Theology of Credible Leadership - Lesson 17

Dr. John Johnson
Theology of Credible Leadership
Missional and Visionary Tasks
Lesson Transcription

So a lot of what we've been discussing so far in this course is really foundational. Talking about what defines a leader. We're asking the question, are leaders really necessary? We're, we're raising the question, how does one become a leader? We're asking and seeking to answer the question, how do leaders, attain credibility? These are all essential, and they're really important.   

But now we turn to more of the question of, so what does it leaders actually do? That is, What am I tasked to do as, as a leader? And, and so when I think of this question, and over the years as I've led, and I've read a lot on leadership, again, synthesizing it down, it seems you can reduce it to four essential tasks that leaders have to do.   

That is, this is what a leader must embrace. And whether you are a secular leader or a spiritual leader, I don't think it makes any difference. These tasks are what every leader must do, whether you're in a political or corporate or spiritual, religious, athletic military realm. These are all essential.   

And the first task this, we'll call this the missional task. The missional task, is answering this really core question. And that question is, why, why are we here? A leader is tasked when he begins a ministry or begins his leadership wherever context he's in to somehow, early on, bring the people together and say, do we know why we're here?   

Do we know our purpose? Do we understand our mission? It sounds really foundational, and basic, doesn't it? But here's a question that sometimes haunts me. I, I wonder, let's say speaking of the church, an average church, if an outsider walked in and said, why are you here?   

I wonder how many of my people could answer that question. Like, what is your purpose? I can imagine someone saying like, our purpose, look, I just come here every Sund. It’s got to be obviously more than that. If that's the best people can answer, then there has been a certain leadership failure because people have to know why we're here.   

As I am working with the church that is an older church that is trying to recover and restore and find its way into the future, this is where I'm starting. I am saying to the leaders, Okay, guys, what's our mission? Are we clear? Do we know why we're here? What our task is? As I have led churches, it's one of the first questions I always ask, are we clear?   

Do we understand our mandate? The great thing about, at least in the church realm, we don't have to invent it or create it. It's already been mandated. We just have to discover it. God's already, in my judgment, made clear what the church's mission is. And I, I generally break it down into four things. A church is called to pursue truth, and one could add here, a discipleship, maturity, A Growth, a church's mission.   

Secondly is to respond to truth. I'll get this right here, which can also be called worship.   

When I think of worship and think of a theology of worship, worship is response to revelation. That's its most basic definition. So truth is delivered, truth is declared, and people respond to truth by worshiping God. So a church's mission is to engage in truth, to teach truth, and then guide people to, to respond to that in worship, there is a third, part of the purpose of a church, and that's to love one another.   

That is, the church is called to form a community. Church is called to care. It's part of the essential mission, of the church.   

And then the final mission is to reach the lost. So when we think about the mission of the church in a very simplistic way, it's the church that is gathered to then scatter. So it sort of goes something like this. Gather, scatter. We gather to love, we gather to go deep in truth, we gather to worship, we scatter to reach lost people.   

This is why when I think about the pandemic that we have gone through, it was so devastating in ways for many churches, certainly not for all, but for many, because it made it very difficult to gather, and it made it very difficult to scatter. But this is the mission. This is, this is what a, a pastor, if you will, does, and bringing people together.   

What's our mission? This is something, again, that God has revealed to us, and we, and churches may put it in different language in different styles, but at the end of the day, I believe every church has the same mission. And, and, but, but, but some, some churches get it and some churches don't. And it goes back to leadership.   

I mentioned, Roy Vagelos early on, who was at one time the CEO of Merck, which is this huge pharmaceutical company that was, that was challenged with the fact that speaking of a pandemic, there was a pandemic in Africa where people were losing their eyesight. There was this plague that was caused by flies that, was leading to many people losing their ability to see.   

And Merck, this pharmaceutical company, had developed a particular product that could alleviate that kind of suffering. The problem is, as Roy Vagelos was leading, Merck Pharmaceutical realized that, that it will all cost and there'll be no profit. People can't pay for this. So it was a huge decision. And the stockholders, as I mentioned, were nervous and, and the need was growing and great.   

