The Calling of Congregational Leadership

Being, Knowing, Doing Ministry

Larry L. McSwain

• Publisher: TCP Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780827205321
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Leading is a calling from God, but that doesn't mean it is easy. There are choices to be made about what your congregation believes, how your church organizes for effective ministry, and how your church serves the settings of which you are a part. The good news is that others have gone before you.

Author Larry L. McSwain's forty years of experience can help guide you through these choices. Rooted in research, The Calling of Congregational Leadership teaches a three-pronged approach to congregational leadership: being a good leader, the knowledge needed by the leader, and the managing of ministry leadership. By using this practical, holistic approach to leading congregations, McSwain shows you how to use your church's potential for conveying the power of God in the lives you touch.

The Calling of Congregational Leadership is for those who seek to enlarge the understanding of their leadership to make their communities of faith more vital and more reflective of the mission of God in the world.

PART 1: Being

The Identity of the Congregational Leader

Leadership flows from the heart. In the contemporary congregation leaders bear the responsibilities of providing vision, giving encouragement, and extending personal care. Leaders accomplish these responsibilities best when they have a clear understanding of self in relationship with congregants. Our identity grows within the self, combining the totality of genetic inheritance, life experience, and faith realities.

Leading is a calling from God. Chapter 1 guides the reader through understandings of the meaning of calling in the biblical narrative by emphasizing the multiple ways in which God is experienced as a calling Holy One. The chapter will explore both the transcendent and the immanent aspects of the meaning of calling, with illustrations from the biographies of the called in the biblical story.

To understand how one lives out the calling that is experienced, the leader must claim certain dimensions of identity. Chapter 2 explores the contributions of family systems and several measures of self-knowing to our identities. Among these measures are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Emergenetics®, and the Enneagram. These instruments can help a leader enlarge one’s personal awareness of primary strengths and weaknesses. Revealing one’s self to others is an essential quality of the mature leader. A guide in practicing revealing identity to others concludes this discussion of leadership identity.

Equally important in the quest for clarity in identity is an understanding of the several forms of intelligence that are a part of our natural styles of leading. Chapter 3 devotes attention to emotional and mystical intelligence. Primary for congregational leadership is awareness of the Spirit’s leadership, with an emphasis on practices of spiritual disciplines to enhance one’s growth in mystical intelligence.

The essence of leading lies in how you integrate these multiple aspects of identity. Chapter 4 discusses how knowing what kind of leader you are is a consequence of understanding your sense of calling, your multiple intelligences, your depth of awareness of the presence of God in life and ministry, and identification of the uniqueness of your gifts for ministry inspired by the Holy Spirit. Congregational leading is a consequence of being who you are as God’s gift, knowing the content of the congregation’s challenges, and shaping how you do the work of ministry based on the effectiveness of your interaction with all of the leaders of the congregation. Ministry leadership integrates the central themes of the book: being, knowing, and doing.

1

Calling

Your Mission here on Earth can be defined generally as follows:

To seek to stand hour by hour in the conscious presence of God, the One from whom your Mission is derived.

To do what you can, moment by moment, day by day, step by step, to make this world a better place, following the leading and guiding of God’s Spirit within you and around you.

To exercise that Talent which you particularly came to Earth to use—your greatest gift, which you most delight to use, in the place(s) or setting(s) which God has caused to appeal to you the most, and for those purposes which God most needs to have done in the world.

RICHARD BOLLES¹

Calling is essential to being in ministry, whether that ministry is leading a congregation or serving others—whatever the context. Every follower of Jesus Christ does so in response to an invitation to follow. Each of the four gospels identifies Jesus as an invitation giver, centered in the word “follow.” It means to walk behind, to walk alongside, to imitate, to respond to. The essence of calling is following Jesus:

• “Follow me.” (Mt. 8:22, 9:9; Mk. 2:14; Lk. 5:27, 18:22; Jn. 1:43; 12:26)
• “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” (Mt. 4:19; Mk. 1:17)
• “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross…and follow me” (Mt. 16:24; Mk. 8:34; Lk. 9:23).
• “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (Jn. 8:12).

I have a fascination with the biography of the called. That interest begins with the call stories of people in the biblical texts. Through the years of my teaching, I have often asked students to write summaries of their understandings of their callings to ministry. I asked each of the ten pastors interviewed in the Atlanta region in Spring 2010 about their sense of why they were ministers. Calling was crucial to their stories.

One reality becomes clear when you listen to people of Christian faith. No two believers describe their experience with God the same. Some would even say they are not called. They think calling is a special experience that is only for those few who serve the church as a job or profession.

The biblical stories of faith would suggest otherwise. All who choose to say “yes” to the invitation to follow Jesus Christ belong to the community of the called. How that response is made and what it means is different for each person.

Calling and leading go hand-in-hand, because faith and community belong together. Following Jesus is a calling to share his ministry with other followers. All who claim faithfulness to Jesus Christ are called to live out their whole lives as reflections of his life and teachings. This means you cannot have a congregation of Jesus followers unless they are called to engage in ministry in the world. Understanding calling as essential for all ministry is foundational to vital congregational life. What, therefore, does it mean for the call of God to so infuse one’s being that we can say one’s identity is “being called”?

