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  • Sam Rushton 10:25 am on February 8, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    A moment of revelation on Monday while chatting with an incumbent of a church in the diocese and his about-to-expand-significantly ministry team. We were talking about the support that would be required from the incumbent for the 4 new ministers plus another in training as their ministry was developing.

    As most leaders will acknowledge, a really key aspect of maintaining direction and momentum of change is the ongoing dialogue between the overall leader and the team which makes up the leadership structure. And it is a dialogue – the leader engages in a conversation with the leadership team and through that debate and exchange of ideas and hopes and fears, a direction emerges and the team moves as one with its leader. Depending on the relative strength of the personalities and skills on either side of the dialogue, the team may move more in the direction that the leader originally envisioned or maybe in a slightly different direction but hopefully that process of communication creates some concensus and shared understanding.

    Consider now the difficulites faced by many of our incumbents who, instead of having one leadership team, have inadvertently created (or inherited) three: their ‘Leadership Team’ often a group of six people who lead the areas of interest of the church (worship, mission, buildings, small groups etc); the PCC, who have legal responsibility for all aspects of church life; and the ministry team, a group of people whose roles are increasingly moving beyond ‘preaching and leading worship’ into leadership of many aspects of church life. The degree of overlap between these three leadership groups varies enormously, church by church. In some, for example, lay ministers are discouraged from being part of the PCC and the leaders of the various ‘Leadership Teams’ may or may not be on the PCC. In some places the only person who has a role in each of these three teams is the Incumbent.

    Which brings us to the moment of revelation. Into my head popped a picture of that ancient torture where a person’s limbs are each strapped to a different team of horses. Each team is then whipped and sets off in a different direction – the resulting carnage gives a whole new potency to the image of ‘managing tension’. Isn’t this what many of our incumbents end up doing? Trying to hold together three different teams, all of whom have a slightly different idea of the direction that the church should be going, each of whom feels aggrieved when they are not ‘in the loop’ of a decision made in another leadership team in the church. And all of the tension between the different leadership groups has only one way to go – straight through the person in the middle trying to hold it all together. Thought about this way, is there any wonder many of our incumbents are feeling torn limb from limb half the time?

    The answer is not an easy one – how to re-organise the reporting and accountability structures, the dialogue groups, so that the flow of tension is managed better. But maybe this metaphor gives us something to play with – is it possible to map the ‘tension flows’ in your church to see who is bearing the brunt of it all?

     

  • Sam Rushton 10:56 am on January 24, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    I am becoming more convinced that ‘leadership’ is the combination of 3 things: a disatisfaction with the ‘status quo’ (either seeing what is wrong with today or what could be better or just ‘what needs to be done’) plus some idea of how to fix it / improve it plus the courage to do it. Everything else is about developing the skills to be able to deliver change and the identification of the values and beliefs which create the framework for action. A lot of books are written about these latter two things (and they are really important to get right) but without those 3 essential starting conditions, it doesn’t go anywhere.

    The good thing about this simple model of leadership is that it applies to very simple personal situations as well as large corporate leadership. A great example of the former was on the TV on Sunday evening: Miranda Hart as ‘Chummy’ delivering a breech baby in ‘Call the Midwife’. (I probably need to say now that this may be a ‘leadership training video’ which is only suitable for women…I understand that many men are struggling to watch this programme without feeling mildly nauseous).

    Chummy is a somewhat clumsy, new midwide who arrives to find that her first solo delivery is a difficult breech birth, something she’s seen done once but has never done herself. Having identified what the problem is, what does she do?
    1. She steps out of the room for a moment and she prays. She knows she can’t do this in her own strength and we see her gather strength from God.
    2. She arranges Plan B, trusting a young lad who we know has been a bit of a pest to her in the earlier scenes to go and ring the more experienced midwife to come and help. We see later how showing this trust in the young lad creates a powerful bond between them, building him up.
    3. She returns to the mother calm and outwardly confident that she knows what she is doing. But she also makes it clear that this is a team effort between her and the mother. Everything is shared, every step along the way explained clearly and simply.
    4. When the mother says “I can’t” to changing position on the bed, Chummy immediately empathises but insists ‘this is how it has to be done.’ Lovingly yet authoritatively, she sets out what must happen next.
    5. Towards the end of the birth, the doctor and the experienced midwife arrive. Having created a ‘safe space’ in which she and the mother are working together on this most dangerous part of the procedure, Chummy insists that they stay quiet and out of the way so she can finish the job. Standing up to authority to protect those who have a lot invested in the process already underway can be a key aspect of leadership.