So what did he do? He like Kenny, excellent leader. He went back to the mission being missional mission-minded. He went back to the statement of Merck that had, at its very beginning years and years and years ago, established this mission statement. We are in the business of preserving and improving human life.   

We are in the business of preserving, human life. And you realize that the decision was made by the mission. So this is, this is essential as a task of a leader, is to ask this question, what's our mission? And make sure the organization stays focused on this. And of course, thinking theologically, this is really important. Why? Because God is missional at, at the heart of God is mission.   

Everything God does think about this, everything God does derives from an eternal purpose. The whole Bible is a missional phenomenon, if you will. The church was created and given a mission. Why? Because God is missional. So it's not about whether God fits into our mission, but whether we fit into his, that's what theology would argue for.   

And I believe that applies to leaders no matter who they are. In every leadership story, God is summoning leaders to serve His mission, his purpose. And the very best leaders, I believe, are those who wake up in the morning with this question, God, am I willing to serve your purposes for me today? And to answer yes, Lord, here I am, like Isaiah I, here I am Lord, your servant.   

I am willing, or is Jesus who certainly modeled this as the Father sent me, I'm sending you in John 2021, he was saying to his disciples, this is your mission. I carried out the mission of the Father. Now I'm sending you out on mission. So God is missional. That's why theology would argue every leader must be missional.   

And maybe if I could break this down just a little bit more, maybe because I recently was tasked to do something that I had never done. I was asked to teach a course in Israel. The title of the course was “The Mission of God.” Now, imagine you're given this, you're given this responsibility.   

Come teach us a course on the mission of God. Can you think of maybe a course that's anymore unnerving? I can't. How do I think about the mission of God? It forced me to start in Genesis and work my way through Revelation and constantly ask the question, what does it mean? What does it mean to be missional? But beyond that, that starts with what is the mission of God?   

And as I worked it through, I could see God clearly is missional, and that his mission, first of all, is to make himself known. And everything God does, this is his mission. We are here to make him known, to make his name great, to glorify his name.   

Everything is about the glory of God. That's the mission. But he discovered this, that God's mission is also to cause Whatever he makes to flourish. So right away in Genesis one and two, God is stepping back and saying, this is good.   

That this is God's desire, that things he makes flourishes. So his mission is that we flourish that in our lives. It's all about restoration. This is why we have redemption and part, it's all part of this larger mission of God that we are saved, that we begin to see our lives restored. This, this mandate to be, those who follow God, who bring glory to God, live lives to the fullest.   

This is the nature of God. This is what He does, which then tells me again, that a leader's mandate is to make God known. That's part of our mission and part of our mandate, I take it from this second part of God's mission, is that we help people flourish.   

That they just find what they were made to do. And that's what leaders I think do, is they step back and they ask the question, are the people I'm leading, flourishing, growing, finding life? Because this is God's mission. The third, what stood out to me as I tasked myself to do this and work through it, is to find that God's mission is to make Earth his home.   

It was Ro Wolf who helped me to see this, that when you think about it, God creates Eden, to walk in the garden, to make himself at home. But then sin interrupted that which led to God making himself at home in the tabernacle, which then moved to the temple, which today is God now moving to make his home, his residence within us as 1 Corinthians 3:16 puts it and make himself eventually at home in a new heaven and new earth, where scripture seems to say in Revelation 21 and 22, that God will come and this will be a new Jerusalem, a new Earth, and he'll be at home, which since tells me that part of, a leader's mandate, missionally, is to invite God to be at home and whatever.   

He's doing that to invite God's presence.   

It's all part of God's mission. But what am I trying to say? Trying to say that everything we read in scripture says God is missional to the core. Everything we read in scripture tells us that God is intent on purpose.   

And so it would seem to me that therefore, a leader's, a leader's task, a leader's mandate is himself, herself to be missional and to lead people to be missional. So ask yourself, if you're a leader of an organization, are you clearer about the mission? Do you teach it?   

Is it somewhere where people can see? Is it clear that this is the mission? Sometimes even in simplistic ways, when I walk into a restaurant that has a mission statement on the wall, I gravitate to it. I find myself saying, well, at least they, they have a certain sense of direction and purpose for why they exist. I sometimes like to look at organizations, corporations, and their mission statements to see if there's something that draws people.   

