Functioning v. leadership training

An old friend recently sent me the link to an article in Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal, “The Dirt on Organic.” The author, Brian Hofmeister, wrote of his experiences in starting and nurturing a small network of home-based organic churches. Only one of the three house churches survived (based on my reading that’s about average), but  with less vision and vitality than at the beginning. As for the problems, Hofmeister identified an insufficient number of leaders as the principle culprit. There were too many immature new believers to be trained and too few mature believers willing to do the work. And most of those who were capable eventually moved into “passive observation.” Which led Hofmeister to advocate the necessity of paid leadership for a church body of 30 to 40 members:

I estimate that a solid leader who is running outreach, discipleship, and leadership development the organic way is going to need 15 to 20 hours per week for a church of 30 to 40 people. That’s assuming there is another leader putting 25 to 40 weekly hours into training and networking.

First, I’ll acknowledge that I know nothing more about Hofmeister’s situation or experience than what he has shared in the article. And second, I’ll admit that this ignorance could make what I now write nothing more than hot air. But I’ll take the chance.

It seems to me that Hofmeister brought an institutional church mentality into an organic church setting. Not surprisingly, the result was the failure of the organic and the need to move to institutional models of leadership. Here’s where I think Hofmeister went astray: he misunderstood the role of leadership in an organic setting. Biblically, that role is clear — to equip the saints so that they (not their leaders) are able to build the body of Christ in love. It appears to me that Hofmeister saw his role as in-house professor of systematic theology, hermeneutics and  Bible survey. These are good things if the goal is well-educated church members. But what this approach will fail to accomplish is to equip the saints to function as the body of Christ when they are together.

What most believers are neither taught nor equipped to do is to function as gifted members of the body of Christ. The reason is that paid professional leaders do almost all the functioning when the body gathers for its most important time each week — the weekend worship service.  The primitive Pauline model of Christian community envisioned regular gatherings  of the body where every member contributed by means of a song, a teaching, a revelation or whatever spiritual gift God had given. Paul never called these gatherings “worship services” and he never taught that they should be planned and led by professionals set apart to do so. Neither should they be used as classrooms. Paul knew that if  these things happened, it would be the end of body ministry and most members of the church would become passive observers.

To keep this from happening individual members of the body must be equipped to function according to their giftedness and in response to the promptings of the Holy Spirit every time the body of Christ gathers. This equipping of the saints is not the same thing as our modern understanding of leadership training.

Contemporary institutional or traditional churches are big on leadership training. Why? Because the programs of such churches require an unending parade of leaders — members to lead the Sunday School, to run the nursery, to organize and schedule ushers, to chair committees, to oversee the sound system, to plan and organize the dinners, to lead the stewardship campaign this year — everything imaginable except equipping the body for building itself up in love.

It seems to me that it was this mindset that Brian Hofmeister brought into an organic church setting. He saw an immature body of believers, could not find enough leaders to address all the things he thought was important, and concluded that the only solution was part- or full-time paid leadership. The better approach would have been to patiently and painstakingly equip these immature believers to function out of the gifts Christ had given them. It really isn’t about leadership training; it’s about being equipped to function as a member of the body.

But I could be wrong.