I am at the annual conference for the Pastoral Leadership Institute (PLI). PLI is a virtual campus for teaching, equipping, inspiring, and training pastors for missional leadership. One key aspect of the PLI program is also the inclusion through the partner program of the pastors’ wives along side their husbands in much of the core curriculum. Diane serves as director of the partner ministry program and does a great job of that. One of the benefits of her service in this capacity is my involvement in the program as co-presenter with her, as well as a presentation on how we are applying these missional principles to the local church at St. John. I also serve as conference chaplain.
Though no one has called into question my involvement as PLI presenter and chaplain, or involvement in other activities outside of St. John, when I received this recent blog post from Todd Hiestand, I immediately thought about the reality of my presence (along with our Associate Pastor, Stephen DeMik and Natalie, his wife – and Diane) at the PLI conference this weekend. The benefits to us of Pastor DeMik’s involvement in PLI is fairly obvious; he will be further equipped for pastoral/missional leadership. Diane’s presence there is simply part of her job. But my involvement definitely falls under the category of, asking:
“How is the Kingdom being impacted because our leaders are spending their time that way?” Measurement needs to change from “what we get” to “what we give”.
This is a good insight, I believe, and I wanted to offer this food for thought. Maybe it applies to you, or your church leaders’ involvement in things outside of the normal ebb and flow of congregational life.
| ★ The Permanent Revolution & Measuring ImpactPosted: 16 Apr 2012 07:25 AM PDT
A thought came to me today while reading The Permanent Revolution and it was too long for a tweet. So I offer you my first blog post in a long, long time. As churches, we have to stop asking the question of “What do we get out of it” and begin asking “How is what we are doing impacting the kingdom”. Leaders do this all the time. When we talk about our budgets, our leadership time, our “investments” one of the first things we ask is “What does this do for us?” We might not ask it out right, just like that, but we ask it. The Well‘s involvement in the Ecclesia Network is a good example. Early one we framed our involvement in Ecclesia as a network that we got something out of being part of it – and we do. But we had confusion as to why we were joining the network because frankly, its not a denomination that funnels lots of cash our way. But, recently we’ve been reframing the way we talk about our involvement in Ecclesia. We’ve moved from “what do we get from being part of Ecclesia” to “What investment are we able to make in the kingdom because we are part of Ecclesia.” The answer there is exciting: We get to be part of planting local churches all across the country that are reaching people with the hope of the gospel. We do the same with leadership do we not? When our paid leaders are spending too much time outside of “our church” (usually with other area churches) we begin asking, “what do we get from them spending their time like that?” Instead, don’t we need to be asking, “How is the Kingdom being impacted because our leaders are spending their time that way?” Measurement needs to change from “what we get” to “what we give”. This isn’t radical. But it is. |
David Bahn - Reflections 
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