And sometimes they're very simplistic statements. While Disney had as his missional statement, at least I read somewhere to make people happy. It's maybe not a compelling statement, but think about it this way, when he created that mission statement to make people happy, it's as if he said, so, what I'm going to do is that in everything I do, I want to bring happiness.   

So if I create a theme park, it's got to be about bringing, making people happy. I don't remember as a kid ever going to Disneyland and leaving unhappy. In fact, everything in everyone is about increasing my happiness. Whether it was someone who was picking up the trash to someone who was overseeing the rides, everyone I, I would guess who were hired had to be in step with the mission.   

If you're not a happy person, it would be a terrible place to work, and you probably wouldn't last. So this is what good organizations, good leaders do. They tap into the mission and they help the people they lead to embrace it. But that's just the first task. There is a second important task, and that is vision. And this answers the question where, so where are we going?   

It's not enough just to have a clear mission. And we can't just stop there and say, okay, so I'm finished with this. No, your task is then to help people see where they need to go. It's a question that gets to the heart of a leader's definition. Remember we said a leader, definitionally is at heart a servant, but we also re reduced it down to these three pieces, has followers, has influence, has direction.   

And here's where we see that lineup with the task. And the task is therefore to say somewhere to the people, one is leading. This is where we need to go and requires great intentionality, requires dreaming, imagining, envisioning, planning.   

It's about inspiring hope. It means confronting people with the visceral sense of the possible. I have to say, in my first church, it was really stuck in the mud, if you will. We were able to get some clarity to the mission, and we began to state it. Every time, in fact, we met, we reminded people our mission. It was there on things that were part of the stationary.   

We wanted to people to not ever be confused with the mission. But my great challenge was helping the church to be visionary. They had stopped dreaming. They just were stuck in the present. They couldn't imagine living in the future, because actually, it's not fair to say they were, they were stuck in the present. Actually, they were stuck in the past. And when I listened to conversations, it was always about in the old days, or this is the way we've always done it.   

They were living like 20, 30 years ago. So it took a lot, a lot of energy just to bring people into the present, let alone get them into the future. But I believe this is true, that every leader who steps into lead an organization has to somewhere ask the question, where are we going?   

What do we want to look like in five years, 10 years, 20 years? We're every organization is in transit, whether it realizes it or not. And a leader stands in this transit, between the past and the present and the future. So what that means is what we have to help people do is begin to dream. And part of the way we do that is helping them to, in a reference point, look back to the past and learn from it.   

And, and so at the core of leadership is pointing people out of their comfort zone. It it is fall at once. Put it this way, it's always the sign of second rate, man, when the decisions merely meet the present situation. Because what we have to do is move forward and moving forward requires three things. So to this question of vision, moving forward means we have to take some time again to help people learn from the past.   

Think about this. If you were to think about a visionary leader, a couple of visionary leaders that come to mind.   

For me, it was Churchill and Nixon. Now, they were visionary because when you read about their leadership, people would say it, it was almost uncanny how they could see the future and see the trends. Churchill could see where England needed to go. Nixon could see the political landscape, and he could see, alliances that needed to be created.   

Now, the reason they were visionaries, they were future minded, is because they were historians. And it's called some, call it the, the Janus Effect. The Janus Effect goes something like this. The further you can look back, the future, you can look forward.   

So leaders who are visionary, in a certain sense at root at heart are historians. They know what has happened. They see these overarching patterns. Churchill was once asked how to prepare for the future. And his response was study history. Study history, which maybe a rightful concern we should have here today is I think if I just talk in a, in a world I lived in, in a seminary, how little attention is given to, to church history.   

But yet, I realize if a church is going to be visionary, if your church that you're part of is going to be future oriented, what I'm, what I'm saying here, and I, I'll help you here clearly, is you need to take time to look backwards, to look at the past.   

I used to teach theology of worship. And I intentionally took students back to the first century, second century, third century, through the Middle Ages, through the Puritan era, through the frontier worship. I wanted them to see how the past informs us as to where worship needs to go into the future. If we are trying to lead people into the future without an understanding of the past, we'll probably go into some really bad directions.   

So a leader who is futuristic, if you will, is learning from the past. Also understanding That is, if you're going to be visionary, you have to be someone who really understands the present situation, that that asks the question, what are our times telling us?   

