from the Willow Creek Leadership Summit:
Many of us have taken our mission statements from “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But there’s a little interpretation problem: who is that neighbor? We act like it’s “someone like us.” It’s the homogeneous principle that “likes attract” (Donald McGavran), which caused churches to grow, but developed a consumer church.
We’re called to develop a church that is contrarian, abnormal, difficult–the path of a third-culture leader. What is a third-culture? Adaptation. Painful adaptation. The mindset and will to love, learn, and serve in any culture, even in the midst of pain and discomfort.
When Jesus told the Good Samaritan story, it’s an Eastern way of telling the story, orbiting the point, not telling it directly, to let the listener discover the point. And the point is: Love someone who’s not like you. The world will stop and say, “That’s beautiful,” when they see us loving someone we hate.
How do we become a third-culture leader?
1. The 3-rd-culture leader is focused on the fringe. The misfit more than the masses.
Most of us focus on the mass in the middle, but if you’re going to really make a change, you have to win the creatives, the early adopters on the margins. The masses don’t lead us, the misfits do. Example: Heather B. Armstrong on deuce.com, whose tweets are followed by 1,000,000 people. And thousands of people read her blog. She’s not a CEO but a housewife with 2 children in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Vision in most churches starts in the center, from the leader out to the congregation. But the vision should move from the outside in. Jesus was from Nazareth, considered an outsider, and he led the greatest movement of all. Ask in your town, “Who’s the outsider?”
2. The 3rd-culture leader has a different set of metrics.
What hinders us from loving on the fringe? Our metrics. How do you define success? We want numbers of people, moving up and to the right. For most of us, that’s an illusion.
Failure is success. Your failure is your platform to humanity. Your weakness and failures are often gifts from God to make a difference in this world, to connect with people. Most of the world does not understand America’s success, but they do understand suffering.
We measure finances, but with human resources, we must look deeper than strengths tests; we must listen to people’s stories. The metanarrative of our lives. Do we have time to hear those?
Through crowds, we need to see people, to have the eyes of a father for them. Weakness will guide you; it’s often our strength.
How do we quantify vision? We pay consultants to help us get a vision, but relationships trump vision. We don’t need more visionaries, we need more relationaries.
God allows pain to come into our lives so we will develop new metrics. Bobb Biehl told me to spend 70% of your time on your priority. In the past, that was programs and sermon preparation. I turned that around and made my 70% of my time in leadership development. And I spend only 5-8 hours on sermon preparation. I hang out with leaders and develop them. The best discipleship happens life on life; it can’t happen in 5 classes.
I also changed whom I hang out with; I moved my office from a safe suburb to a dangerous suburb. I read books I don’t agree with; I go to conferences with people I don’t see every year.
I changed the design of our place. We spun out sites and let them develop their own 501c3, style, and approach.
3. The 3rd-culture leader values obedience more than passion.
Jesus didn’t feel like going to the cross, but he obeyed. 4 acts of obedience to start a revolution:
1. Deeper collaboration. Gifts of the Holy Spirit are not just in your local church, but in other churches within your city, region, nation, world.
2. Communal living. Families that live together or in the same neighborhood with open doors.
3. Prayer. The church doesn’t really believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. Do you really believe you have the power that raised Jesus from the dead?
4. Radical sacrifice for the outsider. You have to choose to shed your own blood, die to your own values, give up some of your material possessions, move to another culture?
Growing up, I had new clothes; my mom made her own dresses. She sacrificed for me. Growing up, my mom was lovely to me, and now she’s beautiful.