    Some might argue that this analysis is a bit simplistic as a training exercise in leadership but I found it really helpful in thinking through what I believe to be important in delivering any change initiative. We can see good (and bad) leadership modelled for us wherever we look if we choose to spend a moment in reflection.

     

  • Sam Rushton 11:27 am on January 10, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    Being both ‘DDO’ (ie responsible for developing vocations to ordained ministry) and ‘Warden of Readers (responsible for overseeing the training and work of our Licensed Lay Ministers) can be pretty stretching, especially at his time of year when I have a mountain of ‘Sponsoring Papers’ to complete for those about to go off for discernment by the national church – in essence writing a 6-7 page essay on each candidate entitled ‘why I think x would be a jolly good priest’. (I’m supposed to be writing one now which is why I’m doing this blog …honestly, I’m worse than my 14 year old for not doing my homework until the last moment!)

    But it isn’t just the volume of work that can be stretching. Recently Bishop Lee asked me ‘Can you honestly say that you feel as committed to developing lay ministry as to ordained ministry?’ And the answer is ‘yes, I absolutely can.’ I know that sometimes some of our ministers think that we raise one form of ministry up at the expense of the other – the Diocese’s recent strong encouragement of lay ministers has meant that some ordained collegues feel on the back foot. Equally, the national church’s lack of encouragement for lay ministry and the relatively little we invest in training and oversight of lay ministry compared to ordained ministry can feel like a bit of a damp handshake for our lay ministers. Often these feelings come about because we are trying to spread our limited resources too thinly and so everyone sometimes gets less attention than they deserve.

    Currently we’re advertising for a new colleague to come and join us to help us continue the development of our lay training and discipleship across the diocese. The new ‘Exploring Christianity’ course has proved a very popular discipleship course for the 100+ people currently doing the course and we now need to consolidate this development by creating a new ‘vocational course’ for those wanting to take their learning further and develop some practical ministry and leadership gifts so that they can use their new learning in an effective way in their churches. We also want to expand the range of vocational courses we are able to point people toward as they seek God’s call on their lives: spiritual direction, evangelism, worship leading, pastoral care etc. Our new colleague will be able to focus on this exciting new area of growth and really make change happen across the diocese.

    By far the best thing about my job is helping someone to become the person that God has called them to be, to be able to use the gifts that he has given in 24-7 worship and in the service of the church and the communities in which they live and work. Our new colleague will have the opportunity to share that kind of vision for people and for God’s Kingdom. It’s an amazing opportunity and a joy to work with people who are so brimming over with love for God that they want to give up time and effort to learn how to serve him better – I can’t recommend it enough.

    Okay there might be a bit of paperwork involved ….. which reminds me of what I should be doing at this moment [sigh....] Maybe time for a little chocolate biscuit just to keep me going?

     

  • Sam Rushton 6:34 pm on December 22, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Being a good listener is a key skill for those in ministry. One of the observations often made to me by those thinking about ordination is that long before they are ordained, those who have opened themselves to that possibility find that people begin talking to them in a way they never have before, showing great vulnerability and revealing more about themselves than they usually do. It is certainly my experience that people will share things with me that they hesitate to talk to anyone else about.

    Why is this? I have a hypothesis that as we seek to grow closer to God through engaging in ministering to others or through ordination, then we become more like him. And God is infinitely interested in us as human beings. He is the Great Listener, open to hearing the deepest secrets of our hearts and wonderfully understanding of our often turbulent emotions. There is nothing more attractive to us as human beings than someone who is interested in us and understands us and so, as we grow in the image of God, then we become better listeners and people respond to that.

    I startled the postman yesterday. It was a thoroughly miserable day and he looked wet and cold and totally fed up. All I did was ask him how he was but there must have been something genuine about the way I asked because just for a moment there was a real human connection between us. He thanked me for my concern before hurrying away to finish his round in the rain. I hope that brief connection between two human souls blessed him just a little.

     

  • Sam Rushton 3:05 pm on November 18, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Outrageous generosity is deeply attractive and compellingly irresistable. Listening to Chris Evans this week has left me each morning with a huge smile on my face as he has overseen the auction of various hospitality packages in aid of Children in Need. His enthusiasm is infectious and delightful – it makes you want to give and give generously.

