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leadership vs. spiritual formation: where’s the both/and?
Last week while spending time at the North American Christian Convention I was able to make my way into a session on Spiritual Formation led by Dr. Neal Windham of Lincoln Christian College. A few of the statements that Dr. Windham made led me down a particular path of thought that juxtaposed our current emphasis on leadership with our lack of emphasis on spiritual formation as necessity.
I have had the opportunity throughout the past couple of years to spend some time at various conferences throughout the country focused specifically on being the church and bettering yourself as a leader. However, I have never found it odd that spiritual formation was never mentioned in the same breath as leadership until Dr. Windham said this:
Ministries can become small, shallow and confused when we neglect the doxological life.
In other words, leadership is important, vision is important, but without a leader who walks with God they are worthless.
It seems as if in our conferences and even in many of our churches we almost assume that spiritual formation is happening even though we do not have the necessary means of measuring or examining the inner life in accountable relationships. Leadership, it seems is all we’re focused on learning about and growing into.
There must be a radical transformation among the people and specifically the leadership of God’s church… yet, in our conventions and conferences the emphasis sits squarely upon the idea of leadership. It is great leaders we bring in to teach us and speak about leadership issues but we rarely, if ever, bring in a great person on spiritual formation to speak to the masses. I do wonder how many leaders, when looking underneath the mask, truly struggle and are unaware with what spiritual formation truly is and how to go about it.
As a church we need to recover a new attentiveness to the Other, a new understanding and emphasis on formation by the work of the Spirit not only in our people but perhaps more especially in our leaders.
I believe the emphasis on leadership has been extremely effective without it I’m not sure we’d see some of the amazing ministries that are on the landscape today. As a result, I’m not advocating we reduce the notion of leadership or reduce our emphasis on it. Rather, I believe what we need is to elevate the role of spiritual formation in our conversation and practice to the level or above where we currently hold leadership. It will be then and only then that the church will begin to move forward into a new realm of revival.
Leadership and spiritual formation is not an either/or issue… it’s both/and.
3 Responses to “leadership vs. spiritual formation: where’s the both/and?”
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great post. loved it.
Amen, brother.