Living What I Lead

I spend most days in the office.  Meetings.  Planning worship.  Writing sermons.  Answering e-mails.  Study.  Reading (the pile on the corner of my desk--stuff to read--getting bigger).  When I leave the office, I visit.  Church Members.  Family of Church Members.  Hospitals, homebound, post-surgical rehab, assisted living, nursing homes.  I fill out my monthly Report to Session, a listing of everything I've done since the last Report to Session, and it is full.  A lot of suff.  I've been busy, no doubt, and I can document it.  And, much of the church's work done, the church moves forward.  I love my job.  I love my calling.  I love the people I work with.  And what I do makes a difference.  It matters.  The Word is read and proclaimed, sacraments celebrated, prayers prayed.  People learn, their minds and hearts expanded.  People are challenged.  They're affirmed.  People feel cared-for.  And I'm grateful.

But, every day, another day at the church done, I drive home, toward the mountains glowing in the afternoon sun (unless, of course, it's been another 12-hour day and the sun has long since disappeared behind the Continental Divide), praising God for my life.  And the question, always there: do I have this right?  

Leading an established, traditional, attractional church to embrace becoming a missional/incarnational church obviously involves change.  Massive change.  And it's change that has to begin with the church leadership which means that it's change that has to begin with me.  I cannot lead what I do not live.  If I want the congregation I serve to, collectively, lead a missional life, I must be leading a missional life.  It isn't so much that the kinds of things pastors typically do are at odds with missional leadership, but it is easy to allow them to continue to define the bullet points of your ministry.  What pastors typically do, in other words, is all you do, and that cannot be.  I don't mean to diminish what pastors do or suggest that whatever it is, it isn't enough.  But to the extent missional church involves shifting from an inward to an outward focus, so too must missional--which is to say, pastoral--leadership.  I'm not a pastor only to the congregation I serve but a pastor to the entire community.

I want to get this right.  But it's tough.  Missional leadership is not the leadership seminary taught me just as missional church is not the church seminary taught me.  I can read books, attend seminars, and write blogs all about what to do, but the pull of the familiar is brutal...it's hard, on a daily basis, to break free of the routines that have defined ministry for so long.  It requires not just a knowledge of what new stuff to do (a challenge in itself) but the mindfulness, the discipline to do it.  It doesn't help that my default reaction all my life has been to read and think...find something I want to do, I read about it and think about it but, somehow, don't always get around to actually doing it.  That won't work here.  The knowing and thinking is important, but as with any issue of discipleship--and that's what this is--important only to the extent it results in doing. Living what I lead...

Do you struggle with this?  How do you handle the struggle?