Leadership In A Small Membership Church

In an article about leadership in a small membership church, Lovett H. Weems, Jr. offers this principle:

Leading "in the middle." To be a leader is to live in the middle – in the tension between a future vision and the current reality. This tension is inherent if a leader becomes the steward of God's vision for the congregation. One cannot give in to the current reality and abandon the vision to which God is calling the church. Nor can one simply lift up the vision and ignore the realities. To be a leader means to stay with the tension. It also means to stay with the people. Remember, people in the small membership church often are people who are living on the edge – geographically, economically, theologically, and culturally. They know whether you are living with them or not.

Keeping sights on both the heritage and the future can be hard. You may know of churches (of any size) who are so much the same church they were a generation ago that they aren't reaching their potential for this or the next generation. Rarely is the cutting edge technology or methodology of one generation sufficient for the next. The same is true for the church.

Our church is barely over 40 years old - just a generation or so. But church style and methodology of the early '70s is not too effective these days. So the leaders must look forward. That's vision. God is leading his church forward to accomplish the ageless mission of making disciples of all nations. Leaders look to God and his vision. They point the church in that direction.

Even though we aren't an "old" church we still have lots of heritage that is important to who we are. Cross Road has served the Lord's mission in our community and around the world. At one time, all those accomplishments were part of a vision of the future. We can and should honor the past and celebrate what God has done.

We just can't cling to the past. But we can't ignore it, either. So my challenge and that of our leaders is to lead in the middle - honoring the past, reaching the future.

That's part of what it means to impact eternity at the cross road of life.

Find the full article from Weems here.