Unique, Not Uniform

Vocation is an ancient religious concept, especially in the religions of Judaism and Christianity with their concepts of God as an active revealer of divine will in human experience. In a biblical sense, the concept of vocation is always communitarian, as it applies to a people. In summary:

Vocation [Lat. vocatio]. The biblical doctrine of God’s call to his people to become instruments of his purpose at work in history and to be the recipients of his grace and salvation. In the OT, vocation is the calling of Israel to be the people of God; and in the NT, the doctrine refers to the calling of men [people] to follow Christ, to become incorporated in the fellowship of the church, and to share in the Christian hope. Strictly speaking, these biblical ideas are quite different from the modern understanding of vocation as a job, position, or profession.²

H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic description of the meaning of calling includes four dimensions. The universal call is the call to be a Christian, the call to follow Christ in all dimensions of one’s life—the calling to service, whatever may be the form of work one does. One may receive the secret call or that inward feeling of God’s invitation to the work of ministry as service to others. The providential call includes the circumstances of guidance and awareness of talents one has—the sense that one is endowed with the gifts for leadership and ministry and chooses to exercise them through the church. Finally, the church issues the ecclesiastical call as a congregation/denomination recognizes people as gifted for ministry and eventually ordains and/or employs them for a particular understanding of ministry leadership.³

Can you imagine the transformation in your congregation if each participant were aware of a calling in his or her life to serve as a follower of Jesus? For many, faith is a verbal acknowledgment of belief without an accompanying commitment that such faith makes a difference in how one serves. R. Paul Stevens emphasizes the call of the laity in his thoughtful emphasis on the “universal” call. He identifies the call of Christ to become a disciple; the providential inheritance of family, education, personality, and opportunities; the gifts of the Holy Spirit as a charismatic call; and the heart call of inner desire for service all as dimensions of the call to “everyone” who claims Christ as Savior.⁴

You may understand the experience of calling in two essential ways. The first view may be best identified as the traditional Christian understanding of calling as a clear encounter with God. Calling comes from beyond the self in this view. James Fowler describes it as a response a person makes of “total self to the address of God and to the calling to partnership.”⁵

Some of us have experienced dramatic encounters with God that defy explanation. Like ancient patriarchs, prophets, priests, and missionaries, we live with an experiential reality of calling rooted in the mystery of a very personal encounter with the holiness of God. Congregations in the Free Church tradition tend to emphasize this view of calling, especially for their clergy. Calling is transcendent.

Calling from Beyond

You must explore the biblical view of calling as beyond the self to understand fully this concept. When one reads the accounts of key leaders called in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, an interesting congruence emerges. The same elements tend to appear in the biographies of the called. These include summons, identity, community, and mission.

The Call of Abram. Abram is the prototypical individual of calling in the biblical story. God initiates a covenant with him. Abram responds positively and becomes the father of a nation. The story of the people of faith begins. “Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing’” (Gen. 12:1–2). We have no more content than that Yahweh directs him without specific detail. Abram becomes a wanderer toward a land of promise and with the implication he will recognize this land when he sees it. The essential element of the call is submission to the Divine Will accomplished by movement toward a mission. Abram, with his wife Sarai, are to become parents of a people in spite of biological conditions that indicate such a mission is impossible.

The details of the story are fascinating—Abram and Sarai leave the security of their homeland and spend years in search of the goal of this pilgrimage, with wanderings in the lands of Sodom and Egypt before agreeing on a settlement with Lot. Abram fathers Ishmael with the slave Hagar, and sends the mother and child away. Eventually, he and Sarai fulfill their destiny with the birth of Isaac.

The call transforms Abram and Sarai. Their identities are rooted in obedience to the One who summons. Abram’s identity (Hebrew for “the Father exalts”) changes to Abraham (Hebrew for “father of a multitude”). Sarai’s identity becomes Sarah, meaning “princess.” All of the multitude born of this family belong to their calling. Abraham and Sarah are claimed as parents by both the people of the Hebrew covenant and the people of the Christian covenant (Gen. 17:4–5; Heb. 11:8–22). They are the parents of all who through faith follow God, not just those who are genetic children.

The Call of Moses: a prototype of transcendence. The call of Moses incorporates all of the elements of the biblical concept of calling as transcendence. First comes the Holy encounter. “God called to him out of the bush” (Ex. 3:4). The dialogue that follows covers each of the four elements suggested above—summons, identity, community, and mission. Most significant is the personal nature of the encounter between Yahweh and Moses. The mysterious caller identifies with the heritage of Abraham, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex. 3:6). When the purpose of the encounter is revealed, Moses asks the name of the One with whom he was speaking. “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex. 3:14). The mysterious, indescribable, otherness of the Divine (YHWH) is made clear. No longer would God be identified with the namable aspects of his character el, but this one who calls is unnamable mystery. Consequently, no one will ever create a total description of one’s encounter with a call from beyond; it defies understanding. The mysterious calling is grace, pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Foreword
• Foreword by George W. Bullard
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Being: The Identity of the Leader
• Part II Knowing: The Content of the Leader’s Repertoire
• Part III Doing: The Actions of Leading
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Notes
• Bibliography