You can't dream forward until you have some grasp of present realities. The point I'm making, if we're simply future minded, we're not going to be much help to those we lead. People have to see that we have, if they're going to follow us into the future, they have to see. We have great respect for the past, and we have a, a pretty clear understanding of the present.   

And then we have an opportunity then to look into the future, Look at trends, look at patterns, and identify possibilities and collaborate and bring people along. Sometimes we're visionary.   

Leadership gets off track is when leaders make it about their dream. I do believe, and I'll reflect on the pastoral world for a moment, that when one is looking, let's say to a new pastor, it's a fair question to say, tell us about your dream. In fact, I believe if a pastor is stepping into a new ministry and doesn't have some sense of vision of where that ministry can go, they're not ready to, they're not ready to come.   

When I was invited to pastor an international church in the Netherlands, somewhere before I ever stepped into the church, I wanted to get a sense of, of a dream. What is, what is it I dream about? What could this church become? What could it do with its resources? And this amazing group of people, 35 nationalities all over the world, converging together, just what can we do? But I realized it would be absolute folly if I stood up and I said to people, this is my dream.   

Follow me. because literally what the next step must be is a leader then brings a next set of leaders together to collaborate and to listen. Here's the dream God's put in my heart. What are you dreaming? What are your hopes? What do you see looking out? We did that in fact as a task of leaders in the Netherlands.   

And we sort of came down the mountain, though actually that doesn't work in the Netherlands. But we, we came back from our, our, our gathering and then our really hard work, because then we came together in our collaboration of dreaming. Then our task was to bring the body, of Christ together and hear their hearts and their dreams, and somehow figure out how we can all get on the same page and, and bridge this together, and not do it in a coercive way.   

Some dreamers can do it in a coercive way, and they've got their great dreams. And it reminds me of a, reminds me of an article I read recently, about Elon Musk that said, when Elon Musk dreams, his employees have nightmares.   

And I think that can be true of churches when pastors dream parishioners have nightmares. because it's all about them and all about what they can see, rather than bringing people together to decide together. And I know in all three churches that I pastored; I led the church through a vision process. And I would love to say, oh, it was easy. It was a lot of fun. It was hard, painful work.   

In fact, my first church, I think it's fair to say we finally captured a vision. It took seven years. But if I had tried to lead the church in a visionary way any earlier than that, we probably would've gotten nowhere. And there is, again, a basis for this. God is a visionary. God, God, even going back to Genesis three 15 with the advent of sin was already par preparing away for the future.   

This is why we have eschatology. This is why we have book of Revelation to tell us. In part, God is a futuristic God. He's always pointing the way to the future. And so if people are to push back and say, why do we need to think about a future? We need to say because God thinks about the future, and he calls leaders to think about the future and dream about the future, move people towards the future.   

So we need to dream in a bold way, but we have to be careful. We don't get wrapped up in our own plans and get ahead of the people or get ahead of God. And maybe one of the classic illustrations of that in scripture is David, who had his vision. You remember his dream? There was the tabernacle. There was God in David's mind, homeless.   

So David decided I'm going to build a temple. And he had his architects and he had all of his contractors, and he was ready to go. And he started moving until his pastor, pastor Nathan came along and said, aren't you getting ahead of yourself? And God had to sit David down and ask the question, did I ever ask you to build a temple?   

In fact, God made it clear to David that it wasn't his mandate. Now, I look at that to simply say that before we do any vision casting or any visionary work as a leader, it's really important that we're in step with God and we sense deep in our hearts, this is what God is saying to us. Otherwise, we could commit great folly in the process.   

I'm just asking this question because people may not know the answer that you told the story of Merck and the disease in Africa. The conclusion of the story was that the president decided to So the conclusion, it's a great conclusion is he decided to go against the advice of some of his stockholders who were a little bit more prone to measure things by the profit. And he, in a sense said, no, let's come back to the mission.   

And so they, they were able to defeat a lot of this, pandemic blindness. It’s a great story. Michael Useem tells the story in his first chapter, of The Leadership Moment. And so actually, when you probably look at the history of Merck Pharmaceutical, it was perhaps the really high, high point, and they were lauded for putting people over profit. So it's a great ending.