Comments on: An Experiential Outlier: Five Pitfalls (part 2)

By: 10,000-hour church planting « the upstream collective blog

10,000-hour church planting « the upstream collective blog — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 23:39:55 +0000

[...] the work of those who have gone before, etc. Additionally, a number of factors may positively or negatively impact the correlation between results and [...]

By: Jeff

Jeff — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:36:39 +0000

Grady,
I’d give your last comment a “nail on the head” sticker. Not that you need my affirmation, but I totally agree with you.

By: Grady Bauer

Grady Bauer — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:56:35 +0000

Almost and Jeff,
I totally agree with you….to be a leader/supervisor of church planters you must have experience in it….but you may not have been the best at it. A good leader may have been a good church planter, but a good church planter doesn’t automatically make a good leader. The skill sets are radically different…but the experience is vital….you would never hire a coach for a baseball team who had never played.

By: adminsmile

adminsmile — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:53:51 +0000

Guys, thanks for your input. Lots to think about as a result of your contributions. Would be good to do this over burgers or pizza some time.

While I do not claim that this is a definitive list, it is, I believe, at least a healthy start to serve as an occasional checklist to determine if the end goal in this scenario–some level of mastery in missions in a particular culture that will lead to the result of God being glorified and people turning to Him–seems to be a future point on the road map based on the present course. Missionaries, missional communities, supervisors, etc. would do well to evaluate periodically. Are we on the right road based on our desired arrival point? (http://almostm.com/2009/07/confidently-un-oriented-part-1/)

While supervision seems to be the most common of themes in these comments, I will say that I agree that healthy, effective supervisors will have and/or will be pursuing experience in making disciples and planting churches. From my vantage point, respectable / respected leaders are ones that do this. By definition, leaders that don’t practice or have experience in the things they are promoting for others are not leaders. They may be called consultants or theorists…. It seems like James had something to say about this.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:25:33 +0000

One of the problems is when you get a guy who is not a good leader and has never tried church planting, so we don’t know if he’s any good at that or not.
I feel that a leader of an organization of cp’er ought to at least be involved in a start at some point. Context is so critical when one is dealing with strategic issues. If a leader has no experience in the context, he tends to make decisions based solely upon his previous experience (which may have nothing to do with the current context).

By: C. Holland

C. Holland — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:05:15 +0000

Great expansion on the last post. On the Moral/Spiritual Failure, I’ve seen a lot of missionaries that weren’t necessarily participating in “bad things”, yet they seemed more in love with the job of being a missionary than in love with Jesus. That alone will cause a collapse.

“Promote an ethnocentric worldview” In my Intercultural Communications class in college, we learned that every culture has a natural measure of ethnocentrism. However, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu asserted that the U.S. has promoted itself as the most advanced society, measuring all others against itself as the end goal of human history. Because most of my exposure has been with American missionaries (and I am American, too), I do believe our Americanism does sometimes interfere with cross-cultural mission work.

“it may not be a success to have a Bible study with a Cambodian guy and Chinese lady” I blogged on this in “When The World Comes To Your Field”. We struggle because many of the Christians here are immigrants, and unfortunately the nationals are very put off by “foreigners” in church.

@Grady: I’ve seen the same example when I worked in advertising. There were some stellar ad sales guys who were promoted to manager–and completely stunk as managers, yet they were still great sales guys. Excelling in one aspect does not equal success in a different field.

By: Grady Bauer

Grady Bauer — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 07:13:58 +0000

Can’t add to this, you said it well. I will say about supervisory roles….in both ministry and business we have a misconception about what makes a good supervisor/manager. In our world we take guys that are good church planters and put them in leadership. Not all church planters will make good leaders….and not all leaders are good church planters. If you look at pro coaches, some were good players but most were average at best….the required qualities are different. I think it’s important that the supervisor has a good idea what it takes to be a good church planter….but when they take the job as supervisor they need to start over with another 10000 hours focused on leadership/development/mentoring.