Planning, planting and sustaining a new church require an assortment and blending of skills and leadership agility to gain and maintain traction. I propose a connectional leadership model as a comprehensive way to “get” the leadership moves and mindset needed to plant and sustain a new church.
One of the most common behavioral types relates to individualized effort and motivation. Within your ministry team, each member offers certain strengths, skills, and intrinsic motivations. Recognizing, affirming, and blending individual assets enables a team to function with greater effectiveness. When you fail to involve people meaningfully, it inevitably leads to low-level ownership and personal investment. Based on my new church observations and experience, I suggest that the individualistic styles of leadership include what I would call intrinsic, performance, and power modes.
The intrinsic or self-motivating expression illustrates church leadership from the “inside out”. Some people respond to tasks because they view the objective as challenging and important. When you cast and re-cast a compelling vision, it ignites people to apply imagination and effort toward that vision. The performing-oriented expression reflects an individual’s natural passion for being his or her best in a given function on the team. The power style offers the picture of an individual who prefers operating as a dominant director. If you’re a dominant director, then you readily embrace challenges, gladly assume authority, and thrive on problem-solving.
I’ll bet you can readily identify servants in the typical new church who are dominantly individualistic in their leadership style – right? How does it help you as a leader by being sensitive to such differences and nuances? Next month, I’ll invite us to explore what I would term the instrumental leadership style as we continuing thinking about the connectional leadership model.