    But I think what makes it so special is that there is nothing false in his enthusiasm and it is driven by his own spirit of generosity and hospitality. He never mentions it but if you think about many of the things he is auctioning, his giving is considerable – the cost to him of hosting the ‘Dine and Disco’, a slap-up feast for 100 diners at his own pub must cost him personally a 5 figure sum at least. And he obviously loves to give it away.

    This outrageous generosity encourages others to give too. New aspects to each of the ‘special days’ he was auctioning – helicopter flights, a give-away Ferrari – kept being offered through the week. The feel-good factor just keeps bubbling up – generosity breeds generosity.

    This is a really important lesson for leaders. Your spirit will infect those you are leading, for good or ill. If you are generous, loving, peaceful, hopeful, forgiving, then those who follow you will begin to catch that spirit too. And if you are cynical, disappointed, bitter, beaten, then those will be the characteristics that are shown by those you lead. And it doesn’t matter what you say in your sermons, how stirring your pep talks are, how carefully crafted your business plans – people will do as you do, feel as you feel. This is an awesome responsibility as a leader and, as the ordination service puts rather well, one which you cannot bear in your own strength.

    Which is why the spirituality of Christian leadership is so important and needs feeding and encouraging, and why all leaders must be attentive to their own emotional health. If those you lead seem downbeat and leaden, maybe you need to look carefully in the mirror to find out if the reason why lies there.

     

  • Sam Rushton 3:21 pm on November 15, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    If consistently high quality worship is top of your shopping list in choosing a new church, you would do well to follow the advice given to me by my dear old grandad. ‘If you’re looking for a good chinese restaurant to eat in’ he said, ‘look for one with chinese people eating in it.’ Wise words from a good judge of egg fried rice.

    In the same way, if you are looking for a church with good worship, look to see how many retired or off-duty clergy there are in the congregation. (Westbury on Trym always seems to have 4 or 5, the cathedral is another favourite haunt…) It may not always be the liveliest worship but it will be consistently high quality. Clergy are notoriously bad at sitting through other people’s services. It must be a bit like being a theatre producer or an actor – one is always looking at the ‘how’ rather than participating fully in the act of worship itself. Maybe it’s just me, but I do often come out of a service thinking ‘well, I wouldn’t have done it like that…’

    So finding a service leader / preacher who allows you to switch off, to not worry about what’s coming next, is a joy. (Thank you Sally for my favourite refuge…) Good liturgy, well delivered, is a gift and a treasure for the church, a difficult feat to bring off week after week, to be prized highly.

    Which brings me to my nomination for the best modern day liturgist. A slightly unusual choice but I think you would go a very long way to beat Chris Evans, the breakfast show host on Radio 2. Listen to the way he combines order and repetition with freshness and verve every morning. He has used many of the same jingles for the 4 years that he has been doing the show and they are not yet becoming ‘stale’; indeed they provide a firm backbone, a comforting solidity for the flights of fancy in between. You can anticipate the smile that you know will come when George does his thing every Friday morning just after 8. Brilliant. Listen for 4 weeks on the trot to get the full benefit.

     

  • Sam Rushton 4:39 pm on November 1, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Reconciled irony.

    At the recent DDO Consultation we were thinking primarily about the importance of ‘Personality and Character’ in discerning a call to ordained ministry. One of the speakers was Revd Chris MacKenna, Director of the St Marylebone Healing and Counselling Centre who is a psychotherapist and priest working in London. Amongst other things, he spoke about the need for ‘reconciled irony’ as a key skill for maintaining a healthy and fruitful ministry. ++Rowan Williams has spoken on this subject in the past and I have to say that I’ve never quite grasped the idea until now, thanks to Chris. The following is an excerpt from his talk:

    ‘The reconciled ironist recognises that the roles we occupy are contingent – they are not the final truth – yet loves and inhabits those roles. The reconciled ironist is able to settle for provisionality because God’s judgement alone can end the story. Meanwhile, the reconciled ironist lives faithfully where she or he is set. ……[For ordained ministry] five qualities came spontaneously to mind. They were,
    i. The capacity to sustain an authentic spiritual life (that is, relationship with God) while anchored in – and representing – a disfunctional organisation.
    ii. The ability genuinely to put oneself in another person’s shoes.
    iii. The ability to hold to a course of action while weathering criticism; yet still to be capable of taking new information on board and modifying one’s plans accordingly.
    iv. A sufficiently stable sense of self, which will not be unhinged by conflicting, and sometimes very powerful transferences, projected onto one.
    v. An ability to relate warmly and fluently to adults and children of both sexes, while maintaining appropriate boundaries and confidences.’

