Bulgaria, Italy, Switzerland June 2009 Day 6

DAY 6
June 16

What a beautifully warm morning—bright, sunny and not too humid! I watched the dawn come and go, so by the time we ate breakfast, I once again felt like I was eating lunch. Only this time, we had giant crepes, one filled with some sort of cream cheese and the other filled with jam. I like few things in the world more than pancakes, so when one of our friends didn’t show up for breakfast (he had to leave early for his job), I took a third of each of his pancakes and piled them together on my plate only long enough to cut them into bite-sized pieces that I quickly consumed.

The morning session took another of those timely turns as I was talking about Acts 6 when complaints arose on the part of the widows who weren’t getting their fair allotment of food. I made the obvious observation that leaders get complaints; if no one has complained about your leadership, you probably aren’t doing much leading. Growth leads to clear indications that we must keep adjusting our administration/leadership to meet the new situations.

But that conversation quickly led to another: What is a true leader? In the text we see that new leaders are raised up to take care of elements of church life, so that the other leaders can stay focused on their assignments. Every leader will eventually encounter what I call the rule of limits. There is a finite number of things that anyone can do; even the more “gifted” (not a term I like, but one that Christians use) will eventually max out. Let’s say the number of things a leader can do is ten. If that leader tries to do eleven things, one of the original ten gets neglected in order for the leader to do the eleventh.

Churches invariably need more things done. As they develop, needs/issues multiply. Consequently, the leadership will need to increase the number of things it handles. That’s why it is so essential to multiply leaders. One leader can do ten things, but five leaders can do fifty things! If the things-that-need-doing don’t get done in a church or a denomination, that organization will lose its growth momentum and stall.

That’s why I define a true leader as someone who is handling (assuming full responsibility for) some aspect of a church that the senior leader no longer needs to do—or think about. This definition is helpful for the people who have been called leaders to determine if, indeed, they are really acting as leaders. What are you doing that releases the senior leader from needing to attend to that doing?

But the definition is also telling to senior leaders who might mistakenly imagine they have raised up “leaders” when, in fact, they have simply collected “groupies” or assistants. If a leader has not off-loaded a responsibility to someone else, that leader has not raised up another leader. Having a staff is not the same as having leaders under us. The rule of limits still applies no matter how many people a leader has working on the ten things; if he or she has not relinquished any of those ten things entirely, the organization is still stymied by the lack of true delegation.

And that leads to a second element of my definition of a leader. Not only must they be taking responsibility for doing things that free the other leader from what he or she has been doing, a true leader is raising up future leaders to whom that leader will eventually off-load some of the things the leader is currently doing (to relieve another leader). Those thoughts—more thoroughly explored during our two-hour discussion—may have had the most impact on the group. I could almost see the implications dawning on Mitko and Vania’s leaders.

Afterwards, we went to lunch and back to Stara Zagora where Niki and James and I had a nice long talk about life and ministry. It’s their story to tell, but I’m glad to have such a place in their lives that they seek my council not just about happy things, but also about hard things in their lives…

Later that afternoon, and again after dinner with Mitko and Vania, I fell into those deep jetlag naps from which it is almost impossible to climb out. That meant, of course, that I slept very little during the night.

Here are some random pictures of Stara Zagora, Bulgaria: