Good decision makers make sure they are working on answering the right question. They know that answering the wrong question, even precisely, doesn’t accomplish anything; in fact, it keeps leaders and organizations tied up in counterproductive pursuits, with potentially disastrous results.
Pastor Ned finally realized that changing the worship style and moving the worship times at his church were the wrong problems for him to be working on. This realization came only after he had paid a terrible price personally in terms of the conflict generated by his new initiatives. He had endured months of criticism from church members who resisted the changes before they happened as he nurtured the hope that the new worship would draw many new faces into the church, making all the pain worthwhile. Trouble is, it didn’t happen. Now, four months into the new schedule and services, he was looking at the same faces – actually, fewer of those faces.
Ned finally came to grips with the real issue: the congregation’s lack of mission. The right question involved helping the church gain God’s heart for people, especially those who have yet to hear the gospel of God’s redemptive love. Absent this conviction, the church members just viewed the worship and schedule changes as a loss for them.
This beleaguered pastor is not alone. All over North America churches and church leaders are busy addressing the wrong questions. Answering them not only won’t address the critical issues facing them, it will, in fact, compound the wider church’s dilemma and hasten its slide into spiritual obsolescence in the emerging culture.
Given the significant collapse of the influence of the church in American culture, and given the fact that church attendance is holding up only because people are living longer, and given the signs of heightened spiritual awareness accompanied by a loss of affection for religious institutions, and given how God is working in other parts of the world where Pentecost is happening every hour, you might think that North American church leaders would be scrambling to deal with the real issues underlying these realities. Instead, many continue to deal only with presenting problems, fed by short-sighted hopes of making their church successful, and are thus working themselves into mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion in pursuit of answers to the wrong questions.
A list of these wrong questions, juxtaposed with the tough questions that church leaders should be addressing, points out how very different the leader’s agenda will be shaped, depending on the question he is addressing.
Wrong question: How do we “do church” better?
Tough question: How do we “be church” better? Or how do we deconvert from “churchianity” (institutional religion) to Christianity (the movement)?
Wrong question: How do we grow this church?
Tough question: How do we serve this community?
Wrong question: How do we develop ministers for the church?
Tough question: How do we develop missionaries to the culture?
Wrong question: How do we develop church members?
Tough question: How do we develop followers of Jesus?
Wrong question: How do we plan for the future we see?
Tough question: How do we prepare for the future God sees?
Wrong question: How do we develop leaders for church work?
Tough question: How do we develop leaders for the Christian movement?
The ability to ask the right question requires that spiritual leaders spend more time thinking beyond the presenting problems, peering under the hood, so to speak, to see the real issues. They must be willing to challenge the status quo and to be ruthless in their analysis of both the situation and the results. Great spiritual leaders are aided in this search by their constant discipline of learning. This is one area where breadth of knowledge becomes indispensable. For instance, a pastor savvy in transition issues understands why people are resistant to change, so he knows to provide emotional support to people, not just arguments to convince them of the necessity for change. A smart leader begins with people’s sense of loss, not their recalcitrance.
The requirement that spiritual leaders grasp the right question also pushes them toward God. The prayer life of great spiritual leaders is oftentimes centered on asking God to help them understand what is happening around them. Contrast this to a typical approach to prayer that informs God about what is going on and then asks for his help or intervention. Great spiritual leaders have God’s view of a situation. This enables them to partner with him in bringing about the future God desires. This powerful prayer life is not accidental. It requires a commitment and discipline on the part of the leader to listen in prayer, not just talk.
Excerpted from, Practicing Greatness: 7 Disciplines of Extraordinary Spiritual Leadersby Reggie McNeal (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2006). Posted with permission from Jossey-Bass/Wiley.
