for a systemic alternative.
🏋️ There is no shame in talent, and no guilt in the gift of a certain opportunity, but our ecclesiology, as far as it should labour to reach out, must structure its core functionality around the universal applicability of spirit-empowered character, and secondarily employ exceptional talents and privileges. So, against inimitability, church leadership must foreground its weak-to-shame-the-strong qualities, and counter-intuitive Davidic-contra-Goliath qualities. The virality of Christianity consists in the slob-like-one-of-us accessibility of its leader, “..For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin..” Hb4v15
🗿 Inimitable leadership is disastrous. If left unexplained and unequipped, a leader will manufacture a Cargo Cult. Bizarre reproductions of the affects of mega-church, a superstition of style, inorganic stunting of churchmanship. Like Monsanto’s Terminator seeds - which perversely engineer single-use seeds through Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT) - which cause the second generation to be infertile. The model of leadership patterned after tech giants will create a precariat of dependents and paternalists - who know only how to multiply followers and subscribers, who like and share on social - but who are not resilient or creative to produce content.
🥾 It is not easy to pursue the display of possible+plausible+profitable imitability without deferring to a lowest-common-denominator mediocrity and subtly displaying defacto contempt for excellence. Navigating this tension is perhaps out-of-scope of this already too long meditation. Fundamentally this is about bootstrapping church growth - it doesn’t have to be sanctimonious.
[6] Beyond being a Good example, be an Explicit example
🎣 Good Example - Being exemplary is moral snapshot that might qualify an individual for leadership . Leaders should be measured by the goodness of their example ~ how nice they are as a person. Teach a man to fish.
👨🏫 Explicit Example - Being exemplary is a persistent ongoing orientation that is the essence of leadership. Leaders should be measured by contagiousness of their example ~ how far they are referenced as an influence. Teach a man to teach fishing
🎣 Paul is a good example: Good in deed. Qualifying as a leader. Justifying his salary. Being upstanding, and indeed exemplary. Good in word. Paul is writing this letter to the Corinthians, to advise, to counsel, to problem solve ~ good things.
👨🏫 Paul is an explicit example Paul is explicitly leading by explicitly talking about explicitly leading-by-example as an example. That is, he’s leading about leading. That is, the leadership of “leading by example” is achieved less in the performing of the example itself, but much more in the saying what the performance exemplifies such that the example can be followed as exemplary. That is, transparent explicating is what distinguishes incidental positive behaviours from catalytic actual productive leadering.
I am finding Paul’s explicit declarative intentional expression of his leadership-as-leadership deeply attractive perhaps because I am currently so furious at the unaccountability of those in positions of leadership to be explicit about the Service Level Agreement for their leadership-as-leadership, disgusted at their subsidised cowardice, mere busy-ness, gross negligence, arbitrary prioritisation, invulnerable presentation of banal privilege, and ungraded lack of urgency.
I am finding Paul’s explicit declarative intentional expression of his leadership-as-leadership deeply challenging because I know how very far I am short of this. I consider that for some extended time at 41 I have retreated entirely from leading-by-explicit-example. I have retreated from seeking to define a north star. I have retreated from seeking to live an imitable life. I have retreated from seeking to be visible in so attempting to do that imitability.
I know that being explicit about what my leadership involves is vulnerable
Vulnerable to being held to account by its own standard. Eg. If I am not consistent about going to the food bank - I can be called out according to the standard we have publicly agreed
Vulnerable to being questioned as a relevant standard. Eg. If my going to the foodbank is incoherent - I can be interrogated and so course-corrected in what I am doing qua-leadership.
📠 Paul is going to bang on about this imitation. His ministry is designed for imitation. How should I?
