The House

Code Pink

Earl and Janet Go to Berkeley

Followership Styles and Mission

Sitting in a coffee house in the northwest I was commiserating with a pastor friend about how neither of us had the sort of “big personality†so often identified with leadership.

He described himself as “leading from the middle,†that is, bringing people together around the congregation’s mission in a way that produced results but not heroes.

Talking about this issue brought up the criticism that both of us have taken over the years for not being more dominant, criticism that has always come from believers and virtually never from those who make no claim to follow Jesus.

We began to speculate about whether church folks and unchurched folks have different followership styles. Do they respond to completely different approaches to leadership, at least in the northwest Anglo context in which the observations were made?

This hypothesis (and that’s all it is) draws a distinction between two primary followership styles. I am deliberately exaggerating the difference for the purposes of clarity and discussion:

1. The churchly followership style: Serving for many years as an audience for platform-driven ministry, lots of church folks seem to equate leadership with a dynamic individual standing at the front of a large room casting vision the way a major league pitcher hurls fastballs. The ability of this lone entrepreneur to sway a large group of people with the quality of his/her strategy and the force of his/her personality is considered the very definition of leadership. This kind of attender is not shy about pressuring less dominant leaders to fit into this mold. And the temptation for leaders is to spin the ministry’s ethos in a direction that will appeal to this follower type because they likely control most of the financial assets in the house.

This is not to say that the less forceful leader loses his/her integrity, but that important nuances of the group’s culture are gradually shaped to please the churchly. If you don’t think this is possible, ask yourself what your ministry would look like if the majority of your financial support came from people under 25, or an ethnic group other than your own? If you don’t feel these pressures, we speculated that the reason may be that this battle was lost so long ago that it’s no longer a fight. Followership for the churchly, then, is a response to greatness—the kind of leadership I deserve.

2. The unchurchly followership style: My friend has noticed that the people coming to faith in Jesus in his congregation have an unswerving distaste for “big personality†leaders. These new Christians are likely to regard the celebrity model as an exercise in narcissism that is more about control and ego than servanthood. Their resistance takes many forms, but mainly is expressed by their relative absence from churches directed by the leaders of a more heroic stature. That way of leading feels to them like working for “the man†in the corporate world. They reason that, if Sunday morning demonstrates essentially authoritarian values, then the rest of this religion is probably not worth checking out. However, this person is more likely to be receptive to the “small personality†leader who, like my friend, brings people together in a faith community that responds in love to the mission of Jesus for the world.

Imagine what would happen if this leader began to spin the ethos of the ministry in this direction so that more and more unchurchly folk began to show up? Perhaps this explains research by Barna and others finding that effective evangelistic churches, in all their diversity, have the common feature of a missional culture. Followership for the unchurchly, then, is a response to humility—the kind of leadership that could change me.

Our embryonic idea concludes with the suggestion that these followership dynamics become cyclical, moving the ministry in either a less or more missional direction over time.

That’s the hypothesis. So test it.

The Demise of Illusions

A famous historian once said the most dangerous form of ignorance is the illusion of knowledge. This maxim has become very real to us as we prepare for our campus church project in Berkeley. On our journey, Janet and I have stumbled over three kinds of "knowledge" (so far) that have all proven to be illusion in their own way.

1. The Google Illusion: During the very anxious season when we were considering becoming planters, we comforted ourselves by doing research about the campus and community at Berkeley. Along with millions of others, we turned to Google to discern the answers to life's questions. What we found was a huge quantity of information about our potential plant site. We learned, for example, that the median adult age is 31, that this adult is likely a single professional, and that Cal is one of the top- ranked universities in the world. Armed with more demographics than the Census Bureau, we headed to the Bay area for our first visit feeling that we understood some things.

2. The Sidewalk Illusion: About ten minutes after we arrived on campus, the statistics that had given us confidence in our own understanding suddenly seemed like pale abstractions. To be honest, we had expected to see a 21st century version of Woodstock reenacted on the campus. What we actually saw were extremely serious students walking by in silence on their way to the next class. Our Google illusions experienced something like a hard drive crash, only to be overwritten by the kind of shallow assumptions that are developed in a first visit. So, maybe the numbers didn't tell the whole story, but now we had actual field experience, meaning that we had walked around for a few hours, eaten Indian food, and sipped Peet's Coffee. Certainly experience couldn't mislead us?

3. The Relationship Illusion: Talking with people about the planting project after a couple of visits was a lot more fun than just reciting the statistics. Now we could tell stories about the "look and feel" of the campus and city, including the homeless guy smashing bottles against a wall and life on the street after dark on homecoming weekend. We also collected sound bites about Berkeley that helped us tell the story of our emerging mission. For example, I will quote William Gibson's comment that, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed" to make the point that Cal is one of the recipients of that uneven dispersal. All of that was fine, until I realized that telling stories about coffee houses and repeating clever quotes was not the same as actually knowing anyone in the community.

There is no "Berkeley Barbara," a perfectly representative 31-year old single professional, or "Berkeley Ben," a prototypical 20 year old engineering student. Our new community is the home of cultural creatives (some in training and some at work) who highly value the atypical.

While numbers and experiences help, only relationship is going to crush the last of our illusions so we can actually discern what God is already up to our community. Berkeley is not the "site" for a "project," it is a community that is home to individuals whom God loves more than I ever will.

How have your illusions met their demise?