    I think there is something really important here for leadership generally and Christian leadership in particular. We, as Christians, ought to be good at reconciled irony – after all we live in the ‘now and not yet’ of salvation, forgiven yet sinning. It has always seemed to me that the ability to hold two completely opposite ideas in one’s head at the same time is an important skill in leadership. I think I may now have found a clever term for it: reconciled irony!

     

  • Sam Rushton 10:16 am on September 24, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Courage comes in many shapes and sizes and that is especially true of the kind of courage needed for leadership.

    Firstly, there is the courage needed to start something new, to separate oneself from the pack and say ‘not that way, but this way – follow me’. This kind of courage often comes with a kind of wild exhiliration, a feeling of stepping out into the unknown. It’s scary but it is also exciting and life-giving.

    The second kind of courage is that required to keep stepping up to the plate day after day, seeing something through even though it is going through a really tough time. ‘If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs…’ This kind of courage is the kind that causes one to dig deep into one’s reserves of self-confidence and self-belief – or into one’s faith in a God of hope and of presence in the face of adversity. It is the kind of courage which enables a child to keep going to school day after day despite the bullies, a manager to keep standing up for what he believes to be true in the face of sneers and backbiting, which enables a minister to pitch up and preach to an increasingly empty church every Sunday. It is a courage which isn’t wild and exciting but deep and character-forming.

    And then there is the courage which is required to face up to the end of something important. to face honestly the reality of dying, and then to oversee the end with compassion and dignity. All things come to an end – projects, careers, churches, lives – the writer of Ecclesiastes knew this truth more than 2,000 years ago and it is still true today. The true leader is the one who sees the inevitability of the end and stays with that truth until it is over, managing the end well. There is something deeply moving about being the one who waits until all the people have found a new safe home, been compassionately ushered into the next thing and then stays just for a moment to turn out the lights…..

    It takes immense courage to do all of this well. The most common command in the whole of the Bible is ‘Do not be afraid.’ And often with the rider ‘the Lord is with you.’ With Him there is nothing to fear and enough strength to do what must be done, today, tomorrow and out into the future.

     

  • Derek Chedzey 4:56 pm on September 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Failure or success 

    I didn’t think I would ever find myself quoting Jason Donovan as the former star of Neighbours and West End star doesn’t usually spring to mind when thinking about leadership.  Yet I heard him recently say this adage.

    ” Fail to prepare then prepare to fail!”

    So often in our leadership of churches and work based projects that’s exactly what we fail to do and then still expect God to bless our activity.

    I was reminded of this important leadership skill at the recent Global Leadership Summit when we were reminded that preparation is often the key to seeing God act.  Just read 2 Kings 3:9-20.  If we want to see God at work through our leadership then we need to dig some ditches and prepare the ground.

    So remember the next time you have a key leadership decision that if you fail to prepare then you are simply preparing to fail.

     

  • Sam Rushton 11:31 am on September 5, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    An interesting observation on leadership from Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali in a piece written on the Sky sports website. He thinks that Sebastian Vettel does not yet have the same leadership skills as Fernando Alonso or Michael Schumacher, despite being way ahead of them in F1 points this year so far.

    According to Sky, Domenicali told German newspaper Bild: “Really, there are only two (leaders) and they are Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher. I see no others, Vettel is still not a leader. He is on the way there but he is still not as far as Michael and Fernando. He is simply too young and still has to gain experience…..Look at Michael and Fernando. I see many parallels. Both are fighting like lions to get their team to the front. They take care of details that others don’t notice. And of course people listen to them because they have a lot of experience. Sebastian is close but right now there are only two.”

    I like this idea of leadership: people listen to you because you have experience worth listening to; you ‘fight like a lion’ for your team; and you pay attention to the detail most people miss. The fact that Vettel is leading the championship by so much this year I suspect means that someone else in his team has these gifts. Despite the fact that Vettel appears to be in a leadership role, it sounds like the real leader is someone behind the scenes making it all happen. It isn’t always the guy on the stage that leads; the best teams are often led by the lion in the wings.

     

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