“..be imitators of me..” 1Co4v16
“..Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ..” 1Co11v1
“..Brothers, join in imitating me..” Ph3v17
“..What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me - practice these things..” Ph4v9
“..For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us, because we were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you. It was not because we do not have that right, but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate..” 2Th3v7-9
“..You, however, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness..” 2Ti3v10-11
“..Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity..” 1Ti4v12
“..be a model of good works..” Ti2v7
[7] TEMPLATE for Explicitly Imitable Leadership
Do it.
Tell them that you are doing it
Tell them How you are doing it - with what strength, by what tools, with what prep, in what tone, by what regulating principle?
Tell them Why you are doing it - from what cause, to what end, as part of what big-picture vision, wearing what hat, believing what benefits, overcoming what risks?
Tell them that you are telling them.
Tell them Meta-How you are telling them - by what medium, with what theory of church, in what language?
Tell them Meta-Why you are telling them - from what cause, to what end, as part of what big-picture vision, wearing what hat. Why do words matter? Why does explanation matter?
Commission them to do it.
[8] EXAMPLE of Explicitly Imitable Leadership
[Do it] Serve the poor by helping out at a foodbank.
[Say What] “Dear church, I am serving the poor by working at the foodbank one morning a week”
[How] “I have made a decision to set aside one morning a week, having devised a schedule that is sustainable, I have set aside space in the church which we share, having counted the cost and weighed other priorities, I have chosen this sacrifice over others as strategic and valuable, having spoken with God and with accountable elders, I have summoned the strength that God gives..”
[Why] “I have discerned the specificity of my calling, and the end to which I am called. I consider that long term and short term, these sacrifices will bring me joy and bring God glory. I consider this maximises the use of my gifts, maximises the surface area that I can expose people to the gospel, maximises the return on investment, most strategically uses my role and gift to achieve the highest good that I can conceive. I believe that doing this activity, in this way, will help me to grow in my character..”
[Say What you are saying] “Dear Church. Pay attention. I-as-church-leader am writing a letter to specifically you-as-church, about our life together serving the poor.”
[Meta-How] “I’m writing and using words that I think you will understand and receive as I mean them to be received. I am taking time to do the slow careful work of writing to explain my decisions to you. I could do other things with my valuable limited time, but I am choosing to prioritise giving you intimate access to my decision tree, and to give you a right of reply. I have been given the gift of this time, and a salary that you subsidise, and I have chosen intentionally to portion my time so that vulnerable access and accountable auditing is given a place in my schedule. This pattern of writing has not come easily. I have tried and failed variously to find a good language and format to use to convey this information about how to minister. Even this example of writing will have shortcomings, self-aggrandisements, and miscommunications. I use all technology available to make this access as wide and as deep as possible. I have chosen formats the increase clarity, nuance, dialogue, replication, simplicity. I have chosen to do some of this writing in public, and some of this in closed groups. I have selected an inner circle of leaders to work with closely, who each will chose a circle of further leaders to work with closely..”
[Meta-Why:] “I’m telling you this so that you will imitate this and find joy in others imitating you and their finding joy in others imitating them. I am doing this because I enjoy it, and this is the greatest cost:benefit way of maximising my joy in so doing. I am doing this because teaching-doing is an exponential gain, is a high accountability, is a rewarding challenge, makes it worth getting up in the morning. Because I am moved with compassion for the plight of the disadvantaged and want to communicate that in such a way that maximises compassionate action by the greatest ultimate number to the greatest ultimate effect. I am writing How to give you access to the blackbox of where my strength comes from, so that you know my frailty and the imperfect ways I do things. I am telling you Why so you can imitate critically from the basis of holistic motives and not mere parroting. Because it is my simplest understanding of right obedience to do the next right thing in front of me. Because I will make an answer to God, not only about how I have served the poor, but how I have lead and facilitated others in like obedience for their joy..”
[Commission to do+tell likewise] “So, go. do, and go tell and go tell others how and why they also get to join this cascade! This is what we do, because of who we-as-we are together.”
Be an explicit example.
Do everything with a skilful and intentional pedagogicality.
Use words.