Missional Leadership 3 -- Cultivating Leadership

The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World , is being used to by the Holy Spirit to reshape and recast my grasp on the nature of pastoral leadership. I did a quick read through the book a week ago and now I am doing the slow, reflective read. It has been very fruitful -- not just in the sense that it is a good book with good ideas (it is that), but in that the Holy Spirit is using it to speak into my life.

The central metaphor the author's use to describe missional leadership is cultivating leadership. This kind of leadership cultivates the life of God in a community the way a farmer cultivates a field of corn. A cultivating leader models and teaches the practices and processes that aid a church in discerning the life and voice of the Holy Spirit and following him into God's future.

In contrast is the command and control leader. This isn't necessarily a high powered executive type leader. It is simply the model that says vision and formation of a community comes out of the mind and the heart of the pastor and then the congregation carries those two things out. The book does not deny that a pastor has a leadership role and authority under God. The point is that he exercises his leadership with the end of cultivating what God is doing in his people. Kingdom work and kingdom fruit are not in the hands of the pastor. The pastor simply labors in the field in conjunction with what God is doing with the field.